James 5:13-20 "Let Us Pray" Scott Hoezee

There were about nine or so people who wrote the books which we now collectively call the New Testament. But you have the feeling that if they were all alive yet today, James would be the one person out of the nine who would have the best shot at getting his own religious program on cable TV! James fits the profile of the average TV preacher rather well. He is dogmatic, uncompromising, and exceedingly directive. There is plenty of black or white in the way he describes life but very few shades of gray. There is dogmatic doctrine but not much nuancing, plenty of simple "either-or" scenarios but very little "both-and" examples of thought.

By comparison the apostle Paul would have made a lousy TV preacher. He's too thoughtful, too ponderous. Paul could go on and on for very long chapters wrestling with various issues, seeing them from all sides, and now and again even arguing that there is more than one way for Christian believers to see certain things but that it is love which determines which choice to make among several valid options. When dealing with such difficult subjects, Paul was known to write Greek sentences extending to over 200 words in length. But not James! He writes in sound bites even as he decisively and swiftly comes down on one side or the other of an issue (but never on both sides or any place in between).

There are a total of 108 verses in the Epistle of James and 56% of them (or 60 of the 108 verses) are in the imperative mood--they are commands, direct orders in other words! James is a veritable drill sergeant of a writer. "Saved by faith, you say? I don't think so--what have you done for God lately? No deeds, no faith. Period. Going through tough times? Stop whining about it and count it all joy! Having conflict in the church? That's because you are a bunch of immature, greedy school children being driven by your egotistical desires. Knock it off and resist the devil! Do you sometimes find yourself enjoying life out in secular society? Fine, but that means you hate God. Do you have lots of money? Too bad because it must mean you swindled someone somewhere along the line and God will make you miserable by bankrupting you eventually!"

Granted that I'm sharpening the point on James' rhetoric a bit, but if you do no more than scan this letter, you also will quickly see all the short questions which James both asks and then immediately answers. Many of us know about Martin Luther's famous dislike of this "epistle of straw." Luther didn't want it in the Bible at all and once even went so far as to exclaim, "It made me so mad I almost threw Jimmy into the fire of my woodstove!"

Given the overall nature of this letter it is no surprise to discover that it likewise concludes both abruptly and dogmatically. But those of us who believe the Bible really is the Word of God, inspired by God's Spirit, may get a bit troubled by James' parting thoughts here. We believe James is inspired and so is correct in what he has to say about prayer in chapter 5. Yet as we read these words, we sometimes hear a little voice inside our heads rising up to reply to James with sentences that begin with, "Yeah but . . ."

What may cause this reaction is the unhappy fact that probably all of us can think of at least a couple--and perhaps even a slew--of counter-examples to James' sweeping statement that if you and the elders of the church pray for someone, that person will be healed. Period. "The prayers of a righteous person are powerful and effective," James declares. But that has made many folks in history conclude that if your prayer is not effective, then that must be a reflection on your faith. Righteous people get prayers answered, James says. So if your prayer is not answered . . . well, there you are!

But James isn't finished startling us. Next he tosses out the name of Elijah and then, strikingly, says, "he was just like us." So if Elijah could secure rain or drought just by praying to God for those things, then those of us who are "just like" Elijah should expect the same results from our own prayers. It all seems so splendidly straightforward.

So why do we read such things and yet end up feeling something just less than splendid ourselves? Maybe because we can tell sad tales about times when the elders, and the pastors, and the members of not one but maybe several church congregations earnestly prayed for and over someone and yet the little girl's leukemia continued its grim gallop through her body, the young mother's coma after the car wreck deepened. Elijah prayed for and got rain but some of us remember pious farmers who prayed day and night for rain only to watch their crops wither along with their hopes.

A retired pastor whom I know once shared what he said was one of his earliest childhood memories. He recalls his father sitting on the front stoop of their Iowa farm in the early 1930s. This farmer had been praying for rain for weeks as a drought threatened what little remained of their Depression-era hopes and livelihood. But in this pastor's memory he can still see his devout father watching some clouds scudding through the wide Iowa sky and then saying with quivering lips, "Those are empties. No rain again."

Tonight our two congregations have gathered for prayer. At this March service one of the things we pray for is indeed agriculture, for rain and sunshine in their proper proportions. But not only that: we pray for our sick, our sorrowing, our depressed members. We pray because God has invited us to pray. We pray because we practically can't help ourselves--the Pentecostal Spirit within us makes prayer bubble up in our hearts almost unbidden. And we pray in the earnest faith that when we open our lips, God listens.

Yet we cannot pray without the thought, trembling on the horizons of our consciousness, that it may well be that God will not grant a given request. It has happened to us before, it even famously happened to Jesus once. It has happened to us before and we are quite certain that the reason was not that we just didn't have enough faith. And anyway we don't pray because we think we are so good or so special or so powerful but because we believe God is all of those things, and more.

True enough, but that still leaves us with James 5. What are we to make of this passage? It's a question with a long history behind it. Not surprisingly there have been those who have tried to wriggle out of the seemingly literal, blank-check promise of prayer always leading to physical healing. Some have tried to nuance this by finding more spiritual ways of reading these verses.

Such efforts have been helped along by the fact that the Greek word translated in verse 15 as "make well" is the word sozein, which can also mean "to be saved." And, of course, the other part of that verse about the Lord "raising up" the sick person uses a word associated with resurrection. So, some have theorized, maybe James is promising not physical cures for a sick person but ultimate salvation and resurrection at the last day, whether or not a person gets cured of a given sickness right now.

That, however, is probably a bit of a stretch. It does look like James is dealing with physical illnesses and with physical cures coming as a result of prayer. But as is clear in other parts of this same letter, even James knows it is not quite that simple. There are prayers that get answered and prayers that don't, and James has already admitted that. Further, there are trials and sufferings that come into a believer's life and sometimes those circumstances do not change no matter how much you pray. That is why James says in the early part of this epistle that sometimes the best (and maybe only) thing you can do in such trials is look to God for the strength to rejoice and grow even so.

But none of that dampens James' enthusiasm for and confidence in prayer. James believes, as we should, that prayer is effective. It is not whistling in the dark, not self-talk, not deluded wishful thinking. It is conversation with the God of the cosmos--with the God who has both the power and the will to save, to raise up, to heal, and so in all these ways to nurture shalom. You cannot fault James for letting his joy in the reality of prayer make him bubble over in confidence.

You would not expect someone like James to write, "Well, if you're sick, give prayer a shot. It's worth a try. Who knows? It might even work!" Instead James says that prayer works because God is faithful. We can pray confidently. We do not pray arrogantly, we do not pray on the basis of how wonderfully spiritual we are. We pray because of who God is. We hope and expect God to take action only because of our rock-solid knowledge that God hears his people when they pray.

James himself, no doubt, could have named examples in his own life of sick people not cured, of difficult situations not resolved, of trials that did not end and of suffering that only deepened. James, of all people, knew about those difficult situations. But still he was able to end this letter with the confidence and hope we find in chapter 5. So as we prepare to engage in prayer again this evening, it strikes me that what we can learn from James are five ideas which I will briefly state and with which we will close.

First, we affirm the necessity of prayer. It is not an option for Christians. Praying to God is part of the very definition of what it means to be a Christian. About twenty-five years ago the radical Roman Catholic writer Hans Küng published a 700-page book which he entitled Christsein or in English, On Being a Christian. Yet in all those tens of thousands of words and dozens of chapters and hundreds of pages detailing what it means to be a Christian not once did Küng deal with prayer. The book's index is thirty-one pages long but "prayer" is not even listed! Of course, if you ask Hans Küng, "Was Jesus raised from the dead," he would be likely to reply, "That depends on what you mean by 'raised'." OK, but those of us who do know what we mean by the word "raised" also know that what it means to be a Christian is that we pray. And so we do.

Second, we affirm the very thing we are doing here tonight, which is the communal nature of prayer. Praying is not just something we do in what has rather unhappily come to be called "private devotions." Prayer is finally corporate, communal, something to do with and for each other in the congregation. Third, we affirm the wide scope of prayer. Notice that James in chapter 5 is not talking about only sickness but about also other kinds of trouble as well as about happy times. Prayer touches all of life.

Fourth, we affirm the constancy of prayer. Prayer is not what you do only when all else has failed. We avoid the foxhole mentality of praying only when we're in trouble, only when the doctor shakes her head, only when we've run out of money or other options. Life is bathed in prayer such that the only difference between the good times in life and the bad times in life is the content of our prayers. But the practice of prayer is constant.

So we affirm that prayer is necessary, prayer is communal, prayer covers everything, prayer is constant, and now fifth and finally, we affirm what we too often forget: namely, the welter of past prayers that were indeed answered. If we think about it, most of us could name scores, perhaps hundreds or thousands, of prayers that God answered throughout the ordinary warp and woof of our lives.

True, most, maybe nearly all, of those answered prayers are not the stuff of high drama, not something that would make Robert Schuller want to interview you at some Crystal Cathedral worship service. Yet we could think about the spouse whom we love and then recall those years when we prayed we would find someone to love. We can look at our children and recall the years when we prayed we could have or adopt children. And we did. We can look at their health, their successes, their own good marriages and remember the countless hours we spent fretting over those kids and praying for God to be with them.

You get the idea. We are surrounded by answered prayers--it's just that we mostly manage to miss seeing them as often as not. Yes, we all have our sad tales to tell, too. For a few of you, some of the things I just mentioned caused another stab of pain to go through your chest because of that one child who is not here anymore, because of the heartache of infertility which still makes tears leap to your eyes, because of the divorce your child went through despite all those prayers for his or her happiness. God knows those things as keenly as you do. Who knows how to account for them? I do not. James would not. But the reason is not because prayer, as it turns out, is a joke after all. Prayer is real. That much James most dearly wants us to know.

And so tonight we pray. We pray because we're in trouble. We pray because we are happy. We pray because we are sick. We pray because we are well. We pray because the farmers need rain. We pray because the world contains evil. We pray because we need to be forgiven. We pray because we really can't help it. But above all we pray because God invites us to do so. We pray because of our belief that James was right: the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective. If that were not true, we would not pray at all. But it is true. So what can we say except, "Brothers and sisters in Christ, let us pray . . ."