Sunday, September 23, 2018

Pray-ers


James 5:13-20 Common English Bible (CEB)


13 If any of you are suffering, they should pray. If any of you are happy, they should sing. 14 If any of you are sick, they should call for the elders of the church, and the elders should pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.  15 Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick, for the Lord will restore them to health. And if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. 16 For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve.

17 Elijah was a person just like us. When he earnestly prayed that it wouldn’t rain, no rain fell for three and a half years. 18 He prayed again, God sent rain, and the earth produced its fruit.

19 My brothers and sisters, if any of you wander from the truth and someone turns back the wanderer, 20 recognize that whoever brings a sinner back from the wrong path will save them from death and will bring about the forgiveness of many sins.

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Pray-ers.   People who pray.  That would include pretty much everyone here.   Even the littlest ones who were sitting up here a few minutes ago say their bedtime prayers and say prayers at mealtimes.   All of us pray.   We might pray a prayer that we memorized - like the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer - or we might pray from the heart or we might have a book of prayers that we use.  Praying seems easy for some and more difficult for others.   But all of us pray.  All of us are pray-ers.  

I have to confess that this particular message was hard for me.  I wrote in fits and starts.  I couldn’t seem to get in the groove of writing about praying and being pray-ers.  And maybe that’s because prayer itself was so difficult for me to get a handle on.   I grew up in a tradition where all the prayers I ever heard were memorized or pre-written for a particular occasion and read out of a book.   I had no idea how to just talk to God, so when people in 12 Step groups started telling me that I needed to pray, I was pretty much lost.  Oh, I knew how to ask for help. I knew how to say, “God, get me out of this one and I swear I’ll never do it again!”  But I didn’t really have any idea how to talk to God, or if there was some way that was especially appropriate.   I was happy to learn the Serenity Prayer, and some other written down prayers that can be found in 12 Step literature, and I pretty much stuck with those prayers.  Because they covered everything I needed to cover, sort of.   Eventually I came to realize that it’s ok to talk to God as if God was simply another person, and my prayers became conversations.  I told God what was going on, and God listened.  And then I would try to get quiet enough to listen for God’s response.  Sometimes I can, and sometimes I can’t.  And sometimes the answer doesn’t come while I am quiet, but through something another person says, or a billboard on the highway, or even a song on the radio.   For a while, that was all I needed. Personal prayer - me and God in conversation.  And then I was called to the ministry.  And if I ever had any doubt that God has a sense of humor, that call was enough to prove it.   I was going to have to get up and talk in front of people, and maybe even worse than that, I was going to have to get up and pray in front of people!  

In my seminary class “Worship and Church Music” we got lots of books full of prayers to use, and we learned how to write prayers according to a formula that had been set probably over 1,000 years ago.   ACTS.  Adoration.  Confession.  Thanksgiving.  Supplication.  I had books full of prayers other people had written to use, and I had a pattern to follow for writing my own prayers.   Which was great, until I started working in a Disciples retirement community.  And the people in the hospital unit wanted me to pray with them, without a book.  Without time to write something.  It was time to panic.

Because, you see, I had exactly zero confidence in my ability to pray for and with other people.   In class and in study groups I always let someone else pray, because they were just so much better at it than I was.  And then, there I was, in the hospital unit, needing to pray out loud.  They were always happy I prayed, but I would go away feeling inadequate, until one day I was holding a woman’s hand, trying to think of words to pray, and looked outside to see the sun glittering on the snow, and a tree branch, and a bright red cardinal on the branch, and suddenly words came.  Not my words, but words the Holy Spirit gave me.  That’s the day I learned that I can do this.  I can pray out loud for other people.  Mind you, I still relied on written prayers most of the time.  I struggled to write new pastoral prayers every week for well over 10 years.  Slowly I gained confidence that if I just opened my heart the Spirit would come and give me the words I needed.  And sometimes it works, and sometimes, not so much.  Praying in this way is not one of my particular gifts or strengths, and I really admire people for whom it is.  We are blessed, because there are quite a few in this congregation who always seem to have the right words when it comes time to pray.  

But even if, like me, you aren’t especially gifted at praying out loud, all of us here are pray-ers.   James says, if you are suffering, pray.

And James said, if you are sick, let the elders pray over you and anoint you with oil.  Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick.  A note of caution here, because some people read that to mean if you have faith you will be healed no matter what your disease, and that if you are not healed it is because you lack faith.   One of my seminary classmates came in one day, devastated because his pastor had been fired.  She had lupus, and when it wasn’t cured by prayer the elders of the church decided she lacked faith, and fired her.    James said, the prayer of a righteous person is powerful in what it can achieve, and this is true - Elijah’s prayers brought on a drought and ended that drought, but not everyone is an Elijah.  He was most certainly not an ordinary person.  He was one of the great prophets, who raised people from the dead, and fed many with just a little food.   

James said, “Prayer that comes from faith will heal the sick, for the Lord will restore them to health. And if they have sinned, they will be forgiven. 16 For this reason, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”   Confession and prayer - healing the soul in order that the body might be healed.   This is the kind of healing Jesus did.  In Matthew, Chapter 9, “People brought to him a man who was paralyzed, lying on a cot. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man who was paralyzed, “Be encouraged, my child, your sins are forgiven.”  Some legal experts said among themselves, “This man is insulting God.”  But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said, “Why do you fill your minds with evil things?  Which is easier—to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’?  But so you will know that the Human One has authority on the earth to forgive sins”—he said to the man who was paralyzed—“Get up, take your cot, and go home.” The man got up and went home.”  

Confessing our sins to another person is not something we do easily.   It’s one thing for me to stand up here and confess on behalf of all of us, to say, as part of the pastoral prayer, “We confess, Lord, that we don’t always speak and act as you would have us do.  We don’t always love one another as you love us.  We beg your forgiveness for these sins, and ask your blessing that we may go out and do as you would have us do.”  It’s a whole different thing to say to another person, “These are my sins.”   Yet we know, for Jesus has told us very clearly, that our God will forgive our sins.  All we need to to is ask.  And when our souls are cleansed of sin, when our hearts are emptied of anger and jealousy, resentment and greed, then there healing.  Then there is room for God’s love to fill our hearts, and overflow onto others, bringing healing to them as well.  

When we join together in prayer, we can literally change the world.  When we, as faithful children of God, stand together to pray for the world’s healing, it will happen.    When we, as pray-ers, gather together in one mind, desiring nothing more than that God’s love pour out to heal every heart, then the world will change.  And we will know God’s kingdom on earth, even as it is in heaven.  

James says if you are happy, sing!  Martin Luther is reputed to have said that singing is praying twice.  So let us stand and pray and sing together, “Sweet Hour of Prayer.”







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