September 30, 2012
© 2012
I.
William Barclay tells an ancient oriental fable about a ring set with a
wonderful opal. It gave whoever wore it a noble and compassionate character.
This charmed ring was passed from father to son for many generations. The ring
came to a man who had three sons, all of whom he loved dearly. When he knew the
end of his life was coming, he had two copies of the ring made. They were such
perfect copies that not even he could tell which the original was. From his
deathbed he called for each of his sons privately. He blessed each one,
expressed his love and gave each of them one of the rings, cautioning them to
say nothing to the brothers until he had been buried. Of course, after the
funeral the brothers discovered they each had a ring, and they could not discern
any differences between them. They took their rings to a wise judge who told
them, “I cannot tell which is the original, charmed ring, but you yourselves
can prove it.” “We?” the brothers responded in astonished unison. “Yes,” said
the judge, “since the true ring gives noble and compassionate character,
everyone in the community will know which of you has the true ring by the
quality of his life. So go your ways; be kind and truthful, brave and just. The
one who does this is the owner of the true ring.” Never before or since had the
community known three such honorable brothers. (Daily Bible Study Series,
Commentary on Mark; p. 227) Similarly, prayer is powerful and effective to transform those who are
suffering or cheerful, sick or wandering.
A.
I deeply appreciate the seriousness with which the Elders pray at the
Lord’s Table and the attention Julia and Andy put into their pastoral prayers. In
the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:7) when Jesus cautions against praying with vain
repetitions, I don’t think he meant either written or memorized prayers. His
concern was going through an empty, powerless routine. When someone shares a
personal need and we say, “I’ll pray for you,” I am sometimes concerned that this
is a polite way to say “I care,” but misses invoking the power of God.
B.
Though the passage we read from James may seem to head in several
directions, powerful and effective prayer is at its core. Prayer is the power
for every season of life: suffering, cheer, sickness and wandering.
1.
The word for suffering is the word for the anguish of the prophets over
wayward Israel. While it includes personal pain and struggle, this prayer
points us to pray for our own and the Church’s spiritual strength.
2.
People who are cheerful should sing praises. Praise is prayer directing
honoring to God. When life is going well, we easily lose our focus on God.
Praise not only credits God with good, but encourages us and others.
3.
The most detailed instructions are that those who are sick should call
the Elders to pray and anoint them with oil. That anointing is a tangible prayer
calling on God’s power by following God’s instructions. The Elders pray on
behalf of the whole Church. Sometimes we may be so sick we can’t even pray for
ourselves, but the Elders pray for us.
4.
The confession of sin and restoration of those who have wandered is
also prayer in action. Our prayers make us agents of God’s grace.
C.
Powerful, effective prayer is a deep mystery. Surely God does not need
us to explain what needs to be done or how to do it. Yet, God has chosen the
prayers of the people of faith to be the means of releasing divine power. Prayer
is powerful and effective to transform those who are suffering or cheerful,
sick or wandering.
II.
James wrote that God’s power is released by the prayer of faith (v. 15)
and the prayers of righteous people (v. 16). I don’t know about you, but in the
face of what needs God’s power, my faith is puny. I wouldn’t dare call out God’s
power by appealing to my righteousness. Neither would James!
A.
Elijah is the example of the righteous person by whose faith God
deployed great power in Israel. James wrote that Elijah was an ordinary person
just like us. Don’t turn him into a superhero! James was saying, “If Elijah
could pray with power, you can pray with power.” Elijah wavered with fear, but
he knew that Deuteronomy 28:23-24 warned that if Israel turned to idols, “The
sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land
into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are
destroyed.” As Elijah prayed from this warning, God let him know that when Ahab
and Jezebel were leading Israel to worship Baal, the time for the drought had
come. Scripture informed Elijah’s prayers.
B.
Since none of us qualify to pray for God’s power as righteous people,
James emphasized confessing our sins to one another. By confession, we
appropriate the righteousness of Christ as Paul wrote in Romans and Galatians. So
our prayers do not release the power of God because we are righteous but
because Jesus is righteous. You may be uncomfortable with confessing your sins
to one another. We ask, “Isn’t it enough to confess to God?” When we struggle
with a persistent sin, speaking it aloud to a trusted, mature fellow Christian
helps us to get some objective distance and let go of our rationalizing.
Perhaps most powerful of all is hearing, “Know that in Christ you are forgiven
and be at peace!”
C.
The great power and effectiveness of praying is not what we get God to
do for us but what God does within us when we pray. As we pray, the Holy Spirit
helps us connect Scripture with our own situations, with the needs of people we
care about, with the mission of the community of faith, with the dilemmas of
the people of the world. With our prayers, God focuses power on people. Prayer is powerful and effective to transform
those who are suffering or cheerful, sick or wandering.
III. Some of you may remember J.
B. Phillips’ 1961 book Your God Is Too
Small. James and Jesus both tell us that our prayers are too small. In Mark
9:38-41, Jesus is still in the house in Capernaum. He has just wrapped up his
lesson on Great Humility that we talked about last Sunday.
John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone
casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not
following us.”39But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of
power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.40Whoever
is not against us is for us.41For
truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear
the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward.
A.
Maybe you’re thinking John’s challenge to the man casting out demons in
Jesus’ name isn’t about prayer, but in Mark 9:29, after the Transfiguration,
when Jesus heals the boy with seizures, he says, “This kind can only come out by
prayer,” which is echoed in what we have read in James. Jesus is tearing down
the boundaries that limit our prayers. The name of Jesus is not magic mumbo
jumbo – if you say the spell right you get results. No! The name of Jesus
released the power of Jesus. So even if this man wasn’t traveling with Jesus
and the Twelve, it was Jesus who was driving out those demons when the man
spoke.
B.
Several commentators, including some I usually respect and trust, wrote
that this man was unauthorized and out of line, but Jesus didn’t want to get in
a distracting dispute on his way to the cross. I don’t buy it! Jesus was
teaching the disciples to be expansive and recognize God’s power comes from
unexpected places. This man is essentially affirming Jesus, and Jesus said, “Whoever
is not against us is for us.” He includes the disciples in his generosity. In
Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23 when Jesus is being attacked, he turns it around
and says, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” He refers specifically to
himself and not the disciples in this more restrictive use. The Apostle Paul takes
Jesus’ expansive attitude to the rivalries that can spring up in Christian
ministry when he wrote in Philippians 1:15-18, “Some proclaim Christ from envy
and rivalry, but others from goodwill. These proclaim Christ out of love,
knowing that I have been put here for the defense of the gospel; the others
proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but intending to
increase my suffering in my imprisonment. What does it matter? Just this, that
Christ is proclaimed in every way, whether out of false motives or true; and in
that I rejoice.”
C.
Both James and Jesus relentlessly push us out of our comfort zones. Confessing
our sins to each other. Praying with effective power. Anointing the sick with
oil. Pursuing the wanderers. Accepting those who do prayer, faith and church
differently than we do. Prayer is powerful and effective to transform those who
are suffering or cheerful, sick or wandering.
IV. Dr. Christina Puchalski,
M.D. teaches at George Washington University School of Medicine and is a member
of the lay Carmelites. I have heard her speak several times about spirituality
and prayer, healing and medicine. She has conducted and collected empirical
studies that explore the effect of spirituality and prayer on medical outcomes.
I remember her talking about one study that was trying to distinguish the
psychological and spiritual. An interfaith prayer group was given the randomly
selected names of half of the patients in a hospital for a week and asked to
pray for them but not contact them or anyone who knew them. While statistically
significant improvements were observed, the uncontrollable variables made the
results inconclusive. Yet, she has made prayer and spirituality an integral
part of her medical practice.
A.
In our empirical, results driven culture, we easily miss how and why prayer
is powerful and effective to transform those who are suffering or cheerful,
sick or wandering. What happens to the patient in the hospital is a tangential byproduct
of what happens to the ones who are praying. Tim Stafford wrote in this month’s
(September 2012) Christianity Today that the New Testament doesn’t speak of miracles but of signs. When something
we have prayed for comes about, that does not say how wonderful our prayers
were. Rather, it is a sign to pay attention to God and recognize that God’s
Reign is breaking in on us. (p. 50)
B.
Powerful, effective prayer is not about giving God a laundry list of
everything we’d like fixed and every person we’d like to be healed. The focus
of powerful, effective prayer shifts from all these things that swirl around
and within us to a steady, stable focus on God. Seventeenth century Russian
mystic Dimitri of Rostov said it this way: “Prayer is turning the mind and
thoughts towards God. To pray means to stand before God with the mind, mentally
to gaze unswervingly at [God], and to converse with [God] in reverent fear and
hope.” (The Art of Prayer, Igumen Chariton, Faber and Faber, Boston, 1936
Russian, 1966 English; p. 50)
C.
We pray together in worship and to open and close meetings, but our
highly individualistic culture pushes us to think of prayer as an individual
activity. Certainly personal prayer is important, but James wrote to
congregations about how to pray in community. James envisioned churches that
pray, that sing, that heal and that restore. That is how prayer becomes
powerful and effective to transform those who are suffering or cheerful, sick
or wandering.
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