James 5:13-20
October 1, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
One of the most popular movies of all times is the Wizard of Oz. When the wizard’s identity has been discovered—when the “man behind the curtain” has been found out—he climbs into a basket of his hot air balloon to finally take Dorothy home. While Dorothy is hugging and weeping and biding everyone a fine farewell, the balloon comes loose from its moorings and up, up, and away it goes; taking the wizard home, leaving Dorothy stranded. Dorothy pleads with the wizard to wait for her. Do you remember what he shouts? “I don’t know how it works!”
As a pastor who climbs up behind this pulpit every Sunday and listens to your prayer requests, my identity is known. While you share your pain and struggles, weeping and despair, and joys and celebrations, I loosed my prayers from their moorings, sending them heavenward on your behalf. And just as you plead with me as Dorothy does with the wizard to make your prayers come true, I seem to be able to only say, “I don’t know how it works!”
Morning Prayer
Just like how James was writing to the early church, I ask you on Sunday mornings “Are any among you suffering? Are any cheerful? Are any among you sick?” I listen very carefully and try to integrate your prayer concerns into my prayer—praying for one another, so that you may be healed. Today, if we are honest with ourselves, many of us pray without really knowing how prayer works. But the only thing that we do know is that we seek a miracle of healing.
Some of you come praying, asking for relief from physical distress, and seeking healing for illness of the body. Some of you come, praying, seeking peace in the midst of spiritual struggles, and seeking healing for illness of the soul. Others of you come praying, looking for the end to emotional turmoil, and seeking healing for the illness of the spirit. Some of you come, praying for help with relationships that are troubled, and seeking the gift of reconciliation. Others come praying, seeking the strength needed to be a caregiver to one who suffers. We all come to pray, to ask God to relieve our fears, to cure our anxiety.
We pray for a miracle of healing that we seek, even if we don’t know how it works.
Focus on Physical Healing
We live in a society that is very focused on physical healing these days—or more accurately, physical relief from various ailments. More and more TV commercials are for medications that promise fast relief. Whether we have a headache, cold, toenail fungus, or a serious medical problem such as high cholesterol or asthma, there are over-the-counter or prescription medications that promise to make us feel better…not only better, but better than their competition’s brand would. We pop a pill and trust that it will work in just a few minutes.
Sometimes, in focusing on relieving our physical pain, we fail to look at the cause of the real problem. Why are we getting so many headaches? Why are we finding ourselves snapping at members of our family? Why are our shoulders constantly in pain from tension? Why is our cholesterol high…could it be all of the fast food we’ve consumed in our refusal to take good care of our bodies, or the fact that we overeat in order to push aside the emotional pain we’re feeling?
It is estimated that over half of the physical ailments in our country are caused or exacerbated by emotional stress… or I might say “spiritual stress.” Anger can cause headache. Envy can cause stomach upset. Gluttony can cause obesity. Sloth can cause you to be unemployed. Greed can cause anxiety. Lust can cause a marital breakup. Pride can cause overworking. They aren’t called the seven deadly sins for nothing! As we harbor these and other sins in our bodies, they often find ways of expressing themselves in physical and emotional ways, no matter how hard we try to suppress them.
Brought Suffering to Themselves
For us to understand today’s passage, we need to go back to the beginning of the chapter. James was rebuking the people for complaining about the suffering that has come to them. James was telling them that they have brought this suffering upon themselves. They have depended on riches, and have gathered every good thing they could possibly want, and have had a delightful time. They have lived a good life without concern for their neighbor or the poor, and now they are paying the price for trampling on those around them.
Perhaps like us, they have engaged in a multitude of sins, escalating in frequency and severity, and their fall has therefore been great. They are now blaming each other for their problems.
James tells them to live the life Christ would want them to live. He tells them to be patient, strengthen their hearts, endure with humility the troubles they are facing. This is probably not welcome news to a group of people who would rather play the blame game, but James is persistent. If they are suffering, as they no doubt are, they should pray. If they are sick, they should call the elders of the church, because the prayer of faith will save the sick.
And then James focuses in on spiritual health. If our spirits are healthy, we can endure bodily pain or disease…James isn’t even concerned about our physical health. He did not promise that the elders coming when one is sick would heal someone of physical disease, but instead said that the “prayer of faith would save the sick.” He is talking about spiritual health. If our souls are harboring sins—greed, anger, pride, etc.—then we are sick and cannot be healthy until we have somehow taken care of our souls.
Our spiritual sickness can lead to physical problems…we begin by nurturing anger and end up hurting someone. Instead of treating the symptoms, James wants us to look for the cause. Go beyond the headache, the high cholesterol, the tension in your shoulders and look for the real cause.
Way to Health
The way to health according to James is to confess your sins by taking responsibility for your wrongdoings, pray for one another—keeping each other accountable, and then you would be healed because the prayers of the righteous are powerful.
Some of us think that since we are feeling fine right now then our life must be fine. We don’t necessarily see the connection between our physical health and our spiritual health. In fact, as long as we are physically feeling pretty good, most of us think that we don’t need to pray at all!
If I were to ask you to confess your sins, you would say that I was talking to someone else. It doesn’t apply to me. After all, I didn’t rob a bank. I’m not a serial killer. We are good people—we go to church, say hello to our neighbor if we happen to see them in the yard and basically live a good life. Besides, we are covered because we say a little prayer of confession each Sunday led by the pastor.
Yet, we are leaving the television on all day, so that we don’t have to think for ourselves. We’re taking more pills to help us sleep, help us wake up, and if we are not using prescriptions, we are using caffeine and alcohol to control our moods. We’re overeating and becoming an obese society. Did you know that the number of people who are overweight in the world now equals the number of people who are hungry or starving? We are becoming an angrier society—we want things to go our way, and if they don’t, we sue someone or go on a rampage to kill innocent bystanders. Our physical health is telling us that spiritually we are out of sync.
Sometimes we think that to pray a prayer of confession is only necessary when we have messed up big. It’s only for the big stuff. If we screw up big, we confess and ask for forgiveness. If we were caught doing something wrong and absolutely couldn’t wiggle out of it, then we confess. Many people have not robbed a bank, embezzled money, or killed anyone in cold blood…but it doesn’t mean that we are free from sin.
We think we don’t need to confess about the little things that happen in our daily living. But no sin is too small for confession; just as no grain of sand is too small to not cause the mechanism in a watch to malfunction. When we have this mindset, we tend to blame what goes wrong on someone else. We would rather not take responsibility for our own wrongdoings.
It’s like when we hurt someone’s feelings, we expect them to accept “well, I got out of the wrong side of the bed” in place of a genuine apology. When we bump into someone, we excuse it by saying, “well, they shouldn’t have been standing there.”
When our children don’t behave at school, it is the teacher’s fault and never our child’s lack of respect.
James tells us that confession and forgiveness is built in to who we are as creations by God. It is what keeps us balance and healthy. When we pray for our forgiveness and to live as Christ lived, our prayers lead us to become both spiritually and physically healthy.
I know that some of you feel that you are not qualified to pray. You always defer to the pastor to pray when all along, you know how to pray. You may think that your sin has disqualified you from receiving God’s love. The good news is that our sin does not disqualify us from God. Even though our acts of sin are contradictory to what we are supposed to be about, God does not abandon us because of our shortcomings.
How Does Pray Work
So how does prayer work? It works when we confess our sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.
Maybe that’s how it works. We seek healing, not alone, but in community. We come together as individuals, but also as a community to pray, not only for ourselves, but for one another, as James encourages us to do. We pray for God’s help to relieve our suffering, and the suffering of our neighbor. We pray for the strength and courage we need to help one another in our suffering, wherever our lives lead us.
Our prayers and worship will be acceptable in God’s sight because we come with humble hearts, asking that God’s goodness be done among us; knowing that we are called to be Jesus’ hands for one another. When we shake hands or bless each other by holding each other’s hands or when we hold hands to sing after the Lord’s Supper, we are Jesus’ hands praying for each other.
So come with hope to pray for healing, even if you’re not sure how it works. Come believing this promise from First Peter: “After you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever.”
We do know that when we struggle with our prayers, God is with us. We do not pray alone. We don’t know how it works, but we know that even when we do not know how to pray, the Spirit intercedes for us…the Spirit prays for us in sighs too deep for words (Romans 8).
Prayer…”I don’t know how it works!” I just know that it does! I don’t know how it works, but I know, just like the wizard’s balloon, it takes us home. Prayer takes us home to God, our Lord.
Let us pray.
Precious Lord, take us home. Teach us to trust in your plan for our lives as we pray for forgiveness of our sins of wanting do things our way. Bless us with the power of prayer that can save the sick, comfort those who suffer, and give you praise and joy when our lives are filled with cheerfulness and hope. In the name of Christ Jesus, we pray who can raise the dead and gave up his life so that our lives may live forever. Amen.