This sermon, based on James 5,13-20, was preached by Rev. Candasu Vernon Cubbage on September 29, 2024 (Proper 21). It is the last sermon of a series based on the book of James called: “Reflecting Christ in Times of Challenge.”
At the beginning of this passage James asks us, “Are any among you suffering?”
Yeah, we are all suffering… in different ways. Some of us are suffering more than others.
Suffering is nothing new. People have suffered since Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden. Maybe even before that.
Technically, the Bible doesn’t say that nothing bad ever happened to Adam and Eve before they left the paradise of the Garden of Eden. We often think of Paradise as an ideal place, even heaven, but Paradise is a Persian (or Iranian) word that just means garden or park.
The Bible doesn’t tell us that Adam and Eve never broke a bone or had a headache or the flu.
What the Bible does say is that while Adam and Eve were still in the garden, they lived in unbroken communion with God, and that is what made life like what we think of as paradise, or heave, or the kin-dom of God.
Communion with God means constant connection with God. It means not only telling God what we want or need, but also listening for God, and hearing God, and doing what God wants us to do. Unbroken communion means being in contact with God all the time.
The Bible says that after they left the Garden of Eden, God increased Eve’s pain, not that Eve had no pain before they left. I’m sure Adam had pain too, and the pain got worse for both of them after they broke their constant communion with God. In the same way, our suffering gets worse when we are not in constant communion with God.
Sometimes other people know about our suffering, but sometimes we keep our suffering hidden. We don’t want other people to know how much we hurt or how hard our lives are, because it makes us feel vulnerable. We think that if other people knew about our pains, our struggles, our weaknesses, it would inspire them to judge us or even attack us.
James tells us that when we suffer, we should pray. Prayer is how we are connected with God, and it is how we get back in touch with God when we, accidentally or on purpose, turn away or drift away from God.
Prayer is how we communicate our praise, our gratitude, and our devotion to God.
Prayer is how we communicate our wants, our needs, and our concern for others.
James calls us to pray and talk to God about it, and then listen and watch for God’s response. But even when we do pray, sometimes it feels like we are doing nothing but watching the world collapse around us. Sometimes it feels like we must not be praying the correct words because we think that God does not hear us and God does not do anything about it.
Prayer is not really about the words. Prayer is not about how beautiful the words are or how long the prayer is.
Prayer is about being open to God, open to a connection with God.
When we reach out to God with all our hopes and fears, with all our praise and confessions, with all our dreams and failures, God does hear and see us, and God responds to us.
When we reach out to God as a group or a community and pour out our thoughts and feelings to God, then together we can connect with God, we can be still, and listen, and respond to God together.
We are called to listen to what God has to say to us both as individuals and as a group. Each one of us might only hear and feel a tiny piece of God’s response, but when we all are praying and listening together we can get a better and stronger sense of what God wants and how each of us can participate as a group to do what God wants.
When we share all our different perspectives together, we get a more clear picture of the situation around us. The more clear a situation is to us, the easier it is to discern what we can and should do together, each one of us participating as we are able.
When someone, or a whole group of people, need healing, connecting with God through prayer can clarify what actually needs to be healed and how to go about it.
But you and I don’t heal ourselves or heal each other. It is God working through us that heals individuals, and groups, and ultimately heals nations.
When someone, or a whole group, needs forgiveness, connecting with God through prayer can help us understand what forgiveness looks like and how to go about it.
But you and I don’t forgive ourselves. It is God working through us that forgives our sin, any sin, and leaves us fresh to start again. Even when we forgive someone else, it is actually God’s forgiveness working through us.
We live in a world that is full of suffering and evil, but this same world is also full of joy and love.
We are called to participate in celebration and thanksgiving even during times when we experience hardship and trials that test our strength and our endurance. We are not called to save our celebration and thankfulness until all the suffering is over. We celebrate and thank God even during the times of tests and tragedy.
It’s hard to focus on both joy and suffering at the same time. It’s hard to feel joy when we are suffering, or others around us are suffering. But we are called to be grounded in joy and love and hope, even in the midst of evil and suffering.
We do this by staying connected to God at all times no matter what is going on around us.
We open our minds and our hearts to both the joy and the suffering around us by allowing ourselves to see and feel both the joy and the suffering. We open our minds and our hearts by giving ourselves over to the power of prayer, which is the power of God working through us.
We come to God in prayer with all the details of what we are living through: the details of our joy and our sorrow, the details of our needs and the needs of others, not so that God will know about these wants and needs. God already knows.
We come to God with all these things so that we, as individuals and as a community, can better understand the problems and the solutions.
In prayer we share with each other those who are sick, those who are lonely, those who are hungry.
In prayer we share the problems of the community along with the injustice and the need for vision for the future.
Prayer is not just a list of items we want or need. Prayer is not just a list that we read to God and then expect God to act on while we wait.
Prayer is opening ourselves up to the power of the Spirit so that God can work through us.
Prayer isn’t just words, sometimes there are no words at all. Sometimes prayer is an idea, a longing, a grounding in hope. Sometimes prayer is a song, or a painting, or a dance.
Prayer is seeing what God is trying to show us, and hearing what God is trying to tell us.
It doesn’t matter if we speak the prayer or someone else prays for us. It doesn’t matter if the prayer was written in the past, or spoken in the moment, or if it is the same prayer that has been prayed for generations.
Sometimes a prayer is something that is not said, but something that is done.
James specifically talks about the prayer of faith.
The prayer of faith is the vow or commitment of our belief.
The prayer of faith is a solemn promise we make to God to do something, or to refrain from doing something.
The prayer of faith heals the sick, but healing is not exactly the same thing as curing.
Curing actually means that a treatment makes a problem go away and the problem is not expected to come back.
Healing means that someone becomes sound and healthy again. The healed person gets better, but they are not necessarily the same as new. Sometimes healing leaves a scar or a change.
The prayer of faith brings forgiveness to anyone who has committed sins, but forgiveness does not mean that what was done is okay. Forgiveness is letting go of and cutting ties to the anger and pain caused by the acts that need to be forgiven.
Once we forgive we cut the ties to the anger and pain we felt.
Once we are forgiven, we are freed from the anger and pain we caused.
The prayer of faith is not something that we do by ourselves. It is a prayer made by the whole community. We pray with each other and for each other. We share our struggles. We confess our sins to each other and those sins will be forgiven.
Through the prayer of faith we are all made whole and healthy again.
Last week we heard about the poisonous tongue, the tongue that Pastor Marissa said was a voice of wisdom from below which does harm rather than good.
We are talking about gossip, about saying mean-spirited or unsympathetic things about strangers or neighbors or even friends.
James reminds us that it is possible for the things we say to be good and helpful and that our prayers can even restore communities. He reminds us to remember the stories of our ancestors who also faced trials and tribulations, and who made it through those trials and tribulations to reconciliation.
But the restoration of the community does not happen overnight. That can be frustrating for us.
We see the evil all around us. We see the injustice, the poverty, the brokenness, the exclusiveness, the anger, and the hate.
We want all those things to be healed, and we want that healing right now. We are impatient and tired of the world as it is right now. We wonder where God is in all this.
Revelation, Chapter 21 tells us that God’s home is among us. God will dwell with us; we will be God’s people. That God will wipe every tear from our eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’
And God said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’
Let us pray:
O God, you have promised to live among us and that we will be your people. Open our ears, our hearts, and our minds so that we may better understand what your will is and so we may be your workers and messengers here, and then work through us to spread healing and forgiveness across the earth.
Amen.
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