sermon James 5-6-16

        Last week, I came across the last will and testament of Mrs. Margaret Stella Rue of Joplin Montana which she wrote on 20 June 1962.  Someone in her family posted it on the internet.

        Margaret begins: “To my son Robert Albert Rue, I bequeath one dollar.  To the Christian Hour Radio Program, in Ohio I give one hundred dollars.”  Then she begins to pray for her daughter, “I pray God will ever watch over you and Wade and keep you in his tender care throughout your lives. And please pray continually that my precious grand children will study God's word and obey the gospel as taught in it that we all will someday meet together around the great white throne in an unbroken circle whose loved ones have gone before.  I do also pray that God will forgive me where I have failed and that I tried to be true to God in my ignorance.”  She ends with a prayer of bendeiction, “May God bless and keep you and yours, and save all my loved ones.  This will be my last prayer to my God through my Christ who gave his all for me”.  Love, Mamma.

        You don’t often hear of someone writing their last will and testament as a prayer.  There are prayers of thanks here, prayers of need, prayers of confession, prayers of blessing, and prayers of hope. Her last testament is written like a worship service.      

        Not everyone these days believes in prayer- its power or its language.  Some people say you’re just talking to yourself. The answer you think you get back is the echo of your own voice bouncing off the back of your brain. 

        I suppose if we thought too much about prayer with the rational part of our brains, we must come to the conclusion that prayer is a little childish perhaps. The rational mind prefers the language of human logic to solve human problems.  Logic says it is superstitious to speak to an invisible God of love

for some favour, or some intervention like healing, or for that matter, to give thanks for anything at all

like the fact that I am born in this great country.

.

        Prayer is well- childish. Jesus teaches this in fact and without apology. Childish in the sense that a child has not made its mind up yet about what is and what is not possible. If someone tells a child a bedtime story of dungeons and dragons and white knights on horses saving damsels in distress and

that they all live in a castle under the bed;

the child will wait for the story teller to leave the room

and then crawl under the bed to see for himself. You got to want to be curious and open to new possibilities, opportunities when one prays.

        Prayer is also childish because a child knows how to trust in a sort of naïve but wholesome way.   Perhaps that is one reason why Jesus gives a warning in his teaching about children and trust-, don’t you dare lead a child’s trust astray, he says in the Gospel this morning. Don’t you lead a child away from coming to understand -that God is love, that I am the healing power of God’s love.

        Still, the optimist in me wants to say that everybody including those who don’t say they believe in God, or believe that God wants to communicate with us through prayer are really praying whether they know it or not:

that odd silence that falls over me like a warm blanket

when I travel west on county road nine  to Creemore from New Lowell.  I see the hills of Creemore ahead

and behind them the huge sky lit by the setting sun

and I let out a sigh. 

        Perhaps the sigh is a prayer- a deep longing to know our own lives are indeed eternal and in God’s care. A sigh that we want to trust this like little children.

        Jesus tells many stories about prayer. Some were quite funny in their original context.

        He says in one:

God is like a friend you go to in the middle of the night

to borrow a loaf of bread from.

You bang on the door and wake your friend up.

His hair is dishevelled, his breath is bad,

but not as bad as his disposition this early in the morning.

When you ask him for bread, he answers:

Get the heck out of here, go away,

the kids are sleeping. 

But you keep knocking anyway until out of sheer exasperation, your friend gives you a love of bread just to get rid of you

so he can get some sleep.

        Be a persistent prayer, says Jesus,

no matter what comes- hell or high water, pray persistently.  

        The apostle James, who was the leader of the church in Jerusalem after Jesus’ resurrection, takes the Lord’s teaching on prayer and passes the wisdom on to his faith community. As faithful Jews, his community would have already spoken prayer in a natural daily rhythm, just like Margaret Stella Rue wrote about it. They would have prayed the Lord’s prayer as Jesus taught and they would have prayed a version of this great prayer that all Jews still pray today:

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation …”—“shield of Abraham,” “who makes the dead alive,” “who delights in repentance,” “rich in forgiveness,” “who humbles the insolent,” “who builds Jerusalem,” “who hears prayer.”

Be persistent in prayer because God hears prayer.

        But James adds some new wisdom and understanding about prayer that is not found so clearly elsewhere in the New Testament. He asks the questions,

are any of you suffering or sick?  Then pray.

        But he adds- go to the elders. Let them pray for you to.  By elders, he does he does not mean necessarily the old people in the congregation. He means those who are spiritually mature and who have life experience,

those who have suffered themselves,

Those who have had doubts and unbelief in their suffering,

        Those who have even experienced the reality that this prayer or that one never got answered or may never be answered satisfactorily in this lifetime..

        Those who were familiar with the tradition that Jesus’ last public prayer from his suffering on the cross was the question from Psalm 22: “My God my God why have you forsaken me?  

        Those who knew that Jesus never had that prayer answered by God this side of his grave.

        But finally also in great mystery of God’s eternal love

        The elders were above all those who knew that an answer did indeed come for Jesus and for all of us on the third day after he died. The elders are those who pray persistently anyway.

        I think James is a wise man who understood intuitively the psychology and the spirituality and the faith of people. He knew that a healthy Christian community needs prayers for those who may no longer be able to pray for themselves because of their fear, their bitterness, their lack of faith, their hardheadedness or heartedness.

        We are all elders at points in our faith journey and we are all unbelievers to. To pray for a friend who is ill, for a colleague who is depressed, for a family whose loved one has died, for those who are victims of social injustice is not a childish attempt to influence God’s will, but a gesture of our humanity.

        To pray for these situations is a desire to make a little gesture to God form our own hearts for another person’s suffering.

         So keep at prayer, Jesus and James would say.  Keep speaking into the darkness of your uncertainty. Keep asking for light. It may not come right away-today or tomorrow but on the third day it will flood your hearts with hope and healing.  TBTG. Amen