God's Great River of Love

by Rev. Shelby Ochs Owen

This sermon is based on James 5:13-20. 

The prayer list in our bulletin here at Trinity is the longest I have seen in any church I have ever been a part of! The list is long enough that we actually divide it up among our three Sunday morning services.  And this is a GOOD problem to have! I think James our epistle writer for today would approve.  You may have noticed that on this list we have names of Trinity members and non-members, some who use only their first names and some who include last names, some are names of folks you know and some you will only know through offering their names to God in prayer; and some names will appear only once while others will remain on this list for years.  There is a great deal of mystery associated with this list and many questions raised.  Why pray? How does prayer work? DOES prayer work?

In our Epistle reading for today, James has concrete ideas of how his audience should respond to all sorts and conditions of people.  “Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of our Lord.”  He goes on to say, “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”  When you think about the Episcopal Sunday Eucharist service, we have many elements of these concrete suggestions in it: we sing or say songs of praise, we make prayers of intercession, meaning we pray for individuals who are in need of healing or some other need, and we have a general confession.  So in a very general sense and in some specific ways we follow through with James’ teaching.

At the time James wrote his letter a tradition of the laying on of hands and using oil for healing purposes had been well established.  While in ancient Jewish tradition, oil was used for anointing a king or priest, it was often a remedy for pain.  In the New Testament oil is connected with healing. The practice is associated with Jesus himself as he sent out the 12 disciples to cast out demons and anoint many who were sick as a sign of the reign of God come near.  You probably remember the story of the Good Samaritan where the Samaritan poured oil on the wounded man. Jesus laid hands on the sick. The apostle Paul did the same.  When James teaches his audience to pray and anoint with oil in the name of the Lord, he is saying that they are to do what Jesus did, they are to invoke the name of Jesus to heal; there is power in the name itself, but to use the name is also to do that which Jesus would do and have us do, to love the way Jesus loved. 

We have a healing service here in the chapel each Wednesday morning at 10:30a.m. Anyone is welcome to come.  Usually we have around 6 or 7 people participate in a litany of prayers that we all say together and then we come to the altar for individual prayers.   People ask for prayers for themselves and on behalf of others.  This is a sacred time when we bring people before God, entrusting them to his saving and healing care.  At the end of each person’s prayer, the priest lays his or her hands upon the person’s head and anoints them with oil in the sign of the cross, and says a prayer similar to this: “I lay my hands upon you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, asking him to uphold you this day, that you may know the power of Christ’s unfailing love.”  There is power in invoking Jesus’ name to heal.  The one who prays is not the healer but simply a vehicle or instrument of God’s healing grace.  It is God who heals.  Sometimes the person being prayed for actually feels something change or shift and sometimes no change consciously registers.  But whether we can see or feel the results, this simple act of faith is what we are called to do and trust God to do his work.  How prayer works and exactly what happens when we pray is difficult to say but prayer does draw us closer to the divine.  

When we pray for others, we are bringing them to Jesus, which is one of the most loving things we can do for anyone.  I often hear people say, when they are in the middle of a situation that seems impossible, “I guess all we can do is pray,” as if that is not much of an offering, as if that is a puny and powerless gesture.  What if we rearranged our thinking and chose to believe that praying for someone is to actually put their hand into the hand of God, that praying for someone is to bring them to the feet of Jesus himself so he can touch them? What can be better than that?

Sometimes the need for prayer for so many in our midst can seem overwhelming. Indeed this wonderfully long list of prayers in our bulletin can overwhelm some of us.  No doubt that each of us could and probably many of us do lift up more names as we go through our days.  A wise friend of mine Liz sees praying for others as an opportunity to give people over to God’s unfailing care.  With each person she prays for she sees it as intentionally placing them in the great river of God’s love.  This river is so wide, so deep, so huge, so beautiful, so beyond our imagining and as we give each person to God’s care through prayer they become part of this great river.  The river image can remind us to trust that God is in charge, that God is sovereign and that God is compassionate.  Then we do what we can do-- it may be to send someone a card or to call them or to visit or to take a meal or to take them to the doctor. (And these things are prayer, too…)

When we pray for others and for ourselves we enter the mysterious place where human and divine activity are one and we cannot even see where one ends and the other begins.  When we pray for others and for ourselves we are reminded that we are part of a community where people are in need of God and one another.  When we pray for others and for ourselves we are better able to see the divine image of God in others and in ourselves.  Prayer is the way we nurture the relationship between human life and the divine realm.  When we pray we make ourselves more vulnerable, and therefore more open to God’s healing touch.

 Where James writes that his audience is to call for the elders, the Greek word used is presbyteroi, which is often used by the later church to refer to priests but possibly here means simply those who are older in the faith.  So to put into practice this idea that we should ask others to pray for us, today I invite you to allow yourselves to be prayed for.  Immediately after you receive communion you are welcome to step over to the chapel to the right where I will be to lay hands upon you and anoint you and pray for you in the name of Jesus.  You don’t need to say a thing except your name or the name of someone who you would like for me to pray for.  We will pray and leave the results to God.  We will pray and we will place those for whom we pray in that great river of God’s love, which is not a bad place to be.