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James 5: 13-20

Calling in the Experts©

       When I was in seminary I worked at a United Methodist Church in Rockville, MD.  My job was to visit the visitors who joined us in worship.  We would usually have several visitors each week, and if they left their addresses, my job was to visit them and thank them for coming and invite them to come again.

            Matt Holt was a visitor who came most Sundays to church.  He was always alone, sitting on the left aisle about halfway down.  He came most Sundays faithfully.

            I stopped by Matt’s home one day, and we chatted for a while.  Matt told me that he was a Methodist from his earliest years.  In fact there was a chapel in a Methodist church in another town in MD that was named after his grandfather.  Charlie was Methodist, but he had been going to Mass with his wife and children for the past thirty years.   Seems that things were not good between Matt and Ben, so Matt had decided to find a Methodist church to worship.

       Matt told me that he and Bev were in the process of getting a divorce.  They were both still living at home, but the divorce was imminent.  Matt told me that I would like his wife.  She was a very capable woman who had single-handedly raised their children.

            I met Bev later, and we did hit it off.  We had motherhood, homemaking and our faith in Christ in common.

            I happened to stop by the Holt’s home one eveing several months later and discovered that Bev had made some big changes in her life.  She was looking for something new.  She had been a stay-at-home mom for twenty-plus years, and now the kids were out of the house—in college or working somewhere.  Bev had taken a job and was discovering the outside world.  She enjoyed her new job and the friendships that were developing at work.  She ran an office for a big company and was happy to have an income of her own and a car she bought herself.

            Another night I stopped by to see Bev, and I found her in a strange state.  She had just finished packing an overnight bag for a weekend trip with her boss.  She had been invited on a tryst.  Bev told me that Matt was never there for her. She thought he didn’t care what she did.  He traveled all the time.

            As we talked I could hear Bev’s desperation.  She knew what she was planning was not right.  She knew better, but she was greatly tempted.  Finally, we held hands on the couch, and we prayed together. We prayed for strength and guidance and healing for both Bev and  Matt.  Tears came streaming down our faces. I left.

            This morning our subject is prayer.

            St. James tells us that we need to call in the elders when there is a need.

            I remember my mother telling me about a conversation that occurred between her brother and sister, my uncle and aunt.  My Uncle Allen worked for Boeing in Seattle. He was about to fly to the Pentagon to meet with some Navy folks to show them something Boeing wanted them to buy.  Uncle Allen impressed my aunt about the importance, the size, the price for the project that he was hoping to sell to the Navy.  Finally my aunt looked at her kid brother and said, ‘You’d think if the project was that important and expensive they would send an expert!’

            We all laughed about that!  I’m sure there are experts in every field.  There are experts in fields I don’t even know about.  Experts are the leaders in their various disciplines who teach classes and write books about their specialties. They are the one who we look to tell us in layman’s language what their field of study is about.

Do you suppose there is such a thing as an expert on prayer?

That seems to be what St. James is talking about at the end of his letter.

James lays out a picture of the early church and how it should function.

James asks, ‘Are any of you suffering?  Are any of you sick? Have any committed sins?  Have any wondered away from the fellowship of believers?

James tells us in these situations we should pray.  Then James says, ‘The prayer of the Righteous is powerful and effective.’  (James 5:16b)  By saying that James seems to be saying that there are some people who are experts in prayer.  Their prayers have power to heal.

Where do you suppose we can find such prayer experts today?  Do you suppose that a prayer expert might get better results from his praying?

Remember the problems James talked about?  They are the same things we face in our churches today. 

·         Suffering

·         Sickness

·         Sin

·         Sliding away from the faith.

  James’ answer for each of those situations is prayer.

He tells those who are suffering to pray.

He tells those who are sick to call in the elders for prayer and anointing with oil for healing.

He tells everyone that they should confess their sins to one another and pray for one another.

The answer for each trouble is prayer.

In each case James is calling for prayer.  Sometimes he recommends personal prayer. Sometimes he says to call in the elders for anointing and prayer. Sometimes he tells us to come in community (or maybe just two or three) to confess our sins and pray for one another.  But each situation calls for prayer.

Prayer is absolutely connected to faith, and faith is entirely connected to Christ Jesus, the one who is the healer and savior of the world. Prayer is the method God uses for believers to live in partnership with God, for communicating God’s blessings.

James tells his readers that when they pray they will be saved, raised up, forgiven, and healed.  Those are all things that God does.  God alone is the one who can save and forgive sins.  God alone heals us.  It is God who answers prayers.  God is the power and the giver of life and health and new possibilities.  Let us never forget the source of our blessings is always God.

The Jews knew that, and they had an enlightened moment when they saw Jesus forgive someone.  Do you remember that story?  Jesus was at somebody’s home, and the house was crowded with people flocking around Jesus to see him, to touch him, to hear him, and to watch him heal people.  There was quite a crowd that day, all clamoring to see Jesus.

It seems some men had a friend who was completely paralyzed, and these friends wanted to take their friend to Jesus, so he could be healed.

Remember how there was such a crowd filling the house where Jesus was that the friends had to find some other way to get their friend before Jesus.  Finally they tore open the roof of the house and lowered their friend through the roof on his pallet in front of where Jesus was standing.  Jesus took one look at the man and told him, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven.’  Then Jesus realized that many who were there watching were thinking to themselves, ‘How can this man forgive sins?  Only God can forgive sins.’  Jesus looked at the people and told them what they were thinking, and then he said, ‘So that you know that the Son of man has the authority to forgive sins, he told the man, ‘get up, take your pallet and walk.’   And the man did just that.  He rose up, picked up his pallet and left.

Jesus does the work of God.  He showed the people that day that he had both the power and authority to heal and to forgive sins.  In fact, Jesus’ name means healer and savior.

When Jesus heals us, he touches not only our spiritual body but our physical body and our emotional body, too.  Jesus heals our entire body.

The experts James is talking about are people with a strong faith in Christ.  James writes about calling in the elders, the recognized leaders of the faith, the ones who have been walking with the LORD for some time, who have trusted him for everything.  They are ones who know about going to the LORD in prayer as a FIRST RESORT, not as a last resort. They are the ones who have been encouraged by their faith, remembering how faithful God has been in the past and completely expecting God to continue in faithfulness in the future.

Prayer experts, or elders, do not have more prayer power or more access to power.  All they have is a strong faith in the One who has the power—that is God in Christ.

The prayer of the Righteous is powerful and effective.

So who is righteous?

Is that an elder?  Is that a prayer warrior?

How is it that some have powerful and effective prayers?

First we must recognize that not one of us is a righteous person in our own right.  None of us are righteous through our own merit. No, not one.

Each of us must set our trust in Christ, whose righteousness is perfect.   When we are clothed in Christ’s righteousness, we can do much. 

·         He is the One with the power,

·         the One with the authority,

·         the One who heals and saves.

The only person with any connection, with any prayer, with any pull in prayer, then, is one who is covered in Christ’s righteousness, believing completely that Jesus Christ is able and willing to heal us.

When I need prayer help I go to a fellow Christian, one who I believe has a strong faith in the power and healing of God, one who has experienced God’s touch and walks daily with the LORD.

I also believe that a new Christian, one who has just come to faith and is in the process of taking her first step with the LORD would be a good choice for prayer partners.  They have the fresh commitment and the fresh determination to follow the LORD.  They are close the LORD by their newness and their enthusiasm.

In other words, it is not the power of the pray-ER, it is not the particular words he or she speaks, the articulateness of the pray-ER that brings the results.  It is the faith in God in Christ who give the healing.

It is God who has the power.

I recently re-read an article written by one of my theology professors, Dr. Larry Stookey from Wesley Seminary.  He wrote about the power of prayer.  He points out that prayer in not just an activity of the individual, but it is also an activity of the community of faith.  Remember the Lord’s Prayer?  “Our Father; give us; forgive us; lead us; deliver us.”

Dr. Stookey says that many people seem to pray at a personal level only.  He calls it the ‘us four and no more syndrome’.

Stookey spent some time exploring the metaphor of electrical power as a picture of God’s power.  Of course the socket itself doesn’t have any power, but the circuit box in the wall is connected to the power station down town.

 Dr. Stookey wrote:  "Suppose that through prayer we access the energy of God, which God wills not only to send to us but to sent through us to others so that in a sense prayer is a distribution of divine energy."

 I love that picture.  It may not be a perfect picture of God’s power, but perhaps it does give us a bigger picture of what can happen when we pray.  If we can become conduits of God’s love and healing energy, allowing the ‘flow’ of God’s blessing to many, then we should pray for more than ‘us four and no more’.  We have a responsibility to stretch our prayers, and thus God’s blessings, to other in the world.

Stookey pointed out that the daily newspapers are a good place to begin our prayers.  It certainly would stretch our focus beyond our own neighborhoods.  When we pray in this broader sense we can ask God to bless, forgive, encourage, give wisdom, and guide many more people who clearly need God’s blessing.

 Praying that way would better address Jesus’ command to pray for our enemies and those who despitefully use us.  I don’t believe we always do that.   

Remember Bev and the story I began telling earlier?  The night we prayed together had been strange.  It has started with great pain for Bev.  I just happened in on her situation, but by the end of the evening something had happened.  We had prayed and tears had run freely down our faces.

A few weeks later I drove by the Holt’s house.  I knocked on the door, and Bev welcomed me in.  She told me that after I left that night she had unpacked her bag.  She didn’t go away with her boss that weekend. And she and Matt had begun talking.

They decided to give the whole thing another try.  They decided to redo everything—their marriage, their home.   (Their house had been very dark and almost gloomy inside with very dark, heavy draperies at the windows.  There was no way the sun would ever come into their house the way it had been.)  The large container outside was to catch all the debris that they were throwing out as they ‘cleaned house’.

Eventually Matt and Bev joined the Methodist Church where I worked, where Matt had been attending.  They are strong members today.  I get to read about them in the church newsletter.  It’s good to see how far they’ve come.

The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.  That’s what St. James tells us.  I believe that the prayer Bev and I spoke that nigh had an important effect on the Holts.  Our faith in Christ, the Righteous One, accessed the power of Almighty God.  It is very powerful and effective.

Copyright © 2009 Marjorie Palmer. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this writing may be reproduced in any form without specific, written permission of the author.

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