Transcript
James Really Works: Caring for the Family
First Baptist Richmond, September 29, 2024
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
James 5:13-20
Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise.
Today I’m preaching from James 5:13-20. It’s a beautiful passage, but most people seem to think it’s about prayer. And maybe that’s because in verse 14 James writes: “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 the Lord.” And in the next verse he writes, “The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up.” If you take that literally then you are going to do just what it says. For example: if your wife gets sick you’re going to call for the elders of the church, and have them anoint her with oil, and pray over her in the name of the Lord, and if she gets well you’re going to say, “See? It worked.”
But what if she doesn’t get well?
Then you’re going to try to figure out what went wrong. You’re going to read this passage closely and start asking some questions:
1. Were those people really elders?
2. What is an elder anyway?
3. Did they anoint her with oil?
4. Was it the right kind of oil?
5. Did they use too much or too little?
6. Did they pray over her?
7. Did they do it in the name of the Lord?
And then the big question:
8. Did they have enough faith?
Because James says, “The prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise them up. Therefore…pray for one another, so that you may be healed.” And then he adds, “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” Which could lead you to believe that you not only need to have a lot of faith when you pray for the sick, but that you also need to be righteous. How righteous? Well, James gives an example. He says, “Elijah was a human like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest.” Earlier in this letter, when James is talking about faith, he gives the example of Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his own son in order to demonstrate his obedience to God.
You could get the idea that if your prayers are going to be answered you have to be as faithful as Abraham or as righteous as Elijah or both. Most people would give up right there. But some people don’t. They struggle to work up enough faith to save the sick. They aim for a righteousness that will be both powerful and effective. And they do it because they love the people they are praying for, and would do anything to make them well. I get that. I really do. I’ve said those kind of prayers. Sometimes when I am praying for someone (and everyone’s eyes are closed) I will hold up one hand like a lightning rod, hoping that the power of God will strike and course through my body to the person whose hand I’m holding. But sometimes, even then, those people don’t get well.
All of which has caused me to wonder about these verses from James,
chapter 5. What if James is not trying to provide us with detailed instructions for how to heal the sick? What if he wrote these words for another reason? Somewhere I’ve heard that an amateur public speaker will ask, “What’s my topic?” while a professional will ask, “Who’s my audience?” That’s the question that keeps coming to mind as I look at this last section of the Book of James: not so much, “What is James talking about?” as, “Who is he talking to?”
If you’ve been following this series then you know that I think James, the author of this book, was the younger brother of Jesus; that he became a leader in the church in Jerusalem; and that he may have even been its pastor. At the beginning of his letter he says that he’s writing to the “twelve tribes in the dispersion,” which may be a poetic way of talking about the members of his church who have been scattered across the ancient world as a result of persecution. It started when Stephen was stoned to death by an angry mob. According to the Book of Acts: “That day a severe persecution began against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria” (8:1). As I worked on this sermon I tried to think of how I would feel if something like that happened here, if a severe persecution broke out in Richmond and you were scattered all over the countryside. How would I stay in touch with you, and what would I want to say?
At some point I realized that it wouldn’t be all that different from how things were during the COVID-19 pandemic, when you were scattered all over central Virginia and couldn’t come to church. I started a special Facebook group as a way of helping us stay connected, and began to go live at 9:00 every morning with a video segment called “Checking in with Pastor Jim.” The first one was on March 16, 2020. The last one was August 8, 2022. In between there were
hundreds of videos, each of them five to fifteen minutes long, and as far as I know they are still available in the church’s private Facebook group. If anyone was crazy enough to go back and transcribe those videos, to type up every word that I said off the top of my head during those months of surviving a global pandemic, it would be a lot of words. And if those words ever ended up in somebody’s Bible, and some poor preacher had the job of trying to make sense of them, I hope she wouldn’t say, “Now, in this segment Pastor Jim is going to teach us the secret of powerful and effective prayer.” I hope she would say instead, “Now in this segment Pastor Jim is going to try to keep his scattered church together,” because that’s what I was trying to do.
I think that’s what James was trying to do, and although he says some things about prayer in today’s passage, I’m not sure that was his main point. Look at the way it begins: “Is any among you suffering?” That’s just the kind of thing I might have asked during a segment of “Checking in with Pastor Jim,” especially in the early days of the Pandemic. I might have looked into my webcam, imagined all of you out there somewhere, trying to survive, and asked, “Are you OK? Is everybody all right? Is anyone suffering?” If so, James says, they should pray. And then he asks, “Are any cheerful?” And if so, they should sing songs of praise.
I get the feeling that James is distressed by not being able to provide pastoral care for his people, so he’s telling them how to provide pastoral care for themselves: “If you’re suffering, pray; if you’re cheerful, sing songs of praise.” But what if you’re sick, or weak, or at the point of death? What should you do then? “Well, you should call for the elders of the church, and ask them to come and pray for you, anointing you with oil. Sometimes that works.” As I said, this doesn’t feel like instructions on how to pray as much as it feels like pastoral care. James is
worried about these people. He’s not there for them. He’s trying to teach them how to care for one another.
If you start reading at the beginning of chapter 5 you find James condemning the rich, which may seem a little out of place in this context. It’s not something I would have done on “Checking in with Pastor Jim” unless I found out that the rich were trying to take advantage of you. For example: if one of those big pharmaceutical companies had come up with an effective vaccine against the Coronavirus but wanted to charge $5,000 a dose I might have had some strong things to say about Big Pharma, especially knowing that some of you wouldn’t be able to afford it. “So, is this the plan?” I might have asked: “Just kill off all the poor people?” James says something like that when he talks about rich people who have withheld the wages of those who have worked in their fields. There’s an Old Testament law that says you have to pay those people, and you have to pay them that very day, because that might be all the money they have to buy food for their families. If that sort of thing was happening to the members of James’s church, then you could see why he would be so angry.
But in the next paragraph he turns his attention to the coming of the Lord, because that’s what the members of the early church were waiting for. Jesus had said that he would come back and those people expected him to do it. But it got harder as time went by. My granddaughter, Vivi, has gotten in the habit of asking us, when we are leaving her house, “You come back?” And my wife, Christy, holds Vivi’s cheeks between her hands and says, “Oh, Sweetheart! We will always come back!” But what if weeks went by, and then months, and then years? How long would it be before Vivi stopped waiting to hear our car pull up in the drive? Those first Christians believed that Jesus was coming again but weeks had gone by, and
months, and years. Some of them had almost given up hope.
I probably had a few episodes like that on “Checking in with Pastor Jim,” when we were all waiting for someone to develop a safe and effective vaccine so we could get out again, and be with other people again, and maybe even come to church. “Be patient,” I might have said. “They tell us its coming. We’re just going to have to hold on a little longer.” Which sounds a whole lot like what James says to his congregation. In verse 7 he writes, “Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You also must be patient.” And then he says, “Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”
And then we come to today’s passage, where James seems to be trying to help the members of his church take care of one another. “Are any among you suffering?” he writes. The word in Greek is kakopatheo, which means, literally, “feeling bad.” That word could refer to depression, discouragement, or anything else that simply leaves you feeling bad. What should people do when they wake up with a bad case of kakopatheo? “They should pray,” James says, and if you haven’t tried it I would strongly recommend it.
But then there are those other people, the ones who wake up in the morning feeling cheerful, throwing back the curtains and saying, “This is the day the Lord has made!” You know the ones I’m talking about. The word in Greek is euthymio, and it means something like “feeling good.” What should those people do? “They should sing songs of praise,” James writes, preferably not too loudly and not around the people who are feeling bad.
But what about those who wake up feeling sick? What should they do?
Well, they shouldn’t wait to see if the pastoral care team has some kind of sixth sense about these things; they should pick up the phone and call for the elders of the church. And in this case “elders” could be deacons, ministers, Sunday school teachers, or anyone who seems to have the gift of prayer. Let them pray over you in the name of the Lord. In James’s time they would anoint with oil, which may have served as a soothing ointment, or simply as a symbol of healing. And sometimes people did get well, and those are the ones James seems to be remembering. Those are the ones we often remember. It’s one of the things that keeps us praying.
He says that anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven, and you need to remember that in his day people thought that sin and sickness were related, that one actually led to the other, that if you were sick it was because you had sinned. The Book of Job should have cured them of that, and if not the Book of Job then then teaching of Jesus, but James seems to believe you wouldn’t want sin in your life any more than you would want sickness, and if somebody can pray it out of you then, by all means, let them pray.
And so James urges his readers to confess their sins to one another and to pray for one another and sometimes we do that. It can happen as naturally as it does when we are sharing prayer requests in Sunday school and someone says, “Please pray for me. I did the stupidest thing last week and now I’m afraid I’m going to lose my job.” That’s confession, and in the best Sunday school classes it is followed with reassurance and prayer.
And finally, James talks about those who wander away from the faith, and these days there seem to be plenty of those. Where is that person who used to be in your small group? Where is that person who used to sit on your pew? James
wants us to think about those people and not let them get away. He wants us to call them up and bring them back. He says, “Whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”
Do you see? This section of James is not primarily a lesson in prayer. It is an appeal to the members of the church to take care of each other, and it is as relevant now as it was then. James urges his readers to pray for one another, to sing songs of praise, to anoint with oil, to confess their sins, to forgive one another, to keep each other on the path that leads to life. And if he were writing to us he might say the same thing. He might say, “Keep the faith friends. I know it’s hard. I know not everybody believes in Jesus like they used to. But you do, don’t you? And you won’t stop, will you? I hope not. I’m counting on you.
“And so is he.”
—Jim Somerville © 2024
