Mark 10:17-31
Jesus said, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (Mark 10:15). Those are words from Scripture that we would expect to hear in the gospel lesson for this morning’s Children’s Sabbath and Family Dedication. But it turns out that the gospel lesson for this morning in churches all around the world is the passage right after Jesus says those ideal words for Children’s Sabbath. Immediately after that child-friendly saying, the Jesus of Mark’s gospel forges ahead to talk about commandments and wealth and leaving your family. So down through the history of interpretation of Mark 10, we preachers and teachers have created a great divide between verses 13-16 in which Jesus talks about children and the next 15 verses that are this morning’s gospel lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary.
But several weeks ago, as I looked at Mark 10 in frustration that the passage for our observance of Children’s Sabbath did not include the verses before this morning’s lectionary passage, I saw something I had never seen before in verses 17-31. Verse 20: “I have kept all these things since my youth.” Hmm. Verse 24: “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God.” Hmm. Verse 29: Brothers and sisters and mother and father and children.” Hmm. “Youth . . . children . . . and children.” What if we’ve had it wrong all these years? What if it turns out that the gospel of Mark intends for all those verses to be read together—verses 13-31—without the great divide we have imposed on them in the history of interpretation? “From my youth” . . . “children, how hard it is” . . . “brothers and sisters, mother and father and children.” This morning I want us to consider what we could learn from looking at this morning’s gospel lesson in verses 17-31 as a continuation—an explanation and explication—of the sayings of Jesus in verses 13-16 about how we must become as children to enter the kingdom of God.
One thing we know about children—among many thing that we know about children—is that they grow and they learn. They grow and they learn. And the hard saying of Jesus in Mark 10:17-22 that follows the words about the model that children are for us is a saying about learning and growing. We usually read verses 17-22 as a lesson about wealth and priorities, but what if the wealth and priorities of the man who came to Jesus with a question about eternal life are only the “presenting problem,” only the symptoms or surface issues that disguise the deeper and underlying reason why he just doesn’t get what Jesus is saying about the kingdom of God?
The question of “eternal life” is a question of ultimate value. Among all the things that matter, what matters the very most? Jesus’ answer to the man’s question was not what the man expected to hear or wanted to hear, because it disrupted his understanding and his expectations. It required him to learn and grow into a new perspective, a perspective beyond what he had already learned.
Years ago, I had a friend who was a medical professional, a specialist whose expertise was recognized all over the country. There was a curious thing about him, though. When we sat down and talked about the Bible or theology, he insisted—and he actually put it this way once—that he didn’t want to hear anything from me or anyone else that he hadn’t learned in sixth-grade Sunday school. Well, sixth-grade Sunday school is that important. It is that good. It is that right, but I never could figure out how this man who was an expert in science and medicine was not willing to let his understanding of science be sixth grade stuff or his practice of medicine be sixth grade stuff, but he insisted that he should stop learning and growing beyond the sixth grade when it came to his faith.
In verses 17-22, the man says, “I learned all that stuff when I was a child, Lord!” And Jesus says, “Yes you did, but now you have another thing to learn.” There’s always another thing to learn, isn’t there? There’s always one more thing, have you noticed? How many times in your life have you arrived at to that “one-more-thing moment”? The diagnosis, the police officer at the door, the separation and divorce, the corporate bankruptcy, the job loss. When’s the last time you experienced a one-more-thing moment? Yesterday, last week, today? Regardless of our age or station in life, there is always “one more thing” we have to learn, one more place we have to grow. Jesus said to the man, “Yes, you’re right in all that you learned before, but now there’s another lesson that you need to learn.” But the man went away sad, not only because of his wealth that he could not part with, but because of the underlying issue that he was unable or unwilling to learn and grow, to adapt to a new perspective and a new understanding of his wealth and his faith and his practice. Unless you become as a child, learning and growing over and over again, you will never get the kingdom of God. Become as a child. Keep learning and growing.
In the second episode in the passage in verses 23-27, the “become-as-a-child” lesson builds on the first lesson. Jesus says that it is so very hard for a person who is so heavily invested in what he or she already knows or has acquired to “get it,” the kingdom of God, that is. We are taught from an early age to acquire: to acquire knowledge, to acquire wisdom, to acquire skills, to acquire money, to acquire things. And somewhere along the line in all our acquisitions we become so invested in what we have acquired that we become bloated and engorged. We become big as camels. We become complacent and entrenched in what we have acquired instead of invested in the One who has given it all to us as a gift, even as a gift acquired through our own hard work.
You see, the reason the disciples were perplexed and amazed at Jesus’ words that it is harder for a wealthy person to enter the kingdom of God than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle is that their theology (as often our theology) presupposed that being wealthy meant that you had been blessed by God. They understood the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and wealth to be a blessing from God. “How can someone who has acquired all of this by the gift of God not be in the kingdom?” the disciples justifiably ask. In other words, “Who can be saved?” they ask. Salvation comes from God alone, says Jesus, not from us or anything we have acquired. In fact, the things that we have acquired, even our theology, our faith and our practice, can incapacitate us when we become more invested in them than in God. We become bloated and big as a camel, unable to pass through, unable to be flexible and graceful as a thread to go through the eye of a needle.
Look at the choir loft this morning. Do you see the flexibility up here among all these children in the choir loft this morning? Have you been noticing all the thread-like motion going on all morning? No camels here. Extraordinary flexibility. Unless you become flexible and graceful . . . you will never enter the kingdom of God. You have to be able to wiggle. Wiggle more! Get unstuck. Be flexible and graceful as a thread that can go through the eye of a needle. You need to learn to wiggle more, because life as God has given it to us takes a great deal of flexibility and adaptability and a great deal of grace and wiggling to make it through. Become as a child. Grow and learn and wiggle as a child does.
And then finally, as a child does, you must move on. You must to move on. Sometimes as we bring our children up, we wish we could hold onto them as children forever. But one thing we know about children is that they learn and grow and up and leave. That's what children do. Children grow into recognizing that the family that nurtured them and in which they grew and learned and loved and were loved is a place from which they must move on. But somewhere along the way in adulthood we forget what we knew as children, and we get stuck. We stop moving on as we learned to do as children. We become complacent and entrenched. But at every age and every station, the kingdom of God is always about moving on, about growing into leaving behind what you have been invested in previously. Jesus says, “Unless you’re willing to move on, you will never enter the kingdom of God.” Unless you are willing to move on, as our children grow and learn to move on.
Let the children come to me, said Jesus, because the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Unless you become as a child is, you won’t ever get it: always learning and growing, being flexible and graceful, and moving on over and over again. Thanks be to God for children who lead us and teach us to learn and grow and wiggle and move on to enter the kingdom of God!
This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
World Communion: One Body, One Spirit, One Hope
Ephesians 4:1-7,11-16
It began hours ago far out in the Pacific in Fiji and Auckland and the Marshall Islands. As the dawn of a new Lord’s Day arrived, it spread west to the Philippines and Australia and the Pacific Rim, across the continent of Asia through successive time zones to Africa and Europe and finally to the Americas so that now it’s our turn, our turn to celebrate with brothers and sisters in Christ all around the world: World Communion Sunday. The first Sunday of every October is set aside on the Christian calendar as a day when we remember and acknowledge and celebrate “one body, one spirit, one hope,” as the book of Ephesians says.
In spite of all our differences, in spite of all our disagreements, in spite of all our divisions, we are one body, one spirit, one hope, says Ephesians. An analogy might be that Pacific Ocean. On the surface of it, there are winds and currents and tides that create massive crashing and foaming waves. But below the surface, deep down below the surface, there is only ocean. An ocean bigger and deeper and wider than whatever may be happening on the surface at any given time and place. The surface features and the deeper reality. One ocean. One body.
We’ve done a pretty good job talking about “one body” in its variety and diversity in local congregations. But we really haven’t done as good a job talking about the terms of those surface features and deeper reality—those varieties of gifts—in the larger church. Consider that with me for a moment: “one body,” one very large and variegated and diverse body. Verses 12 and 13 say that some are called and gifted to be apostles and some to be prophets and some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers. That doesn’t just apply to persons in the church; it applies to churches as well. Some churches and even entire denominations are better at pastoring and teaching than other churches are. But that effectiveness does not make them any more important or any less important than any other part of the body. Some churches and entire denominations are better at evangelizing than other churches and entire denominations are. But that doesn’t make them any more important or less important in the body. Some churches and entire denominations are better at prophetic witness than others are. But that doesn’t make them any more important or less important than any other churches that are part of the body. And some churches and entire denominations do apostolic succession better than other churches do! But that does not make them any more important or any less important than other churches and denominations in the body. Ephesians says that this variety and this diversity is all according to the gifts by the grace of God that various ones of us and various congregations and denominations of us have been given by God. The varieties and the differences and the surface features of the body that are all connected by the deeper reality. One body, one spirit.
It’s fascinating to me that the New Testament does not insist on “one church,” “one church,” “one church,” as some later theologians and denominations do. The New Testaments says “churches,” “churches,” “churches” created by one spirit, called by one spirit, nurtured by one spirit. The oneness is not in the church; the oneness is in the spirit of God that creates and gifts churches as the spirit of God creates and gifts individuals. One body, one spirit, one hope.
And here’s my hope. My hope is that we would learn to do this well: surface features of difference and variety and giftedness along with deep reality. We could do this so well in the church that the world could learn from us how it is done. For example, in the state of South Carolina, we are not merely Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians and Independents. We are not black and white and Hispanic and Asian alone. We are not ultimately from the Upstate or the Midlands or the Pee Dee or the Low Country. We are in a commonwealth together. People who, “while we breathe, we hope.” Surface features and deep reality. In the United States we are not ultimately our political parties, our regions or our ethnicities. We are “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Surface features and deep reality. In North America, we are not ultimately Canadian citizens, U.S. citizens, Mexican citizens. We share a continent, a continent with a geography and a history and an economy that is inseparable. What happens in one directly affects the other. Surface features and deep reality. All around the world. If we can learn to do this in the church around the world, the world in turn can learn from us “one body,” one very large and variegated and diverse body. Around the world, a shared, common humanity, a shared vulnerability to epidemics and recessions and tyranny and terrorism, and shared opportunities to understand our differences as gifts and at the same time to transcend our differences to eat and drink together, to live together, to work together, and to create a better world together, “promoting the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:17). Surface features and a deep reality in a common bond: one body, one spirit, one hope. Now that’s a “world” communion.
This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
It began hours ago far out in the Pacific in Fiji and Auckland and the Marshall Islands. As the dawn of a new Lord’s Day arrived, it spread west to the Philippines and Australia and the Pacific Rim, across the continent of Asia through successive time zones to Africa and Europe and finally to the Americas so that now it’s our turn, our turn to celebrate with brothers and sisters in Christ all around the world: World Communion Sunday. The first Sunday of every October is set aside on the Christian calendar as a day when we remember and acknowledge and celebrate “one body, one spirit, one hope,” as the book of Ephesians says.
In spite of all our differences, in spite of all our disagreements, in spite of all our divisions, we are one body, one spirit, one hope, says Ephesians. An analogy might be that Pacific Ocean. On the surface of it, there are winds and currents and tides that create massive crashing and foaming waves. But below the surface, deep down below the surface, there is only ocean. An ocean bigger and deeper and wider than whatever may be happening on the surface at any given time and place. The surface features and the deeper reality. One ocean. One body.
We’ve done a pretty good job talking about “one body” in its variety and diversity in local congregations. But we really haven’t done as good a job talking about the terms of those surface features and deeper reality—those varieties of gifts—in the larger church. Consider that with me for a moment: “one body,” one very large and variegated and diverse body. Verses 12 and 13 say that some are called and gifted to be apostles and some to be prophets and some to be evangelists and some to be pastors and teachers. That doesn’t just apply to persons in the church; it applies to churches as well. Some churches and even entire denominations are better at pastoring and teaching than other churches are. But that effectiveness does not make them any more important or any less important than any other part of the body. Some churches and entire denominations are better at evangelizing than other churches and entire denominations are. But that doesn’t make them any more important or less important in the body. Some churches and entire denominations are better at prophetic witness than others are. But that doesn’t make them any more important or less important than any other churches that are part of the body. And some churches and entire denominations do apostolic succession better than other churches do! But that does not make them any more important or any less important than other churches and denominations in the body. Ephesians says that this variety and this diversity is all according to the gifts by the grace of God that various ones of us and various congregations and denominations of us have been given by God. The varieties and the differences and the surface features of the body that are all connected by the deeper reality. One body, one spirit.
It’s fascinating to me that the New Testament does not insist on “one church,” “one church,” “one church,” as some later theologians and denominations do. The New Testaments says “churches,” “churches,” “churches” created by one spirit, called by one spirit, nurtured by one spirit. The oneness is not in the church; the oneness is in the spirit of God that creates and gifts churches as the spirit of God creates and gifts individuals. One body, one spirit, one hope.
And here’s my hope. My hope is that we would learn to do this well: surface features of difference and variety and giftedness along with deep reality. We could do this so well in the church that the world could learn from us how it is done. For example, in the state of South Carolina, we are not merely Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians and Independents. We are not black and white and Hispanic and Asian alone. We are not ultimately from the Upstate or the Midlands or the Pee Dee or the Low Country. We are in a commonwealth together. People who, “while we breathe, we hope.” Surface features and deep reality. In the United States we are not ultimately our political parties, our regions or our ethnicities. We are “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Surface features and deep reality. In North America, we are not ultimately Canadian citizens, U.S. citizens, Mexican citizens. We share a continent, a continent with a geography and a history and an economy that is inseparable. What happens in one directly affects the other. Surface features and deep reality. All around the world. If we can learn to do this in the church around the world, the world in turn can learn from us “one body,” one very large and variegated and diverse body. Around the world, a shared, common humanity, a shared vulnerability to epidemics and recessions and tyranny and terrorism, and shared opportunities to understand our differences as gifts and at the same time to transcend our differences to eat and drink together, to live together, to work together, and to create a better world together, “promoting the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:17). Surface features and a deep reality in a common bond: one body, one spirit, one hope. Now that’s a “world” communion.
This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Religion 105 with Professor James: The End of the Course
James 5:13-20
We have arrived at the final session of our course with “Professor James,” as I’ve been calling him. All of us have experience with that feeling of arrival at the end of a course. Sometimes it’s a feeling of “Finally!” because we couldn’t wait for it to end. Other times, we have arrived at the close of a course we were sad to see end because we had enjoyed it. No doubt, there’s a mixed bag of feelings among us as we come to the closing session of this course with Professor James.
As any good course would, we should close with a review. So I want to remind you where we’ve been. In the first session, I suggested that Professor James lays out a definition of genuine religion, “real religion” as Eugene Peterson puts it, grounded in action more than it is in words. The shape of our lives and the practice of our faith is a more compelling indicator, says James, of the authenticity of our relationship with God than are the words that we speak. It is not in a profession of faith but in a practice of faith that religion with integrity lies, says Professor James.
In the second session, he suggested that there are two major obstacles to our living lives of genuine religion or real religion. Those two obstacles are partiality and passiveness. Partiality, James says, is when we welcome into our fellowship persons of wealth and influence who are well dressed and well healed while we look askance at and shuffle off to the side those who look poor and needy, disheveled and dirty. The problem with that partiality, James says, is that it makes hypocrites of us. In God’s eyes, every one of us is poor and needy, disheveled and dirty. None of us is wealthy or well dressed, influential or well heeled, so how could we shuffle someone else off to the side when God did not do that to us? That’s a faulty partiality, James says. The second thing we stumble over in our efforts to be authentic and real in our religion is passiveness. We see the need, but we don’t do anything about it. We speak a kind and encouraging word, but we do nothing. Partiality and passiveness.
In the third session, James pointed to the power of our words: the power of words for good and the power of words for ill. Our words have the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. The words we speak to persons can become the realities in our lives and theirs. What we say has far more influence on others than we would ever think. What we say can actually contribute to creating good and healing and health. And what we say can contribute to creating evil and illness and hatred. The power of words.
In the fourth session, James introduced us to a wisdom community. James says there is a kind of pragmatic and manipulative wisdom in the world that is grounded in envy and ambition, that is grounded in our cravings and in our insatiable need to acquire for ourselves. But James says there is another kind of wisdom: wisdom that “comes from above.” The wisdom that comes from above, the wisdom that characterizes the body of Christ and the people of God, is a wisdom that is pure and peaceable. It is a wisdom that is full of mercy and willing to yield, a wisdom that bears fruit, a wisdom with no trace of partiality or hypocrisy. That’s the wisdom community into which James calls us.
And now at last, our last lesson in the course, which for some of us may be the hardest lesson to hear, at least on the face of it. It is a lesson in the healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation.
Many of us have a deep-seated ambivalence—if not outright skepticism—toward talk of the healing power of prayer. The ways we think of prayer and its healing power have been shaped and influenced, perverted in fact, by charlatans and crooks, who have made spectacles of prayer. More than three decades ago now, I came across my best worst example on television. It was the weekly healing service of a well-known televangelist healer. A man came up from the audience onto the stage asking to be healed of his loss of the sense of smell. He was welcomed and encouraged by this television healer who said to him, “You can be healed. We will pray for your healing. Close your eyes, and let’s pray now for God to heal your sense of smell.” And so the evangelist began to pray, and he prayed and he prayed, and then suddenly without warning and entirely unexpectedly he slammed his hand into the nose of the man standing there praying with his eyes closed. The blow knocked him flat on his back on the floor. Two of the televangelist’s assistants helped the man up, and the preacher said to him, “Can you smell?” Without thinking, the poor, shell-shocked man took a few sniffs, and he shook his head. Whereupon before he could so much as flinch, the preacher slammed him in the nose again, and down he went in a heap a second time. The assistants picked him up again, and the preacher asked, “Can you smell now?” And without even testing the air, the man put his hands up in front of his face and nodded his head vigorously and said, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” And he was healed. You see, some of us have seen that or something like it. And it has so deeply offended us and our principles, our theological and religious senses that we’ve become skeptical or ambivalent about the healing power of prayer.
But let me suggest something this morning, especially for those of us who struggle on the face of it with this lesson from James. Let me suggest to you that we not get caught up in a simplistic and literal, physical and material definition of what’s happening in the power that James knows prayer brings in healing. I want to point you to wise words of a French priest and philosopher and geologist and paleontologist who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. His name is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that one of the mistakes that we make in understanding ourselves and who we are in the world is that we think of ourselves as human beings who are seeking a spiritual experience. But you are not a human being seeking a spiritual experience, said Pierre Teilhard. You are a spiritual being immersed in human experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in human experience, not a human being seeking a spiritual experience. Think about it.
In an earlier lesson, James said we should not praise God and speak well of God in our worship and our prayers and then turn around and speak demeaning and derogatory words about other people who are created in the image and likeness of God. James says that’s at the heart of hypocrisy. Those people of whom we speak in a demeaning and derogatory fashion, cursing them, as James says, are created in the very image and likeness of God of whom we speak so well. Before we were even designed and created by God as human beings, God said, “Let us make human kind in our own image and according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). We were conceived at the outset by God as spiritual beings before we ever became physical beings, material beings. And at the heart and the core of our greatest need and hurt and anxiety—at the heart of our greatest need—is God-relatedness not body-relatedness, not world-relatedness, not material-relatedness. One of our problems in understanding the healing power of prayer is that we have mistakenly come to think of ourselves as human beings who need a spiritual experience, when from the beginning we are spiritual beings immersed in human experience.
Let me give you two examples of members of this congregation whose words exemplify the healing power of prayer in their recognition of who they are in relation to God as spiritual beings immersed in human experience. The first one was several years ago. This person came to me and informed me that he was facing a catastrophic diagnosis. And he asked for me to pray with him and I did and for him and I did. We prayed together, and then we prayed separately and together for several weeks as he began to get the affairs of his life in order in the face of this pending diagnosis. And then one morning he called me on the phone, out of the blue, and he said, “Jeff, I’ve got to tell you what happened last night when I was praying. When I was praying last night, I came to the realization that even if I’m not going to be okay, I’m going to be okay. I’m in a completely different place now. It’s going to be okay, even if I’m not okay. I wanted you to know that.” “I came to the realization,” he said, “that even if I’m not going to be okay, I’m going to be okay.” His prayer, over weeks, in fear and anxiety and desperation had moved him to a place where he was no longer a human being seeking a spiritual experience but a spiritual being grounded in God-relatedness and able to face with grace and dignity and courage his human experience, whatever it turned out to be. And from that evening of prayer on, he faced that diagnosis without the anxiety and the fear, the fright and the desperation that he had carried with him for weeks. That’s the healing power of prayer that touches us at the place of our deepest need, our God-relatedness in the human bodies and the persons that we are.
Another one happened just last week. I was standing by the bedside of a member and longtime friend who was still in considerable discomfort and still recuperating from serious injuries he had received in an accident. I prayed with him and for him. After I finished praying, he looked up at me and said, “Your prayer reminds me of something.” He said, “You know, I have never in my life prayed to God to change my circumstances.” “I’ve never prayed to God to change my circumstances.” He said, “What I always pray to God is for God to be with me and to help me through my circumstances.” My prayer has always been that God will be with me and help me through my circumstances. That’s the healing power of prayer, the prayer of a spiritual being immersed in human experience. Prayer can touch us where we need and hurt the most, at our core. And that is in our God-relatedness even more than it is in our body-relatedness, in our world-relatedness, our material-relatedness.
The healing power of confession of which James speaks works just like the healing power of prayer. Confession is one of the lost arts in the Protestant tradition. Now, to tell you the truth I do not want to sit in a dark little booth all week long and listen to you tell me the things that you did last week that you shouldn’t have. I don’t want to go there. But we Protestants threw the baby out with the bath water when we decided that the sacrament of confession is not something that we needed or wanted. You may have noticed that once a month in worship we engage in the prayer of confession together in this place. Once a month is probably not enough, but once a month is better than not at all. You see, that prayer of confession, either publicly together or privately alone or with someone else, gets right to the core of who we are in our God-relatedness, created in the image and likeness of God. Sin is a rupture in our God-relatedness, and when we are alienated and separated from God by whatever means—our shame, our guilt, our disappointment in ourselves, we cannot be healed until we confess. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said. “I couldn’t carry this around with me any more. I had to find somebody to talk to, but there’s nobody else I could tell this to. Please don’t tell anybody, but I needed to get this off my chest. Thanks. I actually feel better now,” she said. That’s the healing power of confession that restores the God-relatedness of a spiritual being immersed in human experience.
And so also the healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of reconciliation. It just takes one person, James says. One person who reaches out across the separation and alienation and divide of time and space to say, “Hey, I’ve missed you!” Not I’ve missed you as in, “Where were you? I haven’t seen you in a long time!” But “I’ve missed you—we’ve all missed you. It’s not the same without you. Why don’t you come back?” The healing power of reconciliation is like this. If you’ve never been in on the inside, you really don’t know what you’re missing. But when you’ve been on the inside and you feel booted out, or you’ve been on the inside and you slip out the door when no one is noticing, or you’ve been on the inside and you go out with a flourish and slam it behind you, after a while you miss it; but it sure is hard to come back. That’s something else someone told me two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, late in the evening he said, “You know, I thought I could never come back here. But this church amazes me. I don’t deserve to be here, and I don’t understand why people are being so welcoming to me, but I can’t tell you how much it means to me because I need to be back here right now.” James speaks of the healing power of reconciliation when one person reaches out across time and space and alienation and re-connects someone with the body of Christ, the people of God, the gift of an opportunity to draw nearer to God who is drawing near to them. But they need that hand to reach out and help draw them back in.
The healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of confession. The healing power of prayer. That’s the end of the course. The expression “the end of the course” could simply mean it’s over, it’s done, “The End.” Or it could be that “the end of the course” means “the goal of the course,” the telos, the point of consummation toward which it was reaching from the beginning: the healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation addressing our deepest human need for God-relatedness as spiritual beings immersed in human experience. Thanks be to God!
This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
We have arrived at the final session of our course with “Professor James,” as I’ve been calling him. All of us have experience with that feeling of arrival at the end of a course. Sometimes it’s a feeling of “Finally!” because we couldn’t wait for it to end. Other times, we have arrived at the close of a course we were sad to see end because we had enjoyed it. No doubt, there’s a mixed bag of feelings among us as we come to the closing session of this course with Professor James.
As any good course would, we should close with a review. So I want to remind you where we’ve been. In the first session, I suggested that Professor James lays out a definition of genuine religion, “real religion” as Eugene Peterson puts it, grounded in action more than it is in words. The shape of our lives and the practice of our faith is a more compelling indicator, says James, of the authenticity of our relationship with God than are the words that we speak. It is not in a profession of faith but in a practice of faith that religion with integrity lies, says Professor James.
In the second session, he suggested that there are two major obstacles to our living lives of genuine religion or real religion. Those two obstacles are partiality and passiveness. Partiality, James says, is when we welcome into our fellowship persons of wealth and influence who are well dressed and well healed while we look askance at and shuffle off to the side those who look poor and needy, disheveled and dirty. The problem with that partiality, James says, is that it makes hypocrites of us. In God’s eyes, every one of us is poor and needy, disheveled and dirty. None of us is wealthy or well dressed, influential or well heeled, so how could we shuffle someone else off to the side when God did not do that to us? That’s a faulty partiality, James says. The second thing we stumble over in our efforts to be authentic and real in our religion is passiveness. We see the need, but we don’t do anything about it. We speak a kind and encouraging word, but we do nothing. Partiality and passiveness.
In the third session, James pointed to the power of our words: the power of words for good and the power of words for ill. Our words have the power of self-fulfilling prophecies. The words we speak to persons can become the realities in our lives and theirs. What we say has far more influence on others than we would ever think. What we say can actually contribute to creating good and healing and health. And what we say can contribute to creating evil and illness and hatred. The power of words.
In the fourth session, James introduced us to a wisdom community. James says there is a kind of pragmatic and manipulative wisdom in the world that is grounded in envy and ambition, that is grounded in our cravings and in our insatiable need to acquire for ourselves. But James says there is another kind of wisdom: wisdom that “comes from above.” The wisdom that comes from above, the wisdom that characterizes the body of Christ and the people of God, is a wisdom that is pure and peaceable. It is a wisdom that is full of mercy and willing to yield, a wisdom that bears fruit, a wisdom with no trace of partiality or hypocrisy. That’s the wisdom community into which James calls us.
And now at last, our last lesson in the course, which for some of us may be the hardest lesson to hear, at least on the face of it. It is a lesson in the healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation.
Many of us have a deep-seated ambivalence—if not outright skepticism—toward talk of the healing power of prayer. The ways we think of prayer and its healing power have been shaped and influenced, perverted in fact, by charlatans and crooks, who have made spectacles of prayer. More than three decades ago now, I came across my best worst example on television. It was the weekly healing service of a well-known televangelist healer. A man came up from the audience onto the stage asking to be healed of his loss of the sense of smell. He was welcomed and encouraged by this television healer who said to him, “You can be healed. We will pray for your healing. Close your eyes, and let’s pray now for God to heal your sense of smell.” And so the evangelist began to pray, and he prayed and he prayed, and then suddenly without warning and entirely unexpectedly he slammed his hand into the nose of the man standing there praying with his eyes closed. The blow knocked him flat on his back on the floor. Two of the televangelist’s assistants helped the man up, and the preacher said to him, “Can you smell?” Without thinking, the poor, shell-shocked man took a few sniffs, and he shook his head. Whereupon before he could so much as flinch, the preacher slammed him in the nose again, and down he went in a heap a second time. The assistants picked him up again, and the preacher asked, “Can you smell now?” And without even testing the air, the man put his hands up in front of his face and nodded his head vigorously and said, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” And he was healed. You see, some of us have seen that or something like it. And it has so deeply offended us and our principles, our theological and religious senses that we’ve become skeptical or ambivalent about the healing power of prayer.
But let me suggest something this morning, especially for those of us who struggle on the face of it with this lesson from James. Let me suggest to you that we not get caught up in a simplistic and literal, physical and material definition of what’s happening in the power that James knows prayer brings in healing. I want to point you to wise words of a French priest and philosopher and geologist and paleontologist who lived at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. His name is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that one of the mistakes that we make in understanding ourselves and who we are in the world is that we think of ourselves as human beings who are seeking a spiritual experience. But you are not a human being seeking a spiritual experience, said Pierre Teilhard. You are a spiritual being immersed in human experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in human experience, not a human being seeking a spiritual experience. Think about it.
In an earlier lesson, James said we should not praise God and speak well of God in our worship and our prayers and then turn around and speak demeaning and derogatory words about other people who are created in the image and likeness of God. James says that’s at the heart of hypocrisy. Those people of whom we speak in a demeaning and derogatory fashion, cursing them, as James says, are created in the very image and likeness of God of whom we speak so well. Before we were even designed and created by God as human beings, God said, “Let us make human kind in our own image and according to our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). We were conceived at the outset by God as spiritual beings before we ever became physical beings, material beings. And at the heart and the core of our greatest need and hurt and anxiety—at the heart of our greatest need—is God-relatedness not body-relatedness, not world-relatedness, not material-relatedness. One of our problems in understanding the healing power of prayer is that we have mistakenly come to think of ourselves as human beings who need a spiritual experience, when from the beginning we are spiritual beings immersed in human experience.
Let me give you two examples of members of this congregation whose words exemplify the healing power of prayer in their recognition of who they are in relation to God as spiritual beings immersed in human experience. The first one was several years ago. This person came to me and informed me that he was facing a catastrophic diagnosis. And he asked for me to pray with him and I did and for him and I did. We prayed together, and then we prayed separately and together for several weeks as he began to get the affairs of his life in order in the face of this pending diagnosis. And then one morning he called me on the phone, out of the blue, and he said, “Jeff, I’ve got to tell you what happened last night when I was praying. When I was praying last night, I came to the realization that even if I’m not going to be okay, I’m going to be okay. I’m in a completely different place now. It’s going to be okay, even if I’m not okay. I wanted you to know that.” “I came to the realization,” he said, “that even if I’m not going to be okay, I’m going to be okay.” His prayer, over weeks, in fear and anxiety and desperation had moved him to a place where he was no longer a human being seeking a spiritual experience but a spiritual being grounded in God-relatedness and able to face with grace and dignity and courage his human experience, whatever it turned out to be. And from that evening of prayer on, he faced that diagnosis without the anxiety and the fear, the fright and the desperation that he had carried with him for weeks. That’s the healing power of prayer that touches us at the place of our deepest need, our God-relatedness in the human bodies and the persons that we are.
Another one happened just last week. I was standing by the bedside of a member and longtime friend who was still in considerable discomfort and still recuperating from serious injuries he had received in an accident. I prayed with him and for him. After I finished praying, he looked up at me and said, “Your prayer reminds me of something.” He said, “You know, I have never in my life prayed to God to change my circumstances.” “I’ve never prayed to God to change my circumstances.” He said, “What I always pray to God is for God to be with me and to help me through my circumstances.” My prayer has always been that God will be with me and help me through my circumstances. That’s the healing power of prayer, the prayer of a spiritual being immersed in human experience. Prayer can touch us where we need and hurt the most, at our core. And that is in our God-relatedness even more than it is in our body-relatedness, in our world-relatedness, our material-relatedness.
The healing power of confession of which James speaks works just like the healing power of prayer. Confession is one of the lost arts in the Protestant tradition. Now, to tell you the truth I do not want to sit in a dark little booth all week long and listen to you tell me the things that you did last week that you shouldn’t have. I don’t want to go there. But we Protestants threw the baby out with the bath water when we decided that the sacrament of confession is not something that we needed or wanted. You may have noticed that once a month in worship we engage in the prayer of confession together in this place. Once a month is probably not enough, but once a month is better than not at all. You see, that prayer of confession, either publicly together or privately alone or with someone else, gets right to the core of who we are in our God-relatedness, created in the image and likeness of God. Sin is a rupture in our God-relatedness, and when we are alienated and separated from God by whatever means—our shame, our guilt, our disappointment in ourselves, we cannot be healed until we confess. “Thanks for listening to me,” she said. “I couldn’t carry this around with me any more. I had to find somebody to talk to, but there’s nobody else I could tell this to. Please don’t tell anybody, but I needed to get this off my chest. Thanks. I actually feel better now,” she said. That’s the healing power of confession that restores the God-relatedness of a spiritual being immersed in human experience.
And so also the healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of reconciliation. It just takes one person, James says. One person who reaches out across the separation and alienation and divide of time and space to say, “Hey, I’ve missed you!” Not I’ve missed you as in, “Where were you? I haven’t seen you in a long time!” But “I’ve missed you—we’ve all missed you. It’s not the same without you. Why don’t you come back?” The healing power of reconciliation is like this. If you’ve never been in on the inside, you really don’t know what you’re missing. But when you’ve been on the inside and you feel booted out, or you’ve been on the inside and you slip out the door when no one is noticing, or you’ve been on the inside and you go out with a flourish and slam it behind you, after a while you miss it; but it sure is hard to come back. That’s something else someone told me two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, late in the evening he said, “You know, I thought I could never come back here. But this church amazes me. I don’t deserve to be here, and I don’t understand why people are being so welcoming to me, but I can’t tell you how much it means to me because I need to be back here right now.” James speaks of the healing power of reconciliation when one person reaches out across time and space and alienation and re-connects someone with the body of Christ, the people of God, the gift of an opportunity to draw nearer to God who is drawing near to them. But they need that hand to reach out and help draw them back in.
The healing power of reconciliation. The healing power of confession. The healing power of prayer. That’s the end of the course. The expression “the end of the course” could simply mean it’s over, it’s done, “The End.” Or it could be that “the end of the course” means “the goal of the course,” the telos, the point of consummation toward which it was reaching from the beginning: the healing power of prayer, the healing power of confession, and the healing power of reconciliation addressing our deepest human need for God-relatedness as spiritual beings immersed in human experience. Thanks be to God!
This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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