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.