"Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one other so that you (pl.) may be healed" (James 5.16a). It is one of the more impressive things about our church: we have a list of intercessions that are made every day for members of our congregation and others who are sick, who are in hospital, or who simply need prayer. When, say, Jonathan names the people on this list at a weekday mass, it's not only him that's praying for them. We all are. Other churches have their ways of doing such things, but the fact that our intercessions occur in conjunction with the Eucharist keeps the link between God healing our physical illness and repairing the effects of sin that is found in our reading this morning. But I should pause and point out that it is indeed dangerous even to hint at a connection between illness and sin without a good deal of nuance. In fact, simply mentioning the word 'sin' these days can immediately polarize a discussion. But, that is precisely the beauty of scripture. It stops us cold in our tracks and says things that we have to think about, that we have to mull over, to figure out what in the world they mean for us today. And, thanks to this morning's readings, we have to think a bit about sin in an effort to understand what God says to us through these ancient words. What we will find in process, however, is that we need to talk about prayer and community first.
Let's start with the passage in James, for it will go some way in helping us get a grip on what's going on. The first thing that we must note is that illness and sin are not the same thing. And that is a very important point to make, especially for those of us who grew up in traditions that linked sickness with punishment. James says that the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, that the Lord will raise that person up. If the person has committed sins, he or she will be forgiven. That 'if' is extremely important because it clues us in to the disjunction between sin and illness. Obviously, we have all sinned. And that is precisely the point. When James urges us to confess our sins and to pray for one another, he is not suggesting that we necessarily sit down and pour out to one another all our deepest, darkest secrets. What he is urging us to do is to know one another, to know what to pray for. And why? Because 'the prayer of a righteous person has powerful effects' (5.16). This is the crux of the matter: when we pray for one another, when All Saints' prays for people at weekday masses, we are actually accomplishing something. Such a statement might sound on the one hand like fuzzy fundamentalist rhetoric, or on the other, like only metaphorical speech, but it is in fact a statement of faith, the same faith that leads us to cross ourselves when we look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. When we as the Body of Christ pray for our brothers and sisters here and throughout the world, when we pray for those who are suffering, we are actually doing something. Now briefly, we should recall that this is in letter of James: prayer is not all we do. Faith without works, after all, is dead (2.17). But that does not denigrate prayer. "The prayer of a righteous person has powerful effects."
We must be careful, however, to avoid another extreme: thinking that prayer solves all problems. I am sure we have each of us prayed more than once only to find that that prayer remains-at least from our perspective-unanswered. That is why it is an act of faith; in that act, we interact with the God who took on human flesh and died for us. We interact with the God who did not let the world plummet into oblivion when his creation rebelled. We communicate with the God who knows what we need better than we ourselves know it. And that is why James exhorts us: 'Is anyone among you suffering? Let her pray. Is anyone happy? Let her sings psalms of praise' (5.13). In all things, then, whether suffering or rejoicing, God wants to hear about it. We need not look far in the Psalms, or in Job, to find permission to cry out to God in the midst of our deepest anguish, and we need not look far in the same books to see psalms of praise for what God does. In whatever state we find ourselves, God is there, right there, listening. But we must remember the communal aspect of praying for one another. Prayer is effectual. Prayer is communion with God through Christ in union with the Holy Spirit. And it is the Spirit that is poured out on us in baptism, poured into our hearts, drawing us into union with the Trinity and into union with one another. When we pray, we pray together.
To help us understand the Holy Spirit's role in our lives, we can turn to our first reading, where the Lord takes some of his Spirit from Moses and puts it on the seventy elders who prophesy-but only for a moment. This is not what occurs now, in these days after God has revealed himself fully in the person of Jesus, after Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out on all flesh. As Peter says on that day, 'And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh' (Acts 2.17, quoting Joel 2.28). Now, when the Holy Spirit sheds God's love into all our hearts, we are drawn together and into communion with God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And in this fellowship, our prayers for one another become one of the ways we love one another. For, as Paul says, God's love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us (Romans 5.5). As we share together, we learn how our brother or sister suffers, we learn why our brother or sister rejoices, and we bear one another's sorrow and we multiply one another's joy.
It is only in this context, I think, that we can begin to comprehend how to talk about 'sin'. Sin is, after all, a massive part of our faith. After invoking the God of our joy and gladness, we confess our sins and receive absolution. The entire eucharistic celebration is predicated on Christ's sacrificial death. But all too often, 'sin' becomes a way to exclude, a way to point the finger and think oneself better than someone else. Here we must bear in mind the corporate nature that James has been reminding us of. Yes, he says we should bring back those who wander from the truth, but this morning's Gospel suggests that we take a second thought before we go insisting that someone is heading the wrong way. In the Gospel reading, John comes up to Jesus and says, 'Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we stopped him because he was not one of us' (Mark 9.38). You can almost imagine John being rather proud of himself, but we the readers, however, recognize the irony. Just a few verses earlier (9.14-29), the disciples themselves could not cast out a demon. And instead of praising them, Jesus rebukes them because 'the one who is not against us is for us'. Now, this does not mean that anything goes, but it does mean that a measure of humility must come into effect when talk of 'sin' comes up. And surely the end of the Gospel reading feeds into the topic under discussion. Three times Jesus warns his disciples that it is better to remove a body part and enter life crippled than to be thrown whole into hell. That is, Jesus tells the disciples to turn their attention away from this other person, and on to themselves. Here, we would probably do well to bear in mind Jesus' admonition to remove the plank from our own eye before trying to remove the speck from someone else's. He ends, like James, with an insistence on community, on peace: 'Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another' (9.50b). As with James, the point is the same: we are here to support one another, to pray for one another, to bear one another's burdens. 'For everyone will be salted with fire', Jesus says. He highlights the point underlying the passage in James: everyone of us in the community at some point or another enters a period of-in the language of the scriptures-tribulation. That is the nature of the world; it is not as it should (or will) be. Bad things happen to good people. Some of us are fortunate enough not to feel the need ever to use such a strong word as 'tribulation' to describe any period of our lives, while others of us go through more than anyone should ever have to. And that is where the importance of prayer again comes up: prayer is one way we shoulder one another's burdens: the person we pray for is not one we can easily let suffer without getting in there with them. Likewise, when James exhorts us to rejoice in psalms of praise, we don't do that alone. We are the Body of Christ. We stand and we fall together.
I'm afraid I haven't untangled any knots here about sin. Likewise, I'm certain that there are a lot of things I've left unsaid about how we practically deal with sin that threatens to cause division. But I think this morning's passages give us a context to think through such a topic. Sin can only be addressed humbly from within the community, a community that knows one another, that prays for one another, that cares for one another. We are toiling through life together, through good times and bad times. From baptisms to burials. In the unity of the Holy Spirit, we pray together, trusting in faith that our prayers are effective and powerful. From baptisms to burials, I said, but that is not the end of the matter. The very people we pray with and for, the very world we are laboring to bring more in line with the truths revealed in Christ, will one day in the unity of the Holy Spirit, see Jesus and the Father face to face. And in that day, we will no longer have to shoulder one another's burdens. No, in that day, we will - together - only need to sing psalms of praise.
Amen.
Sermon by: Jake Andrews