Prayer Makes Possible
Preacher: The Rev. Andrew Van Kirk
Passage: James 5:13-20
The name of the general of the Aramean army was Naaman. He was a mighty warrior, and walked into the chambers of the Joram, the king of Israel, with shoulders broad and strong. As he reached out and handed the King of Israel the letter, the armor up and down his arms hid his secret: that he suffered from the terrible, debilitating, incurable skin condition known leprosy.
The king opened the letter. It was from the King of Aram himself, and as Joram read it, his hands began to tremble. It read: "When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy."
Here before him was his the general of his enemy, and a demand from his powerful boss to heal him, or else. How was this fair? This was a setup!
Joram, the King of Israel stood, tore his clothes, and said, "Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me."
The story works out in the end; Naaman is in fact healed by God through the work of the prophet Elisha in 2 Kings, chapter 8. But I've always felt for Joram in this moment. And my professional position has only increased my sympathy. Because, as is the case for virtually every pastor, I've had letters from the King of Aram handed to me too.
These days, they are usually emails. But the come with a prayer request, usually a request for prayers for healing, and then they quote this morning's reading from the epistle of James: usually the famous line in verse 16 "The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective," or, as the King James renders it, "the prayer of a righteous a availeth much."
Dear Father,
Please pray for my cousin. He's in a coma with serious injuries and the doctors say he may not make it.
"The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective."
Thanks,
Betsy
It's always ambiguous whether Betsy is quoting the scripture as a compliment or a threat – in any case, the line feels real thin. You can do it Andrew, you're the priest! So…if the cousin doesn't make it…what does that say about me?
I want to hit reply and quote Joram, "Am I God, to give death or life, that this Betsy sends word to me to cure her cousin of his coma? Just look and see how she is trying to pick a quarrel with me."
This experience is near universal for pastors. And some of you, I'm sure, just by virtue of being faithful, believing, Christians, have had the same requests placed on you.
And also, while we're talking about the challenges of this passage, perhaps you've noticed we're in the midst of a pandemic. And people keep dying. And I don't know about you, but I've been praying for lots of these people. And some get better, but others don't.
Doesn't James say, "the prayer of faith will save the sick." If the prayer of faith saves the sick, and yet the sick keep dying, are we…faithless? What is James getting at here?
Is this passage anything other than a minefield of potential ways to fail in prayer and faith? Indeed, I believe it is gospel: hopefully, empowering, good news. But we have to come at it from a different angle.
First, we have to remember that James is not solving an individual's health care crisis. He did not write this letter in response to an inquiry from Thaddeus about what the family should do about grandma's stage 4 lung cancer. When we bring a specific problem to the text, we're going at it backwards. We're pulling on the door that says push.
James lived in the first century in Jerusalem. His was a violent, disease ridden society. James surely knew people that died; James surely prayed for people that died. And, despite referencing the Elijah story about the drought, James never, so far as we know anyway, prayed a storm into or out of being.
If the ability to control the weather were a regular effect of prayer, faithful Christians would have turned the whole world into San Diego a long time ago.
The James who was inspired by God to write this letter was also the James who prayed for sick people and then they died anyway.
This only sounds like a recipe for making people better – combine one part prayer with one part oil and mix until healthy – if you read it without thinking very hard at all about the real person who wrote it.
We do that because we're most likely to let go of context precisely when we're grasping for any sort of hope at all. We stop seeing the real world of the letter precisely when our the darkness of our real world blinds us to anything else.
If he's not unlocking the secret of perfect health, what James is actually doing here is something akin to what the speaker at my 5th grade commencement did. I don't remember much about my fifth grade commencement. I remember standing outside in the sun with my classmates. I remember being in a polo shirt that day. I remember thinking that I was so grown up. And I remember thinking that my classmates and I were so cool.
And I remember some vague address about how "If you will work hard and dream big, you can be anything you want to be." Did any of you hear something similar growing up?
Yeah. Here's the deal about that. It's not true. One of the things I wanted to be was a professional basketball player. I'm…uhhh…not built for that. At 11 anyone could have looked at me and thought, "Nope, not him."
There were other things, like astronaut, that when I was still 11, were only highly unlikely, but not actually impossible. It was later, when I chose not to go to the military academies to fly, and when I chose not to study the hard sciences or engineering, that 'astronaut' was definitively moved into the impossible side on my life's list.
But in any case, it's no more factually correct to promise an 11 year old "you can do anything if you will work hard and dream big" than it is to promise "the prayer of faith will save the sick." But neither that 5th grade speaker, nor the apostle James are lying: what they're doing is declaratively creating possibility.
The commencement speaker was making room for possibility in ourselves; James was making room for the possibility of God.
If you step back from the lines of this passage that are often quoted and look at the whole thing, you see that James' encouragement towards prayer is pervasive. Look at how it starts: "Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? The should sing songs of praise (and what are those but prayers of joy). Are you sick?" Call for the elders and be prayed for and anointed. Have you sinned? Confess and pray for one another.
The thrust of this whole passage is pro-prayer. James is trying to stir up in his hearers, including us, an attitude towards prayer. And this is so important because prayer makes possible God's action.
That's not quite the same as prayer makes God act. We do not compel God. It was God who made the rain stop when Elijah prayed; not Elijah who made it happen. But God didn't do it without Elijah's prayer either.
Prayer makes possible God's action.
The scientist Stuart Kauffman introduced a term in 2002: the "adjacent possible." The "adjacent possible" is everything at the edge of the actual present situation, it's a sort of map of all the things the present could change into.
Think of it like this. We're in Texas. We have a car. If we want to go to another state, we can only go to New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, or Louisiana. Those states are our "adjacent possible."
And James is saying that in life, if you'll bring God into the mix, your adjacent possible will expand. The map of what is adjacent to your present world will suddenly be bigger and more hopeful. You still may be in Texas, but now you have an airplane.
Into the complex calculus of what happens next in life, your prayer adds a new and powerful variable: the hand of God.
It's safe to say that today, on the cusp of 40, I can be or do fewer things than I could be when I was 11. One of the realities of aging is the foreclosure of possibility.
But James is stressing that wherever we are in life, we must not give up on the possibility of God. Happy or hard, suffering of super, make space for God in prayer. Prayer does make a difference; the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective – but not because it makes God do what we want, but because it opens up in us the possibility of allowing God to do what he will.
Three years ago I stood up here in this pulpit and I promised you that we would build this building expansion and we would do it without adding any long-term debt. And I really wanted that to be true. I wasn't sure how it was going to happen…if it would happen. I prayed about it, I invited all of you to prayer about it.
Then this summer, I sent the members of this parish a letter, reminding them of the upcoming end of the campaign. I knew then that we were not on a path to make it. We were going to come up short. Despite my promise, we were going to have $50,000 of debt remaining. I prayed about it, and just asked for some miracle. And again, I know I haven't been the only one praying.
And as you heard in the announcements this morning, God has come through. You have been the miracle. I can't say too much without revealing more than is appropriate – but if you knew the who and the how and all the details, you'd be in awe at the work of God.
I never could have imagined the way this ended when I stood right there in 2018. I couldn't have. It wasn't in my "adjacent possible." But prayer changes what's possible. Healing, saving, forgiving, and giving – God's possible is way bigger than ours. Thanks be to God. We should pray:
Almighty God, generous Father, you have multiplied our gifts beyond what we can imagine: thank you! Thank you for all those who have given to the Multiply Campaign, and for its successful conclusion. Thank you for all that your blessings make possible our lives, our community, and this parish of St. Andrew's. Lord, there are so many areas in our life where we need your sense of possibility, of hope, of healing. We pray for our families, for our government, for our health, for this pandemic. We pray knowing that your sense of what can happen is more than we can imagine, and ask you to work in us and through us to make it so, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
