Psalm 124 | James 5:13-20
Jeremy Richards
This morning I’m going to attempt a rather tall order: to give something of a theology of petitionary prayer, though such an explanation will always be incomplete because prayer always, inevitably, holds an element of mystery. Petitionary prayer is, simply, prayer where we ask for things – everything from direction in life and success at work to healing from illness and reconciliation of relationships to liberation of the oppressed and equity for the disenfranchised.
A sermon on this topic is both timely and sensitive in these days of Covid-19, political division, atrocities against immigrants and refugees (most recently refugees from Haiti), economic instability, voter suppression, and power grabbing by politicians. It’s timely because these days reveal what little control we have and how dependent we are on circumstances, one another, and (hopefully) God.
It’s sensitive because members of this congregation and people the world over – good, faithful people – have asked God for things – healing, safety, food and housing, justice, deliverance from natural disasters – and many times God seemingly did not, would not, or could not help. God did not deliver them. For those whose prayers went unanswered, passages like the one we read this morning from James are not a comfort but a source of sorrow. They may not bolster our faith but may instead topple it. James says the prayer of the righteous will save the sick and the Lord will raise them up. But some in our community, and millions of righteous people the world over, have prayed for their sick and the Lord did not raise them up.
James begins with the question, “Are any among you suffering?” and the suffering in this passage doesn’t refer to just any old suffering but to suffering caused by oppression. Most likely, in light of the verses preceding this passage, the suffering James is referring to is the suffering the poor experience at the hands of the rich. For hundreds of years Black folx, Latinx folx, Native Americans, and immigrants and refugees from around the world whose skin is not white have prayed for acceptance and equality in the United States, and yet the culture of white supremacy continues to dominate to this day, often in ways those of us who are white can’t even see.
Our queer siblings in Christ continue to be marginalized and maligned by our society, nowhere more so than in our churches of all places. They have prayed for loving, accepting communities where they can be their full selves as they seek to follow Christ, but so often they’ve been met with judgment, passive aggressive exclusion, and at times flat out rejection.
Women pray for safety from sexual harassment and abuse, and yet they are repeatedly mistreated as they go about their day-to-day lives: walking down the street, shopping for groceries, at work, sometimes in their own homes, and – God help us – often in our churches.
And there are many other groups who have prayed for freedom, for safety, for healing, for acceptance and inclusion, who continue to suffer because the dominant culture ignores them, belittles them, or outright oppresses them. In all these cases it seems as if their prayers have gone unanswered. It seems as if God doesn’t care. So why should we pray for God’s help?
Personally, I’ve really struggled with this idea of petitionary prayer. When I was in divinity school, someone close to me went through a very traumatic experience. God did not protect them from something bad happening to them. After that, I couldn’t pray. Because what was the point?
I had this one personal experience at the same time that I was also learning about systemic oppression for the first time. I looked out at the world and saw all the injustices and inequalities I mentioned a minute ago. God wasn’t protecting black and brown folx. God wasn’t protecting queer folx. God wasn’t protecting women. God wasn’t protecting the poor. God didn’t protect this friend of mine.
Despite all this, I still had faith that God was good, so I came to the conclusion that God simply couldn’t make a difference. Because if God could and God wasn’t, then God couldn’t be good. This isn’t a unique dilemma I was facing. Theologically, it’s called theodicy. Theodicy tries to answer the question how/why a good God allows evil. My answer was that God simply couldn’t prevent evil from happening. But again, if that’s the case, then why pray?
I met with one of my professors, hoping that she could give me a good, theological answer to solve my dilemma. Because I wanted to pray, I just couldn’t. Unfortunately, she didn’t really have an answer for me. She did say that it seemed like I was going through what John of the Cross called the “dark night of the soul.” I’m actually reading The Dark Night of the Soul right now, and I think that term gets thrown around a little too flippantly. The dark night of the soul refers to a pretty specific experience in one’s spiritual life. It isn’t just anytime things aren’t going well. But I think, in this case, my professor was right.
According to John of the Cross, in the dark night of the soul, God weans us off our previous, more immature understandings of prayer and moves us into a deeper communion with God. This process often initially leads to feelings of abandonment, because the previous assurance we felt of God’s presence is suddenly gone. Since we can’t feel God, we wonder if God is there, if God was ever there. Or was it just our imagination? But, John says, this will eventually lead us to a deeper communion with God.
Over time, through my own personal dark night of the soul, I eventually came to understand prayer as more than me talking to God, and started to focus more on God talking to me. This led me to contemplative prayer and eventually to the Living School at the Center for Action and Contemplation, where I’ve learned about various forms of prayer that emphasize silence and stillness. So through this dark night, God led me to a deeper understanding of prayer and ultimately a deeper relationship with God. In the end it was a blessing.
But that’s all kind of a tangent because discovering contemplative prayer didn’t “solve” the problem of petitionary prayer. Contemplative prayer was an addition, not a replacement. It was another way to pray, but it wasn’t a substitute for petitionary prayer. Because, truth be told, there are times when we do, in fact, need things. And there are times when our needs become so strong that, even if we can’t rationally explain how it works, we can’t help but cry out to God.
In his book Learning to Pray, the Jesuit priest James Martin says,
…your desire for prayer reveals something about how God created you. Deep within you is a natural desire to communicate with God, to share yourself with God, to have God hear your voice, or, more basically, to encounter God. Deep within you is a longing to be in relationship with God. So you long to pray.
Continuing that thought, when it comes to petitionary prayer specifically – prayers when we ask God for something – we are acknowledging that to be human is to be dependent. We are not as self-sufficient as we would like to believe. And we don’t just need other people. We need God.
In our reading from James this morning, James says there is power in petitionary prayer. To quote him, he says, “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” He says there is a point to asking God for things and that, in fact, prayer can make a difference, it’s effective.
But how? And if James is right, then why does it “work” sometimes and doesn’t work other times? Is God just helping some people and not others, all willy-nilly? And if so, what kind of God is that? That doesn’t seem very loving.
In my own journey toward trying to better understand prayer, and especially petitionary prayer, I’ve found the various forms of process theology helpful (though, to be clear, I wouldn’t say I ascribe to process theology as a whole). One book that I found especially helpful is Thomas Oord’s book The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. In this book, Oord argues that since before God is sovereign or powerful or any other descriptor, scriptures says that God is love, then by God’s very nature God can’t be controlling or coercive. So ever since God created the world, from the beginning God’s orientation to it has been, as the subtitle says, open and relational, meaning God doesn’t interact with creation in a top down way, like a chess player moving pieces. Instead God opens Godself to creation in a relational way, which leaves room for the unexpected. But it also leaves room for creation to rebel against God, which is what we call sin.
This means God doesn’t simply control things, but instead influences them, so the outcome depends, to some degree, on their willingness to be influenced. So whenever we pray for something, we are one of any number of influences. God, other people, bodies, creation, weather, environment, they all can play a role in any given outcome. Unfortunately, there are also negative forces that have power in the world – those things scripture refers to as sin, evil, death, the devil. They can also be actors and influencers in any given situation.
This may challenge or even offend those who are committed to the idea of God as being an all-powerful sovereign. But, in Oord’s interpretation, and I would agree, this “open and relational” understanding of God is actually much more biblical. You may remember the story of Jesus travelling to his hometown, but he isn’t able to do any miracles there because of their unbelief. On the other hand, there’s the story of the woman who has an issue with bleeding, who reaches out in faith to touch Jesus’ cloak and he heals her without knowing anything about it! In both cases, it isn’t just about Jesus’ power, it depends on the faith of others as well.
In scripture, individuals’ and community’s cooperation with God makes a difference. This “open and relational” understanding of prayer maintains the conviction that God is good and wants what’s best for us, as well as the biblical promise that prayer makes a difference. It’s also grounds itself in God’s primary identity as that of love, which is also biblical.
At the same time, it leaves room for chance and tragedy, because sin continues to be a force that works in opposition to God’s will. In any given instance when you pray, it isn’t just you and God and that’s it. There are other factors exerting influence. Because there is still sin in the world, there continues to be forces contrary to God. Sin manifests in personal choices, but also in physical illnesses, natural disasters, systemic injustices, and everything that is contrary to God and the abundant life God intends for us through Christ.
In fact, as we’ve talked about before, sin is primarily not personal moral failing, but a larger, reality that affects all of creation. It’s death in all its forms. James says, earlier in the book, “…sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.” Scripture sometimes calls it the “powers and the principalities.” Personal sins, then, are the ways we participate in the destructive and death-dealing ways of the world instead of in the life-giving, redemptive way of Jesus.
Prayer is one of the most powerful ways we confront and combat sin in all of its forms. Through prayer we align ourselves with God and God’s redemptive work in the world. Because sin, brokenness, and death continue to be realities, we can’t guarantee that our prayers will ultimately heal those we are praying for, but we can be confident that they do make a difference. Maybe a dramatic miracle will take place, or maybe the pain will be reduced, or maybe the one we are praying for will simply sense that they are not alone, that God is with them and all those who are holding them in prayer are with them, and that will ease their suffering.
In that sense, prayer may “save” someone, even if they never actually recover. In fact, in our reading today, what seems to be the most straightforward promise that God will heal anyone who is prayed for in faith, may actually be making a more nuanced point. In v. 15, James says, The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up.” On the surface, this seems to be saying that if a truly faithful prayer is offered up, the sick person will be healed. But the word for saved here is sozo, which, Micah taught us a few weeks ago, is the same word that is often translated as salvation. The phrase “raise up” on the surface refers to physical healing, but on a deeper level it can be read as an allusion to the resurrection, when we will be “raised up” with Christ. So it may be that James is assuring his readers that even if a sick member who is prayed for dies, they will be saved, and even if they never leave their sickbed, they will be “raised up” at the resurrection.
It’s important to note that while this passage is, in a general sense, about prayer and the power of prayer, it’s specifically about the power of communal prayer within the church family. James is less concerned, in this specific passage, about your personal devotional practices, and more interested in the prayer life of the whole community and its ability to affect change in the lives of its members: to relieve suffering caused by oppression, to call sinners to repentance, and yes, even to heal the sick.
As I thought about this passage this week, I began to wonder how much we pray as a community, and how much could be accomplished if we more intentionally prayed for things together. Of course, we pray during our joys and concerns, which is one of my favorite times in the service, but are we praying for the same things during the week?
This last week, I had a number of meetings about needs in our church – primarily about the need for children’s ministry volunteers and the building. There’s a lot to do, and it’s pretty overwhelming for those involved. I’ve known this for a while, and yet, to be honest with you, I realized this week that I don’t regularly pray for them.
What if I did? And what if we all did? What if we all prayed every day that God would raise up people from within our congregation to minister to our kids? What if we prayed for all the work being done in our building? What if we prayed for more people to come to our church, so we could share the love of Christ with them? We know there are people out there hurting who need Jesus. Are we praying for them? What if we all prayed that our little church would thrive? What if every day everyone here prayed that Grant Park would thrive. I really think that would make a difference.
And when one of us gets sick or is injured, what if we actually did gather around them and lay hands on them and pray for them. Maybe we could even anoint them with oil! Instead of trying to face our health problems on our own, or at the most only asking the pastor to come and pray with us, what if we opened ourselves to the care and the prayer of our whole church community? I know this has happened before, like when Kaitlyn had her accident.
And if one of us was caught in some kind of suffering based on unjust systems or laws, what if they brought it to the church and the church actively prayed for them and fought for them and assisted them. This has also happened here, when different members have faced financial hardship.
And if one of us has a moral failing, what if, instead of trying to deal with it on their own, afraid to let anyone know what was going on, they felt safe enough here to confess what they’d done, and then they got the opportunity to receive forgiveness and restoration and encouragement from a whole community?!
In other words, what if we became a community, a church, of prayer?