SatSep262009
Scripture: JAMES 5:13-20
Friday’s comic says it all. As Dagwood gets into bed, Blondie says, “I can’t believe you said a prayer to win your round of golf tomorrow. You should ask for more important things than a round of golf, you know.” “That’s a good point, honey,” he says. And then he kneels at his bed, looks beseechingly to heaven, and says, “There’s this really big office bowling tournament next week, and . . .” (“Blondie,” The Plain Dealer, Sept. 25, 2009, p. HA 1). There’s a guy who gets what the really big things are!
And of course he raises the question that all our prayers that ask something of God raise: what do we have a right to pray for; should we expect that God will respond; and especially—because it comes up all the time—is it legitimate to pray for healing?
Prayers for healing are a major subject in our talks with God. I bet I’ve prayed for my own healing during every bout of cold, flu, blood clots, and dizziness. I suspect you have, too. And it’s a major part of our prayers for others. ‘Please, God, take away Amy’s depression; remove Tony’s cancer; don’t let Grandma’s memory lapses be Alzheimer’s.’ Most of us, at one time or another, have prayed for healing—for ourselves or for someone we love. It’s almost as if we’re built that way. We can’t help it.
But most of us also wonder about the legitimacy of those prayers. If we hear that our friend Erin has cancer and we start a prayer chain for her, what are we saying? Are we saying that we believe sheer numbers of people praying for her will make her better—that ten people praying is better than one or two? Are we saying that our prayers may make the difference between Erin’s living and dying—as though we’re alerting God to this disease and thereby prompting God do something that wouldn’t have happened without those prayers? There’s something terribly wrong with the idea that God didn’t know about the problem until we brought it up. And there’s something even more awful about the notion that God isn’t going to engage in any healing until enough people, or the right people, have asked for it—as though it’s some kind of popularity contest. What kind of God would act like that? That’s absurdly calculating and cruel. If that’s what God is like, count me out. I’d just as soon skip the whole faith thing.
One of the things church people are fond of saying, when they hear that someone has been healed, is something to the effect that “our prayers made a difference.” One way of framing the issue before us today is: did they? Do those prayers bring about a healing? Do we want to say that we manipulated God? Do we believe that if Johnny doesn’t have as many friends as Erin, he’s going to die of exactly the same disease because not enough people brought it to God’s attention?
The whole question comes up because of our reading from James this morning. At the very end of a letter to some early Christians, the writer says, “Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet” (5:13-15, The Message). ‘What an immensely appealing prospect,’ we think—healing by prayer. But at the same time, we wince, both because we have all these questions, and because we have prayed so many times for healing and recovery that hasn’t happened.
To help us think more closely about the purpose and meaning of prayers for healing, let’s look at an example. It’s worth spending some extended time with this today it seems to me. At the 20-week mark of her pregnancy, Dayna Olson-Getty and her husband Eric learned that the baby they were expecting had a fatal birth defect. It turns out that the top and back of the baby’s skull never formed. Babies with this condition typically make it full term and then die a few days after birth.
Knowing the prognosis, Dayna and Eric named the baby Ethan James the day they learned of his condition, and decided they would keep the baby and deliver it. The conundrum that bedeviled them, though, was what they should pray for in this circumstance. Some of their friends told them they were praying for a miracle. “We are not particular about who prays for us or how they pray,” Dayna says. “We are grateful to be upheld in prayer, and we have sensed that we are receiving strength we didn’t think we’d have because of these prayers . . . But the choice of some our friends to pray for a miracle has made me think hard about what I pray for and how I pray.”
She writes eloquently about the feelings she and her husband have for Ethan. After they heard the news, “Only one thing mattered: We love this child. We love him with a love that is far fiercer and stronger than we imagined it could be. All this making room in our lives and getting ready for his arrival had, without our realizing it, made us into parents. We have no power to change anything about his development or diagnosis or the length of his life, but we choose to love him with our whole hearts and to provide for him for as long as God gives him life. . .
“But,” she says, “I am not praying for a miracle. At first, I wondered if this was because I lack faith. It is true that I have a hard time having confidence that God will supernaturally heal those I love when they are deathly ill. Maybe this is because I lived through my mother’s excruciating death from cancer, despite many prayers for her healing. Probably it is also because I am culturally a rational Westerner, more likely to put my confidence in the technology of medicine than in the healing power of God.”
For Dayna, what it comes down to is this: she has seen the ultrasound. She knows what his skull is like. She knows that it would take an utter miracle to change things and let him live a normal life. “I desperately want Ethan to be born whole,” she says. “I would give up one of my own arms or legs if it meant that Ethan’s skull could close over and his brain form normally. There is nothing I want more in life than to raise this little boy and to have him outlive me . . . But I am not praying for a miracle. I am not capable of praying for healing while simultaneously preparing for Ethan’s death. I have to choose one or the other—the two possibilities are simply too much for me to hold together.” Parenting well, for her, means giving Ethan the best life they can give him, no matter how short that life is (Christian Century, Sept. 22, 2009, p. 12).
We spend as much time with Dayna’s story as we do this morning because she sets a compelling standard for our prayer life. And if we could put it into a word, we might call her stance, “yielding.” What she does is yield and trust. While many of us might well beg for a healthy baby, and bargain with God—‘what can I do to make this right?’—and perhaps even demand our way, what Dayna does is relinquish her own desires and put herself, instead, into the hands of God.
One of the great challenges for Christians is to get away from thinking of prayer as some sort of magic act. As someone put it in a Bible study this week, “I’m trying to get away from the notion of God as the ‘genie’ who fixes my problems whenever I ask.” Maggie Ross, an Episcopal Solitary, says, “The difference between prayer and magic is an attitude toward the future. If theology has forgotten it, Einstein reminds us that there are many futures. Prayer, especially intercessory prayer, is opening to this possibility of many futures. Magic wishes to limit us to only one [‘I know what should happen here. I know how this should turn out. God, you should make this happen.’]. Magic tries to exert total short-term control over a single, narrowly focused aspect of life, heedless of the long-term consequences or ripple effect on others’ lives” (Weavings, July/August 2007, p. 40).
We need to say as clearly as we can that it’s still perfectly appropriate, that it is good and right, to pray for those who are sick. In the first place, a healthy prayer life bring to God all of what’s most on our minds and hearts. Just as we’d tell a best friend our hopes for healing, so it’s perfectly right to tell God how much that healing would mean to us. We should be that forthright and persistent with God.
And in the second place, we know that people do get healed without any obvious scientific explanation. Working in our midst is a mighty power for wholeness and renewal. The problem comes when we expect God to fulfill our desires. The problem comes when we think we can manipulate and control the results we seek.
If we want to learn how to pray, it’s always helpful to look to Jesus. Jesus sets the model for prayer that arises from suffering as he faces his last hours of life in the Garden of Gethsemane, knowing the inevitable crucifixion that awaits him. He begs God: “for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me” (Mark 14:36). He does not want this to happen, and he tells God so. If it’s alright for Jesus to pray for relief from suffering, then it’s certainly OK for us to do the same.
The key thing in that story of Jesus’ last moment, though, is that as soon as he has finished asking for an end to the pain, he says, “yet, not what I want, but what you want.” He lets go of control and puts himself in God’s hands.
That, it seems to me, is what we’re to do. By all means, when you’re suffering, say, “God take this pain away. I can’t stand it.” Our agonized pleas, for ourselves and for others, are part of how we get through our worst moments. They’re part of feeling closer to God. But in the next breath, the charge for us is to let go of the results and trust God to be present in whatever happens.
What’s fundamental in Christian faith is the blessed presence of God in whatever life brings us. When people we love get sick, when we ourselves get sick, the mind-blowing truth is that God is already working in the tissues and fibers of that body for a healing that only God can give. Even better than the potential potency of our prayers is knowing that God is at work before we ask and in ways that we can’t imagine. This can lighten the burden of fearing that it all depends on us and agonizing about whether we’ve prayed the proper prayers. It’s God who does the healing, not us. Incredibly wonderful things happen to bodies and nations because God makes them happen.
What we can do is add our energies to that relentless healing energy of God. Which is what we do as a church. We pray for people in our Fellowship of Prayer every Sunday. We have a Prayer Box in our chapel where we encourage people to leave their written prayers, and every Wednesday morning our staff reads through those prayers and prays for the people named there. We have prayer teams who pray for everyone in this church every year. And we have a group of Federated “prayer warriors” who get hundreds of prayer requests every year, and who add their heartfelt pleas to the God-energy that infuses the entire ether of life. Do they make a difference? You bet they do. “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective” (5:16). Those prayers open us to a new and perhaps unimagined future. They enable us to keep giving ourselves into the hands of the God who made us and continues to hold us. They tighten our bonds with our Maker and Redeemer.
Oswald Chambers puts it this way: “What we must avoid in intercession is praying for someone to be simply ‘patched up.’ We must [instead] pray that person through into contact with the very life of God” (Weavings, July/August 2007, p. 16). That’s a great way to put it: the heart of our prayer is not so much that our broken bodies be mended, but that our whole selves be immersed in the very heart of God. That’s incredibly powerful stuff—“powerful and effective.”
There’s one more thing. It’s crucial to remember that the power of God is not limited to this life only. The wholeness for which we yearn is a gift that may have its fruition in a life yet to come. Dayna, the woman whose expected baby developed without a full skull, finishes her account of her prayer life this way. To the question of what sort of prayer she and her husband utter, she says this: “I have not been praying for the miracle of his healing, but I have been taking great comfort in the miracle that is already assured—the miracle that Ethan’s life will not end with his death, but will be joined to the eternal life of the God who made him and gave him to us.” She knows she will grieve his absence all of her life. But she knows, too, that “there is something about his life—the life that God put in him—that is not ephemeral and fragile like his body. In this way, Ethan is no different from any of us. Our bodies are frail and fallible too, and they will all die sooner or later, but we have the promise of resurrection into a life that is not constrained by our frailty and that comes from the One who breathed life into all creation.” Does God answer prayer? Without a doubt! Our role is to let God work, to trust, and to know that “all things work together for good for those who love God” (Romans 8:28). That’s the good news of God. Let the people say, “Amen.”