Summon the Elders

James 5:13-20, Mark 9:38-42

September 27, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

The great prophet and leader Moses, strong in mind, body and spirit and given special power by God to do wonders, needed help. His father-in-law saw him working one day, trying to solve all the problems of his people, and he said to Moses, “You will surely wear yourself out, both you and these people with you. The task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” He counseled Moses to bring on other leaders to help, and he did.

Queen Esther of the Persian Empire saw ahead of her the need to save her people from a threatened genocide. She knew that some of the work she had to do alone, but she knew she could not do that without the strong prayer and fasting support of her people. So she called for three days of fasting and prayer by thousands of people to give her the strength she needed to do what needed to be done.

The 12 disciples of Jesus saw themselves as great, empowered by God like Moses to do wonders of healing and teaching. They decided they didn’t need or want the help of anyone who wasn’t in the inner circle to do the work of God for which they saw themselves as uniquely empowered. Jesus knew better. He knew that soon he would die, and that the work the disciples would need to carry on was simply too great for any small group of people, no matter how gifted. He told them they needed to sacrifice their arrogance in order to let God raise up other leaders that they would need to nurture and support, and not to block or exclude potential companions in joy and struggle, especially companions they might not expect to have.

In one of those early churches, the writer of James saw that sometimes people did not bring their joys and especially their struggles with illness, trouble or sin to share with the community. He saw people carrying burdens or celebrating God’s grace alone, outside the church. He tried to explain what Moses and Esther and the 12 disciples learned, that Christian community is a place where burdens are shared, where the community strengthens each member for the sometimes challenging work of following Jesus is shared, where prayer and healing become powerful and possible because of the shared gifts and power of many gathered together, and where, when we fall away and desire to honestly look at our lives and reconcile with God and other people, we don’t need to hide in shame and silence; we can come to the community to find assurance of forgiveness and help in the work of reconciliation.

This week and next week I am going to be expanding on the themes these stories and the creating of the “body” of Christ we began on Rally Sunday all lift up: the strong message of the Bible and of the history of the church to us about the critical importance of Christian community. Shared prayer, confession, reconciliation, healing and teaching work. On Rally Sunday, we celebrated the joy and gifts of being one body, and next week we will also celebrate our variety and ponder what it means that God did not create us to be alone.

This week I want to look at both the gospel and the words from James to consider that being in Christian community is not just a joy, not just somewhere that we get what we need, but that we must, as Christians, live our faith in community because we are not just responsible for our own life of faith and our own actions before God. God calls us to be responsible for, accountable to, and engaged in healing work with and for each other. Christian community is not optional or just a nice bonus, it is central to a life of faith.

Reponsible for, accountable to, engaged in healing work with. That first is a hard word to hear, that God calls us to be responsible for someone else. Parents readily take on this role when they choose to have children enter their lives. We also stretch to take on that role with the Church’s children whenever one of them is baptized, promising to support them in their journey. But wait, we say the same thing when we baptize adults, and when new members join the church. “We promise our love, support and care.” We promise to help them on their faith journey. We don’t promise just to hire staff to do that. James doesn’t call on those who are sick to summon the pastor, but the elders, probably leaders in the church. “Confess to one another,” James writes, “pray for one another.”

Yet it is still more than that. Jesus tells the disciples that anyone who causes another believer to stumble should understand how deeply serious that is to God. We are responsible for considering how our words and actions might harm the faith of the people around us, in the same way that parents are very clear that children “learn what they live.” The hyperbole about millstones and cutting off hands is Jesus trying to get the disciples to see that this responsibility is taken very, very seriously by God, and should be by them as well. Clergy often talk about the challenge of living life in a fishbowl, where everyone looks at their every move to discern if they are living up to Christian values and practices. I would say that every one of us as Christians is being looked at by those not in our churches in the same way. Have you heard the story about the woman driving along a road and cut off by another driver? So incensed was she that she yelled out her open window rude and obscene comments to the other driver, also using hand gestures to get her point across. Unbeknownst to her a police car was following her. The officer turned on the sirens and pulled her over, took her license and went back to his car for a long radio conversation. When he returned, he said, “I apologize, you can go on your way.” When she asked why he had pulled her over in the first place, the officer said, “Well, I saw the gestures you made to that person who cut you off and I heard the words you were yelling. I noticed that on the bumper of your car you had a fish sign and the words ‘Honk if you love Jesus,’ so I just assumed this had to be a stolen car!”

Now this is a big responsibility, and, as Paul says, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory.” Clergy and parishioner alike will disappoint God and the community, will sin. Instead of cutting off our hands, James calls us to come to the community and confess and be led to reconciliation. Protestants are not real keen on this confession thing in general. Catholics have the sacrament of confession, but of course some people take that more seriously than others. We have a ritual of confession here whenever we celebrate Holy Communion, but I have in many churches had people complain about any time in worship for confession, either because the things that might be said in a written prayer might not apply to them or because, as someone once said to me, “it’s really a downer to start worship by admitting I did something wrong.” So I know people who have sinned, especially if it has happened in some public way, who then leave the church community just when they need it most because they can’t bear to be accountable for what they have done and are sure they will be rejected. Yet we are a community of reconciliation. This is the place to struggle to understand and give forgiveness and rebuild relationships. I am on the worship committee for the Conference Annual Meeting whose subject is Sacred Conversations on Race. Creating worship for this event has been a challenging task as we sort out wounds and denials that go very deep. As we struggle together more and more it is obvious to me that if we cannot deal with this in the church, where can we?

Which leads to the call for healing.

Responsible for, accountable to, and engaged in healing work with one another. I was very moved by Sara’s prayer request last week for someone she knows who is suffering but does not want the support and prayers of other people. That person is not alone, even among people who are in a Christian community. I am always a bit baffled by those who choose to suffer alone, or who wait for someone to come and support them without making clear what their need is. James tells his church members to be bold and ask one another for help, for prayer, for healing. Yes, it is true that sometimes we pray for someone to be healed and the healing does not come. We prayed for my brother-in-law to be cured from brain cancer, and he died. We have prayed over the years for other people here whose diseases were not cured. Why the answer to such prayers is sometimes, “No,” I cannot explain. However, I do know that in very many cases we can all name, healing came even to those who were not cured. People who did not know how they could endure another chemo treatment or who felt they were so drowning in trouble they could never come out can tell us that they were strengthened, empowered, encouraged, helped by knowing and feeling the power of the prayers of Christians gathered together. Have you experienced this, too? How odd that the disciple John tried to stop someone from healing in Jesus’ name when so much healing is so needed all around us! How inadequate I feel as a single Christian in the face of the need for healing in this church, this community, the world! How empowered I am when I come to be with you every week and we hear each other’s concerns and lift them to God in prayer, or when I visit someone and discover another church member has been to see them and brought comfort!

A colleague summed up both the Jesus and James readings by saying that Jesus and James “do not want us to write each other off.” Even more, Jesus and James are telling us that it is not only the call of the clergy, or the prophets like Elijah, or the saints, living or dead, to be responsible for, accountable to, and engaged in healing with the faith community around us. We are the Pips to Jesus’ Gladys Knight! We are the utility infielders without whom a baseball game cannot be won! We are the chorus singing Handel’s “Hallelujah” which cannot be done by soloists alone! We are the construction workers without whose sweat the architect’s design will never be realized! I am the church. You are the church. We are the church, together. What good news! Amen.