Author
Oliver Burkeman isn’t big on positive thinking. “Telling yourself that
everything must work out,” he explains, “is poor preparation for those times
when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help
advice to eliminate the word ‘failure’ from your vocabulary — but then you’ll
just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes.”
James
appears to agree. He prefaces this section on prayer by naming three possible
conditions of the Christian. Like legendary football coach Tom Landry’s
assessment of the passing game, it has three possible outcomes, two of which
are bad: suffering, singing, and sickness. He recommends prayer in all three cases.
(“Sing praises” is literally “sing psalms,” most likely the prayers in the Old
Testament.) Even his example of
answered prayer involves a request for judgment and he follows his big brother’s
fudging of the original time-frame (1 Kings 17.1, see Luke 4.25) to introduce
the idea of ill omen. (Three point five halves the perfect number of seven.) He
also studs his treatment of prayer with references to sin: forgiveness of sin
(v.15) and confession of sin (v.16) and salvation from sin (v.20).
Sorrow
and sin – two forbidden categories in the conversation of American society and,
too often, American churches. In place of an inadequate vocabulary of denial,
James offers the concerted effort of the Christian community. The church’s
spiritual leaders, not the ice-cream suited celebrity healer, gather to pray.
Confession of sin to “one another,” not to some pastoral potentate, leads to
life. Like the firing squad where one unknown rifle fires blanks, the Holy
Spirit moves in the church so that no one knows whose prayer did the job and
only God receives the glory.
Telling
yourself that everything is all right is lying. Reminding yourself that God
will in the end make all things well is eschatology. In between, the Scripture
offers a rich lexicon of lament and a powerful practice of prayer.
Brethren,
Let Us Pray.
Doug
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