Prayer: a younger perspective. James 5.

Today we finish the book of James. Pointed, pithy, practical. Frank discussion of some practical considerations concerning the ethic of Christ. I was struck by three similarities between what James had to say, and what is contained in the letters to the Hebrews and Galatians. I'm going to add them as a comment to this post, because I have a special treat for you.

I asked two members of our class, James and Ellen, to comment on James' words about prayer recorded in James 5:16-18.

"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops." (James 5:16-18 NIV)

Here's what our classmate James has to say about what Jesus' brother James wrote:

"Prayer is talking to God one on one. You know that he can hear you because you are praying to him which makes you feel better because you know he is listening. God can do anything. This shows one of the amazing things God did when someone prayed to him."

I want you to stop for a minute and consider both sets of words -- from James and from James. Good stuff, huh? Now I'm going to add some more good stuff to this by adding Ellen's comments on this passage:

"‘Elijah was a man just like us.’ He wasn’t so much different from us, and yet he prayed and it didn’t rain for three and a half years! God can do so much more when we pray than we realize. In The Message version, verse 16 says, “The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.” Elijah was living right with God, and God blessed his prayers. This encourages us as Christians that if we are living as God calls us to, we will experience powerfully answered prayer."

Okay, stop again, and consider what Ellen has added to our thoughts about prayer. This is exactly the kind of interaction we should have with God's Word as we read through it. I'm confident that you are all doing that, but I thought you would be encouraged by these thoughts from these younger members of our class.

I sure am.

God willing. James 4.

In 1530 the emperor Charles V attempted put the lid back on the reformation process that began in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses against the practice of indulgences on the Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Charles called a meeting, or Diet, in Augsburg, hoping the leaders of the Lutheran revolt would issue a statement clarifying their beliefs, possibly resolving the controversy, so that a political unification of the German princes would help in the defense of his territories. It didn't work, and the result of the meeting was "The Augsburg Confession", which cemented the split between the Catholic and Protestant churches. To this day it is the primary confessional document of the Lutheran faith.

The last sentence of the document reads, "If there is anything that any one might desire in this Confession, we are ready, God willing, to present ampler information according to the Scriptures."

The phrase, "God willing," or "the Lord willing," used to be a common qualifier in the language of Christians. Listen to some of our oldest saints, and you still can hear it today. But it's usage has dwindled in the last 50 years, until it now sounds quaint to our ears.

Using this phrase is one way of making sure we understand how the universe works. As James says in verses 4:13-17, it's a conceit of people to think they know how life will turn out from day to day, month to month, and year to year. The only reason we can even think this way, is the same reason we shouldn't -- God is in control, and He is consistent. Think of how much we depend on His consistency -- in the laws of the natural world, in the understanding of one another as human beings, made in God's image, in His mercy and care. The reality is, He is in control. And James says simply, we ought to remember that. In our attitude, and in our speech, and in our plans.

What gem did you mine out of James 4 today?

Figurative language. James 3.

There are times for me when a passage of the Bible becomes so familiar that I have a hard time really reading exactly what it says. When that happens I need to slow down, and spend a while observing the text, maybe even re-writing what it says in my own words to make sure I'm seeing it clearly. This chapter of James has that quality, and maybe it does for you too. The first verse, however, always draws me up short, and so when that happens, I just need to make sure I slow down for the rest of the chapter. (Verse 1 is about teachers, and I take it very seriously.)

What I noticed this time through is how easily I'm able to ignore the literal words of James and understand his meaning through his figurative use of the word tongue. Here's some of what he says:

3:5 "So too the tongue is a small part of the body,yet it has great pretensions."
3:6 "And the tongue is a fire! ...The tongue represents the world of wrongdoing among the parts of our bodies. It pollutes the entire body and sets fire to the course of human existence..."
3:8 "But no human being can subdue the tongue; it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison."

I don't know about you, but my tongue isn't any of those things. The American Heritage Dictionary says this:

The fleshy, movable, muscular organ, attached in most vertebrates to the floor of the mouth, that is the principal organ of taste, an aid in chewing and swallowing, and, in humans, an important organ of speech.

And yet, at the same time I understand what my tongue is, I also understand perfectly what James is saying. And I'm confident you do too. The tongue is an organ of speech, working with our lungs, vocal chords, mouth, teeth, and nose, under control of our mind (or brain if you prefer) to produce speech. James is talking about the content of that speech, the words we use, and the person we show ourselves to be when we speak.

The reason I bring this up, is to remind you of something we said in class. When we interpret the meaning of a Bible passage, one of the principles to use is to take the passage literally. And when there is figurative language in a passage, then taking the passage literally means that we recognize the language being used is figurative, and take that into account when determining the meaning. Even if that last sentence sounds confusing, this passage in James makes the point nicely. It also shows that, generally speaking, we are able to treat figurative speech as figurative, even if we don't immediately recognize it as such. We go ahead make the translation of tongue = speech. By using figurative speech, James makes what he has to say memorable. The idea that our tongue is a fire, or that it pollutes the entire body, is striking in its picture of what our speech can do. The idea of a bit in our mouths, like a horse, even more so.

(I did a quick search of how commentators talk about James 3. It's interesting that many of them make only one reference or no reference to our speech, and then just casually talk about the tongue in the rest of their commentary. That's so interesting to me that I'm going to post a comment to this post with some quotes of what others say about this passage. But I want to continue below, with a finishing thought on language.)

When does that figurative language flip or slip into literal teaching? James makes a bold statement in verse two, that if we never stumbled (sinned) in our speech, we would be perfect. How is that true? At first I thought that it was true because we would never have perfect speech, unless we were perfect. In other words, our speech reflects who we are. I still think that is true. And that's taking what James says in a figurative kind of way. Thinking about it some more, I realized that James also had in mind the literal sense of what he said. If we exercise control over what we say, we will affect and change who we are.

The kind of control needed over what we say is not simply repression. It does no good to have an angry thought and express it. Likewise, it does no good to have that same angry thought and merely repress it, although James would say that's a good start, because we stop any further damage from occurring. It's a start if we do as James said, and look on the other person as "someone made in God's image." But we need to examine where the anger came from, and do so in light of the principles we have from God. Some ideas here would include reflection and meditation: on the gift of life Jesus has given us, on the exemplary life He led, on His command to love one another, and other instructions God has given us in the Scriptures. We can ask for the Spirit's help in changing what we say. By taking control of our speech, we pay attention to it, and look for the causes reflected in that speech. Done right, our exercising control over our speech, will allow God to reshape who we are. Done wrong, we can end up a neurotic bundle of repressed speech, waiting to explode on some unsuspecting someone, or being eaten away from the inside. Done not all, and we poison ourselves and the world around us.

Jesus put it this way: "There is nothing outside of a person that can defile him by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles him."

Work? James 2.

While at the beginning of his letter James fired off a bunch of instructions in rapid succession, in this section (chapter 2), he took the time to deliver extended arguments about acting with prejudice, and not acting at all.

The heart of chapter two is in verses 14-26, where James talks about having faith, but not acting upon it. What James has to say makes sense and yet also looks somewhat contradictory to what we read at the end of Hebrews and in Galatians. As I've read these verses, I've been trying to figure out how they fit into the context of the letter. The catchphrase, "my brothers," could be seen as a way to separate out this section from other thoughts in the book. That's a common way people have interpreted it. But I'm still not certain whether James is shifting the argument, or summarizing all the instructions that went before.

What I do know is that I'd like to handle the question of exactly what James is talking about, in dialogue. So if someone wants to talk about it here, write a comment and we can do so. Otherwise, we'll look at these verses in greater detail in class on Sunday.

However, without talking about the precise idea James is stating in verse 14, when he says, "Can such a faith save him?," there's no difficulty about what he says about faith without works being dead. And his example in verses 15 and 16, of not helping someone but giving only lip service to their needs, is right out of Jesus' story book.

There's no question about it -- a living faith is always expressed in our actions. Remember the ideas contained in the Greek word, pistis, translated as "faith" or "belief" or even as "trust"? There are three concepts contained in pistis:

belief - intellectual assent to the truth of something
trust - actions based on belief
loyalty - acting faithfully to a person, ideal, custom, cause, or duty.

As James says, while it's good to be right-thinking in your understanding about God, even the demons have that belief. What the demons are missing, is the rest of faith - acting in trust and being loyal to the one you put your faith in. In other words, faith without works.

Now why do you think James wrote all of this? And why do we need to hear it today? Rather than answer that, I think I'll just leave that as an open question to think about.

Leaving the mirror. James 1.

Today our journey through the New Testament takes us into the letter of James. Once again this transition to a new book brings with it a real change in tone and form. We first experienced this kind of shift when we finished Acts and began Hebrews. It happened again when we finished Hebrews and began Galatians. Those books were both letters, but quite different in tone and style.

The same is true of the letter of James. In this first chapter, I counted at least 13 instructions on how to act. More, if you decide to treat, for example, the admonitions in verse 1:19 to "be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger" as three admonitions instead of one. After many of these instructions, James provides either a reason why we should do them, or further teaching about the instruction.

Thirteen instructions for life. That's a lot to talk about. I want to talk about verses 22-25, but feel free to add any comments you have on any part of this first chapter. Here's what James writes in these verses:

But be sure you live out the message and do not merely listen to it and so deceive yourselves. For if someone merely listens to the message and does not live it out, he is like someone who gazes at his own face in a mirror. For he gazes at himself and then goes out and immediately forgets what sort of person he was. But the one who peers into the perfect law of liberty and fixes his attention there, and does not become a forgetful listener but one who lives it out – he will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:22-25 NET)

For those of you old enough, you may remember the TV show "Happy Days" from the 70s. While I never quite understood why the show was so popular, I do remember the opening credits. Sappy song, spinning vinyl record, montage of 50s looking scenes, hoop skirts, and "the Fonz" looking into the mirror ready to comb his greased-back hair, but changing his mind at the last minute because he looked perfect. There's an apocryphal story that Henry Winkler landed the role as Fonzie when, during the audition, he ad-libbed that move instead of simply combing his hair. When Fonzie walked away from the mirror, you can bet that he remembered everything he saw in it.

And how about you? We live in an age of abundant and accurate mirrors, and where emphasis is placed on how we look. Would you forget? Maybe not. What if you looked into the mirror and noticed a smudge on your face? Would you walk away and forget about the smudge, or would you clean your face, check again, and then walk away? James is writing about that case, where you see yourself correctly in God's Word, but upon seeing yourself, that's it. No action taken. Instead you walk away with the smudge, some spinach between your teeth, hair unkempt, and sleepers in your eyes, to greet the world. "Hey, have you heard about my friend, Jesus?"

Of course, James isn't talking about appearance. It's his thought that the law or word of God provides clarity in our understanding of who we are in relationship to God. In that revelation there is both liberty, and anticipated response. And the guidelines for that response are contained in the Word. I would say in both God's written word, the Bible, and in Jesus, Who is the eternal Word of God. If Jesus has made us holy in God's sight, we can walk away from the mirror like the Fonz. But if we do, if we really understand what that means, if we remember all those smudges that Jesus wiped away, then our actions will reflect that understanding. And as we take those actions, under the guidelines given to us, we will continue to remember with gratitude what God has done for us. And that... is worship. I can hear the praise from our lips now -- "aaaaayyyy."

Image from Wikipedia, used under Fair Use guidelines.