Most of you probably know that I used to be a pharmacist.  In jest, I have sometimes said that my Christian testimony can be expressed by saying “I used to sell drugs, and now I am a preacher.”  Occasionally, I am asked if I miss my first career.  Here is one reality about the difference between my two career choices:  While both are involved with helping people, as a pharmacist, I was literally responsible for people’s actual lives.  As a preacher and a pastor, I am not responsible for actual lives – just eternal souls.  And in the end, that responsibility is not mine alone, but exists in the relationship between God, my call to preach and pastor, and the choices you each make with regard to the well being of your own soul.  We’re in this together, and we each have roles to faithfully fulfill if we are to live into the promise that Julian of Norwich famously wrote this way:  “And all will be will.  And all will be well.  And all manner of things will be well.”

James has been our physician over these last weeks, describing and helping us diagnose those things that ail us spiritually and rob us of the abundance and fullness of life characterized by joy and peace that Jesus promises.  Today…we get almost literally and quite clearly the instructions for what to do when all is not well.

Pray.

Look with me at what James says:

“Are any among you suffering.  They should pray.

Are any cheerful?  They should sing songs of praise.

“Are any among you sick?  They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them.”

James goes on to connect these practices of prayer with the forgiveness of sins and prescribes a most startling idea for spiritual health:  “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

Prayer is essential for spiritual health.  Personal prayer and corporate prayer are essential for spiritual health.  Last weekend’s edition of The New York Times Magazine featured an article entitled “The Right Way to Pray.”  (September 20, 2009; by Zev Chafets)

In it, the Rev.  Daniel Henderson, who teaches prayer, is quoted as saying:  “Prayer is like other activities …You learn from people who are already good at it… Prayer is a lot more than reciting words.  It requires mastering both theory and technique.”

There is not time in a single sermon for mastering theory and technique – the point here is to help us understand that if we want to become serious about the well being of our souls, we have to pray, and if we want to pray in a way that sustains us through the trials and tribulations of life, we have to figure out both theory and technique.  The great gift of Christian community, of course, is that there are always people in every community who are gifted for prayer and from whom we can learn.

Here, at North Broadway, we have an intercessory prayer team.  People committed to the practices of prayer pray with and for you and me daily.  Every prayer request written on these cards, and every prayer request submitted to the prayer box in the hallway is prayed for faithfully within and throughout this community.  We are usually praying for between 20 and 30 different circumstances and people from these specific requests.  This commitment of time and spiritual discipline is a gift to this community that value of which we can never calculate.

Here, at North Broadway, we have a team of people who carry the grace of this worshipping congregation to the homes of those who are unable to attend worship.  The bread and cup of communion come from this altar and go into the homes of home bound members every month, offered to them accompanied by prayer.

Pastoral staff and sometimes lay volunteers respond to the call of the sick, and go to hospitals, homes and care facilities to pray for the sick.  One word about James text that I invite us to notice, because it is so important.  Those who are sick are to call for the church.  Nothing in ministry is so humbling to me as when I recognize that someone in trouble – and it is not always physical illness – sometimes it is relationship or job related or due to grief – but whenever someone in trouble seeks the help and support of the church for their trouble, I am humbled to be able to offer the ministry of the church.  Often this is just a ministry of presence – walking alongside someone through difficulty.  But it is soul nourishing and life saving and deeply healing.

Sadly, though, people will often move through such times without ever calling for the church, and will lament that the church did nothing to help them.  James is clear – the responsibility is on us to call for help when we need it.  Practically speaking this is so important today.  Hospitals and health care facilities will not call the church when you are a patient.  The privacy laws prohibit that.  You must call, or specifically request that someone call us.  (Fortunately, it has not been possible to outlaw the church grapevine – and that helps!)

The prescription for spiritual health is prayer.  How can we learn to pray?  Because my own prayer language is impoverished, I like to borrow the prayer language of others.  I am learning how to pray – still – from those who have known better than me.  I like to read prayers and reflections on prayer from others.  Collections of written prayer and books of prayer with written prayers help shape my personal prayers.  I recommend some kind of resource for anyone who is trying to learn how to better pray.

(The Upper Room; The Daily Disciplines; resources by Reuben Job; Phyllis Tickle’s daily office resource)

Small groups like those currently meeting on Wednesday evenings are a great place to learn to pray, because they bring us together in community to share our lives and are a natural place to call the community to prayer.  The weekly worship bulletin can become a tool for prayer.

I do not intend to say that we should wait to pray until we are experts at prayer.  I had the great joy of going to a soccer game recently.  The players were all five years old.  It is clear that these five year olds are not expert soccer players.  But they are not learning soccer by sitting in a room and learning about it.  They are on the field, in their pads and shoes and matching T-shirts, and they’ve got nets and field markings and a real soccer ball and they are playing soccer – learning as they play.

That is how prayer is learned.  Rabbi Marc Gellman, a Reform Rabbi on Long Island who was interviewed for the New York Times piece said this:  “I’m saying that techniques can make a difference. . . (but) when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers.  Gimme!  Thanks!  Oops!  and Wow!”  … Wow!  are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation.  Oops!  is asking for forgiveness.  Gimme!  is a request or a petition.  Thanks!  is expressing gratitude.  That’s the entire Judeo-Christian doxology.  That’s what we teach our kids in religious school.”

The author of the Times article describes his visit with children in a church in rural West Virginia.

“I prayed to Jesus when my grandmother broke her leg,” a little girl said.  “Now she can get by herself to the bathroom.”

“Amen,” the kids said.

“I prayed over my sister and cured her asthma,” a teenage girl said.  She wasn’t bragging.  She just wanted me to know.  “A boy named Wayne was burned in a fire,” another boy said.  “The whole church prayed for him, and now he’s getting around without a walker.”

He goes on to describe his impression of the children’s prayers:  “They prayed to a God with whom they were on a first-name basis, and they believed their prayers gave them power, which they used on behalf of their asthmatic sisters and infirm grandparents and a kid they knew with burns on his body. . . Straight-up Gimme!  on behalf of people who really need the help.”

Just when we think – yeah – I can learn to pray.  I can keep a gratitude journal, and a prayer list and I can learn to do this – James totally intimidates us with the example of Elijah.  Few if any of us can claim to have prayed with the kinds of results that Elijah got, or with the kind of naïve faith that those children express.  When James gives us the example of this prayer as the prayer of the righteous, we are tempted to question our own righteousness, our own fitness for prayer.  After all, we have our share of unanswered prayers.  We have all prayed for a healing miracle in the midst of life threatening illness and had to face the reality that in spite of our prayers, the patient died.  A friend told me just the other day that when her father died, she was so angry at God that she stayed away from church for years.  But not forever.  Her grief gradually gave way to renewed faith.

If we persist in prayer, it will teach us the truth about God’s grace and love and power.  God cannot keep people alive forever.  The great story that shapes our faith is the story of one who died.  And that story teaches us that death doesn’t separate us from love.  Resurrection is about the enduring nature of love.  Prayer is about finding God’s love steadfastly with us even when life cannot be sustained in this world as we like it.  Prayer is about relying on the promise of the Psalmist until we know its truth:  “Our help is in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.”

Spiritual health is about transformation of death to life and sorrow to joy.  Spiritual health is deeply about transformation of sin to redemption.

James says that our sins are transformed when we are brought into accountability by one another.  That’s right.  At the end of his treatise on Christian living, James asserts that it is properly and profoundly the work of the church to invade our privacy and challenge our individualism.  Because we are responsible for one another’s eternal souls.  In worship and in our small groups and among the friends who love and support us in our spiritual journey, we are given this great privilege and this sacred work of learning to pray together.  Because prayer gives us power that we can use on behalf of people who need help, perhaps the most important words we ever speak are these:  “Let us pray.”