Standing Around Club – James 5:13-20

A text – James 5:13-20

¹³ Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. ¹⁴ Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵ The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up, and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Therefore confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. ¹⁷ Elijah was a human like us, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. ¹⁸ Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth yielded its harvest.

¹⁹ My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truthand is brought back by another, ²⁰ you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

A reflection:

The Letter of James is an easy one to skip over. It prescribes a lot of behavior for people who are sinning, and who wants to read about that? It doesn’t sugarcoat anything, and it sort of wags a finger in your face. Especially Lutherans, who believe God always loves us, even when we’re being little brats, really don’t feel comfortable lingering in this letter.

But from its very first chapter, James says that if we lack anything of wisdom, we ought to turn to God in prayer, and God will act toward us “generously and ungrudgingly” (James 1:5). James does something wonderful – he says if we place God in the center of all interactions, we will come out much better.

Here in this passage almost at the end of the letter, James is showing us how this generosity of God gets lived out in the community or congregation: we love one another and supply one another’s needs. So if there are those who, deep in themselves, are suffering or low or depressed, they should let another person who is NOT any of those things come to pray with the suffering one. If there are those who are sick, they should bring in others who can pray over them. James may be saying “God has put you all together for a reason. Help one another. Love one another. What this one lacks, this other one has.” Place God in the center of this community of well and ill persons and they can lift one another up.

In North American churches, many small groups of people do exactly these things for one another regularly and over many, many years. My father was very handy at fixing things. He hung around with a group of similarly talented men at church once a week. Whatever was broken, they fixed. Mostly I think they stood around together (they were known to many as “the standing around club”) and ate cinnamon rolls. Fixing was their group’s function. But when one got prostate cancer, the others helped as he recovered from treatment. When one’s wife died, the rest were there with cinnamon rolls. They used their various gifts and their very beings to support the others.

God’s generosity often plays out in human acts of kindness to others. Some people miss that point. Others call the helpers “angels” in acknowledgment of their being sent from God to help. James’s letter isn’t all awkward finger pointing. Some of it gives credit where credit is due: to God, through the hands of us.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for being our helper and savior. Thank you for sending friends who have what we lack. Help us to remember that we are not alone, and that more people than we think are actually standing around eating cinnamon rolls, waiting to lend a hand if only they knew where. And also thank you for cinnamon rolls.  Amen.