HURTING AND HEALING, TOGETHER
James 5: 13-18

           How often has the phrase “in a perfect world” started a statement? If you’ve spent more than just a moment in this world, you know that we do not live in a perfect world. In fact, the world that we know is quite imperfect. With that imperfection comes the reality that there is hurt and pain in this world.

           Hurt is one those human emotions that we really don’t want to feel. Do you like to feel hurt in any way? Not many do. But if we look around our family, our church, our community, our world, there is hurt everywhere. And it’s not just physical hurt. It’s also mental pain and hurt, emotional hurt, social hurt, or spiritual hurt. There is so much hurt going on that it is enough to make us want to wring our hands and try our best to ignore it or forget what we saw or heard. Our human inclination is put blinders on so we can see only what is on the path right in front of us. As a result, there are times when the hurt goes unnoticed.

           Jesus had a way of drawing his disciples’ attention to the pain around them. We see in the gospels so many different times where the disciples kept trying to keep Jesus moving. He would stop, and they would try to push him along. They couldn’t believe and understand why Jesus would want to have dinner in the home of a tax collector, a despised person. Can’t you just hear them? “Jesus, do you know what you are DOING? The same was true for a woman who came to a well as Jesus was resting from the midday sun. Not only was she a woman, but she was a Samaritan. On top of those two strikes, she was also divorced and living with someone who wasn’t her husband. She was an outcast of outcasts in her community. Yet, it was to her to whom Jesus revealed himself. It was to this social and spiritually hurting Samaritan woman that Jesus identified himself as the Messiah who would break the barrier between Jew and Gentile. How about the little children that followed Jesus? The disciples tried to get him to send them away; after all, the Master had better things to do than associate with these…kids. But Jesus says, “let the little ones come to me, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven”. Jesus once told a group of “religious” folks that it wasn’t the healthy that needed a doctor, but the sick. The disciples and others around Jesus constantly tried to keep him moving to “his mission”. What they didn’t realize, until later, is that the “sick”, the hurting and the lowly WERE Jesus’ mission.

           Just like those first disciples, we are called to see and share in the hurts of this world. When I say “call”, what I mean is that God has invited each follower of Jesus, and the Church, to share in these hurts. The stories of hurt are everywhere: those who have just found out they have a life-threatening illness, those who have lost young children, those who have lost jobs and homes, those who feel as if God has either abandoned them or doesn’t love them, and the list goes on and on. Through all of this, the followers of Jesus have been called to ache with and for those who hurt. In our passage from James, there is an instruction that illustrates this perfectly. James says that whoever is sick should have someone else pray over them. Obviously, this only deals with the physical hurts, but we can read into it all the other hurts of the world. In other words, our instruction, first from Christ, secondly from the ancient church, is to full of compassion for one another and hurt with those who hurt.

           Hurting with others, though, is not the end of the story. Not only are we called to hurt with the world, we are also called to be agents of Christ’s healing in the world today. Part of Jesus’ ministry was a ministry of healing—along with preaching and teaching. My guess is that we often think of healing in the physical sense—someone is cured from an illness or something else that makes the medical community scratch its collective head. To be sure, Jesus and his disciples did lots of physical healing. The gospels are full of stories of the lame walking again, the blind seeing, the deaf hearing, and the dead rising. In the book of Acts, we see Jesus’ disciples healing others in the name of Jesus. But there are other kinds of healing that can, and need to, take place. Essentially, anything that can be hurt can be healed. Healing is a restoration to wholeness; anything that is less-than-whole, therefore, can be healed. As followers of Christ, one of our callings is help bring about this restoration, this healing.

           The automatic question then becomes, “how?”. How do we, normal everyday folks, become agents of Christ’s healing in this world? The answer is revealed to us in this passage from James: prayer. Prayer, as simple as it might sound, is the biggest, perhaps only, step in being an agent of healing. Did you hear what James said? The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective! In and through our prayers, we can unleash a power that is beyond the comprehension of this world! Unfortunately, though, we humans have a habit of turning the prayer around and making it about ourselves. What I mean is this: we tell ourselves that we aren’t good enough or capable of making that kind of powerful prayer, or we tell ourselves that only the pastor or some other “religious” person can make this prayer, or we simply say that it’s not our place. What we sometimes forget, though, is that our prayers are never about who is praying but the one who is receiving the prayers! When we pray, it isn’t just some metaphysical being who is hearing our prayers, it is ALMIGHTY GOD! When we pray, it isn’t some limited, abstract human creation to which we are praying, it is to the one who is more powerful than anything in all of creation! To take things a bit further, the one to whom we are praying, Scripture assures us, knows what is on our heart long before we pray it. Some of you might be hoping that I’m going to be quiet soon, because you really need some time just to pray, and that’s more important than the words I say. Rest assured, God knows those prayers even now. Our words, however fumbled they may be, serve to express to God our deepest desires. Our prayers give voice to our hurts and pains; our prayers give voice to the hurts and pains of those around us and those around the world from us. And just so we are all clear…those prayers can move God to do things that are so beyond what we think. Those prayers can bring about healing and a restoration to wholeness, for an individual, for a community, for a world in need of Christ’s healing.

           It seems like a tall task…to hurt and to heal with the world. But it’s not something we were called to do alone, all by ourselves. No…we were invited by God to do this together, with one another, in community. We weren’t designed to be Lone Rangers and deal with things all by ourselves. As part of a community of faith in Jesus Christ, we are invited by God to share in the cheers of one another and in the hurts of one another. As an aside, let me say that I think we do this well. We care for one another in exceptional ways. Now, Jesus is calling us to extend that care and love to those beyond our walls. Our calling is not just to share in the hurts of those with us in the pews, but also to the ones down the street who are aching to hear the gospel, or the ones across the world who wonder when they might get to eat again, and all those in between. As we prepare to begin another week, I want to leave with you two questions. How can you hurt with someone this week? How can you be an agent of Christ’s healing in the world this week? AMEN.

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