Magical Thinking

Propers: Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 26), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

For the last five Sundays, we have read together from the Epistle of St James. James is one of the most important figures in early Christianity whom we often overlook. He is called “the brother of the Lord,” and was clearly Jesus’ cousin or stepbrother or something—his closest living male relative. As such, James took over leadership of the Jerusalem Church after Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension. We tend to focus on people like Peter and Paul in the Book of Acts, but it was to James that both of those men would defer.

Today James closes out his letter with an appeal to the community, to support one another, heal one another, pray for one another. His overarching concern has been those who purport to believe in Jesus, without walking in the Way of Jesus. And this has been a problem in the Church from the get-go. A lot of people in our world today are big fans of Jesus, but they don’t trust Christians half as far as they could throw us. And who could blame them, what with our public image these days?

St Paul is the one who emphasizes the grace conferred through faith. I cannot save myself, O Lord. I cannot keep even the most basic tenets of the moral Law. When I try, I inevitably end up divided and at war with my own flesh. If I have to earn my way into the Kingdom of Heaven, O Lord, then I’m sunk. Thanks be to God, says Paul, that I have a Savior in Jesus Christ, who forgives me my sins, raises me to life, and inundates me with a grace that I could never have earned.

And that’s true. That’s all true. We are saved by grace through faith. But James wants to clarify that faith is not just an idea. It isn’t a box that we check on a multiple-choice test. Faith in Jesus is different from faith in an idea about Jesus.

Faith is a way of life. To be a faithful Christian is to be Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him. And of course, we’re not perfect. And of course, we all sin. But the Word of God has been implanted in us: the Word that is to James the Torah and Gospel and Jesus Himself. The Word is the heart of grace, the seed of life. We have within us now the Spirit of Christ, who makes of us the Body of Christ. And that’s the Church. That’s Christianity.

And James is quite convinced that one cannot do this alone. Oh, there must be an individual component, of course. It has to mean something to you, make a difference in daily life. But we can’t be Jesus by ourselves. That’s why we are here together, to support one another. We hear the Word together, receive the Sacraments together, confess our sins and rise reborn in the faith together. And so James leaves us by reaffirming our communal life.

“Are any among you suffering evil?” he writes. “They should pray,” instead of murmuring against their opponents. “Are any cheerful?” he continues. “They should sing songs of praise,” rather than boasting of their own achievements. “Are any among you sick?” he asks. And here’s where things get interesting:

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. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven.

Now I’ll confess that for years I really wasn’t sure what to do with that passage—because honestly, it sounds like magical thinking. The priest shows up, anoints you with oil, and what, your fever goes away? Your cancer goes into remission? I mean, don’t get me wrong: I believe in miracles. I’ve seen miracles. But I know that they don’t happen on demand. If they did, we wouldn’t call them miracles. We’d just call them laws of nature.

So what happens if I anoint someone and nothing seems to happen? Does that mean they somehow failed, or that the priest botched things up along the way? See, oil is not magic, and the priest is no magician. I worry that James, who typically sounds so sensible, is making promises in Scripture that we simply cannot keep.

So let’s break this down for a minute. Let’s see if we can figure out what he’s saying. “Call for the elders of the church,” he writes, “and have them pray over them.” These elders—πρεσβύτεροι, in Greek—are the folks who host the αγάπη feast. Here’s what I mean by that. In the time in which James is writing, the Temple is still standing and the Christians are still Jewish. They worship in the way that Jesus did, in the faith that Jesus did. In addition to attending the Temple and the synagogue, Christians had their own gatherings.

In Jerusalem, this took place at the Temple; in other cities, it took place in people’s homes. Christians would gather on Sundays, the Day of Resurrection; they would share the Word together, and eat a sacred Meal in ἀνάμνησις of Jesus. The bones of this worship look very much like our own worship. We gather, we confess our sins, we receive forgiveness, we read the Scriptures, we hear them interpreted, we have Holy Communion, and then we are sent out into the world rejoicing.

The Eucharist, back then, was not just a wafer of bread dipped in a drop of wine. It was part of a larger communal meal, an αγάπη- or love-feast. The people who organized the meal were called elders, πρεσβύτεροι, shortened now to priest. But these weren’t priests like the Cohens, the Temple-priests. These were rather the planners and founders of the feast. And their helpers—since you can hardly host a proper meal all by me onesies—were literally διακόνων, the deacons.

Later, when there were many congregations, many house-churches, within a single city, an overseer or ἐπίσκοπος would coördinate the greater Christian community, so that we would all act as one body, and not as many separate bodies. This term, ἐπίσκοπος, was taken from a government office, and is in English bishop. So there you have it: the threefold ministry of the Church—bishops, priests, and deacons—not as some separate species of clergy apart from the laity, but as natural roles within and among the gathering of the faithful.

If the community thought you had gifts to be an overseer, elder, or helper, you would be trained, taught, and ordained to that office. Over time additional roles emerged, for readers, greeters, acolytes, and exorcists—which didn’t mean what you think. My point in recounting all this is simply to say that there’s nothing magical about the priest’s blessing versus the community’s blessing. Indeed, the priest’s blessing is the community’s, and therefore Jesus’ own.

As for the oil: this was the go-to, all-purpose product in antiquity. Olive oil was used as sealant, soap, food, and fuel. It was eminently practical. And when someone was sick or wounded, oil would be their first aid. It cleaned and cleansed wounds. It returned suppleness to skin. Olive oil was a legitimate medical treatment.

So what James is saying is that when people are sick, the whole community should surround them, clean them, feed them, cleanse them, pray for them and get them the care that they need. It’s not that you pray the doctor away; it’s that prayer should motivate each and every one of us to get this person a doctor! Folks who reject medical treatment on religious grounds do not understand the Bible. Medicine is a miracle in and of itself, and we should bloody well thank God for it.

And, of course, James was no fool. He knew quite well that people get sick and die. We should and must do all we can to help, but even if there’s a miraculous recovery—even if a deadly disease vanishes as if by magic—it’s really only a reprieve. Because you will get sick again. And we all get old. And we all die. It’s a broken world.

And here James is more nuanced than perhaps we give him credit for. “The prayer of faith will save the sick,” he writes, “and the Lord will raise them up.” Now there’s an ambiguous phrase! Yeah, it can mean that they might well get better. But “raise you up” can also mean resurrection. It means you die and you rise in Christ.

In the churches that have maintained the oldest traditions, anointing with oil is reserved as preparation for death. You don’t anoint a cold or a broken arm. You anoint the dying; because the most profound healing is the assurance of forgiveness; the most profound healing is to die to this world and to rise in Christ.

It’s not about magic. It’s not really about miracles, though as I said, those certainly do occur. Even the healings that Jesus performed were but outward signs of a deeper inner reintegration, wrought through love, coöperation, and community. What Jesus did outwardly in His ministry, He continues inwardly through us—through this ἐκκλησία of mutual healing, mutual confession, and mutual prayer.

Together we are Christ for a world in need of Him.

And this is Christianity.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Credit where credit is due: This sermon and its four predecessors owe a great deal to The Letter of James: A Pastoral Commentary by Addison Hodges Hart.