PRIMED: PRAYERFUL
Noel K. Anderson
First Presbyterian Church of Upland
Text: James 5: 13-16 NRSV
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. . †
Social Mobility, ULTD.
What can a person choose to be?
QUESTION: What can a person choose to be?
Historically, the answer has been very limited. One was born into a caste, profession, or culture that determined what one could and could not choose to be. Sons of cobblers tended to become cobblers. Women became wives and mothers. The poor stayed poor, and the rich stayed rich.
In America, we celebrate social mobility; it is one of our founding freedoms. We believe that it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female, rich or poor, native or foreign born, but if you work hard, apply yourself, and live virtuously, you have every possibility to raise your standard of living. More than a couple hundred years ago, people never dreamed of this—certainly not of it being the normal course for an entire nation.
Today, we love to tell our children, “You can be anything!” “You can do anything you set your mind to it, so go for it—follow your dreams!” Such statements are a celebration of social mobility. There are still many places in the world where such things do not and can not be uttered—places where upward mobility is extremely rare. We use these phrases with our young people so that they will become willful, spirited in their studies, and strive diligently to become whoever they would like to be.
“You wanna be a doctor? Great!” “You’d like to grow up to be president? Fantastic!” “You’d like to become a rock star? [Pause] Have you thought about becoming a doctor?” I joke, but have people today taken this too literally?
When we say, You can be anything!, what we mean is something like, “You are privileged to live in a free society—one that allows you to work your way into your dreams and aspirations.” It means we are free to make choices that can serve and secure our future happiness. If you want to be a doctor or a wealthy entrepreneur, you can choose to become so by sacrificing other things—television, gaming, social media—and focusing on your goals. That’s a free society, and that is the path to upward mobility.
But many today hear, “You can be anything!” as an invitation to total boundlessness. No limits. “I can be anything—including a multiple-gendered, Marian unicorn!” We see this in ridiculous proportions today in regard to sexual identity—you can be whatever you choose—which translates to, “I can choose to do whatever I want and whatever I feel like.” But this is no longer about social mobility, but about choosing for oneself what is true or not true about reality.
A few decades ago, as the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and 70s ripened into full fruit, alternative lifestyles were defended by saying just the opposite: “I did not choose this, but rather I was born this way! This is whom I have always been.”
Back then, it was not about choosing—it was more like discovering a timeless, hidden truth and revealing that truth. So is it chosen or just discovered, or chosen to be discovered? We won’t figure that out here, but we should ask, Can a person choose to be anything? And if it is true, then what ought we choose to be?
It is clear: we have choices that former generations and centuries never had. The freedoms we celebrate as Americans include the ability for one to say, “I choose to be me and to master my own destiny.” That seems perfectly reasonable at a certain level. Our Constitution enshrines life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but there are limits and boundaries to what we can be or become. There have to be; otherwise, one could say, “I choose to be superior to other people.” This runs contrary to everything we hold to be true in a democracy, but the freedom to be “anything you want to be” necessarily includes this possibility. I think plenty of Americans today consider themselves superior and believe that their sense of superiority is a perfectly legitimate right.
It seems more people grow up thinking this way today than ever before. The extremes people go to in expressing their individuality—and the laws set up to protect their rights—are at an unprecedented rise and expansion.
To deal with the question “What can a person choose to be?” we must ask, “Where is God in all of this?” Many answer nowhere--either because they have already disregarded God or they fear their liberty and self-made authority would be threatened. Without God, we can do or be whatever we like, because who is to say we can’t?
Even pagans—ancient or modern—who believe in false gods live with levels of accountability to greater powers. They are answerable to the gods or the Fates for their choices. Pagans live beneath the gods and therefore have limitations on what they can choose and whom they can choose to be. For instance, they can not choose to be gods because they and everyone else know that they are not gods but mere mortals.
For people of faith, the idea of choosing to be whomever you’d like to be is a patent falsehood. Yes, you can choose to do certain things instead of others, or pursue this or that career, but that is not the same as choosing your essential identity. People of faith, even pagans, believe in a higher authority to which humankind is accountable.
Remove God from the equation, and you have immediate, endless, boundless liberty! Without God, I can re-create myself as whatever I choose to be. Without God, I can be king of the world or even as good as God. I can account for myself alone and answer to myself alone. Remove God, and I can judge right from wrong and good from evil for myself. I can judge what is true and not true. Remove God, and you and I can play God forever (or at least until we die).
Are we seeing this?—the removal of God from questions of identity and who we can be or become? Most definitely.
In Genesis, in the Garden, the Serpent tells Eve that she and Adam can become like God, knowing good from evil on their own—that is, without having to be told by God. The Serpent says, “God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like him, knowing good and evil” [Genesis 3:4]. The implication is, “You’ll be able to judge for yourselves because you will be like God.”
This same thinking came to dominate Europe a century ago and led to its ugly conclusions in Nazi Germany. Nazis embraced the ideology that they only had to answer to themselves and their own success. Imagining themselves superior to others mobilized their twisted ambitions. As they set themselves up above all other peoples, the Nazi Aryans became the Superior men—the Übermensch— who were beyond good and evil. There is no God in Nazism, except as a tool to manipulate the masses into supporting their feverish will to power.
WHEN WE PRAY
We change and the World changes.
Okay, so you’re thinking—rightly—What has all of this got to do with prayer? In short, absolutely everything. Prayer and prayerfulness are of infinite importance for us and the world. I want to suggest five things that happen when we pray—things that make all the difference in the world.
1. When we pray, we know that we are not God. Most simply put, prayer acknowledges God is God. Anyone who prays to God takes themself out of the center of the cosmos. Prayer humanizes us.
2. When we pray, we orient ourselves under God. God is superior, and we are humbled because we know we are inferior. This works for us both individually and collectively as peoples—nations, tribes, congregations, and families. When we pray, we are God’s subjects—his lessers.
No, can’t be “whatever we choose.” At our best we become the person God has chosen for us to become.
These first two are only the first level of the value of prayer. Even these two, if revived, would change the world, for they put an end to any delusions of glorious humanism. We human beings may be at the top of the natural food chain, but spiritually, we stand under God and beneath the heavens.
We are to become who God intends us to be.
3. When we pray, we commune with God. Do we ever fully appreciate the power and privilege of this? We get to have fellowship with God Almighty! We are privileged to simply sit with him and know he’s there—hearing us, loving us—what can the world give that compares?
4. When we pray, we realign ourselves with Truth. We are who we are through our relationship with God, and our identity is created, formed, and refreshed by God alone. When we commune with God, we remember who we are—which is Whose we are. When we pray, we find proper alignment with reality. God made us, redeemed us, and sustains us. We are who we are through him.
The only identity we need is the one God gives us in baptism. In baptism, we are united with Christ and become the Father’s adopted sons and daughters. In short, all the identities we might invent for ourselves—all the things we could choose to be or become—all dissolve in the waters of baptism. What remains is Christ, as in Galatians 2:20:
“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Once we abandon the things we choose to be, God gives us our new identity—our eternal, true name—and we live for that identity instead of any other.
In Galatians 3:28, Paul says:
“There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free, male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
We can add that there is no modified Christianity—no Gay Christianity, no Black Christianity, no White Christianity, no Conservative Christianity, No Liberal or Progressive Christianities, no Catholic Christianity, no Orthodox or Evangelical Christianity—we must abandon all modifications, claim our identity in Jesus Christ, and leave it there. The rest are unimportant incidentals.
Claim Christ; forget the rest!
5. When we pray, we receive power from God. This is also unspeakably amazing. God empowers the Church—that’s us, you and me. In James, we read:
“The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”
This is real, not merely symbolic or “spiritual” in the sense of otherworldly-but-not-here. Our prayers are powerful and effective—quite unlike human governments (like ours?)—so who in their right mind would invest greater trust in politics than in the Lord?
What to DO About Prayer
Brief. Frequent. Intense.
To apply it, I want us to take home three things:
1. Make prayer your habit. Every day—brief, frequent, and intense, just as Luther said.
2. Pray both alone and in community. Not either-or, but both/and. Right now, at First Pres, there is no better way for you to grow in Christ and make Him known than to become part of a small group. We call them lifegroups. Between 6 and 12 people covenanted to gather together regularly. You might go through the sermon questions; you might study together; you might serve at SOVA or Bridges to Home together—but whatever you do, prayer must be part of it. Praying together is part of God’s design for our growth.
And 3. Protect prayer as prayer. Lots of Presbyterians hate praying aloud with others, and that is okay. Still, you should learn how; and the best way to learn is by jumping in with both feet and just doing it.
We want our prayers to be real prayers, which means they must be Godward. When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who pray to be heard by others. When you pray, be sure you talk to God and not the people sitting around you. You talk to God—aloud—while others listen in and pray alongside your prayers. See how easy it is?
Prayerfulness makes us who we are, who God intends us to be, and it secures our identity in Christ. To be a prayerful people is to be growing in Christ and faithfulness. It is the first of our values, and it is by far the most important.
Finally, let us love and be kind to all people who do not know the Lord. Let us be generous and gracious to the self-deceived and those who remain rebellious toward God.
We can’t hate people out of sin,
but we can love them toward grace. †
Questions
- “You can choose to be anything!” Discuss pros and cons.
- Do we choose identity or discover it? Discuss.
- In what way were the ancient pagans similar to modern Christians when it comes to discerning right from wrong?
- When we pray, we know that we are not _______.
- When we pray, we orient ourselves u________ God.
- When we pray, we c___________ with God.
- When we pray, we realign ourselves with T________.
- When we pray, we receive p__________ from God.
- In baptism all secondary i_______________ are dissolved.
- What can do about prayer:
- Make it a h_______.
- Pray both a___________ and in c________________.
- Protect prayer as p_________.