Review Sep. 30, 2015 Needs Some Oil...

Needs Some Oil...

James 5:13-20
"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, 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. 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. Elijah was a human being 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. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. My brothers and sisters, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, 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."

I tend to use photos from the internet for most of my posts, but for this one I needed a more personal picture.  In that picture above is the cross my Lutheran Great Grandfather made for his own home, draped over it is a rosary a family member brought me from a trip to Vatican City, at the base is a bottle of holy oil from some Orthodox monks in Palestine, and a flask that was designed to hold a shot of liqueur.  Make of that theologically what you will... These items sit in my office and I make use of them all in some fashion regularly (no, the flask is for transporting the oil, not taking a shot....).

The power of prayer cannot be overstated.  Prayer, as the author of James points out, is good for pretty much any and everything.

The items that sit next my desk everyday all have to do with prayer.  I don't have much use for praying the rosary the way our Roman cousins do but I respect the concept.  I am glad it is a useful tool for them, and I have a (much altered) habit of using prayer beads myself.  This is due in no small part to the fact that I discovered early on that having a device, or pattern to my prayer life greatly increased my efficacy.  My mind is just too cluttered and busy to sit still long enough for prayer without some means of enforcing order from without myself.

The cross has sat somewhere near to me for almost thirty years.  It was a present that I took to college with me as a Freshman.  This cross has never failed to remind me of the praying tradition that has been passed down to me through generations and generations of my family.

But, the oil is another story.  Prayers of healing are the ones that have dogged me through my career.

I know God heals.  I have seen it again and again in my life.  I also know that a pretty fair number of folks I pray for and anoint with oil, as James says I ought, do not receive health.  So, what do we do with the promises of God, when we can't quite figure out how they are distributed?

I suppose I could say that God is a mystery...which is true.  I could fault the faith of the one praying (me) or the one being prayed for (the congregant) but this hardly seems in keeping with the grace and mercy of God that finds faith the size of a mustard seed sufficient to move mountains.

So what is the answer to unanswered prayers?  I think that God is listening. And I think that God is sympathetic. I do not believe that God afflicts us as punishment...I think our human sufferings are a result of The Fall and the whole of human history seems to be about God laboring to deliver us from that state...not worsen it. Sometimes though, I believe that God finds greater health in allowing our human frailties to persist than if he were to remove them.  Perhaps it is not the sort of health or wholeness we would pray for, but the sort that we need regardless. Sometimes I think the eye of God sees the value in what we cannot and can perceive the worthlessness of what we think is treasure.

So, now when I anoint with oil and pray for health I trust that God will provide...It may just look nothing like what I thought it would.  There is a pattern at play here I cannot see.  A purpose greater than my ability to conceive.  A final outcome I can only guess at.  But I trust that when seen from God's point of view it all looks like wholeness .