Proper 17 Year B 2024: James 1:17-27

I was in a parish discussion group where the beginning prompt for the day was “what is a prayer practice that is meaningful to you?” Responses varied, ranging from more structured practices like praying the daily office and using Anglican prayer beads to more freeform practices like breath prayer and centering prayer. One of the great things about there being such a wide variety of prayer practices available to us is that we can adjust for what we want to talk about with God, where we are emotionally at any time, or even, simply, how we feel like praying at that moment. There are so many ways in which we have connected with God in the past and we can look to any one of them when we’re entering into a time of prayer.

Every Sunday in our Eucharistic liturgy we spend most of our time in prayer together - we just mix up the ways in which we pray so that it tricks us out of feeling like we’re spending the better part of an hour in prayer together. Just this morning so far, we began with a hymn - a song of prayer, followed by an opening acclamation - a prayer of praise and identifying who we are here to worship, a collect for purity - a prayer of preparation for worship, the gloria - a song of praise, and the collect of the day - which prepares us for the set readings for the day.

When we look at our collect, it appears that the writer had the epistle of James in front of them as they wrote. I was really struck by the verbs we use to make our petitions to God: graft, increase, nourish, and bring forth. All four of those verbs feed into one another - grafting leads to the ability to increase, which then requires nourishment, after which more can be brought forth. Which leads to the question of what the objects of those verbs are building: the love of (God’s) name, true religion, all goodness, and the fruit of good works.

James spends a lot of time on works - chapter 2 is where we get the phrase “faith without works is dead.” This can lead to a mistaken works-based theology of salvation that ignores the importance of the faith that produces good works, not a transaction of works for salvation - the idea that one can do enough good works to earn their own salvation. Moreover, I don’t think that’s a generous enough reading of James. James’ concern with practicality is part of a concern with the corrupt ways of “the world” i.e. the world of his time and ways in which followers of Christ could show that they were not of “the world”. It’s telling that the ways in which James’ community could show they were followers of Christ still directly speak to us today: to not show partiality, to avoid speaking evil, to avoid envy and selfish ambition, avoid boasting, and to pay fair wages.

People oftentimes get hung up on phrases like “increase in us true religion” and the idea that there is a “pure” or “undefiled” religion like James writes of. But when we use the word “religious” or “religion”, there are undertones to it today that the writer of James didn’t experience. When he described people as “religious” he was most likely referring to a devotion of practice and when he spoke of “religion” it was a reference to worship as expressed in ritual acts, like a liturgy. But in the time in which this letter was written, it is believed that it was before there was a developed ecclesiastical structure. That is, many of the things people will point to today as being particularly recognizable as “religious” or “religion” were not in place yet in Christianity - Christianity wasn’t in place yet as separate from Judaism.

I’ve taken surveys where I’m asked to rate how religious I am and I hesitate to select “very religious”. I am…“very religious”. But the word has undergone enough changes in English to where there is the connotation or connection where very religious people are also very judgmental and very mean in how they act out their judgmentalism. So to get to where James is - or where the writer of today’s particular collect which can be traced back to Thomas Cranmer in the 1500s is  - we have to sift our way through and release many years of modern baggage to remind ourselves that both James and the writer of our collect find being religious as a good thing to aspire to.

In today’s reading and the following chapters, from which we will read excerpts in the next several weeks, James provides practical examples of a variety of ways in which we ought to do the word to show that we have heard the word. And then as he wraps up his message in chapter five - the last chapter - he tells us how we ought to find the guidance, strength, and solidarity to live in the word that is Jesus in this world: to pray. In the final seven verses of his letter, he uses some form of the word “pray” 8 times.

It is a complicated question, what prayer does. How prayer works. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins fancies himself smarter than thousands of years of theologians and did an “experiment” where some people were prayed for and some were not and he measured outcomes in an attempt to disprove the efficacy of prayer. Which is, indeed, how you do a scientific experiment. But it makes some wild assumptions that we know exactly how God works and how prayer works. And Dawkins is not a theologian; he was not doing this “experiment” in good faith and, because he thinks prayer is silly, he didn’t leave room for there being anything he didn’t understand or couldn’t quantify to be happening.

My mom is a piano teacher and every so often, a kid will come to her with, “Donna, have you heard of this band? They’re called…The Beatles.” To which my mom will graciously respond with, “you know, I have!” And it’s adorable and sweet because they’re children and they’re learning and they will look back on it and smile - like I do when I think about how I told her all about this new band I discovered in the early 2000s called Pink Floyd. Dawkins’ “experiment” is as if none of those children “discovering” bands ever made it to the point where they realized that music existed before they first heard it. People have been praying in countless ways for thousands of years. We have been discussing what prayer is and what prayer does and how it works for most of those thousands of years.

And sometimes the answer is “I don’t know.” It’s an incredibly unsatisfying answer. But it’s an honest answer. And it can also be a freeing answer. That we don’t have to entirely know how everything about God works in order to have a relationship with God. We don’t have to be able to map out just the right combination of how to pray to get our desired response - an approach that gets worryingly close to magic.

My daughter has a picture book called What is God Like? where the authors, from the very beginning of the book, acknowledge that “what is God like?” is a very big question, “one that people from places all around the world have wondered about since the beginning of time. And while nobody has seen all of God (because God is far too big for any of us to fully see), we can know what God is like.” And throughout the book it tells you how “God is like a fort, strong and secure”, “God is like the wind, passionate and full of mystery”, and “God is like an artist, creative and unpredictable.” But my favorite part is how the book ends, where the authors remind us, “whenever you aren’t sure what God is like, think about what makes you feel safe, what makes you feel brave, and what makes you feel loved. That’s what God is like.”

We can not have all the answers and still pray for others. We can not know what it is that we are even asking for and still pray for ourselves. We can pray for God to do “x” to help us do “y” and not know how God will do it. I don’t know if I’m even able to recognize the ways in which God is working on me. I’m not sure how it happens, but I do know I am changed when I pray. And I do know that God is constantly working on us and through us and with us, and it is always important that we return to God in the conversation with our Creator that is prayer. Amen.