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SERMONS:
Pastor Peg posts her two most recent sermons on this page. If you are interested in reading more of her sermons you can go to pastorpeg.wordpress.com. Currently our sermon series is: The Book of James. Enjoy.
The Prayer of Faith
July 13, 2025 5th Sunday of Pentecost
James 5:13-19 Matthew 7:7-11
In the five chapters of the Book of James, James gives some practical advice to the people of his church to help them be better Christians. And I don't think that any how-to-book of Christianity would be complete without a section on prayer.
Prayer is an act of faith. In fact, I think that it’s one of the strongest actions of faith that we do. Think about what happens when we pray. We take time out of our lives, whether it's a moment, or 20 minutes, or an hour, to verbalize a situation that is happening in our lives. We speak the situation out loud and ask a higher power to help us out with it. That takes faith that there is higher power out there which we can connect to; and that it is listening to us and will respond to us in turn.
There are a lot of types of prayer because there are a lot of different reasons why we would pray. James starts out his advice on prayer by saying: Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Singing hymns is not out of place in this prayer commentary because when we sing hymns we are essentially praying. James is telling us that in the bad times we should tell God what's going on and ask him for help. And in good times, we should express our joy and thank God for all that he has given to us. If you feel like singing your thanks, go for it. James is encouraging his people (and us) to stay in constant connection with the divine power of the universe no matter what happens. And the easiest way to do that is through prayer.
So, our first two types of prayer are prayers about our difficulties and prayers of thanks for our joys.
But then James lifts up another type of prayer: Community prayer as opposed to personal prayer. He says: 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. Here he's talking about a group of people getting together and praying for those who are in need.
He goes on to say: 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 you need to understand that the concept of being sick could encompass being physically sick, like having a cold, or sick within your soul because you felt that you had done something wrong. This was considered to be spiritual sickness. In the first century it was believed that often you were sick because your sins would make you feel sick or bring about an illness. In other words, guilt and heartache would make you sick. This is why Jesus, when he cured people, would often say, “Your sins are forgiven.”
Today with our extensive medical knowledge about how the body works that might seem to be a simplistic explanation. But besides bacteria and viruses, we also know that a person’s mental state can influence how well or how poorly they fight off an illness. Maybe our ancestors weren’t that simplistic after all. If they did believe that whatever sin they thought was causing them to be ill was forgiven through prayer, then the relief of getting right with God probably did help them to heal. James says: Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.
Community prayer has always been a central part of the Christian church from the beginning. I personally feel that Joys and Concerns, our community prayer time, is more important than my sermon. (Now that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to try to give you the best sermon I can every week.) But one of the main purposes of a church is that we come together to support each other. This should be a place where we can lift our burdens up and ask each other to help us get through life. There’s an old expression: Shared joy is doubled; shared sorrow is halved. And I always feel that any church should be a place where people can share their joys and unburden their sorrows. A space that does that is always a welcoming and a healing place.
James tries to be practical with prayer. So do many books that I’ve read on the subject. But in all the books I’ve read, prayer is ultimately a tough thing to write or talk about because at a certain point it’s unexplainable and elusive. It's unexplainable because we don't really know how it works. It's elusive because we know that our prayers don’t always come about the way we think they will. We just have faith that when we send our prayers out into the power of the universe that they will come back in some shape and some form that will be helpful to us.
We know that Jesus took time to pray; sometimes he even went off by himself to do his own prayer retreat. We also know that he encouraged prayer among the disciples. Today we read a passage from a speech that he was giving about prayer. As I studied it this week, I thought: Wow, this is a very encouraging speech! I wonder if his disciples were having some struggles with their own prayer life, and he was trying to help them
He starts by saying: Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. All of the words: Ask, search, and knock are active words. They push the idea of prayer from just sitting and talking with God into a set of actions that help us to reveal the answers to our prayers.
First, we take the time to sit down and ask, or speak to, God. Remember that the Word and speaking things into being is a mystical idea that connects us to the power of God.
Next, we search around our lives and try to find the resources that God is sending to us to solve the problems or situations of our prayers. I’m reminded of that old parable about a Christian in a flood. The sheriff knocks on a man’s door and says, “Sir the river is rising. I’ve come to take you to safety.” The man replies, “Thank you, but Jesus is my savior, and I know he’ll save me.” The water rises and a neighbor in a rowboat comes by and offers to take him to safety. The man replies, “Thank you, but Jesus is my savior, and I know he’ll save me.” Then the water rises so high he has to go onto the roof and a helicopter comes down and offers to take him to safety. The man replies, “Thank you, but Jesus is my savior. and I know he’ll save me.” The waters then rise over the roof and the man goes to heaven where he sees Jesus and says, “Lord, why didn’t you save me?” Jesus said, “I sent you a sheriff, a boat, and a helicopter. What more did you want?”
The word search means to look intensely; to investigate; to explore. We need to be searching for what God has given to us in our lives that will help us to make our prayers happen, and when they come to us accept and use them.
Finally, we need to knock, so that the door will open. I know that many of you have probably seen the print of Jesus knocking on the door, which is a very layered image of Jesus calling to us and an invitation for us to open our hearts and let him in. But I would like to also add that when we knock on someone’s door we can also be asking for help. And I really feel that often there can be shyness in us that might prevent us from asking for help; even when we meet someone who might have been sent to us who can help us with our prayer request. I think that Jesus, like James, is also trying to promote the idea of a community that helps its members. We should not be shy about asking for help. Go ahead and knock on that door and ask someone who was sent to you if they can help you.
Jesus assures his disciples, like James does, that prayer will help us. If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him! Yes, we are flawed and often confused but that doesn’t mean that God is going to give up on us. We are God’s children, and, as a good Divine Parent, He will try to help us. But He also gave us the gift of free will. Kids sometimes don’t want to take their parent’s advice, and sometimes we don’t want to take God’s. But a good parent will keep on trying to give good things to their children, and God will keep on trying to give good things to us.
But we’ve got to have faith and pray with that faith. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. A righteous person is just a regular, flawed person – not a perfect person – who is trying to be right with God. And that’s another thing that prayer is for: A practice to help us get right with God.
So, let’s get our praying on. And we just might find that there are great gifts from God, just waiting to help us around the corner.
Taming the Tongue
June 29, 2025 3rd Sunday of Pentecost
James 3:1-12 Matthew 5:21-26
You know how you remember random events from elementary school? I remember when I was in 3rd grade, and we were shown a picture of people fishing with a description of the picture underneath. But the description, instead of saying: The men are using fishing poles to catch fish, it said: The men are using things to catch stuff. We were told to rewrite the description by replacing the words stuff and things for specific words in the picture.
This was to teach us how to be clearer in our writing, and to show us how important specific words are to describe something. And this also is immensely important with speaking. I can ask my husband nicely: Can you get the thing out of the cupboard in the kitchen? But he's not going to be able to do it because he's not going to know what thing I'm talking about. Is it a glass, a plate, or some spices? Clarity is key with communication.
We use language to convey to other people who we are. Our words and how we use them tell people so many things about us. Whether we're in good health or not feeling well. What we like or dislike, and hope and dream. What we think is important or what is something that we'd rather not have anything to do with. What are important issues to us and where do we stand on them.
Speech is also how we exchange ideas, how we solve problems as a group, and even sometimes how we solve problems by ourselves by talking out loud about a situation. (Yes, talking to yourself feels a little crazy, but I think we’ve all done it.) Speech is how we relate to people and make connections with them; how we let people know how we feel. Words give two people the ability to say I love you to each other and to build a life from those feelings.
Speech is an immensely important part of the human existence. It’s one of the greatest gifts that God gave to us. One that we take for granted. We assume that since nearly everyone can talk, and that we've been doing it since we've been kids, that we must have this skill down. But like any other skill it takes practice, and we don’t always get it right.
Sometimes we simply don't have the vocabulary that we need and so we don't make our intentions clear. But often speech is a little more complicated than that because our speech center sits right in the middle of our brain; and is connected to the three parts of our brain that process our reactions.
The first level is your reactive brain down by your spinal column. It's speech-reactive to pain or pleasure. That's the part of speech that you use when you stub your toe and say Ouch or other bad words that we can’t say in church. Ever take a bite of a delicious cake and you say, Oh, that is so good? You're not even thinking it, you're just saying it.
The second level is your emotional brain. You stub your toe, you get hurt, and, along with the pain, is maybe an emotion of anger or disappointment. So besides saying Ouch, you’re going to tell the table what an awful nuisance it is that it's decided to be in the way as you walked across the room. (Hey, I didn’t say that emotions were rational.)
The third level is the front part of the brain, where we do our cognitive thinking. After we stub our toe and say Ouch, and a few nasty words to the table, we might say: Well, that was a stupid place for me to put the table. I should move it over about 6 inches, so I don't do this again. That's the part of your brain that sees the problem and then tries to solve it.
Stubbing your toe though is a pretty benign event. How do we react when we get angry, or are disappointed, or hurt? Often when we're confronted with strong emotions, or have things happen to us that are connected to strong emotions, we don't go into the cognitive part of our brain. We get stuck in the emotive part of our brain and we lash out emotionally.
Sometimes we lash out to ourselves by telling ourselves that we’re stupid or worthless. Other times we lash out at the people who we perceive are hurting us by telling them they’re stupid and worthless. And yes, maybe they are hurting us, or maybe they're just trying to help us and we're reading the situation wrong. In any case, reacting inside the emotional part of your brain is where and when things get said that are hurtful, or difficult to walk back, and result in a lot of emotional stress, trauma, or abuse.
To avoid that, Jesus wants us to have better self-control, and to think about and deal with our emotions and our tempers in a spiritual way. This doesn't mean that we negate our emotions. It means that we think about them rather than react to them. As Christians we are supposed to think about our emotions and put them into perspective with our faith. We decide where we’re going to stand with our emotions, rather than be ruled by them.
So, how can our faith help us to tame our tongues and tempers?
James gives us a good place to start when he talks about comparing the use of our tongue to guiding horses and ships. When you ride a horse or sail a ship you have a destination in mind and the bit or rudder are what you use to steer the horse or ship in the direction you want to go. So, we have to ask ourselves: What is our destination, or goal, and the direction, or steps we’re going to take to get there? And how do we speak that destination and direction into existence?
If our destination is to be as Christ like as we can, and to live as Christian brothers and sisters, then we need to bridal our tongues and refrain from using our speech to inflict negativity on other people, when negativity is inflicted on us. And instead, use our speech to be as generous, renewing, and compassionate as we can in emotional situations.
Sometimes the negativity is spontaneous, like when someone bumps into us and we say: Hey, I’m walking here. How about saying instead: Oh, my goodness. Are you alright? I’ve done this several times to people on the NYC subway and they were flabbergasted that I didn’t snap at them and instead inquired about their state of being. I could actually see their brains realigning from confrontation mode to: Oh, no. I’m okay.
Sometimes the negativity is strategic, like when someone gives you a backhanded compliment/insult. That dress looks nice on you. Too bad the skit length is out of fashion. Instead of saying something snarky back, smile and say: Thank you. I’ve always liked this length though – it makes me feel comfortable and happy. You’ve just accepted their generosity and renewed your spirit, and demonstrated that you are a person who is comfortable with themselves.
And sometimes the negativity is systemic, like when someone tells me that all those foreigners can’t be trusted; just look at the news. In my case I try to mentally forgive them and tell them that my Japanese-American children would be very sad to hear that. And that I’m sad to hear about that as well.
We break the cycles of unjust-thinking by confronting them with kindness and purpose.
Breaking the cycles of negativity and building cycles of positivity is what living as a Christian is all about. When Jesus tells his people to: Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison, he is saying that we need to break the cycle of accusation, counter-accusation, litigation, counter litigation, and all the social feuding that accompanies it. Once you let the bad feelings and speeches spiral outward from you, they take a on a life of their own. It becomes a fire that burns everything and destroys not only you but the people around you.
Words are powerful. Remember God spoke the world into being, and we speak our own lives into being with our words, that leads to our actions, shows our directions, and takes us to our destinations. Words can heal people and renew them so that they can go out and carry on with life. Words of compassion can inspire others to be compassionate. Words of generous inspiration can lead to actions that build us up and cause us to make the world a better place.
So use your words to bless others in the name of the Divine Parent, our brother Jesus, and our sister the Holy Spirit. Send your blessings out into the world and you will be speaking into being great exploits of God’s people.