as preached on 22 Sept 2024 from James 3-4.
I want to encourage you today to pray Bad Prayers. Pray prayers that are not well thought through, that have poor grammatical construction, I want you to pray selfish prayers, angry prayers, stupid prayers, bold prayers.
And I want you to add to these prayers a prayer that says – ‘Lord you can hear that I’m a bit mixed up in my thoughts and emotions and priorities, I’m aware that my prayers have got some good in them but also that there’s quite a bit of selfish-me in them too. But You Lord are The Lord and you will know what to do with these prayers so sift them through and Please God, Do what you do best.
St James in his epistle says ‘You do not get what you want because you do not ask God’. So today’s lesson is Ask God. Talk to God about everything and anything. Talk to God about the stuff that makes you smile and laugh, when the sun is shining, talk to God about the injustice that you see in the world – and say ‘Come On God, I cant do anything about Ukraine but you can’! Talk to God about the injustice that you see around you, and maybe there you might see something that you can do, a voice you can give to the voiceless.
Pray to God about all those things that push your buttons, that evoke in you bitterness, envy, and selfish ambition, – Give it to God.
St James says – ‘You don’t get what you want because you ask with wrong motives’. Alas I am afraid that most of my prayers have mixed motives. I was once praying for someone who had asked for healing for something and in the middle of my prayer I had this sudden thought – ‘Oh please God, please heal this person because then I will look good. Then everyone will think I’m an amazing vicar!’
I should add that I did not pray this prayer out loud! But I immediately blushed and prayed: ‘Look God, please don’t hold my poor motivations against them, this person needs your healing touch, don’t let my ego get in the way of your kindness’.
I didn’t pray that prayer out loud either.
St James says the ‘Cure to praying prayers with bad motivations are firstly – don’t boast about it’. There are times when we find ourselves welling up with envy and selfish ambition and because we’re good Christians we know how to spiritualise our thinking and so we find a way of making it sound okay. James says Don’t boast about it.
James also says Don’t deny it. This is harder but this is the invitation to come to God in confession and say ‘Oh dear God help me here. I am feeling a mix of feelings and some of them are good and plenty of them are – as St James puts it – Earthly, positively unspiritual, some of them on the worst days occasionally might even sound a little demonic if I said them out loud.’
St James advice is not to deny it, is an invitation to come to God in prayer and confess it.
The Gospel reading is a really good example of this. Jesus is trying to get them prepared for his sacrifice, his death, and his resurrection. But we read that the Disciples were afraid to ask Him about it. Afraid.
Children are afraid to ask questions in the classroom because they might feel that they should know the answer to this by now – please sir what is the hypotenuse? And so you’re worried that if you ask the question that the Teacher might say something that embarrasses you – I’m sure today’s teachers wouldn’t do that – but there’s also the possibility that others in the class might laugh at you. It takes courage to ask a question.
So there’s something sad about that. The Disciples were afraid to ask Jesus. Why? Wwhat’s going on in their thinking?
Perhaps there’s something emotional here – I was talking to my Aunt about my uncle’s funeral years ago, I’d only just become a vicar – and we got about ten minutes in and she said ‘Okay I need a break’. So we had a cup of tea and ten minutes later started up again. And that’s fine, that shows that often we only have so much stamina for certain difficult subjects – we can only really bare to talk about them for so long and then the emotion of it all is just a bit too much.
So I’m going to cut the disciples some slack here, maybe they were not so much afraid of what Jesus would say – as just holding the fear of what He has said about death and being killed. That’s horrible stuff. And sometimes a little silence is good to just hold it and let it settle.
But with these Disciples instead of settling and coming back to the difficult subject they find an alternative game, the game of distraction. Who is the greatest! Oh for goodness sake what does that matter!
It’s a fun game right up there with Who’s your favourite child and all that. And the main part of the game is not to resolve it. The aim is to keep arguing. The devil loves it when we play this game, there are no winners, there are only losers. People can only be hurt by this game, even if you win you actually lose.
Jesus stops the game by reversing the rules. Who is the humblest? Who is the least among you, the servant of all. And in a sense this is what Jesus has been trying to teach them all along. Jesus will sacrifice Himself for our sins, He will become the Ransom for Many, the Lamb who takes away the Sin of the World. He will be the least.
St James in his letter says we should be peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy, – that’s not the fighting talk that you expect from a game that asks ‘Who is the greatest!’
But actually when you think about the people who have been the best Bosses, the best Heads of Dept over you – probably they’re the ones who have found a way to encourage you, to motivate you, to not steal the glory from your ideas, to not be an irritant.
St James is not trying to squash your Ambition. There’s nothing wrong here about wanting the next job up, the promotion – but you might want to think about what its costing your soul as you fight for it, and you might want to think about whether actually the way to win it is through being gentle and reasonable.
A couple of sermons ago we saw how the letter of James was saying – Its no good having Faith but not then showing it in your lives. Now in this reading we’re seeing the opposite. Its not much good trying to live the good life unless its steeped in prayer – unless you are asking God, drawing close to God.
And that prayer is going to be full of mistakes, confessed selfish ambition, and earnest prayers – because it’s that prayer that will feed into your faith, that will show itself in your character, the fruits of the Spirit – which James lists differently here – I note that wisdom and humility are quite intertwined – as are Prayer and the Life you live. These two are connected.
Prayer draws us close to God, allows God to draw close to us, has the additional effect of resisting the wiles, schemes and temptations of the devil, and leads your character into Godly fruit, and that fruit, that is the life lived filled with the humility that comes from God’s wisdom.
So How do I start with this? You start by praying Bad Prayers. And you keep at it. And ask God to help you pray better prayers, ask God to help you with your motivation. Because Prayer is simply welcoming God into your life, your every day life.
Amen.
photo is of us outside Chalvington Church