The key is in our response - May 12

Today’s Readings: AM Psalm 119:97-120; Baruch 3:24-37; James 5:13-18; Luke 12:22-31; Eve of the Ascension: PM Psalm 68:1-20; 2 Kings 2:1-15; Rev. 5:1-14

 While connecting on the phone with a dear friend late and sharing stories, Dale made the comment that life’s lessons are everywhere, even on a baking show. She’s so right. That is one of the joys that comes from reflecting on lived experiences and those of others – we have “aha” moments that guide and challenge us to respond in different ways. The key is in our response.

The fragment of our epistle from James 5 today holds several tokens of guidance for leading a life of faithfulness, suggesting responses to various scenarios. Suffering? Gotta pray. Cheerful? Gotta sing. Sick? The response is a little longer: get church people to pray over you and put oil on you. And here is what James writes next, “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.” (v. 15-16) James carries us from suffering to joyfulness, to sickness and then to sin.

As we see, our recommended response for sin is a three-step process: confess to one another; pray for one another; and, God will heal us. It is here that I have my own little “aha” moment: I usually think about confession as prayerful requests for my sins to be forgiven. Discharged. Put away so I no longer hang onto them. God’s response is even bigger…bringing about healing. Healing. Wow. That is more generous than I can imagine. When we confess our sins, we are praying that God will slough away that layer of worldly clutter that obscures the sheen of the new life promised in baptism, and then heal our rhythms of accumulating that clutter.

British politician William Wilberforce (1759-1833) was converted to evangelical Christianity in the mid-1780s. This conversion opened his eyes in a new way to how we respond to those around us. Wilberforce helped found a society for the “reformation of manners” or morals – where virtues were extolled and vices (like profanity, alcohol, and immorality) were suppressed.

He is perhaps more widely known for his work to abolish slave trade, and eventually slavery, as a practice. In the House of Commons on May 12, 1789, William Wilberforce rose and offered a speech against Great Britain’s participation in the financially lucrative slave trade. He outlined how the practice generated war, devastation, and discord with Africa, and then peeled back the veneer on slave trade in the West Indies. The tales told were of humane accommodations of the dark-skinned people being transported for sale; Wilberforce said, “if the wretchedness of any one of the many hundred Negroes stowed in each ship could be brought before their view…there is no one among them whose heart would bear it.” Being chained to one another and treated terribly, and then cleaned up in order to be sold for a good price – it is a hard story to read and know. The economics of the system made it hard to stop the process…and British parliament authorized the actions.

In knowing all of this, William Wilberforce responded not in agreeing to the processes in place, but to respond differently. To confess to his colleagues the wrong of slave trade. To confess to his community the devastation caused by their endorsements. He ended his speech in this way, “Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.” The abolition of slave trade in Britain ended in 1807; slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire in 1833.

Let us be moved by our convictions like William Wilberforce and cling to the guidance in James 5:16 – “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed”.

-- Katherine+