Healing Brokenness: From Caring About the Cause to Creating the Care

Scripture: James 5:13-20

James writes, “Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.”

“Confess your sins.” In recent years, sin has gotten a lot of bad press. Listen to the fundamentalists and the evangelists – if we were to believe the mass media, these are about the only professing Christians there are. It’s easy to see why many of us and especially the younger generations associate the word sin with guilt and general bad behavior. Some of you may recall, many years ago, the televangelist who got caught in a zipper issue. He then famously threw himself at the mercy of his TV audience, weeping, “Lord: I have sinned!”

Well … yeah! And yet, this televangelist’s promiscuously public confession does not represent the heart of the biblical understanding of sin – not even close. For sin is a given of the human condition. Sin may not be necessary, but it is certainly inevitable. For sin is separation – we cannot avoid it, in the closest of our relationships. For sin means brokenness – we see it all around, in the holiest of the whole. Sin represents how we are driven away from relationship with God, with others, with God’s creation, into that separation – and into brokenness. We are driven: meaning, we are not in control.

All of which means – again – that sin is a given. Which means locating a particular cause for a particular brokenness in our world – as important as it is to know that cause, to ferret out that injustice – is not the ultimate goal of the community of faith and the kingdom of God.

For as important as a particular cause for a particular brokenness might be, when we don’t know what it is – when we can’t know what it is – when we can only guess at what the cause is … it is important for us – it is imperative for us – it is essential for us to do two things:

1.     Admit that sin is at work in the world in all things; and therefore,

2.     Move where the Holy Spirit moves. Meaning, move our discipleship energies on over. Over, from caring overly much about the cause to creating and cultivating an environment of care.

I wonder if often, too often, our cause-oriented diagnostic conditioning – many of us are professionally trained in that way – prompts us to move from an acceptance of the inescapable and immutable condition of sin in the world, into a direct engagement, and then ranking, of the particular sins in our world. And because we confuse sins with sin, I have come to wonder that perhaps -- just perhaps -- the ranking of sins could be the rankest of sins. In an ironic manner of speaking.

We get lost in the particulars of “sin” in our world. But James could seemingly care less about ranking sins, when he writes, “Confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” Confess your sins – after all, we all have them. Confess your sins, that this church might become God's vision for us: A Place For Healing.

Not, confess your sins if you sin. Not, confess your sins only after we have determined that that sin needs to be confessed– though some confessions need to be handled with more care and discernment than others. “Confess your sins,” James says, because: Sin is a given. Our brokenness is a given …

But our honesty about our sins – our brokenness – is not a given. In some way – in some fashion – they must be shared. If our sanctuary is to be indeed a sanctuary: confessed sins and all. If our healing is to take place at all!

Perhaps we can take a cue from the Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Naples, FL. In her book Christianity for the Rest of Us, Diana Butler Bass writes this about that church:

A preppy-looking retired man is talking to a man covered with tattoos. Senior citizens … and single people mingle in the entryway. There are several people from other ethnic backgrounds, too … Three black-clad teenage girls with pierced noses and Goth makeup approach an elderly woman in a wheelchair. One by one, they lean down, kiss the woman on the cheek, and ask her how she is doing.*

Such hospitality, I would imagine, can only be exercised once questions about the nature of our sin – our brokenness – are set aside. Only then can our focus fall on creating the caring community of social healing the letter of James envisions today.

“Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another … so that you-plural” – in the original Greek, it is you plural – “may be healed.”

That’s a plural you: that y’all – or the Southern plural of y’all, “all y’all” – may be healed. For when individual confession over our inevitable sinning, and then the prayer surrounding it, are exercised, it’s a community healing, and not simply an individual one, that transpires.

  Scripture is huge on that!

  Go, and do likewise.

*HarperOne, 2006, 78-79.