Today’s passage from James is the scriptural backing for two of the traditional sacraments of the Catholic church: the anointing of the sick (formerly called Extreme Unction) and confession (now generally referred to, at least formally, as the sacrament of Reconciliation).
My first boss at the Council of Churches in Portland was an old-school kind of boss. He sat in the corner office and summoned me when he wanted something. He’d call me to come and go through paperwork with him at his convenience, without regard to what I was doing at the time. He would even call from time to time to have me make him a cup of tea and bring it to him.
When we translate from one language to another, things get lost in translation. There are words that have so many different meanings that you have to choose one as you translate. Or, as in the case of the three terms in New Testament Greek that are all rendered with one English word, love, there are simply no equivalent words in the new language that can fully communicate the meaning.
Do you remember the show Northern Exposure? Before it made the unfortunate error a great many shows make (I’m looking at you, Moonlighting, X-Files, Bones, and any number of others), having the two main characters hook up, it was a good show, with a really interesting ensemble cast.
So apparently someone once asked Andrew Carnegie how much wealth he thought was enough. His response was, “Just a little bit more.”
On the other hand, I once read about a woman down south, living in a tiny house with a dirt floor, trying to eke out a living on a meager piece of land. She received some money from the Farm Aid benefit, and somebody asked her what she was going to do with it.
Fred Craddock told some of the best stories. There’s even a book of them compiled by a couple of his students and colleagues.
I don’t know that this one is in that book; I first heard it in a recording someone made of a lecture of his, maybe at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon. He said he was guest preaching at a church somewhere in Oklahoma one Sunday. It was his custom to teach an adult Sunday school class when he was preaching somewhere like that, so he asked if he could do that there.
I know I don’t have to stand up here and tell you that you should pray. It goes without saying that if you’re a Christian, you pray. It’s just part of what it means to be a Christian. I also don’t want anybody thinking there’s only one right way to pray.
I learned something a couple weeks back.
We’ve all seen, in Western movies and TV programs, tumbleweeds blowing around. A lot of the time they symbolize something: desolation, emptiness, perhaps a lead character’s aimlessness.
Pastor Joe McTaggart answered the knock on his study door with a weary sigh.
Things had gotten so bad in his church, the First Christian Church of Corbin City, Kansas, that or the first time in his life he was seriously thinking about leaving the ministry, retiring, moving to a quiet lake somewhere to finish out his days fishing and writing. It wasn’t that he didn’t love the people there—he’d spent the last decade living and working among them, sharing their joys and sorrows, watching their children grow up, helping them raise up new leaders.
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