This is an approximation of the sermon I delivered this morning

What is church for? This is what James the letter-writer is talking about – what he has been talking about for some time now. 

We know that we come here to worship, to stand, kneel, sing, and sigh before God, to receive the blessed Sacrament, to be renewed by its ineffable grace. For healing and renewal, prayer and praise, redemption, community, comfort. But there is a reason that we do it all together. 

James says that if any has need of healing, they should call the church to them. If any has need to give thanksgiving, they should sing – and you know he didn’t mean in the shower. He speaks of the power of prayer, but also of the necessity of community. We are here for one another, because we follow Jesus, and he was here for us, for the sake of us; so we are here for one another. 

I want to tell you a story from a church long ago and far away. Thirty-eight years ago on the last Sunday in May, I came home from church to find the house empty. I knew immediately that something was wrong. I called the hospital, and the nurse on the ward told me that my mother had been taken down for emergency open heart surgery. My father and brother had just been in; the hospital called them to come quickly before they took her down, in case it was their last chance to see her.

When they came home, I asked why they had not come to get me, too. My father said, “The service had already started.” It never crossed my father’s mind that it would be ok – in fact, a good and faithful thing – to come and get me and my prayers out of the pew after service had started, so that I could join them on their pilgrimage to the hospital.

My mother survived that surgery, thank God, but I have never quite got over the idea that it could be so socially mortifying to walk into a church service – a service dedicated to the gracious and merciful God – once it had started that I would have missed saying goodbye. 

I think, and I hope, that my father was wrong. I believe that had he opened those heavy oak doors and stepped inside, Mr Evans, the churchwarden, would first have stepped quickly forward with a prayerbook and hymnal; then, he would have seen my father’s face, and he would have asked, “What’s wrong?” Then, without waiting for an answer, he would have continued, “I’ll get Rosalind,” because Mr Evans was a retired school principal, so he watched out for us teenagers, and he knew exactly where I was sitting. He wouldn’t have thought twice about the propriety of interrupting the psalm. I know that. But my father didn’t.

How do we let people know that we are here for them? Not, as James said a couple of weeks ago, only if they are properly turned out and prompt in their arrival, if they know their way around the service, and sing in tune. I love that in my twelve years with you, there have always been people who come late, leave early, get up and stretch mid-service, act like human beings in the middle of divine worship. Just as Jesus became human with us. And that matters, so much, that we can be human in church, drawn toward the one in whose image we all share. How else do we let people know that we are here if they are sick, if they are suffering, if they are singing, if they are sighing, that they can be human here? 

How do we let them know that just as Jesus excelled in being interrupted, we are here to welcome sinners and saints alike? How do we let the hurting and hopeful know what church is for?

We follow Jesus, and he became human so that we would know that God is with us; so that we would know that God gets what it’s like to be human; so that we could be human with each other, and in doing so, share the love of God not only amongst ourselves, but with the world.

Amen.

Text: James 5:13-20, Year B Proper 21

Featured image: Jaggery / All Saints Church, Penarth, via Wikimedia Commons,  CC BY-SA 2.0