Our Many Kinds of Broken--March 22, 2022

Our Many Kinds of Broken--March 22, 2022

"Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed." [James 5:16]

There are, it seems, already countless specialists in different fields of medicine.  Maybe you already know something of the challenges of navigating multiple doctors with multiple kinds of expertise.  From your primary care physician to cardiologists, oncologists, pulmonary doctors, endocrinologists, and surgeons, your weekly calendar can already be full just with doctors' appointments.  And that's before we even get to doctors who specialize in eyes, ears, nose, throat, feet, teeth, or mental health.  And of course, there are reasons for each of those specialized disciplines--human beings are complicated, and the more we study how our bodies work, the more each separate area or system of our body can become its own field of study.  That all makes sense.

But it also comes at a cost, doesn't it?  It means that increasingly, different experts compartmentalize our health into different pieces, and treat each almost like it is separate from the rest of your whole self.  If you end up with bad communication between your cancer doctor and your cardiologist, you can end up making one problem worse in the name of curing another.  If your primary care physician can only see you as a body but has no thought for your mind, your depression can go unaddressed while your muscles and bones are in fine shape.  

We can sometimes do the same thing as people of faith, too--and the roles we give to "religious professionals" like pastors can be a part of it, I confess.  We end up not only dividing our bodies into individual areas of specialized study--heart from kidneys, brain from bowels, and so on--but we end up dividing our spiritual lives from our physical lives, too, as though "religion" is cut off from all the actual practical, physical dimensions of our lives as embodied beings.  We end up filtering things like feelings of guilt, sin, hope, and despair with faith, and shunt them into the realm of "spiritual" things, which are for pastors, church services, Bible studies, and prayer request times.  And then the rest of our lives--the actual nuts-and-bolts stuff of life, health, jobs, and family--we give to "real" experts, from doctors to investment advisors to career and life-coaches.  And in the name of tapping the expertise of people with specialized knowledge, we end up making every part of our lives a technical problem to be solved only by the right professional.

But what if there were another way?  What if we could bear our selves--our whole, full selves--to one another, bringing both the things we label "spiritual" and the things we call "physical," along with the social, financial, mental, and familial pieces, and offer strength and help for each other?  What if we found in community together support for mending our many kinds of broken?

I think that's what James is offering here in this verse.  He points us, not to a specialized professional, but to one another, for bearing our many kinds of broken.  There's not a mention of a priest or pastor being necessary, but also notice that James sees our "spiritual" needs going side by side with all of the other needs we might bring to God in prayer. James directs his readers both to confess our sins to one another--something that might be classified as a "spiritual" matter--but also to pray for each other more generically, too.  He doesn't see the Christian community as "just" here for "spiritual" things, while "real-life" things are handled by separate experts.  But rather, we come with whatever things are going on in our lives, and we dare to share them with each other vulnerably, letting others see us with our defenses down, and also trusting that others will offer healing to soothe and help to strengthen the places where we have needs.  There is something compelling and beautiful about that kind of life together.

And like I say, I completely understand the need to have specialized expert professionals offer skilled help in their different disciplines.  But I also think there is something wonderful about the vision James gives, where we attend to each others' needs, amateurs and ordinary folks that we may be, bringing physical, spiritual, social, financial, and family situations to one another, and seeking help, guidance, and support from one another.  That helps the work of a congregation or a pastor to be more than just "the expert I consult for spiritual things" but a community of people like me or you who just share life together, where nobody gets to (or has to) pretend to be the expert with all the answers, but where we each share our own struggles, tell about our failures and the wisdom that has come from them, and offer our strength to carry someone else in their time of need.

Instead of treating our lives as fine-tuned machines that need to be fixed by a different particular specially-trained expert depending on the part that goes wrong, what if we saw our life in Christian community as a gathering of wounded people who are all committed to healing each other, and who are brave enough to risk showing our hurts to one another, regardless of what they are, so that we may be made well together?  That's the kind of community I want to belong to.  I wouldn't care if they had video screens or the fanciest church coffee bar in the county.  I wouldn't care if they had a trendy logo all over their cutting edge social media presence, or the most polished sounding praise band in the state. I want to know that it's safe to let down my guard and bring my whole self--all the facets of who I am and what I need--to the community, where I can find healing for my wounds and can offer help to someone else in their struggles... maybe both at the same time.

What would it look like for us to strive to be that kind of community today?

Lord Jesus, let us be today the kind of community where all are safe, all are honored, and all can be healed.