Prayer is a conversation between you and God. It’s an opportunity to get connected to God and with all the rest of creation. Because the God that made us is not some older guy with a white beard like Michelangelo’s depiction of God reaching out to spark Adam to life with his fingertip, but rather, God is so much more than we can imagine that it takes conversation—practice, to learn the languages through which God talks to us when we have those conversations.

So when James asks, “Are any among you suffering” and follows up with “Are any cheerful? Are any among you sick?” He offers the same prescription whatever the condition may be: prayer. James comes right out and says, “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” Do you get that? He doesn’t say “God is powerful,” because of course God is powerful—look at all this cool stuff in the universe! James puts the power into human hands—our hands, by telling us that the conversations WE have with God are powerful and effective.

Now I’ll bet you’re thinking, “ok—hang on a minute. James did not say that MY prayer would be powerful and effective. He said the prayer “of the righteous. I’m just saying—that is so not me.”

So I want to make sure that we all understand that the word “righteous” does apply to you—to your prayer. Because to be righteous means “to act in accord with divine or moral law: to be free from guilt or sin.” That’s straight from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary to your ears. You are righteous when you pray with genuine love because love is perhaps the only moral law that we are sure is divine, and not some made up stuff some humans thought of for self-serving purpose. Because God is love, and when you love you are righteous. Your prayer is powerful and effective! So how can we use that power wisely?

The reasons that we pray might be numerous: for healing, peace, forgiveness, clarity… I’d like to suggest that the most important reason for prayer is that it’s an opportunity keep our hearts actively loving.

Prayer ensures that we break down the fortresses we build around ourselves that can mislead us into believing that we are alone and misunderstood. If you build those fortress walls high enough, no one can get in and break your heart. But neither can you scale those walls so you can escape and reach out for help. Some of us are so expert at erecting barriers, we can’t even see that we’ve done so until they are so high and so impenetrable that it seems we’ll never find our way out. And once we’ve separated our hearts from contact with others, we can’t love very well. We can’t pray very well when our hearts are locked up in solitary confinement because God IS love.

We must love in order to pray effectively and powerfully. It serves no one—not God, not anyone else, certainly not our own selves to separate our hearts from others, and isolation is NOT protection from heartbreak. We are not meant to live separated either from God or God’s creation, so we have a hard-wired instinct to merge into community with those we love and with the One who created us. Unless we become scarred by bad experiences, we instinctively seek community. Unfortunately, we have an equally powerful and opposite instinct to avoid pain whenever we can, and we can get mixed up and try to place our hearts in isolation for safe-keeping from pain. Breaking our own hearts to keep them safe won’t keep them from longing for love, and longing for love is longing for God.

You can’t live and love without getting your heart broken at least some, because we only live on this planet temporarily. No person—not your spouse, nor your children, nor your parents, nor the animal creatures that you love will always be there for you. They are all created beings as you are, and while God exists within and around them, they, like you, will all eventually come to the end of their days. It’s the God in them that is eternal, and prayer is the way that you plug into that eternal part. The ones you love weren’t made to last forever, even though your love for them might be. Remember God is in that love—God IS that love, and prayer is the way you keep touching that love no matter where you are…no matter how you are.

The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective, and YOU are righteous and powerful.

The things that Jesus taught were radical and scary. They upended the social order in Roman-occupied Israel where freeborn adult males were top dogs, and slaves, women and children had successively lower value in that order. That’s why Jesus held a child in his arms as he taught his disciples by example that there can be no “greatest” and that the lowest of the low, a child, was to be treated with the same welcome and respect that they reserved for him. Isn’t that eerily like the lesson that God taught all of us by sending a savior into the world as a helpless infant?

So here we are a couple of thousand years later and we are looking at Jesus’ words, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” We do not get to rank the value of God’s children and then decide whether or not to welcome them into our arms, but rather we welcome everyone, because if we don’t, we are denying hospitality to the very God who sent Jesus to us.

Sadly, I don’t know of a single culture on Earth that doesn’t have a pecking order of some sort. And that leads to a climate where we don’t even question that there are winners and losers, top bananas and untouchables. We love winners, even improbable underdogs who come from behind and delight us with their grit. And the reason we are delighted is because they have become winners.

But that radical rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, was telling even his closest circle of friends to hold on and consider whether or not who was the winner—the greatest—”head boy,” as they say in British schools, was really something that mattered.

I think the disciples were embarrassed they were caught arguing about something so trivial as which of them was greatest in that group when Jesus taught them with a shocking prophecy:  “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” Maybe the disciples needed to retreat into something trivial, so they could escape thinking about the implication of what their beloved friend and teacher had told them. After all, wouldn’t thinking about being a winner give you a good distraction?

We love our winners. We like the best athletes, the most beautiful people, and to be the ones who have the most wealth. We want to have the greenest grass in the neighborhood, the cutest babies and the top score on the test in school. We not only love winners, we want to be winners, so who wouldn’t have empathy for the disciples?

The good news of Jesus Christ is actually tough news for people who believe that they are already the top dogs. Because God doesn’t care about winners and losers. And if you look at the stories of our faith ancestors in the Old Testament, you’ll notice right away that God has always mixed things up. God was always picking the youngest, the least articulate, and the most improbable of leaders. And Jesus knew that—and he kept repeating that message again and again and again.

“OK, you wanna be first? Well then, you’re gonna have to be last of all and servant of all. And ALL means ALL. Think about it. In the Body of Christ, we are each to think of our selves last of all, and we are to be servants of all. Just as the disciples couldn’t do it, neither can we climb to the top of the puppy pile by stepping on each other. We can only “win”  by serving each other! That was unthinkable in those ancient days, and it’s pretty much unthinkable now! If the Holy Spirit presents someone to any one of us, we are to serve them. That’s really hard, but it’s the job of the Christian.

Every single person in this church is here for reasons that God knows, and we each have the job of serving each other, no one of us being more deserving than any one of us. We serve not begrudgingly, but wholeheartedly with our time, our talents and our treasure. If we can do this, we will be living in the wisdom that James talks about that is “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.” All means all, and there’s not a single one of you who is not a beautiful image of God. If that image is hard to see, and a person is hard to serve, do as James says. “Submit yourselves…to God. Draw near to God, and [God] will draw near to you.”

There are a lot of commentaries about the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Syrophoenician woman. The scholars have largely focused on the woman—her faith, her humility, and her persistence.

In a region populated with many gentiles, not too far from the Sea of Galilee, Jesus had sought rest and solitude, as he often did amidst intense periods of teaching and healing. But the word somehow got out that he was there, and this woman, marginalized by the Chosen People, who would have normally had no direct interaction with a man, much less a Jew and a teacher, she had the nerve to seek out Jesus and plead for help, bowing down at his feet. With James’ words ringing in our ears, “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:17), it’s easy to recognize that this desperate mother had faith and works. She did not sit home by the bed of her demon-possessed daughter, but sought out the help of the powerful God of Israel, through a teacher who was rumored to wield that power in the name of God to help her. She used her faith to propel herself into action. And as much as that Syrophoenician woman impresses me with the way she followed up on her faith by leaping into action, I think what we can learn about Jesus from this story is as exciting as what the woman herself teaches us.

You see, Jesus was not just God’s son, Jesus was also a human being who ate and slept and laughed and cried…and learned. And you’ve got to love that part about learning, because it teaches us that even the Son of God continued to learn during his lifetime on Earth. Clearly Jesus had a sense of his mission and the people to whom he was intended to bring it. But this story suggests to me that God could blow even Jesus’ mind by revealing the immensity of his role over time—the special job for which Jesus and no one else was born. He grew into his full potential after baptism and testing and teaching and healing.

The Syrophoenician woman went beyond the bounds of propriety and maybe even of safety by busting in on this Jewish teacher taking his rest. She, a gentile woman, another race, marginalized by Jesus’ people, didn’t have the time to wait for the right moment. She had to seize the opportunity when she saw it, and moved into immediate action.

It was not only she and her little girl that were rewarded from this improbable encounter, but also Jesus. Because for him, through the woman, God showed him a glimpse of the breadth of God’s saving grace. Jesus could now contemplate the notion that though he had been foretold by the prophets and validated by God’s own voice at his baptism in the Jordan River, perhaps the Good News was to be spread further and more widely than he ever imagined. And in fact, when he gave his disciples the great commission, he said as much: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matt 28:19).

God’s grace is for everyone. It was not owned solely by Jesus’ own race, but also for Syrophoenicians, and everyone else. Yes he knew he had to get his own house in order first, but he was not to turn his back on such steadfast faith as that desperate and brave mother showed him on that day. He was to think bigger and offer God’s love and grace to everyone willing to answer in faith. Everyone.

So Jesus continued with his mission. He urged the people of Israel to turn their attention away from self-centered interests and repent, that is to turn back to the Lord God and follow the law that was so precious to God, they had been commanded to “fix these words of [God] into [their] heart[s] and mind[s]” (Deut. 11:18).

But also, Jesus learned from the Syrophoenician woman that in order to restore Israel to right relationship with God, perhaps they also had to broaden their concept of who their neighbors were. They didn’t like the gentiles. These were tribal times. And then, in a flash—it all changed. Jesus saw faith where he had not expected to see it. He learned that Grace is for everyone who was willing to trust in the power of God and then act. And then he taught that lesson to his disciples and sent them off to do likewise.

The plans of God are much grander than we imagine, and the kingdom of God—it is much more expansive than you might think it is. We are called to move—to grow, to be bigger and more loving as a community than any of us may be accustomed to being. It is not always comfortable, but the consequence of not stepping out of our comfort zone and learning to take care of the people who are not part of our own circle of friends and family is that the demons remain in the world. We don’t get to pick who the worthy candidates are for salvation, and we don’t get to pick our mission– God does that, and our decision is to say yes or to say no. Each minute that we live, we have the opportunity to learn something new, to love someone unexpected and to be part of God’s plan to work out salvation for all of humanity.

The woman who persistently sought Jesus’ help to rid her daughter of demons did have substantial faith, and that alone is a story from which we can all learn. And it’s also a story about Jesus’ own willingness to go to a new place, to learn from God that his mission was even bigger than he thought it was.

We can do that too if we are willing. When someone turns to us for help, we must give it. Any one of us just might be the singular angel that God has sent to liberate them from demons which haunt them, and it is just as possible that God has sent that person, thinking they are the one who needed help, to you, so that God can free you from your own demons at last.