My kids like the cartoon Spongebob Squarepants. And there is an episode where Squidward Tentacles teaches an art class and Spongebob is his only student. Now, Squidward believes himself to be a master of art and he begins to show Spongebob his ways. Squidward draws a circle on the chalkboard that is pretty wonky and only vaguely round. Then Spongebob draws a perfect circle on a piece of paper. Squidward is shocked and tells Spongebob to do it again so he can see Spongebob’s process. So Spongebob draws a really detailed picture of a man’s face, then erases features until eventually all that is left is a perfect circle. This angers Squidward so he crumples the sheet of paper into a ball. This gives Spongebob an idea and he quickly re-folds the piece of paper into an origami design of himself and Squidward playing leapfrog. This makes Squidward even more annoyed, so he tears the paper into tiny pieces. At that, Spongebob takes the pieces and begins to arrange them in a certain order on his desk. Squidward asks him what he is doing and he says, “I call it rippybits. You take a bunch of ripped up paper and you make a new picture out of it.” And the camera scrolls down to show a picture made with the ripped paper that depicts Spongebob and Squidward playing leapfrog again.

The reason I tell that story is that what Spongebob called “rippybits” is a form of a mosaic. Miriam Webster defines mosaic as “a surface decoration made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material to form pictures or patterns.” Mosaic art takes small things and orders them in a way that forms a bigger picture. One of my favorite types of mosaic art is called a photo mosaic. A photo mosaic takes small photos and orders them in such a way that together they form a larger picture. The largest photo mosaic in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, is in Kaifeng, Henan, China, and consists of 29,480 photographs. The bigger picture that the little pictures make is a famous Chinese painting titled Qingming Shanghe Tu. It is absolutely amazing how the artist took all those individual pictures and made them into something so much larger.

When James talks about prayer in the section of his letter that we read this morning, it reminded me of a mosaic. James writes, “Are any among you suffering? They should pray. Are any cheerful? They should sing songs of praise. Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.” James shows the connection between prayer and community. We pray with and for one another. And James says that “the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”

There was once a boy “who had been sent to his room because he had been bad. A short time later he came out and said to his mother, ‘I’ve been thinking about what I did and I said a prayer.’ ‘That’s fine,’ she said, ‘if you ask God to make you good, He will help you.’ ‘Oh, I didn’t ask Him to help me be good,’ replied the boy. ‘I asked Him to help you put up with me.’” Prayer is a tricky thing. What is the right thing to pray for? How do we know that we are praying rightly? How do we know that our prayers are doing anything? James says, “The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.” But what does that really mean? This morning I want to break that verse down and look at the four key words used by James in this sentence to see if it sheds any light on these questions.

First, what do we mean when we talk about “prayer”? The Norwegian theologian Ole Hallesby defines prayer this way. “To pray is nothing more involved than to let Jesus into our needs. To pray is to give Jesus permission to employ His powers in the alleviation of our distress.” That definition fits pretty well with the root of the Greek word that James uses in verse 16 for prayer. The Greek word is deésis, which comes from the root word deo, which means ‘to be in want or to lack.’ So, prayer is giving voice to deep needs and asking God for help. Interestingly, James says that deésis prayer is powerful and effective. But elsewhere in this reading from James he uses the word euchomai to talk about prayer. Euchomai means ‘to pray’ or ‘to wish’. So, why the change of words for James? Is he talking about something different? I think the answer to that is both yes and no. I believe that James is singling out one particular piece of prayer, the piece that is about community, the piece that is about loving neighbor. I think that deésis is about pleading for help, not just for our own needs, but for the deepest needs of our friends, family, community, and world. And James says that “The [deésis] of the righteous is powerful and effective.”

So, then who are the righteous that James is referring to? The word James uses for ‘righteous’ can also mean ‘just.’ So, is it the prayer of the righteous or the prayer of the just that is effective and powerful? For James, it was probably both. But we’ve come to regard those terms as meaning different things. The righteous are those who properly follow the laws of God. The righteous are those who seek continually to do God’s will instead of their own, while the just are those who seek equality between themselves and their neighbor. The just are those who seek a better life for the oppressed and downtrodden in our world. In our attempt to follow the law of God strictly, we have often ignored the pleas of the oppressed and sometimes even contributed to their continued oppression. I believe that what James is talking about here in verse 16 is actually a melding of those two things. The prayer of the just and righteous is powerful and effective. We must seek to be both…to live rightly and to love rightly.

And James says that supplications made by those seeking to live and love rightly are powerful and effective. The word translated as powerful speaks of an “embodied strength that gets ‘into the fray’” through action. Our prayers are most powerful when we are actively engaged in the results of those prayers. Martin Luther once put it this way: “Pray as if everything depends on God, then work as if everything depends on you.” I was once told that if you are going to pray for something then you need to be prepared to be the answer. I think that may be the idea behind what James is saying here. The prayer of the just and righteous is powerful when the pray-er is willing to work toward the answer. “A [man once] asked [his] friend why he got donuts if he is trying to diet. [The man] said, “Well, I came around the corner where the donut shop was. I told God, if He wanted me to buy some donuts to have a parking spot in the front. On the eighth time around, there it was!” The prayer of the righteous is powerful when the person praying is willing to work toward an answer.

James says that the prayer of the righteous is not only powerful, but it is also effective. The word James uses here that is translated is the Greek word energeó. Can you hear an English cognate in there? Energeó…energy. The prayer of the righteous is energizing. It has power because it energizes us to work toward the answer. Have you ever sat down to pray about something in your life that was really draining you? Something that was causing you to feel tired and weak? And then, after going to God in prayer about it, you felt a new energy for the situation? I think that’s what prayer should do for us when we are praying rightly and justly. It should lift us up out of whatever cloud of discouragement or exhaustion we may find ourselves in and re-energize us to continue working toward the answer to our prayer. When we pray, we receive from God a divine energy.

When I first came to faith in Christ as a teenager, I don’t think I ever felt energized by prayer. It felt more like talking to a stranger about the weather than talking to a friend about deep needs and desires. But I still distinctly remember my first experience of prayer that was energizing and powerful. I had attended a worship gathering put on by some local college students. After some songs, a skit, and a message, we entered into a time of prayer. The leader took prayer requests, someone began to play Seek Ye First on guitar, and the leader began to pray aloud for the requests. But he was not the only one in the room who began to pray. The entire room erupted with spoken prayers, many people praying for the requests that had been made. At first it was a bit disorienting with so many voices saying different things all at the same time, but soon the room was filled with an energy I’d never experienced before. And before I knew it, I found myself adding my own prayers to the din. And I left that place with a new energy, ready to serve God however I was asked to do so. That, to me, exemplifies what I think James is trying to say here. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and energizes us to join our voices to the din and to be ready to work for God.

And none of this is something we do in isolation from others. We are individuals and we can pray individual prayers. But God calls us to join our voices with others and for others. We are like the small pictures of a photo mosaic. We may speak them alone, but they are most effective and beautiful when they are part of a greater picture, part of the picture of God’s righteousness and justice for the world God created. Part of a greater picture that energizes us to love our neighbors better and love God better. And our prayers don’t need to be long or perfectly scripted. In fact, there’s an old Jewish maxim that says, “The prayers of the righteous are short.” So, pray. Pray for one another. Pray for the community. Pray for the world. But be ready to be the answer to those prayers. And to join your voice with the voices of others in creating a beautiful mosaic of love for God and for one another. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Thanks be to God! Amen.