We Are the Ones We've Been Waiting For
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on August 24, 2025
A sermon on James 5:13-20
Note - Remember, the video and the text may differ a bit. I rarely stick 100% to my written material when I preach.
Scripture – “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. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective. Elijah was a human being like us, and he prayed fervently that it would not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain and the earth yielded its harvest. Siblings, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”
“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” These words, spoken by Alice Walker, pierce through our expectations of divine intervention like sunlight breaking through storm clouds. We’ve been conditioned, haven’t we, to look up when we need help? To crane our necks toward heaven, waiting for some cosmic cavalry to ride over the hill? But Walker’s wisdom, rooted in the story of Black women’s survival, resistance, and resurrection, calls us to look around. To look within. To see the divine not as some distant deity but as present power flowing through the very people sitting in these pews.
James understood this. In his letter to the scattered communities of early believers, he doesn’t give us a theology of individual piety or private prayer. He gives us a roadmap for communal transformation. “Are any among you suffering?” he asks. Not are you suffering in isolation, but are any among you, any within this body, this community, this network of interconnected souls, experiencing pain?
The question assumes we belong to each other, because we do belong to each other.
Let’s sit with this text for a moment, because James is painting us a picture of divine intervention that looks nothing like what we’ve been taught to expect. When someone is sick, James doesn’t say “pray to God and wait for healing.” He says, “call for the elders.”
When someone is struggling spiritually, he doesn’t prescribe solo scripture reading. He says, “confess your sins to one another.” When someone wanders from truth, he doesn’t suggest they find their own way back. He says another person will bring them home.
This is God working through us. This is divine power made manifest in community care. This is the sacred showing up in the everyday actions of ordinary people who refuse to let each other suffer alone.
Walker knew this intimately. In her novel The Color Purple, one of her characters, Celie, discovers the divine not in a distant God but in the love that flows between women who refuse to abandon each other. Another character, Shug Avery, tells Celie, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” But more than that, God shows up when the characters create spaces of healing for each other. God shows up when they become the healing in each other’s lives.
The God that James and Walker both point us toward is not a rescuer God who swoops down from on high, but a community-building God who works through the networks of care we create for and with each other. This God doesn’t bypass human relationship, this God uses human relationship as the primary means of grace.
Now, I want us to think about what this meant for the communities to which James was writing. These were scattered believers, many of them poor, many of them marginalized, living under the weight of Roman imperial power. They didn’t have access to the systems and structures that could provide for their needs. The empire wasn’t coming to save them. The authorities had no interest in their healing, their wholeness, and their survival. In fact, in most cases the empire was actively trying to erase them.
Sound familiar?
So, James tells them: You are the ones you’ve been waiting for. When someone in your community is sick, you gather around them. You anoint them. You pray over them. You create the conditions for healing. When someone is struggling with guilt and shame, you provide the safe space for confession. You offer forgiveness. You speak words of restoration.
This wasn’t just spiritual advice, this was a survival strategy. This was resistance. This was a way of saying: We won’t wait for the empire to care for us. We won’t depend on systems designed to exploit us. We will create our own networks of care, our own economies of grace, our own communities of healing.
And friends, this is womanist theology at its finest, even though James was writing two thousand years before we had that term. Because womanist thought, rooted in the experiences of Black women, has always understood that survival and liberation happen in community. They have always known that God works through the hands that tend wounds, the voices that speak truth, and the arms that embrace the broken.
Alice Walker writes about her grandmother’s garden, how she made beauty grow in soil that seemed too hard, too depleted to sustain life. But her grandmother knew something about divine partnership. She knew that God provides the rain, but human hands must plant the seeds. God provides the sun, but human hearts must tend the growth. God provides the possibility, but human community must nurture it into reality.
This is what James is calling us to see. Prayer isn’t just petition, it’s partnership. Healing isn’t just divine miracle, it’s communal work. Faith isn’t just belief, it’s collective action.
“The prayer of faith will save the sick,” James tells us. But notice, it’s not just any prayer. It’s the prayer offered in community, surrounded by elders, supported by the gathered body. It’s prayer that’s embodied, enacted, made manifest through human presence and care.
The oil they used for anointing wasn’t magical, it was medicine. It was practical care given spiritual significance. It was human hands made sacred through the act of tending another’s need. It was the divine working through the ordinary materials of human compassion.
I think about the women in Walker’s stories who create healing circles without even knowing that’s what they’re doing. I think about characters teaching children while their mother recovered from brutality. I think about people nursing others back to emotional health through patience and presence. I think about how these women become conduits of divine grace for each other, not through supernatural intervention but through the power of refusing to let each other face their pain alone.
This is the God James is pointing us toward. Not the God who remains distant and unmoved, but the God who gets Their hands dirty in the work of human healing. Not the God who works around human community, but the God who works through human community as the primary vehicle of grace.
And here’s what’s revolutionary about this understanding: we stop waiting for someone else to be our salvation. It means we stop looking for rescue from some otherworldly force and start recognizing the divine power that flows between us when we choose to show up for each other.
Let me tell you what this looks like in practice, because James doesn’t leave us with abstract theology. He gives us concrete actions.
“Are any among you suffering?” The first step is acknowledgment. We have to be willing to see each other’s pain, to name it, to refuse to pretend that everything is fine when it’s not. In a culture that tells us to suffer in silence, to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, to keep our struggles private, James says: Make it communal. Bring it into the light of community care.
Turn to someone and say: “Make it communal!”
“They should call for the elders.” The second step is reaching out. But notice it’s not just the suffering person’s responsibility to ask for help. The community has already created structures, already designated people whose job it is to respond. The elders aren’t just waiting to be asked, they’re already positioned to notice, to respond, to show up.
“Elder” is a loaded term particularly in exvangelical circles. Too often the “elders” are just that, the old, white-haired group of people who gate keep the church and in the worst cases gate keep God and God’s grace. Far too often it was the elders who told us how to act, how to show up, and how to access a God who has always been as close as our next breath. This isn’t what James has in mind when he talks about elders. For James and for us the elders can be anyone and indeed we can be both elder and not elder depending on the situation and the context.
Alice Walker talks about how her mother and the other women in her community never waited for someone to ask for help. They saw a need, and they moved toward it. When someone was sick, the women gathered. When someone was grieving, the casseroles appeared. When someone was struggling, the prayers began. This wasn’t organized charity; this was organic community. This was the divine operating through the assumption that we belong to each other.
“Pray for one another,” James continues, “so that you may be healed.” Not so that they may be healed, so that you may be healed. Because here’s what James understands that we often miss: healing is communal. When one person in the body is sick, the whole body is affected. When one person experiences restoration, the whole community is strengthened.
This is why confession isn’t just about individual guilt; it’s about communal integrity.
When we hold our secrets, our shame, our struggles in isolation, we deprive the community of the chance to offer healing. We rob ourselves of the grace that flows through human forgiveness. We miss the opportunity to experience God’s love made tangible through the acceptance and restoration offered by people who know our worst and choose to love us anyway.
In Walker’s work, transformation always happens in relationship. This is how God shows up not in isolation, but in intersection. Not in private prayer, but in communal spaces where people dare to be vulnerable with each other. Not in individual encounters but in the web of relationships that hold us when we can’t hold ourselves.
And then James talks about the great prophet and legendary figure, Elijah. But James says, “Elijah was a human being like us.” Not “Elijah was a special person with special access to God.” Not “Elijah had powers we don’t have.” Elijah was human like us. Elijah prayed like us. And his prayers were effective not because he was superhuman, but because he understood something about divine partnership that we can understand too.
The power isn’t in the specialness of the person praying. The power is in the prayer itself, offered in faith, grounded in community, connected to the networks of care that make healing possible.
This is Walker’s point when she says, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” We keep looking for someone more qualified, more holy, more connected to God. But we need to realize that we are Elijah. We have access to the same divine power. We will be the answer to someone else’s prayer. We can be the hands of God reaching out to console and heal.
The passage ends with this beautiful image: “If anyone among you wanders from the truth and is brought back by another, you should know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”
Notice that restoration happens through relationship. Someone wanders, and someone else brings them back. It’s not God reaching down from heaven to snatch the wanderer back to safety. It’s God working through human relationship, through community connection, through the refusal to let anyone walk away and disappear into their own pain and confusion.
God saves the soul from death, but God does it through the love of people who see the person’s worth when they can’t see it themselves. God covers their sins, but God does it through human forgiveness, human acceptance, and human grace.
What does this mean for us today? It means we stop waiting for God to fix things and start recognizing that we are how God fixes things. It means we stop praying for God to heal our communities and start understanding that we are the healers God is sending.
When someone in our community is struggling with depression, we don’t just pray for their healing, we show up at their door. We bring food. We offer presence. We help them get to therapy. We create the conditions where healing can happen.
When someone is wrestling with addiction, we don’t just pray for their deliverance, we create circles of support. We offer accountability and grace in equal measure. We become the community strong enough to hold them through their recovery.
When someone is grieving, we don’t just pray for their comfort, we become their comfort. We sit with them in their pain. We speak their loved one’s name when they’re afraid everyone else has forgotten. We show up at the one-year mark when the casseroles have stopped coming but the grief is still fresh.
When someone is facing injustice, we don’t just pray for God to intervene, we become God’s intervention. We stand with them. We amplify their voice. We use our privilege as a tool for their liberation.
God doesn’t work around us. God works through us. God doesn’t bypass human community. God uses human community as a means of grace. God doesn’t remain distant. God is intimately involved in the work of liberation and healing, which doesn’t diminish our need for God. It deepens that need. If we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, then we need all the divine wisdom, strength, and love we can get. If we are called to be the hands, feet, and heart of God in the world, then we need to stay connected to the source of all healing, of all hope, and of all transformative power.
James ends this passage with a powerful image: “Whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save the sinner’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.” When we show up for each other, when we refuse to let people stay lost, when we create communities of healing and restoration, we participate in salvation itself. We become partners with God in the work of resurrection.
This is the God who doesn’t just save souls in some distant future. This is the God who saves souls through the ministry of human community. This is the God who doesn’t just forgive sins in some cosmic ledger. This is the God who makes forgiveness real through human relationships that embody grace.
Walker writes about her mother saving discarded plants, nursing them back to health, creating gardens of impossible beauty from what others had thrown away. She writes about communities of Black women who refused to let anyone be disposable, who saw worth where the world saw worthlessness, who created beauty where others saw only brokenness.
This is the ministry James is calling us to. This is the divine partnership we’re invited into. This is what it means to be the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Who in your life is waiting for someone to show up?
Who needs the kind of prayer that comes with hands attached, that manifests as presence, which looks like practical love?
Who has wandered from truth and needs someone to walk alongside them on the journey back to wholeness?
Here’s what I want you to understand, friends: You don’t have to wait until you’re perfect to be the answer to someone’s prayer. You don’t have to wait until you have your own life completely together to be a healing presence in someone else’s story. You don’t have to wait until you are some kind of theological expert or a spiritual giant to be the hands of God reaching out to touch a broken place.
Turn to someone and say: “We don’t have to wait.”
Elijah was a human being like us. Walker’s grandmother was a woman working with dirt and seeds. The elders James talks about were ordinary people who had simply committed to showing up when others needed them.
You are the one someone has been waiting for. Your presence is prayer made flesh. Your compassion is divine love made tangible. Your commitment to community is God’s work in the world.
The question isn’t whether you’re qualified. The question is whether you’re willing. Are you willing to be the intervention you keep praying for God to send? Are you willing to be the community that makes healing possible? Are you willing to be the love that brings the wandering ones home?
This is what James understood, what Walker articulates so beautifully, what womanist theology has always known: God is not elsewhere. God is here, in the space between us, in the love that flows when we choose each other, in the healing that happens when we refuse to let anyone suffer alone.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Not because we are gods ourselves, but because we are the people through whom the God of love and liberation chooses to work in the world. Not because we are perfect, but because we are willing. Not because we have all the answers, but because we are committed to staying in relationship with the questions and with each other.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
May we have the courage to believe it. May we have the wisdom to live it. May we have the love to make it true, not just for ourselves, but for everyone who needs to know they belong, they matter, they are held by a community that will not let them go.
Amen.