Word and Table

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My sermon on James 3.
———-

Today my intentions were to preach a short and sweet sermon.
Unfortunately, though it may be shorter than some of my messages,
I’m afraid it won’t be very sweet.
And if you want to blame anyone for this,
then you’re going to have to blame James,
the writer of our second scripture reading.

You see, at first I thought I might preach on the theme of teaching,
since it is that time of the year and since Isaiah writes about it.
But I decided to hold off on that and maybe preach on this subject on September 27th, which will be our Christian Education Sunday.
Then I thought about preaching on Jesus’ question in the gospel:
Who do you say that I am,
but when I looked back,
I discovered that I preached on this text three years ago when it came around,
and since I know you all remember what I said then,
I decided to pursue another theme.
Maybe the theme of carrying our crosses,
as Jesus admonishes us to do in the gospel as well.
But it was only this past Lent that I spoke on that.
And if you can remember what I preached about three years ago, I thought,
then something I spoke about just six months will really be too familiar.

So that left me, and by extension, you, stuck with the verses from James.
And what verses they are too.
Verses that are anything but sweet.       
The tongue is a small member, James tells us, yet it boasts of great exploits.
How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!
And the tongue is a fire.
The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity;
it stains the whole body,
sets on fire the cycle of nature,
and is itself set on fire by hell.
For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature,
can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species,
but no one can tame the tongue– a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

I don’t know what Sunday School teacher of mine was responsible for this,
but the very first Bible verse I learned as a child was that last one: James 3:8
Though I, of course, learned it in the original King James version:
“But the tongue can no man tame;
it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.”
Can you imagine?
The first verse I learned was not John 3:16 or Psalm 23 or even the Lord’s Prayer, but James 3:8.
Maybe the teacher knew something about me that I didn’t know.

But just so this message won’t be all about me,
let me quote Neil, a friend of mine currently attending seminary at Princeton.
He wrote:
The day I was born (according to my mother) one of the doctors listened to my loud cries and quipped, “That kid’s ALL mouth!”
And somehow that characterization has followed me ever since.
He goes on to add:
I have an old cassette tape recording of myself in the 3rd grade,
talking to the tape recorder.
It was a pretty one-sided conversation,
but apparently that didn’t bother me too much,
as I talked non-stop for 60 minutes on one side,
paused to flip the tape, and carried on for another 60 minutes.

And then he states:
Sometimes when my wife asks me about something for which I have a strong opinion (which could be anything from theology to parenting to what color the frying pan *really* is)
I get on a soapbox and notice about half an hour later that her eyes have glazed over and her responses have degenerated into
“uh huh…yeah…uh huh.”
He concludes with: One might say that I’m prone to diarrhea of the mouth.               
Now I hope that phrase doesn’t offend anyone: diarrhea of the mouth,
but it seems an appropriate description of a disease that affects much of humankind.

Anything and everything can come out of our mouths,
both good and bad.
As James says about the tongue:
With it we bless the Lord and Father,
and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.
From the same mouth come blessing and cursing.
My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.
Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water?
Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs?
No more can salt water yield fresh.
This ought not be so! James states, and I agree with him,
even though I know that I myself have been guilty of the very thing he is talking about.
How about you?

Our scripture lesson from James may seem harsh.
But if you look at it carefully with an open mind,
you will see he is right on target. 
Let me give you a short, three question quiz. 
How many of you can say:
1.    I have never hurt another person with my words
2.    I have never repeated something about another person that I did not know for certain was absolutely true.
3.    I never participate in gossip about other people and their lives.

The truth is that our tongues and our words can hurt or heal —
they can tear down or build up.
Words are powerful.
And the power of words, in some sense, shows the image of God in us. 
It is by the power of the Word that God created the universe. 
When God said, "Let there be…" there was! 
It is the Word become flesh that brought us salvation.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews once wrote:
The Word of God is living and powerful — it is sharper than any two edged sword."  [Heb. 4:12]

As one of my fellow preachers puts it:
“Today’s scripture reading from the letter of James is a critical test of Christian maturity. 
And if you want to ask yourself the question, "How am I doing?" 
Listen to this quick assessment from James 3:2. 
The Living Bible puts it this way,
"If anyone can control his tongue,
it proves that he has perfect control over himself in every other way."
Or perhaps you have heard this definition: 
A mature Christian is one who would not hesitate to sell their talking parrot to the town gossip.”
Or if you want to look at this from a negative point of view,
you could recall the words of the great theologian Oscar Wilde,
"If you can’t say something good about someone,
come over here and sit next to me."

But while we can joke about gossip and loose tongues,
most of the time neither are a laughing matter.
The story is told of a man who lived in a highland village in Scotland.
He passed along a story he had heard about another man for whom he did not care . . . a story, he thought, that was true.
But when the story got around the village,
the man in question was devastated.
His family, his job and his integrity were all destroyed by the rumor mill.
He finally had to leave town — a ruined and defeated man.

As you might have guessed, the guy who helped spread the story eventually discovered that the rumor was false.
He had helped to destroy an innocent man with his tongue.
So he went to his priest.
"Dominie, I have destroyed a man with my words"
and he told the priest the whole story.
"Please Dominie," he said, "I am sorry — can I be forgiven this sin?"

The priest told the man that this was not so simple and told him to take a bag of feathers and place one in the front yard of every house in the village. Although the man thought this to be a strange request to make,
he really wanted forgiveness,
so he followed the instructions to the letter.
At last he came back and said,
"Dominie, I have done all that you asked, may I now be forgiven?"

"Not yet, my son," the priest replied,
"You must first retrace your steps and bring back to me every feather you placed in the village!"
"But, Dominie — I could never do that,
the wind has carried the feathers away!"
"Yes," the priest said, "And in the same way your careless words have destroyed an innocent man!"

As another has said, “Thoughts unexpressed may fall back dead,
but even God can’t kill words after they’re said!"

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.
The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity;
it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature,
and is itself set on fire by hell.
For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species,
but no one can tame the tongue-a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

As a pastor there are several passages of scripture that I am reminded of from time to time or that I turn to in time of need. 
Unfortunately, this is one of those passages. 
I realize that we Christians are sinners like everyone else in the world,
and I realize that the Church can act like so many of the other organizations in the world as well,
but there should be a limit to how true this is in practice.

I have served as a conflict intervention consultant to seven churches and have also been appointed to serve in two churches that were at the highest level of conflict prior to my arrival.
The words that James writes are dead center on the mark when it comes to churches in conflict,
and unfortunately they are also applicable to some churches and Christians that are not in open conflict as well.

When will we learn as Christians to place our tongues along with the rest of who we are under the lordship of Christ?
You see, we are entrusted with a great power here.
We are given a gift that can create or destroy.
We can build up or tear down with this gift.
Do you remember that one of the strongest warnings Jesus ever issued has to do with the matter of how we use our speech? 
Listen carefully:
"I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter…"  Matt. 12:36

Why is this issue so important to Jesus?
It’s important, my friends, because with our words we can draw people to the love of God with our speech or we can turn them off and away. 
We can set the course of a child’s life with a careless word and turn a young person around with a positive nourishing word.
I’m reminded of the musical “Into the Woods.”
In it one of the characters issues a warning in song:
Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
To learn what to be
Careful before you say "Listen to me"
Children will listen

Children will listen . . . and the world is listening,
to what we, as followers of Jesus, have to say.       
What will the people around us hear?

The other day while visiting Gene and Sandy Swann,
we got to talking about finding truth in the Bible and also in other sources.
One of the truths that I have found comes from the Hindu tradition and is called the “Three Gates of Speech.”
These gates of speech are meant to give a person pause before opening his or her mouth and perhaps saying something he or she shouldn’t say. 
Before speaking, one should ask three questions:
Is what I’m about to say the truth?
Is what I am about to say kind?
Is what I am about to say necessary?
Only when we can answer these three questions in the affirmative,
thus going through the three gates of speech,
should we dare to open our mouths to say something.

Needless to say (but I will say it anyway, because that’s how I am),
practicing such a discipline would drastically cut down on all the noise and chatter around us. 
It would also drastically reduce the negativity common in everyday conversation. 
The only trouble I see with using these gates of speech as a kind of filter is that a lot of us might be left without anything to say at all.

But would that be such a bad thing?
Would it?