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I was thinking about you, about us this week, and I ran into this from I Peter:
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, God’s own people…”
Oh really? Well, as I look around this morning, it seems more like we are pretty ordinary people, just stumbling along, trying to do the best we can just like everybody else. But if we are really the church of Jesus Christ, it seems as if there must be something different, something distinctive about being the community of faith.
That’s what we’re talking about in these weeks. “Following Jesus Together.”
What does it mean to be the church? I get really excited thinking when I think about the possibilities. “Wow, here’s how we can make a difference. Here’s how in a world gone awry in so many ways people might look at God’s people and see something different. Something attractive. And they might be drawn to follow as well.”
So far, we’ve looked at four things:
- People who follow Jesus worship together- one of few times take eyes off of selves, and pay attention to God.
- People who follow Jesus pray together- we hear and know God more fully in community.
- People who follow Jesus risk knowing each other- and can be the palpable presence of Christ to each other in open, honest, loving relationship.
- People who follow Jesus have conflict, not perfect…but can deal with it quickly, directly and with open-hearted generosity.
This morning, in our fifth message, we’re going to look at a section in the book of James. Please stand for the reading of God’s Word.
James 1:19-26
You know, most all of us that preach at Bethany eventually suffer from this complex where we look at the passage we’re supposed to preach on, and we say to ourselves “This is the hardest passage in the whole Bible! What a bummer that I drew the short straw!” (Or, “Why did Dan assign this to me?!) And then we step up here, and we say something like “Well, I read the Bible scholars on this and they all said, “Good luck preaching on this passage!”
Well, I’m happy to report, there is no such angst this morning. We’ve heard two passages from James.
by the way: The great preponderance of Church tradition and other historical evidence indicates that this author is James, the brother of Jesus. James was a leader in the earliest church community, headquartered in Jerusalem, and he appears several times in other NT books.
What James says is neither difficult, nor puzzling, nor complicated. It’s very practical: “Mind Your Tongue.”
Really, that’s pretty much what it says. Not so complicated. Just hard to do.
Our passage from chapter 1 is bookended by this: James’ first word is
Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak,
slow to anger.
And nearly the last word in the passage is this:
If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.
And the entire passage from chapter 3 corresponds:
No one can tame the tongue- with it we bless the Lord…and with it we curse others… My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so!
James is neither the first person nor the last to understand the danger of the unrestrained tongue.
A quick look at the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, started in perhaps the 11 th century BC, let’s us know how important the control of our speech is:
Listen to these proverbs, stacked one on top of another:
12:6 The words of the wicked are a deadly ambush, but the speech of the upright delivers them.
12:13 The evil are ensnared by the transgression of their lips, but the righteous escape from trouble.
12:18 Rash words are like sword thrusts, but the tongue of the wise brings healing.
12:19 Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.
13:3 Those who guard their mouths preserve their lives, those who open wide their lips come to ruin.
or listen to Zeno, a Greek philosopher from the 5th century BC:
(People) are born with two eyes, but with one tongue, in order that they should see twice as much as they say.
“Bridle your tongue,” says James in the first century AD.
You don’t have to be a Christian to recognize that the tongue is a powerful thing. But I’m interested that here in the first century AD, James, the leader of an early Christian community found it so important to emphasize this so strongly.
Why did James give such strong warnings about the community restraining its speech?
When we talk, we don’t listen.
There's a well-known story from the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt story. FDR was weary with night after night of receiving lines, greeting guests to the White House, etc. and he began to feel as though no one listened to what he said anyway, because they were so nervous and only concerned with what they would say to the president.
So FDR decide to have a little fun one night, and as people came through the line he said to them quietly “I murdered my grandmother this morning!” And just as he had predicted, no one even said a thing about it for some time.
Then finally, one member of the diplomatic corps did hear, leaned close to FDR and said “Mr. President, I’m sure she deserved it!”
When we talk, we don’t listen.
We do this to one another, don’t we?
I was with someone for an hour a couple of months ago, a friend…another pastor, actually. I came away from the conversation vaguely dissatisfied. Somebody asked me how the time had been, and then it hit me. I had asked any number of questions about their life, but not one question came back about me. Not one, in over an hour!
- Have you ever been with a person who couldn’t let you even finish talking before they were jumping in with advice?
- Have you ever been in a group where you shared something going on inside you, and before you could exhale you were receiving five pieces of advice?
Fixing it? I thought that was just males who had this urgent need to fix things, but groups are good at it too. James says “Be quick to hear…slow to speak.”
When we invert that, we practice “quickspeak,” and we miss things. It is a discipline not to do it. Anne and I have a little game now where, if one of us is talking and the other one jumps in and cuts us off, the other one says (gently, hopefully!) “Can I finish my sentence now?” When we talk, we don’t listen.
We do the same thing with God, I think. How many times have you had a prayer time with people where you hardly get your eyes closed and someone is rattling off the list of things to pray for? That’s what you’re supposed to do when you pray, right?
Not really.
I’ve learned so much from people I’ve gotten to pray with…who just sit silently for a few moments or minutes. Listening. Before we say a word. Because when we talk, we don’t listen.
One of the things I so loved about my sabbatical last fall was the time to listen for God and not just talk…on a long bike ride, or long beach walk.
Having hours to be quiet was amazing. It meant I didn’t have to sit down (like I find myself sometimes doing now) and say “Okay, Lord, I have exactly 30 minutes to be with you this morning, and I have a long list, so listen up!”
Listening gives God’s word a chance to implant in your souls, as James says (1:21). Be quick to listen…slow to speak. Because our talking can cause us to miss what other people, or what God is saying.
Why else does James give such warning about bridling our tongues?
If we say something enough…we start to believe it’s true. Even if it’s not.
If we think we’re religious, and do not bridle our tongues but deceive our hearts…we’re in a bad place. (-James)
Some of the many, many corporate ethics scandals which have happened in the last four or five years…I don’t think those involved necessarily started out saying “we’re going to cheat our stockholders and employees out of a bunch of money.” They said “well, this is a grey area. And then this area is grey. And this may not be the right thing to do, but the end will justify it.”
We call it “spinning” the truth. We can do it so easily and for so long, we think it is the truth. We don’t restrain our tongues, and our hearts are deceived. It’s one reason we need each other. Sometimes we need someone to say “What on earth are you talking about? That is way off base!”
And if our hearts are deceived, James says, we quit doing good. We don’t have time to go into this today, but it’s another one of those things in James that is way too easy to understand. Do you want to please God? Okay, here it is. Care for the orphans and widows. Care for those who need help. Your heart has not been deceived by your mouth if you are caring for those in need.
Why else does James give such warning about restraining our speech?
Because he knows…that with our mouths…we can so easily destroy people...or... we can amazingly build them up.
The same mouth does both things. Words are powerful…they matter. Whoever thought up the saying “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me” was wrong. Just wrong. Words matter.
I’m reading this huge, thick biography of Winston Churchill right now. Whatever else Churchill was, during the darkest days of WWII, he was an encourager with his speech. One writer says
From a concrete bomb shelter deep underground, Churchill spoke to the people of Britain not of superiority but of sacrifice, not of conquest but of courage, not of revenge but of renewal…to old men waiting on rooftops with buckets of water for the firebombs to land, to frightened women and children huddled behind sand bags, with sirens screaming overhead…Slowly but surely, Winston Churchill talked England back to life.
I think I saw some of the power of encouragement at our last Session meeting. We were verbally thanking and saying goodbye to the six elders going off of Session after 3 or 6 year terms. For each one, around the circle, four or five others would speak to them, talk about where they had seen God, how they had been encouraged in specific ways by their life and ministry. I tell you, it felt like holy ground. I watched the people receiving the encouragement, I saw them tear up, I saw them sit up a little straighter.
Words matter.
But they matter the other way as well. An unkind, unwelcoming, harshly spoken word can remain with us for a long, long time. I bet every one of us could remember from childhood some name, some mean thing that was said to us. It sticks with you. We instantly know the difference between receiving constructive criticism…and just being criticized. Let me tell you two quick stories.
One Sunday near the beginning of the 20th century, in a little church in a small village in Croatia, an altar boy was helping the priest at Mass. The boy accidentally dropped the glass of wine, and it smashed on the ground in pieces. The priest shouted at the boy “Leave, and don’t come back!” The boy obliged, and never returned. Later he grew up and became Tito, the ruthless dictator of Yugoslavia at the end of WWII.
At almost the exact same time, in Peoria, Illinois in a Catholic cathedral, another altar boy also helped at a mass presided over by the bishop. He, too, dropped the wine glass, and later in his life would write: “There is no atomic explosion that can equal in intensity of decibels the noise and explosive force of a wine glass falling on the marble floor of a cathedral in the presence of the bishop. I was frightened to death.” The bishop, with a warm smile, merely said “Someday you will be a priest.” He indeed grew up to be Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, one of the most beloved and well-known pastors of the 20th century.
Of course things are more complicated than just a word or two. But words matter, for better or for worse.
Watch your tongue, James says. From the same mouth can come blessing or curse. And when it is curse, it not only can destroy other people, but it also gets in the way of US coming to God.
Have you ever tried centering yourself here for worship on a Sunday morning after you’ve had a fight on the way here with your spouse? Or yelled at the kids?
One last thing. Restraining our tongue…does not mean saying nothing.
It’s also a mark of Christ’s community that we can be truth-tellers. “Speak the truth,” Ephesians says, “in love.” Bridling the tongue does not mean being silent. It means:
- not saying everything that comes into your mouth
- thinking about the impact on the other person
- questioning your motive in saying it
- asking the question, “Will this conversation please God?”
I actually think that many of us could grow a lot in speaking a hard word to someone.
Have you ever been in a group where one person dominated and talked constantly to the point of discomfort?
Or you watched one person absolutely go after another verbally?
Or listened to someone just blatantly gossip?
The right thing is for someone to confront them. “This is not okay.” Lovingly, with appropriate timing, with right motives…but it needs to be done.
We’re not very good at this in the church. Doing nothing is ultimately not loving, either to the next person who will be hurt, nor to the speaker themselves. It would be a great witness to our world if we could, in the context of loving relationship, help one another hold our tongues.
Why does James give such a strong warning about the faith community watching our tongues?
So that we might pay attention to one another and to God, routinely speak the truth, build others up, praise God…and show the world something different.
I suspect James learned quite a bit from his brother, Jesus. The New Testament is full of stories of Jesus listening to people, speaking the truth, building others up, confronting them when needed. If we are going to follow Jesus together, we need to work hard at something as mundane, as routine, as ordinary as holding our tongues. So that in our life together, we might help one another…so that “every knee will bow, and every tongue confess…that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
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