Sermon James 3:1-12 for September 13, 2009

 

When we consider speech in church, it is usually in a word of waring. We could also consider speech as a Christian practice. We could make it a habit to consider how we use our words as a reflection of our Christian commitments.In time, it can become a habit, a natural way of employing the gift of language. Isn't hospitality an extension of saying hello? Isn't dying well an extension of a proper goodbye?

 

James  wants Christians to be consistent, to have a laser-like focus on the ways of God without becoming distracted. Being double minded is cursing and blessing with the same mouth. His emphasis, his expectation, is  on the creative and saving word of God. Johnson speaks of world defining capacity (205:NIB). After all Genesis 1 has God creating with a word.. In Proverbs, Lady Wisdom speaks to a public that rarely wants to hear her life-giving words. What we say can help affect the atmosphere of our experience to be easy or tense, pleasurable or painful. We live with distorted language-Maybe we should take a media sabbath every week, or even every day. Especially when the words are propaganda or distorted or designed only to fuel frustration.

 

James plays with the idea of little things having big impact. First, he speaks of small things acting to steer large things,  of bridle and rudder. In our time the tiny computer chip helps process the ones and zeros that make up computer code. Carrie Newcomer has a cute little song, Don't Push Send, about the dangers of that little button when a private e-mail can get published to the entire office. I heard the senior Senator from Minnesota say yesterday that it was time to press the reset button on health care plans. Maybe it's best to go back to Luther's hymn, A Mighty Fortress, where he says that one little word can fell the devil.

 

Speech can indeed become demonic-it breathes hellfire when we get angry. Anger seems to bypass the filter we all have between mind and mouth.If we go back to chapter one, anger doesn't produce God's righteousness. As James says, those same lips that pray, those same lips that say I love. We can say hurtful things that cut to the marrow. I'm of the age when children had their mouths washed out with soap. I'm not troubled by its method, but I am troubled that it was used exclusively for vulgarity. Far more threatening are hateful words, cruel words. When we are the recipient of angry words, we may be able to dismiss them more easily. The ones that have been practiced, that come from some deep place can be even more threatening.  

 

Quotes and proverbs are often examples of good words-"words, once spoken, can never be recalled." It's similar to a children's sermon I heard where words were compared to toothpaste being squeezed out, and they tried to shove it back in. I filled in at a wedding yesterday, and when people starting stressing about little things intoned the words of my grandmother-"a smart person won't notice and a dumb person will think that's the way it's supposed to be." The tongue can offer so much blessing: a word of encouragement, of sympathy. To say I love you is a powerful set of three small words,  almost as powerful as the words I do at a wedding that celebrates that love. What if we sought to say a kind word every day, to ingrain it as a habit? Maybe some of us  had a family gathering here at the last Holiday of the summer, blessed Labor Day. What if we spent some time over the grace before meals, what if we labored a bit over the toast? What if we said something kind along with the teasing? After this Labor Day weekend, we do well to take a break from a discouraging word and labor on some encouraging ones.