Made for Blessing--September 17, 2024

Made for Blessing--September 17, 2024

"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." [James 3:10-12]

We weren't made for hate. 

We weren't created to rip each other apart with cruelty and cursing.

We were not intended to spew meanness and crudeness at other people.

God formed us for love, all around--with God, and with our neighbors--and fashioned us with the power of communication so that we could live in healthy and holy relationships with them all.  We were made for blessing--to bless one another with our words, and to bless and praise the God who made us.

There is something truly beautiful about that vision, and these verses from James (which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship) help us to see just how much we have lost by giving into the impulse to speak hatefully and spitefully to one another.  He reminds us that God's intention for humanity has always been that we would use this God-given gift of language for good.  We are the ones who have found ways to weaponize words, to mislead each other, to deceive each other, to hurt each other, and to belittle each other in some childish attempt to make ourselves feel bigger by contrast.  But none of that is what God wanted for us--God had a different way of life in mind for us.  And so it's all the more tragic that we use these mouths of ours both to bless and to curse, to heal and to hurt, to speak the truth and to peddle lies.  We weren't meant for this: we were made for blessing.

One of the gifts of James' letter in the New Testament is that he so very clearly captures a glimpse of what that blessed way of life could look like for us.  He shows us what the way of Jesus would mean in our lives, in our speech, in our choices, in our attitudes and actions, if we dared to take Jesus seriously.  And in a sense, he invites us to dream--to use our faithful imaginations to envision lives in which we didn't feel the need to lob petty insults at people when we disagree, in which we didn't need to stir up anger with false or misleading claims that looks for easy scapegoats, and in which we didn't get sucked into comment wars in social media. James' point here is that we don't have to get lured into any of those things.  We are made, to borrow his imagery, to be springs of good and fresh water! There is no reason for bitter salty brine to come from inside us.  

That's just it. There is nothing and no one forcing us to be rotten to each other with our words... other than that we give in to the rotten lie that tells us we have to fight fire with fire. "You have to have a comeback, or you'll look weak!" the thinking goes.   Or something like, "You can't rely on the truth to be enough; you have to create a story that will make people upset and get them on your side!"  Or in our most insecure moments, we get suckered into the "You have to be as crude to them as they were to you or else you'll be a loser!" mindset.  We don't have to give in to any of those impulses, and we do not have to give them power over us.  Jesus certainly didn't, and he gives us a glimpse of what wholeness in humanity could look like in us.  The way Jesus didn't take the bait when the Respectable Religious People or the Politically Powerful People would set traps for him or lob gotcha questions at him--that can be our way, too, of dealing with others.  The way Jesus used words to heal, to encourage, and to forgive--those can be ours as well.  The only question is whether we will dare to take the path that Jesus has laid out for us... which is the very same way of life we were made for in the first place.

Today is a day to take a step, even if it feels only like a single step, further on that way, by paying attention to what we say and how we say it, and by using this wondrous gift of language we human beings have been given in order to speak truth, beauty, encouragement, compassion, and justice into the world.  Like the Switchfoot lyric puts it, "Love is our native tongue."  This is who we were created to be. This is what it looks like to walk the way of Jesus. We were made for blessing.

Lord Jesus, draw from our lips words that reflect your goodness and invoke your blessings on the world you love.