The Power of Our Words--September 16, 2024

The Power of Our Words--September 16, 2024

"For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, 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. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God." [James 3:2-9]

For people who care about following the way of Jesus, the way we speak matters.

I would hope that much is obvious, but sometimes it is worth just letting the words of Scripture sink in on the subject.  You can tell here in these words from James, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, just how seriously this ancient church leader took matters of speech in the Christian community.  You get the sense that James has seen firsthand the kind of damage that hateful and careless words can do in a community, and he is coming from a place of heartache that is still healing as he writes here.

James is feeling pretty raw here, you can tell. He almost sounds like he's ready to give up hope on us human beings ever using words in a good or healthy way.  The description he gives here is pretty bleak: "the tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body... and is itself set on fire by hell."  Wow--that's pretty severe!  (I would not recommend James look for work writing greeting cards, to be honest.)  And part of what is so difficult--and so disappointing from James' perspective--is that he's writing to Christians, who (one would hope) should know better than to give into hateful speech, gossip, or rotten language.  James isn't writing to a hypothetical audience of "general citizens" of the Empire, or to people who have never heard of Jesus.  He is writing to followers of Jesus as a leader of a Christian community, and you can hear it in the way he speaks that he has just been gutted before by seeing the damage caused by mean-spirited, deceitful, and hateful language.  Don't try and tell James that words don't matter, or that Christ-followers are free to spew whatever garbage or vitriol they want to out of their mouths--we aren't.  We are bound by the way of Jesus, who uses the power of his words for truth, for healing, and for love. We simply do not have the option of peddling convenient lies that fit our preferred narratives or degrading other people because we don't like them. If we care about walking the way of Jesus, we have to care about the way we use words.

This is one of the things James is painfully clear about, actually: the reason for us not to use hateful or vile speech toward anybody else is that everybody is made in God's image, and is worthy of being treated with decency and dignity because of the value God has placed in them.  That's a really important notion, and it's pretty fundamental to how the Scriptures teach us to think about our speech and about other people.  For the writers of the Bible, the right question is never "Can I get away with saying this?" or, "Don't I have the right to say whatever I want, whether it's true and kind or not?" but rather, "Is this something I ought to be saying to someone who bear's God's image?"  And if we take that question seriously, it really changes what we say, and how we say it.

Of course, as you can tell from James here, this isn't just about matters of etiquette or good manners. James isn't merely worried about Christians being accepted in polite society--he knows that reckless and hateful speech can wound, or even kill.  In our day and our culture, the stakes are terribly obvious--as false rumors about Haitian migrants (who have legal permission to be here) have been amplified (often by people who claim to be followers of Jesus) and in turn have led to threats of bombings, shootings, and other violence in schools, colleges, and offices just a few hours from where I live.  What starts as rumor gets amped up by demagogues into a culture-war talking point, and now we end up with people's lives being threatened--all because people were careless with their words.  We are living in a time when casual and thoughtless speech about one's political opponents gets fanned into real-life violence.  And we're living in a time when the incendiary comments of public figures can easily incident stochastic violence (that is, you can't predict precisely when or where someone will do something terrible, but the provocations from public voices keeps increasing the likelihood that something terrible will happen at some point).  You get the sense that James would take a look at the fear and danger unleashed these days and weep with the sorrow that comes from knowing it didn't have to be this way.

James' point in all of this passage is precisely that--it doesn't have to be this way.  We don't have to use our words as weapons, and we don't have to give into the temptation to dabble in gossip, deceit, or slander (or even just irresponsibly sharing rumors without having facts or the full story) to serve our own agendas.  We don't have to give into the conventional wisdom that the end justifies the means, and that we can invent false stories to suit our purposes at the cost of the well-being of other people who are made in the image of God.  The world's voices will tell us we "have to" play its game and play by its rules, but James reminds us that we don't. Indeed, if we are followers of Jesus, we cannot.

It's worth a second thought today before we click "like" or repost or share or amplify words that reinforce hatred, that slander other people, or that deny the image of God in other people. The watching world--as well as the next generation of disciples--is watching us, and more importantly, listening to us.  James simply reminds us that if we are going to call ourselves followers of Jesus, we cannot ignore the ways our words reflect the way of Jesus, too.

Lord Jesus, direct our words and our thoughts, so that people can heard the cadences of your own voice in us.