Bite Your Tongue

In my sermons so far this September we’ve been looking at the New Testament’s book of James and we have already seen James’ practicality. He was less interested in faith as a way of thinking than faith as a way of living. So two weeks ago my sermon was called “Just Do It.” Like the old Nike shoe advertisement, we need to do what Jesus wants us to do. For James, being a Christian is all about how we live.

My sermon last Sunday was called “Just the Facts, Ma’am.” I tried to express what James meant when he wrote, famously as it turns out, that “faith without works is dead.” (James 2.17) If we were put on trial for being Christians and the facts presented by the prosecution were not enough to convict us, can we truthfully claim to be followers of Jesus? James would say “no” because Christian faith is about how we live. James always points to the factual and practical.

But who was this James? A traditional answer says he was one of, probably the oldest of, the brothers of Jesus. In three places the gospels mention the brothers or sisters of our Lord.[1] But one of the problems with the traditional answer about who wrote the book of James is that according to Catholic teaching Jesus didn’t have any physical brothers or sisters. This viewpoint arises from the Catholic belief that Mary remained a virgin not only in conceiving Jesus but throughout her life. This requires that New Testament references to Jesus’ siblings be read as referring to cousins or to stepbrothers or stepsisters fathered by Joseph in another, unmentioned marriage.[2]

We are not constrained by Catholic teaching, of course, but who wrote James remains a complicated subject.[3] The discussion of authorship goes on for many pages in most commentaries[4] and most but not all New Testament scholars do feel that James was written by Jesus’ actual brother. It appears that James was not a disciple of his big brother during Jesus’ earthly lifetime but became a disciple after the Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection. James also became a major leader in the Christian church in Jerusalem and was probably stoned to death about ad 62 for being a follower of Christ.[5]

But in all of this the thing that interested me the most was that in many ways James sounds a lot like the reformer John Calvin, the father of Presbyterianism.[6] For Calvin, one of the most brilliant theologians who ever lived, was never interested in theology for theology’s sake. Theology has to make a difference in how we live and, of course, that is James’ primary concern. You say that you believe in God and have faith in Jesus. James says, “Show me!” Calvin says the same thing.

John Buchanan, the pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, recently made this point at a conference of pastors. He reminded them that in Calvin’s time — the mid-1500s — that most everyone thought that Christian faith was lived best by the religious: priests, monks, and nuns. But lay people had a difficult perhaps impossible time living faithfully. This attitude still lingers. I can’t count how many times I’ve been asked to pray in a group by someone suggesting that being a minister I have a “better connection.” But the Reformation in general and John Calvin in particular taught otherwise. What clergy do is no more holy than what homemakers, laborers, physicians, police, and teachers do.[7] That was Buchanan’s point. Or farmers and shopkeepers, managers and programmers, students and people who are retired. I am not more holy than you because being a Christian is not about who we are or our job. It is about how we live. James makes that point again and again and again.

And, to finally come to the morning lesson, James says it is not just about how we live or what we do. It is also about what we say or don’t say. James was very concerned about what comes out of our mouths. What we say can bless or it can curse. Whether we are clergy or laity what we say makes a difference. Let’s read today’s text in chapter 3.

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. 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. 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.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me! With these brave little lines, countless kids ward off the taunts of other kids. I chanted this at my best friend Donny when he called me names. I would guess that you chanted it too. How many generations of parents have passed on this little ditty or something like it, hoping it will protect their children from harm done by human speech?

Yet we know the ditty lies. If words did not have the power to hurt, we would not need a chant to protect ourselves. But words do hurt. Psychology teaches what common experience already knows. Words wound and even cripple — words spoken that cannot be retrieved, words withheld from others who ache to hear them, even words imputed to the minds of others in the imagination. Words can and do hurt.[8] When James talks about how little things — a bridle or a rudder — can control such large things — a horse or a ship — we have no trouble understanding that the tongue, although very small, can cause such huge effects. The tongue accomplishes far more than its size seems to make possible. James’ concludes pessimistically that while we can tame all other species, “no one can tame the tongue.”

Last week I read a sermon on this text that talked about a little boy’s remembrance of grade school. “In first grade, Mr. Lohr said my purple teepee wasn’t realistic enough, that purple was no color for a tent, that purple was a color for people who died, that my drawing wasn’t good enough to hang with the others. I walked back to my seat counting the swishes of my baggy corduroy trousers.” Then the boy took a black crayon and wiped out what he had drawn.

But he also remembered another teacher. “In second grade, Mr. Barta said, ‘Draw anything.’ He didn’t care what. I left my paper blank and when he came around to my desk, my heart beat like a tom-tom while he touched my head with his big hand and in a soft voice said, ‘The snowfall. How clean and white and beautiful.”[9] The tongue can curse. The tongue can bless. And it doesn’t just happen with kids.

Quite a few years ago some people at the church I was serving became upset with me. I met with them to see if we could work through our differences. That meeting didn’t go very well and afterwards a woman got quite literally in my face. She came so close that the spittle from her angry words sprayed my face and she said, “You have never preached the Gospel!”

I am not a very holy man. At least not as holy as I want to be, or could be, or should be, or perhaps even appear to be. But I can honestly tell you that the only thing I have ever wanted seriously to do in my life is to preach the Gospel. I have never claimed to do it well. I only claim that it is all I have ever wanted to do.

So I don’t have words to express what the words of that woman did to me. For if she was right, then my life was a lie. And if she was wrong, a part of my soul was set afire and years later it can still burn. I have forgiven her. I keep forgiving her. But don’t ever doubt James when he says that the tongue is “itself set on fire by hell.”

My point is not that woman. My point is James’ point. The very same gift of speech that enables human beings to praise God also enables them to curse their fellow human beings. Such a contradiction ought not to happen, but it does. Can we ever learn to bite our tongues?

Can we ever tame the tongue’s tendency to hurt and do harm? James appears pessimistic. If we just read the verses of today’s text where James describes common human experiences and didn’t bother with the rest of the book, we might feel he sounds more like an advice columnist than a writer of sacred scripture. I grew up with Ann Landers and Dear Abby. They offered practical advice for practical problems and I suppose advice columnists — I don’t know who they are today — still offer practical solutions. But James is unlike an advice columnist because he offers no solutions for the problem of human speech. He has no advice for quenching the tongue’s fiery ways. James seems quite pessimistic about human speech, speech that simultaneously praises God and curses God’s creatures.

Preachers being who we are, I’m guessing that most sermons on this text do offer advice about taming the tongue. Certainly the sermons I read did that. But I think we must pay attention to James’ pessimism. If I offered a list of tips about taming the tongue, we might be able to do them. Some of the time, but not all of the time. We might even want to do them but ultimately we find out that we are incapable to always say the right things and never say the wrong things.[10] James is right. There is no complete taming of the tongue.

This is why it amazes me to hear people, perhaps very notable people, think back over their lives and say, “If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” I hear that all the time and I always think can anyone be so monumentally arrogant that they wouldn’t change anything if they could live their lives again? Who are they kidding? Themselves, I guess. There are thousands of things I would change if I were to live my life again and most of those have to do with things I said or didn’t say, with curses spoken or blessings not spoken.

But the larger truth James wants us to know is that even when our speech curses and does not bless, we still belong to God. (We’ll talk more about this next week.) We are always God’s children and when we know that, we learn to trust God’s forgiveness and seek to forgive others in turn. Then our lives become a blessing. So James always points back to the practicalities of how we live. Ultimately our living is even more important than our speaking. We’ll sing about this in a moment.

Can the same spring pour forth fresh water and brackish water at the same time? No, of course not. So James tells us to do what is right. We are loved by God. Live out that love in practical ways. Let our lives be springs of fresh water. James agrees with the Apostle Paul who wrote “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13.4-8a)

The more we live in the practicalities of love, the more our tongues will bless and not curse. May God helps us so to live.

[1] See Matthew 12.46-47, Mark 6.3, Luke 8.19-20.

[2] Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 95.

[3] I found the most thorough discussion in Luke Timothy Johnson’s Anchor Bible commentary. Johnson concludes that the most likely author was James, the brother of the Lord. But his caveat is helpful: “These arguments do not prove that James of Jerusalem, the ‘Brother of the Lord,’ wrote the letter. Such proof is unavailable, for the simple reason that, even if early, the document could still have been penned by some other ‘James’ than the one who became famous in the tradition. But the arguments do tend strongly toward the conclusion that James is a very early writing from a Palestinian Jewish Christian source. And James the Brother of the Lord is a reasonable candidate. A letter from this James to ‘the twelve tribes in the dispersion’ accords well with the fairest reading of our earliest sources and the self-presentation of the composition itself.” Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James, The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 121.

[4] The discussion takes up more than 130 pages in the four James commentaries in by own library and at least two dozen additional pages in various New Testament reference works, dictionaries, and introductions.

[5] Catholic scholar Raymond Brown appears to avoid commenting on whether James was a full physical sibling of Jesus. Nonetheless Brown cites arguments pro and con for James being the “James of Jerusalem” who was martyred in ad 62. Brown also appears to favor that the sophisticated Greek of the letter makes it unlikely to have been written personally by a “villager from Nazareth,” that is, James the brother of Jesus. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997) 741. However, Johnson argues that the “question of language” is not as decisively against James as Brown suggests. See Johnson, 116-118.

[6] Johnson, 142-144.

[7] Jerry L. Van Marter, “A Weekday Faith,” Presbyterians Today 96.7 (2006): 13.

[8] Walter Brueggemann, Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, James D. Newsome, Texts For Preaching, Year B (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993) 509.

[9] Alex Gondola, “Tips on Taming the Tongue,” Lectionary Homiletics 17.5 (2006): 63.

[10] NewProclamation.com, http://members.newploclamation.com/commentary, Internet, 17 Sep. 2006.