September 17, 2006

Be Careful What You Say
 

by Rev. Dr. Jim Carlson

James 3:1-12

Opening Illustration – Ironic that on Rally Day our passage says that not many of you should become teachers.

Passage concerns abundance of teachers. Chapter is focused on behavior that disqualifies a person from teaching in the church.

Two behaviors are cited: careless speech and arrogance. Today’s focus is on careless speech.

Situation where anyone who wanted could declare himself/herself to be a teacher. Lack of oversight led to people using teaching time to disparage others.

Unclear who the self-proclaimed teachers were criticizing. Reason why James is difficult to interpret. Best guess is that teachers were criticizing each other.

Group of people who each felt their own understanding of the message of Jesus was the correct one. When they taught, they probably cursed each other.

Author responds by warning potential teachers – stricter judgment by God. Expected return of Jesus any day.

Author admits that everyone makes mistakes, even himself. No teacher can claim his/her teaching is unquestionable.

Small body part – the tongue - has great influence over congregation. Like small bit that controls horse or small rudder that steers large ship. Like a small fire that starts a forest fire.

If words have so much influence, they must be chosen carefully, and people who teach must be held accountable for what they say.

Author discourages armchair quarterbacks from appointing themselves to teaching position by describing harmful potential of words – poison, disruption of the cycle of life, unrighteous part of the body.

Author shows inconsistency of teachers who disparage others. (slide)

Obviously, one speaker who does both these things is defying all logic. Blessing God excludes the possibility of cursing someone else.

Now what I’ve presented so far this morning may have accomplished nothing except for scaring off anyone who ever considered the possibility of teaching Sunday school. But I hope that anyone who suddenly feels that way will consider the possibility that there is a lot more for us here than a warning against sloppy teaching.

What we have here is some important principles for sharing our faith with each other. Whenever we are together, whether its in Sunday school, which I hope you’ll attend regularly, or in meetings or drinking coffee after worship or working on a project or whatever, we are constantly sharing our faith with each other, whether we know it or not.

This passage gives us some very useful advice in how we interact. There are two things I want to focus on.

First: we all make mistakes. No one is perfect in everything he or she says. People with the best of intentions and the love of God in their hearts are capable of saying cruel, unloving, insensitive, things. That’s just how we were created.

Sometimes we are going to be the very ones who make the remark we wish we could take back. If the writer of this letter can admit that about himself, then we have to be willing to give grace both to ourselves and to other people who say something we think is ridiculous.

People who piled on Mel Gibson for anti-semitic comments. We’ve all made comments that we’re not proud of. If someone had a tape recorder recording everything we said for a year, we’d probably all find things we’d like to take back.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t be held accountable for what they say. I’m just reminding that the mercy you show others in speech should be the kind of mercy you would want others to show you. And sometimes we just need to take what people say with a grain of salt.

Second, I think the underlying premise behind what’s being said here is a deep respect for other human beings as people made in the image of God.

The reason why a person can’t talk about how wonderful God is while at the same time calling someone else a stooge is because every one of us is made in God’s image. To deny the innate goodness and value of another human being is to deny the goodness of God. And no Christian wants to do that.

One of the things that really disturbs me these days is the way the public debate has been cheapened as a way of making the media more profitable. We turn to people who are supposed to be well informed about the issues of life because we want to get their take on things that we don’t completely understand.

It used to be that pundits simply stated their opinions, usually with a great deal of respect for those who hold a different viewpoint. But we’ve come to realize that it would be more interesting and better for ratings to have people disparage each other to the point of wishing death on those who see things differently.

Now you probably think I’m kidding about this, but unfortunately I’m not. I’m going to place a quote from a nationally syndicated columnist on the screen. This best selling author and columnist is a woman who appears constantly on the TV and even has a regular column in our Waukesha paper.

This columnist has long running philosophical and political differences with the editors of the NY Times. In reflecting on her differences with the Times in 2002 she wrote, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”

When asked later if she regretted making such inflammatory comments, she said, “Of course I regret it. I should have added 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and the reporters.”

In another magazine interview she said, “I don't care about anything else: Christ died for my sins and nothing else matters.” In today’s passage James says, “From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. This ought not to be so.”

This kind of inconsistency should not be associated with the good news of Jesus. We should not bless God and wish death on other people. It’s like me trying to grow pickles from my pumpkin plant or like expecting the Cubs to field a winning baseball team. Things just don’t work that way.

Our interaction with each other here in church, as well as our interaction with people we meet every day in the course of our lives, must be based in a deep respect for the dignity of other people because they are made in the same image of God.

James tells us that respect should be apparent in the way we talk, in the way we act. James would say that someone who claims to be a Christian but displays that kind of inconsistency has a dead faith.

But my hope is that in the coming year of Sunday school our discussions and classes will model a living faith, one which affirms the great value of every person as being a reflection of God. And I hope that every word I choose will make that respect clear.

I know that I will make mistakes. I know that sometime I’m going to say something I wish I wouldn’t. And even James admits he made mistakes. But I hope we’ll do our best to be careful what we say so that we can allow God to steer this ship straight into the Kingdom of God.