Religion 104 with Professor James: The Wisdom Community

James 3:13-4:3,7-8a

We live in an “information society.” Since the 1970s at least, our society has experienced an explosion of information and an expansion of access to information that has been positively mind-boggling. We live in an information society. I carry around on my hip more computer memory than existed in the entire mainframe computer of the old Computation Center at UNC-Chapel Hill where I worked as a work-study student in the mid-1970s. I’ve got more memory on my hip than that giant thing had in the whole room, and I have access at my fingertips to information that only a few decades ago was available only in libraries and corporate offices and private collections. But here it all is in my hand: 24/7/365(or 6) access to information and misinformation galore. We live in an information society.

With the rise of an information society, we have entered into what is called a “knowledge economy.” Depending on your definition of the knowledge economy, it either means that knowledge is the preeminent output of our economy now, or it means that knowledge is the indispensable tool and the economic driver of economies the world over. Both are correct. Not just in major academic centers or in large corporate offices but in cities and towns and rural areas all over the country and all over the world, knowledge is a power that has gone out from a relatively few select centers to places and people far-flung. “Know-how” is no longer the private property of a select few. We live in an information society, and we work in a knowledge economy.

But this morning, I’d like to suggest that “Professor James,” as I’ve been calling him for the last several weeks, presents to us in today’s Epistle Lesson in the Revised Common Lectionary a “third order.” In addition to the information society and the knowledge economy in which we live and work, James calls our attention to the necessity of a wisdom community. A wisdom community.

You see, the information society is amazing. But one of its shortcomings is that in and of itself, the information society does not provide us with any criteria on the basis of which to decide which information of all the information that is out there we should use to shape our lives and form our souls and inform our perspective on the world. The information available to us is so expansive that it cannot be calculated, but there are no criteria provided by the information society to guide us in discerning which information should shape us and form us and feed us. That requires a wisdom community. In the knowledge economy, the know-how available to us, the know-how that we have—or that we have available to us through the capability of others—is astonishing and astounding. We have no shortage of know-how, but we stumble again and again over know-why. We have plenty of know-how, but we trip and fall down over know-when and know-when-not. Know-how comes with the knowledge economy. But know-why and know-when and know-when-not can only be cultivated in a wisdom community.

“Professor James” lived on the cusp of a revolution in information and knowledge. Shortly after his lifetime there was a revolution in the dissemination of information and the expansion of knowledge. This far removed from it, we don’t even think about it. We’re accustomed to saying “the book” of James without realizing that by speaking of “the book,” we’re revealing that we’re on the other side of the information and knowledge revolution on the cusp of which James lived. We don’t say “the scroll” of James, do we? We say “the book” of James. That shift from scroll-making and scroll-reading to book-making and book-reading was a revolution in human civilization. Instead of producing enormously expensive and tediously prepared material to write on made from goatskin or sheepskin tanned and cut and sewn together at the edges so that you would “scroll” your way into the text and scroll your way back out, it was becoming possible to produce books sewn on one edge with writing on both sides of the page. One of the many advantages of this new information technology was the ability to open it and scan through it. You could leaf through it, and you could find what you wanted and needed far more quickly and easily than in a scroll. Why, it was positively Google-ish, this new information technology called “books.” “Professor James” lived on the cusp of a revolution in civilization and information and knowledge, but he understood very well that no matter how good your information is and no matter how extensive your knowledge is, without wisdom you have no criteria, no principles, no grounding for negotiating your way through the information you have access to and the knowledge you acquire.

A wisdom community is what James points us to at the end of chapter three and the beginning of chapter four. James acknowledges in 3:15 that there is a kind of wisdom that is all about our own ambition, our own self-absorption, our own self-interest and capacity to acquire and gain for ourselves at the expense of others. He says that that kind of wisdom does not create community. That kind of wisdom creates disorder and conflict, wickedness and disputes. It is driven by envy and selfish ambition. But James says there is an alternative wisdom that must be cultivated in community, and that alternative wisdom is “from above.” Wisdom “from above” is the kind of wisdom that comes to us individually and together when we make an effort to draw near to God who draws near to us, as James 4:8 puts it. The wisdom from above, said James, is the wisdom that should form our lives and shape our behaviors and our perspectives on the world. It’s not driven by envy or selfish ambition or cravings. Instead, it is pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits without even a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.

This morning I want to offer two examples of individuals whom I would like to hold up as persons who were fully engaged in the emergence of our information society and our knowledge economy, but neither one of them forgot the importance of the wisdom community. Both of them died this week, and that put them on my radar screen.

Chances are, you have never heard of Horace Carter. In North Carolina journalism circles in which I had my fair share of selfish ambition for a time when I was younger, Horace Carter was a living legend. In 1947, Horace Carter founded the Tabor City Tribune. And at the ripe old age of 33, he won a Pulitzer Prize. Now for those who aren’t familiar with it, the Pulitzer Prize is like an Emmy or a Grammy. It’s the biggest award in the business; it’s the highest prize a journalist or newspaper can win. Horace Carter won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 33 because between 1950 and 1952 there was an enormous uprising of the Ku Klux Klan in Columbus County, North Carolina, and Horry County, South Carolina, the two counties which Horace Carter had decided his newspaper, the Tabor City Tribune, would serve.

This is what he wrote in the first editorial in the first edition of that newspaper. The editorial began, “‘In the beginning, God created’—and so goes the Bible. And this is the beginning of a newspaper designed to serve peoples of all races and colors who live in Columbus County, North Carolina, and Horry County, South Carolina” (emphasis added). That was the mission statement that he wrote in the first editorial of the first edition of the Tabor City Tribune. So in 1950, when the uprising of the KKK began in those two counties, Horace Carter had to decide between his mission and his popularity, between his mission and his personal safety. And during those three years he engaged in investigation after investigation, wrote article after article, wrote editorial after editorial confronting and condemning the Klan and refusing to stand down or be intimidated by the Klan’s violence and vigilantism and its domestic terrorism. There were threats on his life, threats on his family’s life, threats on the lives of his pets. He was threatened that he would be run out of business and run out of town, but he did not stand down, and with him stood advertisers and merchants and others in Tabor City who also refused to back down to the threats.

It’s a remarkable story, really, that a young man born to uneducated parents in a mill village in Albemarle, North Carolina, who graduated from a high school from which no male student had ever completed college won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Not because he had better information than anyone else. Not because he had more knowledge than anyone else. But because he was committed to a community of wisdom in which he had been nurtured. He received a biblical grounding and principled rearing in a strict Southern Baptist family and a Southern Baptist church. And he had a profoundly influential mentoring experience his senior year in college when he was the editor of The Daily Tar Heel, and he sat on Sunday evenings with Frank Porter Graham, the president of UNC-Chapel Hill, as they talked about the problems that the university faced and the state faced and the world faced. Horace Carter was nurtured in a wisdom community, and that’s why he was prepared to do amazing and courageous things in a small town in North Carolina in a troubled and troubling era of that state’s history.

But you don’t have to start out poor or without means in order to cultivate and create and live out the kind of wisdom James espouses. Unless you’re a Virginian, you probably don’t know the name Frank Batten, Sr. Frank Batten, Sr., was born in Virgina seven years after Horace Carter was born in North Carolina. He was born a child of privilege, an heir of a family fortune. But he worked himself up from the bottom of a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, the Virginian-Pilot. He worked himself up from the bottom of the paper to become its publisher. In 1958, the governor of Virginia ordered the secondary schools in Norfolk to close rather than to comply with a court order to integrate. Alone among Virginia’s major papers, Frank Batten, Sr.’s Virginian-Pilot stood against the governor and against the prevailing winds of the “Massive Resistance,” as it was called in Virginia. He stood against it editorially, and he stood against it personally. He helped to mobilize business people and socialites of Norfolk to support re-opening the schools—re-opening them peaceably and re-opening them integrated—which happened in 1959. And for his efforts, Frank Batten won a Pulitzer Prize and became a legend in Virginia journalism circles. He had no different information at his disposal or no special knowledge that other publishers at other newspapers in the state of Virginia did not have. What he had was wisdom without partiality or hypocrisy. And he parlayed that wisdom into becoming one of the most important media moguls of the twentieth century in the United States, acquiring newspapers and television stations and then launching what some people said would surely be one of the greatest follies in the new cable television business. When he came out with the business plan, people told him it would never work. No one would ever watch it, they said. Nobody would watch a 24-hour “Weather Channel”! He believed in it, and he kept working on it, and the rest, as they say, is history. A part of that history is that Frank Batten, Sr., became one of the foremost philanthropists of higher education in the United States, especially in Virginia.

But what I like best about the story of Frank Batten, Sr.’s life is that a few years ago, when someone asked him in an interview how he would like to be remembered, he didn’t talk about the Virginian-Pilot; he didn’t talk about his media exploits or his corporate venture on cable; and he didn’t talk about his breath-taking philanthropy. This is what he said: “I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things.” “I’d like to be remembered as someone who did some worthwhile things,” he said, and Professor James smiled. Doing “some worthwhile things,” pure and peaceable, gentle and willing to yield, full of mercy and bearing fruits without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy is what James is calling us all to do. You don’t have to be born poor, and you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth. It’s not about how much information you have or how much knowledge you acquire. It’s about being a part of a community of wisdom that cultivates discernment and values and principles that inform the decisions we make and the lives we lead as we make our own effort to draw near to God who draws near to us.

Information society? You bet. Knowledge economy? You better believe it. Wisdom community. May it be so. May it be so.

This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.

Religion 103 with Professor James: The Power of Words

James 3:1-12

A curious aside: After I delivered this sermon in the 9:00 a.m. service at First Baptist Greenville on September 13, 2009, I went back to my office and pulled a 50-year-old commentary on the book of James off my shelf just to stay "in the spirit of James" before I preached again at 11:00. What I read was astonishing--and bit frightening to someone trained in the academic disciplines of research and citation. The writer of that commentary used four illustrations that I had just used in my sermon. Things that I was pleased with myself for coming up with during the week before, he had written more than 50 years ago. Now, I don't for a minute think that I'm all that original. Ecclesiastes said it: "There is nothing new under the sun." And it's no surprise that the interpretation of the Word of God across the ages involves criteria and principles that sometimes carry a common content from one century to the next, entirely independently of printed and published works.

But it turns out that the connection here is a little more unsettling--or more deeply gratifying--than that. When I saw the convergence of this writer's exposition to my own, I flipped to the front of the commentary to see who it was. His name was Gordon Poteat. If I had been a teenager texting at that moment, I would have keyed in "OMG!" Gordon Poteat was the son of Edwin McNeill Poteat, President of Furman University from 1903-1918 and a member of First Baptist Greenville, as every President of Furman has been since 1850 when the school moved to Greenville. Gordon Poteat was twelve years old when his family moved to Greenville and to First Baptist Greenville, and he was part of this congregation until he went to college. The connection was eerie.

But there's more. In 1938, Gordon Poteat returned to Greenville to deliver a series of sermons for "Religious Emphasis Week" at Furman. By then, Poteat was a professor of social ethics at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. In his series of sermons, Poteat claimed that the practice of the Christian faith was more important than the mere profession of it. That message so fired up certain Furman students and certain Baptist clergy in the Greenville area in anger and hostility against what he preached that the Furman Trustees fired a religion professor who defended Poteat's preaching. His name was Herbert Gezork, and he was a member of this congregation. He was fired for defending Gordon Poteat who preached sermons along the lines of what I had been preaching for several weeks.

There's one more piece to this. I pulled the bound copy of orders of worship from 1938 off the shelf and turned to February. On February 13, 1938, at the beginning of his famously controversial Religious Emphasis Week at Furman, Gordon Poteat was the preacher in the Sunday evening service at First Baptist Greenville. I know better than to say, "He's ba-a-a-a-a-ck!" But it sure felt that way. It felt as though old Gordon Poteat had just walked right off the pages of his commentary and back into the life of First Baptist Greenville seventy years later. OMG!

“Talk is cheap,” we like to say. “Talk is cheap.” “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me,” we teach our children to say. Talk is cheap, and if any biblical writer was going to endorse the statements that talk is cheap and that sticks and stones can break our bones but words can never hurt us, you would think it would be Professor James, as I have been calling him for the last several weeks. It’s James who insists that it’s not just what you profess; it’s not just what you say with your mouth; it’s what you practice with your life that counts. So you would expect that when we got around to the talk part, James would agree that talk is cheap and that sticks and stones could break our bones but words would never hurt us. But in James 3:1-12, he moves in exactly the opposite direction. Talk is powerful, expensive, and can even be destructive, he says.

Ask Howard Dean. Just to remind some of you (or for those of you who are too young to know), it was 2004. Howard Dean was the leading candidate to become the Democratic nominee for President of the United States until the night of January 19, 2004. Dean finished a disappointing third in the Iowa caucuses. Late that night, in an effort to rev up his supporters, he delivered a speech that will forever be known in the history of American political campaign rhetoric as the “I have a scream” speech. Howard Dean went off in an extraordinary rant that so befuddled and unsettled the American public, at least the Democratic portion of the American public, that he went from a 30 point lead in New Hampshire, the first primary after the caucuses, to losing that primary and out of the race for President. Intemperate speech can be expensive. Ask Joe Biden. For decades, Joe Biden was a wise and effective Senator. No one on either side of the aisle disagrees with that. But every time he ran for President he managed to shoot himself in the foot with his mouth. Talk can be expensive. And now we have a fellow South Carolinian who has won a national foot-in-mouth award. Joe Wilson’s outburst at Barack Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress has reminded us all that something we might say spontaneously turns out to be a case of really bad judgment in retrospect. It’s not the first thing Joe Wilson has said that he has had to apologize for publicly, but it’s his most notorious gaff, for sure. And then there’s Steve Anderson, a Baptist pastor in Tempe, Arizona, who won a previous national foot-in-mouth award for preaching a sermon titled “Why I hate Barack Obama,” and for leading his congregation in praying for the President of the United States to die. Words can be costly and destructive and detrimental not just to the person who speaks them but to the congregation and the community and the world in which they are spoken.

That’s why Professor James, as I call him, says that not many of us should aspire to be teachers and public speakers because all of us make many mistakes. And the problem with that is that there is a double standard when it comes to speaking--and it is an appropriate double standard. Teachers and public persons are appropriately held to a higher standard of judgment than everyone else because words can hurt and destroy. When private individuals in private conversation in their home or family or circle of friends say hurtful, destructive or ignorant things, the damage is not all that widespread. But when teachers in the church, when leaders in the world turn loose words that turn on themselves and on others, James says, they are—we are—rightfully judged more harshly than anyone else. Now what I want you to see about James 3:1-12 as we work through this passage is that there is a double standard and justifiably so, but the principle applies to all of us. Leaders and teachers are held to a higher standard, but the principle of the power of speech for good and for ill applies to all of us.

Take a look at James 3:1-12. If you have your own Bible or the Bible in the pew rack on page 981, I’d like you to take a look at it because what I think Professor James does in these 12 short verses has a fascinating structure and contains a message about the power--and the danger--of speech that we should all be reminded of. In verse one, he points out that teachers are held to a higher standard. In verses 2 through 4 he talks about the powerful positive effect of the tongue or of speech. The first image he uses is that of a horse. With something as small and simple as a bit in the mouth of the horse, the rider can effect a direction of an animal far larger and stronger than the rider. The positive direction and force of the horse can be channeled by the mouth. It’s a positive image of the power of speech. The next image he uses in verses 2 through 4 is also positive. He says, consider a ship. The direction of the entire ship is changed and determined by something as small as the rudder. And he compares that to speech. The tongue, so small a part of the body, and speech, so small an act, is like the rudder that determines the direction of a large ship. Powerful images, positive images for speech.

Then verse 5 becomes a hinge. It’s a hinge on which the imagery swings from positive to negative. He says in verse five, the hinge expression, that the tongue can boast of great exploits. He’s just given positive examples by analogy, but in verse 6 he turns to give negative examples of the power of speech by using the image of the tongue as a forest fire. Fire can consume you. Fire can destroy. Something as small as a spark of words can set off a mob. Something as small as a spark of words can destroy a lifetime of a person’s reputation. A small spark can start a fire that consumes hundreds of thousands of acres. That’s the danger of speech, he says. The second negative image is of how the tongue seems less controllable than wild animals. There is a poisonous power in the tongue that can be deadly. Powerful, negative images for speech.

The positive power of the tongue, of words that are spoken, might best be illustrated, say, in the speeches of Winston Churchill. Churchill’s speeches, his addresses to the people of England, carried them through Britain’s darkest hours, night-long bombardments and day long struggles to make do through the consequences of what had happened overnight. Again and again, Churchill spoke power and inspiration that unified a people and carried them through. Now flip the hinge. All we have to do is cross the English Channel into Europe and Germany at the very same time to see and hear and (for some of us) remember the negative power of speech. Adolf Hitler’s words succeeded in inspiring good people to do unthinkable things. Hitler succeeded in inspiring people just like you and me to do things that they or we would swear on a stack of Bibles we would never do, things contrary to our nature, contrary to our ideals, contrary to our culture and our confession, and yet Hitler’s words had the power to inspire murder and mayhem, death and destruction on an unthinkable scale among cultured, civilized people. Those are the two sides of the hinge in verses 2 through 8. Now, none of us here is a Winston Churchill, and none of us is an Adolf Hitler. We are somewhere in between. And it’s in verses 9 through 12 that James brings the negative and the positive together in a way that applies to most of us.

We're in verses 9 through 12. We arrive in this room to lift up praises to God, to give glory to God, to say wonderful things about God. And then how often we leave this place to say hurtful, destructive, and demeaning things about persons created in the image and likeness of God. James says, my brothers and sisters, this makes no sense. You cannot come into worship and praise and glorify God, and then speak hatefully and destructively of those whom God has created in God’s own image. You are speaking hatefully and destructively of God when you speak that way of God’s image.

We are capable of speaking words that are like fresh water to thirsty people, words of kindness and sometimes correction, words of comfort and encouragement and sometimes redirection. We are capable of those life-giving words. And we are capable also of brackish water, salty, muddy, nasty stuff that gives life to no one but only infects and agitates. James says it ought not be so, my brothers and sisters.

Words have a power to become self-fulfilling prophecies. We know this in education; it’s well documented in study after study after study. If you say to a child, “You are stupid!” “You are stupid!” “You are stupid!” she will come to believe it, and she will live as though she were stupid. If you say to a child, “You are ugly and worthless!” "You are ugly and worthless!" he will come to think of himself and live as ugly and worthless. But if you say to a person, “My, you did that well. Thank you, you should do more of that.” Or “You know, something you said the other day has really meant a lot to me. Thank you.” If we encourage, if we find the things that are good and speak the good again and again and again, the good becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s what James knows. That which is spoken for hurt has the capacity to hurt. That which is spoken for good has the capacity to nurture and encourage and create good in itself. The power of words.

Let us not speak highly of God and speak destructively and hatefully of the likeness and image of God, my brothers and sisters. Let it not be so. Let it not be so.


This material is Copyrighted © 2009 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.