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.
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