This sermon, based on James 3:1-12, was preached at Luther Memorial Church in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 13-2015.
I confess I’m not terribly excited
about jumping into this passage from James. I don't much like thinking about
tongues. When I go to Abelardo’s for some more authentic Mexican than Tasty
Tacos offers, I usually order a burrito. I’ve tried the cabeza burrito, but I
only got a third of the way through it before I started thinking that cabeza is
cheek meat from a cow’s head. You’ll never catch me eating a lengua burrito,
because that’s beef tongue, and I can’t get myself to do a single bite. And I
don’t want to think about the fact that each one of you has a muscle in your
mouth at this very moment that could poke out and start flapping around. I’ll
get a little queasy in a second, and a want to be able to down my donut
downstairs.
So let’s tie up this tongue business a
different way by thinking about what tongues are for. Our reading from James
has two parts, though both have to do with the Word. The first part aims at
preachers and teachers. It holds people like me to a higher standard when it
comes to wielding words, because God's Word is our stock in trade. Apparently
for James words are so powerful and volatile that professional gospel
wordsmiths are charged with being extra careful with how they shape their
theology and proclaim the gospel.
That's
why Mark Mattes and I in our Theology and Philosophy Department at Grand View
are so determined that our classrooms be places where our words don't
jeopardize faith but build it up. In a former congregation where I was a
pew-sitter, I endured a lay preacher who proceeded to diss college religion
classes. She claimed to have lost her faith in one of them and urged us all to
abandon any formal thinking about matters of faith. I wanted to raise my hand
and say, “Come over to the East side where we know how to blend intellectual
rigor and care for students’ faith.” As a professor and a called pastor of a
college of the church, I bear a special responsibility. Maybe in a regents’
institution a professor could get away with a mission to destroy the faith
someone learned in Sunday school, but a college of the church can do better. We
can treat the Bible with integrity, we can tend and nourish the faith lives of
those in the classroom, we can dig deep into the questions that cut to the
quick. We can do it faithfully and unabashedly.
James’ charge also means pastors have
to be very careful when they mess with the language and structure of worship.
As Ryan Cosgrove reminded us a couple Sundays ago, the job of preachers is not
to bestow their wisdom, their opinions, or their politics. Their job is
delivering the goods as efficiently and dependably as the guys in the brown
trucks. That only happens, though, when faithful lay people know what the
gospel preached in truth and purity sounds like and then hold their pastor’s
feet to the fire to make sure they get it.
When
James gives his tongue-lashing to preachers and teachers as well as to the rest
of us, he does it because of how important language is to both faith and to our
relationships. It shouldn't surprise us when James says the tongue is where our
problems often begin. After all, when the Word stands at the center of our
faith and our Lord himself is called the embodied Word spoken by God from the
beginning, then, of course, the Devil's first line of attack to break down what
God wills is going to be words. And the Devil loves it when we make light of them.
However
they’re spoken, words have power to both build up and destroy faith. My favorite
Emily Dickinson poem goes like this: “A word is dead when it is said, some say.
I say it just begins to live that day.” That’s the way Hebrew thinking in the
Bible looks at speech and words. For the people of the Old Testament as well as
those in the time of the Apostles, words do something. After all, God used
words to create the entire cosmos. And they thought that when God did it, God
was expressing God’s very being out into the universe. It’s just like when we
say, “I’m going to give her a piece of my mind.”
If
words have power, if words do something, then the kind of language we speak
matters. In my high school days, far too often I heard the word “faggot” roll
off the tongue of a jock whose goal was to demean and diminish me so that my
being a drama and music nerd wouldn’t be a threat. His words tried to make what
was different into what is nothing. And most days it worked. God’s Word,
however, functions in the opposite way. It takes those who have been made into
a formless void, like the cosmos before God spoke, and it turns the nothings of
the world into something. This is the language of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is who Jesus is. It’s what he did. It’s a muezzin that draws us together and
creates us anew.
I'm
sorry to say, though, that James doesn’t think our mother tongue is the gospel
proclamation of forgiveness and mercy in the name of Christ. We speak another
language – the language of the world. All too often we use our tongues like my
high school nemesis. Our thoughts about another person’s foibles and failings are
shaped by the words we too quickly sling in judgment. Our mouths begin to
yammer to another person with gossipy triangulation. Our first move is not to
put the best construction on someone’s actions, but instead it’s to tear down
and demean, even as we flaunt our own good deeds and stellar judgment. And in
this silly season of pre-caucus campaigning and political punditry, don’t get
me started on how words get twisted in the realm of our public life together.
The
upshot is that it’s just plain hard to shape our tongues, lips, and teeth into
a different way of speaking. If you've ever studied a second language you know
how difficult it can be, especially if you begin as an adult. In the 80s there
was a brief summer satire series called “Television Parts.” It was created by
Mike Nesmith of The Monkees. In one sketch, a college student walks into a
language lab in his letter jacket. He grabs a videotape, heads into a booth, and
pushes it into a slot on the VCR. On the screen in front of him is a
shepherd-type man in a meadow surrounded by sheep. The Irish man says, “Repeat
after me: Does the meal come with potatoes? Does the suit come with potatoes?
Does the bride come with potatoes?” He speaks so quickly that the college
student gets ever more flustered and never has a chance to learn awful Irish
stereotypes, much less a new language.
Even if
you learn a second language as a child, if you don't speak it every day it can still
be hard work. I grew up with German in our household, but when I first went to
Germany to visit family on my own when I was twenty, trying to navigate life in
German 24/7, with no one around who spoke English, was absolutely exhausting.
Not only did I feel drained, whenever I opened my mouth I was sure my German
kin thought I was deficient. My five-year-old cousin spoke better German that I
did with my pre-schooler vocabulary.
James
calls us to do better than I did in Germany. He chastens us and calls us to
study and become fluent in GSL, that is, Gospel as a Second Language. He knows
how our first language works. When I tired of Deutsch sprechen in Germany and I
want so badly to let flow with the English, I want to lash out with non-gospel
words. My pride and desire for control rule my tongue. My lips fling bile. But
in my baptism I entered a foreign land called Christendom where other words are
the lingua Franca. I need to learn to speak in a new way. My tongue
needs to lead the rest of me into this new world where love reigns and mercy is
the coin of the realm.
How
exactly do our tongues learn to twist themselves around the Cross of Christ?
How do our words begin to resemble the Word himself? The first place is in
worship. This is our GSL language lab. This is where a sermon redefines what we
think about the world, our neighbors, and ourselves. This is where baptism
becomes citizenship papers for us undocumented sinners standing outside the borders
of righteousness. This is where the Lord's Supper puts the crucified and risen
Word, Jesus Christ, literally on your tongue. This is where parents become
Gospel language learners who can speak faith at home so it becomes their
children's mother tongue. This is where we are schooled as interpreters of the
Good News for those without a voice in this world.
The
other way to learn this new language so deeply that it flows trippingly off our
tongues is through travel abroad. I don't mean you need to go to Zimbabwe or
Bolivia or Minnesota where they talk “differnt.” I mean entering into the land
of another person's life. There in your relationships you have the chance to
practice speaking the gospel.
I can still remember the dialogs we learned in German class
when I was a freshman in high school:
Wohin geht Peter?
An den See.
Wo ist Monika? Im
Boot.
Ute, wo ist der
Hut? In der Stube.
Was tust du? Ich übe Geige.
I even have a copy of what’s now an antique ALM German
textbook the dialogs came from. In our relationships we get to practice similar
Gospel dialogs with one another. You do it every Sunday when you say “Peace be
with you. And also with you.” You’ll do it at the end of the service when you
hear “Go in peace. Serve the Lord,” and respond with “Thanks be to God.”
One of
the best places to practice this new gospel language is in a marriage. We have
a few long-standing ones in this congregation. The Jespersens just celebrated a
significant anniversary last night. In the give-and-take of daily married life,
we have regular opportunities to bring forgiveness to bear on the relationship.
In fact, it’s what makes those long-lived marriages last. When you begin to let
go the selfish language that puts yourself first and takes your partner as the
servant of your needs and wishes, in essence you share the peace that you speak
in worship. By bringing the forgiveness that you first received at the Lord’s
hands, you speak this language that is so foreign to the way the world works.
Shaping your tongue around the gospel for the sake of the other is what Paul
says creates faith, not just in your spouse’s trust in you but more so in God’s
reign over a realm that operates by grace rather than demand.
This is an alien tongue and, at first,
it’s uncomfortable to speak. You do it haltingly. And you get the grammar and
syntax wrong, even in a long time into the relationship. When I had a
fellowship to study in Germany I would e-mail Mary and Sam back home each day.
I’d tell them what happened in my day. What they noticed that I didn’t was that
I’d used perfectly good English vocabulary. But the longer I was in Germany and
the better I got at German, Mary and Sam saw I started constructing my English
sentences as if I were writing in German. For instance, I’d throw my verbs to
the ends of my sentences. “I’d my verbs to the ends of my sentences throw.” In
the same way, as we become more fluent in speaking the gospel to one another,
even when we’re not explicitly engaged in preaching or teaching or absolving
and forgiving, the gospel begins to seep in – even when where speaking our
native worldly tongue. And marriage can become a microcosm for what God is up
to in Christ for the whole world.
Today we’re going to sing a hymn that
most Lutherans outside of Denmark have never heard. The text was written by
N.F.S. Grundtvig, whom the Danes regard as their nation-builder, establisher of
schools, and theologian of first rank. I learned this hymn a few months ago
when Edward Broadbridge lectured about the great Danish theologian in this
room. “How Sweet to Travel the Road Ahead” is commonly sung at Danish weddings
and anniversary celebrations. In fact, it was written for a couple’s
twenty-fifth anniversary. Today we sing it as a reminder of what the language
of the gospel on our tongues produces. And to be honest, I also asked Pastor
Russ if we could sing it today because mine and Mary’s twenty-fifth wedding
anniversary is on Tuesday. The hymn is such an accurate reflection of what’s
it’s been like for me to be married: what it’s like to be surrounded by forgiveness
and mercy bestowed by your beloved. Especially when both of you have had the
gospel spoken to you by others’ tongues and this powerful language makes you
citizens of a sovereign realm of grace. Amen.
Hymn text: “How Sweet to Travel the Road Ahead” by N.F.S.
Grundtvig (1855)
Follow link to hear the tune.
1. How sweet to travel the road ahead
for two desiring to
be together,
for joy is double
when we are wed,
and sorrow’s
storm-winds much lighter to weather.
How sweetly valid to
travel married,
when we are carried
on wings of love.
2. How great the comfort is here bestowed
when two as one are
secure united;
and that which
carries the heaviest load
is love’s heart-flame
in two hearts ignited:
as one together that
none shall sever,
with yes forever from
heart to heart.
3. How wonderful to entrust our love
to God in this our
celebration,
whose boundless mercy
flows from above
to this and to ev’ry
generation.
In grateful pleasure
we cannot measure
how great the
treasure of God’s good grace.
4. When two at length must then parted be,
how sad the days are
of grief and sighing;
but God be praised
for the pledge that He
prepares a country
for love undying.
How great the
pleasure! Beyond all measure,
the greatest treasure
is endless love.
5.Each married couple whose love is
blessed
in Jesus’ name at
their festive wedding,
through all this life’s
ebb and flow may rest
in Him, as wider His
love is spreading.
He will inspire their
hearts’ desire,
to share the fire of
love, true love.
