Gospel as a Second Language

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.