Tag Archives: Tongue

Jesus “delivered into human hands”–ours! (19th Sunday after Pentecost, 9/29/2024)

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Readings

Help us, Lord, to become masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others. Take our minds and think through them. Take our lips and speak through them. And, take our hearts and set them on fire. For Christ’s sake, Amen.

Masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others: that’s where we’ll end up; it will take some time to get there.

The first reading is the Lectionary’s only selection from the Book of Esther, the story of God’s saving the Jews from Haman’s genocidal attack throughout the Persian Empire through a Jewess named Esther. It’s a gem of a short story, filled with sharp humor, and is the basis for the Jewish feast of Purim, or Lots.

It is also a subversive story. When Cyrus the Persian gave the Jews permission to return home from exile toward the end of the 6th Century bc, Jewish leadership was united in urging, exhorting, guilting the Jews to return. Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: all agree that Good Jews belong on the road back to Jerusalem. Esther is one of the Bad Jews who didn’t make the trip, and whom we encounter in Susa, the Persian capital. Obviously, God will be attending to the Good Jews, and not to Jews like Esther. But when this threat of genocide comes, deliverance comes not from Jerusalem, but from Susa. If there were ever a tale warning us against writing some portion of the Body of Christ off, it’s this one.

“Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” Jesus, one suspects, has been reading Esther.

Our second lesson is the last part of the Epistle of James, in which James speaks to us of patience and the tongue.

Patience.Ambrose Bierce, probably in The Devil’s Dictionary, says “Patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” So we exercise patience when we don’t have other options. James’ vision of patience is quite different. The future is assured because Jesus is coming. There will be a rich harvest, so we can settle into the farmer’s patience. And, James reminds us, Jesus is coming as judge, so judging is something we don’t need to do and are positively forbidden to do.

But some people require so much patience! Yes; us –and God is patient with us. If, by the way, we don’t think that God has to exercise patience with us, we don’t know ourselves very well. So, our exercises in patience with others become a matter of exercising the same patience that we know we need from God. And, notice, the last thing we want from God is any hint of condescension. Are we in the company of an obnoxious person? Well, we have an excellent opportunity to mirror the patience we need from God.

The tongue. A couple chapters ago James warned us of its dangers; here, in an unguarded display of hope, he turns to its positive uses. Three points to notice:

Echoing Jesus, he warns us against oaths. Our ordinary speech should be trustworthy, so that “I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is quite unnecessary. It’s a little disconcerting how often our speech betrays this problem. “Speaking frankly…”: so the rest of the time I’m not? “Honestly…”; and what was I saying before? “To be perfectly truthful…”

We use the tongue to bring our illnesses before the community and before God. “Are any…sick? They should call for the elders of the church…” Illness is not a private matter; if one of us is sick, all are affected. As we pray for the sick, we’re saying “God, this is our problem, not simply their problem. “The Lord will raise them up.” ‘Raise up’ is used both for healing and for resurrection. We do not know how God will respond to any particular request for healing. We pray for healing both because we can do no other, and because, bringing the sick to Jesus, there is no better place we can bring them.

We properly use the tongue to bring back those who wander from the truth. This sounds quite foreign to us, because we’re used to thinking of each person as having a rather large sphere marked “private” and live in a culture that constantly tells us that one person’s truth is not another’s. Ironically, the same society that hungers for community encourages us to act as strangers to each other. I have no interest in bringing in judging through the back door. But not judging is not the same thing as remaining silent. When we see a brother or sister acting self-destructively, we need to risk saying something. If our society can manage “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk,” we Christians should be able to take that a bit further. There are, in other words, things worse than conflict, and one of them is watching someone taking a wrong turn and saying nothing.

Our Gospel comes from that part of Mark that is structured thematically by Jesus’ repeated warnings of the fate that awaits him in Jerusalem. “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands” says Jesus, and Mark follows this warning with stories of the disciples arguing over who’s greatest, trying to silence those who don’t follow them, etc. The human hands into which Jesus is most immediately and consistently betrayed are the disciples’!

Jesus follows his rebuke to the disciples regarding their treatment of others with exhortations regarding their treatment of themselves. The ruthlessness they’ve displayed towards others needs to be focused on themselves: If your hand, your foot, your eye, causes you to stumble, cut it off, tear it out. Metaphorically, but no less decisively for being metaphoric.

One of society’s most seductive promises is “you can have it all.” It shows up in songs, as the goal of various self-help schemes. A women’s organization that should know better will even sell you a t-shirt for your (grand)daughter: “Girls can have it all.”[1]

Nope. We have to choose, and the higher we aim, the more we have to give up. A relatively innocuous example of a literal enactment of Jesus words was provided by the NFL defensive back Ronnie Lott, who had the tip of his left pinky finger amputated during the offseason so he wouldn’t risk injuring it in the future and miss more football games.[2] Any sort of excellence demands hours of practice and preparation, time that’s simply not available for other things.

More fundamentally, Jesus’ words are about paying attention to the choices we have. Rather than spending our energy on the faults of others; we might spend our energy on the choices we have regarding how we live before God. Here some ruthlessness isn’t a bad thing, being as attentive to our life before God as the new car owner is to the sound of the engine, or the photographer is to the cleanliness of her lenses.

Why? Because the stuff that destroys us and those around us usually starts small. There are so many incitements to complain; it is so natural. But over time we can spend more and more time complaining, until there is no longer a person complaining, just an incessant complaint. Again, the disciples’ “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him…”: well, they’re a small group and don’t have much power so that “someone” is probably safe. But with more power that same impulse drives the inquisition.

Bottom line: we have more power, more choices than we imagine. We may not appear center-stage to deliver our people as did Esther. All of us can pray, as did our brother Elijah, and thereby transformed the weather and the politics of Israel. And all of us daily make decisions: how much slack do I cut those around me; how much slack do I cut myself? Those around me: a lot, as God cuts us a lot of slack. Myself: very little, for little decisions add up, for good or ill, and at the last day I hope to be one who seeks, rather than avoids, God’s gaze.

Help us, Lord, to become masters of ourselves, that we may become the servants of others. Take our minds and think through them. Take our lips and speak through them. And, take our hearts and set them on fire. For Christ’s sake, Amen.

[1] http://www.now.org/cgi-bin/store/TK-GCH.html?id=3QKrWV34.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Lott.

Life with this generous God (15th Sunday after Pentecost, 9/1/2024)

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Readings (Track 1)

For the next five weeks the second reading is from the Letter of James. The James who authored this book is St James of Jerusalem, Jesus’ brother, leader of the Jerusalem church, and martyred about ad 62. We celebrate his feast on October 23.

The letter is a long exhortation to the churches. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s the insight that friendship with God and with the world are mutually exclusive. James uses ‘world’ not for God’s good creation, but for the arrangements we impose on this creation that systematically distort and disfigure it—and us.

So why are God and world in this sense mutually exclusive? The world we’ve created is a zero-sum game: if you have more, I have less, so envy, competition, aggression are only logical. How does James bring God onstage? God is the one “who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly,” and–in the verses we read—“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” It’s of a piece with what his Brother used to say: “Look at the birds of the air… Consider the lilies of the field…” Our God is a generous God. If we live both believing that and treating life as a zero-sum game, we’re consign ourselves to incoherency. James uses words like ‘double-minded’ and ‘adulterers’.

This sort of incoherency is something many of us have plenty of experience in, and I speak from experience. We track our finances on a piece of computer software called Quicken. It’s all there: checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, investments. When I’m working with it it’s difficult not to assume that what’s on the screen is what’s important about our family’s fortunes in the present and the future. Maybe an incense burner next to the computer would help, or a program that would send those birds that Jesus was talking about across the screen periodically. The comfort in all this is a remark Karl Barth makes in the midst of his massive Church Dogmatics, that the difference between the Christian and non-Christian is not that one is righteous and the other a sinner, but that the Christian is a sinner with an uneasy conscience.

Anyhow, back to James. Let’s walk through the text together, as James works at what it means to be a friend to this generous God.

“Every generous act of giving” is from the Father of lights. God is the generous giver. And what does God give? Well,—verse v.18—life: “he gave us birth by the word of truth.” The Father gives birth. There’s a flexibility in the biblical image of God the Father that we’ve lost. Or, if you’re looking for an image of God as Mother, here it is.

“…so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.” A different fertility image, and also a hint that what God is doing in us is for the benefit of all God’s creatures.

“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.” The prophets had used fruit as an image for the righteousness God sought in Israel; James uses that image: God’s still looking for fruit & your quick speech and quick anger won’t produce it. But I suspect there’s more here. James has just given us the image of God giving us birth. There’s mystery there, and if we’re attentive to that mystery we realize that quick speech and quick anger don’t cut it.

Let me stay with this for a moment. We realize instinctively that there’s mystery, something sacred, in birth. At the same time, we tend to assume that there’s no mystery to the people we interact with every day, or even the one we see in the mirror. What James is doing with this image is helping us to recover that sense of mystery and the sacred. Each one of us is someone God is birthing. We know we don’t understand God; why are we so quick to assume that we know all we need to know about what God’s birthing?

This works the other way, too. We may struggle with a sense of God’s absence. Well, one place to start is by attending to the mystery in God’s creatures. Attend to the mystery of God’s creatures; attend to the mystery of God. Who knows where that might lead?

Back to James. “Welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” This picks up the word from the birth image and urges us to care for it. We might recall Jesus’ parable of the sower and the different soils into which the seed falls. Guard that seed, that word, Jesus’ brother tells us. (You may recall Mark Twain’s comment that went something like this: “Some people say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. I say, put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket.” That’s what’s in play here.)

How we guard that seed is developed in the following verses: “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers.” Again, James is working themes common to Jesus’ preaching, as in the conclusion to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew: hearing the word and obeying it is like building your house on the rock; hearing and not obeying is like building on sand.

The last two verses contrast true and false religion: “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” True enough, we might say, but what an odd combination of themes.

“And do not bridle their tongues.” Why talk about this? His hearers need to hear it? True enough. We could also observe that in practice the tongue regularly has a role when we’re hearing but not doing the word. We may not be doing it, but we’re talking about it. This doesn’t confuse God, but it often confuses us.

[“If any one thinks he is religious, and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this man’s religion is vain.” There’s another dimension to this worth noticing, one I ran across in the middle of Revelation: “the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God” (12:10b). That description of Satan is worth chewing on. Of all the ways John could have described him, he focuses on Satan as accuser. And this description brings us full circle back to some of Satan’s earliest appearances in the Old Testament: the accuser of Job (“Job just worships you because you bless and protect him”), the accuser of Joshua the high priest (see Zechariah 3), and, in the garden, the accuser of God Almighty (“God’s prohibiting you this tree out of selfishness”). All these accusations—through the tongue. So let us watch our own tongues. How often do we accuse, lowering others and thereby—conveniently—raising ourselves up? That’s a habit to discourage—before our noses begin to complain of the smell of sulfur. ]

Pure and undefiled religion? “To care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” We might recall Jesus’ many arguments with the Pharisees: mercy, not sacrifice. More, caring for orphans and widows reflects God’s generous character. And it’s in this context that we need to hear the last part: “to keep oneself unstained by the world.” James hasn’t changed the subject. The world tells us that we’re in a zero-sum game, so more for the orphans and widows means less for me. Believing that, acting on that, is getting stained by the world. Stained by the world: believing that more for the poor means less for me, that acknowledgement of your needs means that mine go unmet, that the most important information about me is in Quicken. Stained by the world: losing any sense of mystery and the sacred as we encounter one another.

I’ve focused this morning on our second reading. What happens if we pull back the camera? At least two things; perhaps you’ll discover others as you reread these lessons later today or later in the week. First, the first reading from Song of Songs and the Psalm give us a more specific image for this generous God: God as Lover. So these readings encourage us to experience God’s generosity as the generosity of a lover. Second, Jesus’ argument with some of the religious leaders ends with a list of things that defile: “fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice” etc. Notice how many of these result from that zero-sum game orientation. If we allow that vision of God’s generosity to form us, to transform us, we’re simultaneously draining the power of a number of these temptations.

“Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.” This, if our eyes are open, is the world we live in. We often say in our dismissal “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.” We can say that also because in this world God is already loving and serving us. In the week ahead we have the opportunity to discover this anew.