Taming the Tongue (Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost)

Sermon Reflections

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This year, in our Confirmation classes, we’re spending most of the year studying the 10 Commandments.  Often, people wonder why we spend so much time on a list of rules that seems so simple and so straightforward.

But as Luther explains in the Small Catechism, you don’t do God’s will simply by refraining from evil.  It’s a good start of course.  But over and over again, Luther reminds us that there’s more to each of these commandments than meets the eye.

And so as we go through the Commandments, I always emphasize what I call the “but clause.”  These are not the clamps that hold your butt to the chair during class, but the phrase that Luther always uses to describe the proper way to view each commandment.  Luther’s explanation always says something like “Of course, we shouldn’t do this bad thing, BUT we should instead do something positive.”

So, for example, we shouldn’t:

  • Take God’s name in vain, BUT we should use God’s name to praise and thank him;
  • Steal, BUT we should also endeavor to protect the rights of our neighbors from having their stuff stolen; and we should not
  • Lie about people, BUT we should “come to their defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.”

The problem is, fulfilling the “but clause” is usually a whole lot harder and more complex than simply refraining from doing something obviously evil.

In today’s second reading, James writes that the “tongue is a fire.”  With the tongue “we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.”  And as when we read the 10 Commandments, when we read these words from James, what most often comes to mind is all the cursing of “those made in the likeness of God” that we hear, read and see each day in the news and in our social media feeds.

This is particularly true in an election year, not only because the politicians do it, but because so many others get caught up in the feeding frenzy of cursing people on the opposite side of the political aisle.

General nastiness has unfortunately become part of the background of civil (or perhaps uncivil) life together.  And often, we excuse it if we believe it’s in the service of defending what we believe is the truth.

But here, as James writes about “taming the tongue”, he’s really doing what Luther later summed up in the catechisms.  He’s not just calling on Christians NOT to  “fight fire with fire” by being nasty to their opponents, but to live and speak in a different way.  That is, to speak in ways that give blessing and life, not simply to refrain from lighting fires.

In fact, “taming the tongue” is really about living Luther’s “but clause.”  And living the “but clause” isn’t so much about being “nice” people as it is about:

  • Personal growth as a disciple of Jesus – as Christians, we believe everybody (including us) has to rely on God’s love and Jesus’ forgiveness as the basis of our relationship with God; that is, we know God loves us in spite of our mistakes.  And sometimes, speaking in ways that “come to our neighbor’s defense, speak well of them, and interpret everything they do in the best possible light” reminds us that even the people we disagree with and don’t like are also people loved by God; and it’s a way of “taming the tongue” by forcing us to think and speak from a different perspective…
  • Building and sustaining community – Jesus called us to be individual disciples, but he also calls us to be a community, and to live in community even with those who don’t share our faith; and you can live and work well with people you don’t agree with, but you can’t live and work well with people who you’ve simply dismissed as evil liars; and part of the problem we face today is that it’s easier to dismiss people who are “anonymous” to us, because we have cyberspace between us… (so sometimes “taming the tongue” can mean “taming the tweet”  or “thinking twice before sending that email” when we’re interacting with people we incorrectly think aren’t really part of our “community” …)
  • Bearing witness to God’s love and presence in our lives – James was probably writing to an early Jewish Christian community, which would have been familiar with the Old Testament concept of “holiness” – that is, God is “holy” and calls his people to be “holy”; and “holy” in this case, doesn’t mean “holier than thou”; instead, it means “special” or “distinct”.  That is, God’s people have the distinct and special opportunity to show the world who God is by their words, deeds and attitudes.  And that, James writes, is also what “taming the tongue” is about; it’s about being people who show the world a different way to live and a different way to speak…  (it may not “change the world”, but it will show the world something different – and in the early church, it was being “different” that got people to take a closer look at the Jesus movement…)

And so even though we often focus as Christians on things like feeding the hungry and advocating for justice, sometimes the most important things we do every day are showing who God is in our lives by striving to do things like taming our tongues.

Taming our tongues – and living the “but clause” – is actually harder than it seems. But James reminds us today that when we tame our tongues, we train ourselves to be better disciples of Jesus.  When we tame our tongues, we build the kind of community that’s able to engage in complex and even difficult conversations.  And when we tame our tongues, our words will end up being less about us, and more about the God who empowers us.

Amen.