A Devotional Life

James 3:1-12

"...but no one can tame the tongue - a restless evil, full of deadly poison" (James 3:8)

            I have often been told that I'm "bold." This is almost always meant as a compliment and is quite often told to me by my gentler friends. I've never really understood what it meant to be "bold," except that I speak up when I see reason to do so. Maybe for my kinder friends, this is difficult. Probably it is. So I'm bold and that's apparently praiseworthy, but it has also always been my downfall too. As with most gifts, they cut two ways. They can be used in the service of the God who gave the gift in the first place or they can be used in service elsewhere - often to the detriment of others. I have known both sides of this.

            Today's passage from James is familiar to me because it has been recommended reading by countless past mentors in the faith. My boldness has become a brashness that has hurt others and when this has happened, I've been duly chided and sent to read my James chapter three one more time. And so for the longest time I've come to associate this passage not only with being scolded, but also as regulating interpersonal relationships. Almost every time that I've been told my speech had gone too far or my boldness had become brashness, it was because I hurt someone's feelings. To be sure, hurting someone's feelings is a bad thing - maybe even a sin - and reconciliation is necessary, but as I re-read this passage through my devotional lens (and not as a chided child at the blackboard writing, "And the tongue is a fire"), I realized that the speech that is most damning, the most condemnable, is not the speech that hurts, but the speech that twists and manipulates, while sounding reasonable.

            Venomous speech - that which James is writing against here - is duplicitous speech. It is speech that sounds like it is meant to help others, but is actually self-interested. It is speech that sounds like a compliment, but cuts like an insult. It is speech that - to get in the spirit of James - wants to be a praise, but is actually a curse. And the worst part is this: Such speech is tough to call into account.

            In my younger years when I would pop off at the mouth and say something mean out of frustration (or even just in a misguided attempt to be humorous), it was clear and apparent that my speech was wrong. But that's easy to see. That's easy to call into account. The truly difficult speech to stand up against is that speech that appeals to the lowest common denominator or that speech that uses pre-existent prejudices as its justification. Yet this is precisely the speech the Church must stand against.

            We must stand against baseless accusations lobbed toward unwitting victims. We must stand against oversimplifications that reduce complex problems and complex people to easy, pat answers. We must stand against curses that are uttered with smiles. We must stand up against fear-mongering dolled up as "concern." The Church must stand up against all of this sort of speech not only because James demands it of us in today's passage but because if we do not, then we will soon find that the Church will be controlled by the tiny rudder of someone else's misguided tongue and not guided by the Word given to us in Jesus Christ. Amen.