Poolesville Presbyterian Church
Rev. David Williams; 09.16.12
It’s always enjoyable finding something you can appreciate about an opponent.
This week, I found myself repeatedly coming across references to one of the most vociferous opponents of Christian faith in the modern world. Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and vigorous evangelist for atheism. His book The God Delusion forwards the premise that faith is, in and of itself, inherently dangerous and evil. So, like, he’s not my BFF.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t find value or interest in some of what he has to say. In fact, one of the concepts that Dawkins pitched out into the world is actually kind of interesting. That idea is what he called a “meme.” Anyone who has spent any time around teh interwebs over the last few years knows exactly what a meme is, or at least we think we do.
Memes, as Dawkins described them, are self-replicating ideas and patterns of thought. They move throughout a culture a bit like a virus, passed along from person to person. Being a biologist, he conceptualized them as something like human genes. Where genes pass on physical traits from generation to generation, memes pass on cultural information.
When Dawkins coined the phrase, he used it as a way to describe faith, which for him was a form of mind-virus. But when denizens of the interwebs think about memes, it’s rather different. I’m not quite sure he had in mind the kind of “meme” we encounter on Facebook or twitter.
In fact, I’m almost entirely positive that when he coined the term “meme” he didn’t visualize it in the form of an eight-bit cat with the body of a cherry pop tart flying through outer space while impossibly annoying earworm music played in the background. Nyancat memes and lolcat memes and trollface memes and ermahgerd herpaderp memes aren’t quite the conveyors of cultural meaning that Dawkins might have anticipated. I’m not sure what he would think about a video of an obscure Korean rapper prancing like a pony being viewed almost 180 million times in a month, although visualizing Richard Dawkins doing it gangnam style is kind of amusing.
These memes spread across the face of our culture, but to no great purpose. We pass them along because they’re doofy. They make us laugh. And human beings like to laugh.
But I think that there’s considerably more to the meme concept than the endless combinations of images and text that worm their way through our social networks. Ideas do have power, and as a concept or a way of understanding the world is passed from person to person, they do have the capacity to significantly transform the way we live. While Dawkins might have given it a name, this is something that human beings have known for millennia.
Over the last several weeks, we’ve been working our way through the Book of James, which is one of the most practical, action-oriented books of the New Testament. Traditionally ascribed to James, the brother of Jesus, it is a book of Wisdom, and as such it is radically oriented to the type of “right action” that makes the difference between a real faith and a faith that is as dead and as lifeless as a stone.
Right action is a significant part of James, who demands that our actions match what we claim about our faith. That’s an essential part of any Wisdom literature. But equally important is the focus on how we speak, because grasping the deep connection between words and actions is an essential part of moving wisely through the world.
Language, James acknowledges, can be utterly empty. We can speak platitudes, or talk about our faith in ways that our actions show to be completely false. But that does not mean that James felt that words were meaningless. He understood that language also bears the seeds of action. Our sharing the symbols and sounds that allow us to communicate with one another is an essential part of being human together. Language knits us together, as we listen and act upon what we hear.
It’s a strange and marvelous thing. I can speak the word “love,” and it’s just vibrations humming in the atmosphere around us, shaped by the air rushing past my vocal cords and by the movement of my tongue and my lips. But that idea, that concept, that thought, that “love” conveys through that physical reality to each and every one of you, speaking into your understanding, shimmering through the air from my mind to yours across this little sanctuary.
The tongue is, as James said, like a fire. It is an immensely potent thing, this ability to share knowledge, to speak a thought into another creature. And with that potency, the wisdom literature of much of the ancient world counseled deep caution around the use of language. In the Hebrew wisdom tradition, this is a strong and consistent thing. To be wise, Proverbs 10:19 tells us, you need not to multiply words, but to hold your tongue. To be wise, Proverbs 10: 8 tells us, you listen for instructions, instead of chattering on endlessly. To be wise, Proverbs 11:12 tells us, you stay silent rather than mock your neighbor. In the Greco-Roman world, teachers of wise living like Plutarch and Seneca taught the same thing.
Wisdom teaches that words burn like fire, and our ability to freely express ourselves can both bring joy and cause harm. More often than not, our tongues become our lickin’ stick, which we use to abuse, belittle, and control those around us.
That truth has been intensely and tragically expressed this last week. The power of misused self-expression to stir action was really, really driven home. A “film” entitled “The Innocence of Muslims” was produced, edited, and put up onto YouTube. This “film” directly and pointedly insulted Muhammed.
By “film” I mean it can only be described as a “film” with the consistent use of quotation marks. I watched the video this week, and it was the most impossibly amateurish thing I’ve seen. Over the summer, my twelve year old son made a 38 second movie for YouTube entitled “Raisin Bran Must Die,” a trenchant social commentary about our household’s selection of breakfast cereals. “The Innocence of Muslims” is nowhere near as entertaining as Raisin Bran Must Die, and has only marginally better production values.
But that it was amateurish and irrelevant to anything means nothing in the Arab world.
Much has been made about the Arab Spring, about how the overthrow of governments in Egypt and Libya were popular uprisings filled with hope for democracy. It’s hard for me to see them that way. Instead, what happened in Libya and Egypt seems to have more to do with a population that is without hope, where young men look out at their lives and see no purpose, only the morass of poverty and frustrated meaninglessness. From that frustration comes anger, anger at everything, anger that rages and surges at the slightest provocation. Into that anger, demagogues rage and shout in the name of faith, stirring the hate.
And so they rise up, striking out at anything, not caring. And so even this incompetent, pointless, half-baked amateur video can stir mobs to violence, it’s influence magnified a hundredfold by the rage poured into angry men by other angry men.
The tongue, as James says, is a fire. Sometimes, poorly chosen or foolish words aren’t just like a fire. They become fire. Cities and embassies burn. Innocent people die.
As we express ourselves into the world, our words don’t have quite the same effect. Hopefully.
But if we’re to listen to the wise counsel of James, we need to be aware of how deeply our words can effect those who are around us. It’s easy to fall into whispering and gossip, easy to speak a cutting word to the one who has offended us, easy to casually insult someone as if they were a caricature and not a living and self-aware child of God.
James asks us to remember that our task as Christians is not to curse and tear down, but to bless and build up. If we spread anything, if we pass on anything, those things should serve that blessed purpose.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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