Blessing and Cursing

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 09.13.2015

Scripture Lesson: James 3:1-12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

It was a beautiful late summer day, and the kids were out of town, and so I and my wife decided it might be nice to take our dog for a long walk in a nearby park.  The park’s just a few minutes from our house, seventy five acres of forest and meadows, a reminder of what Annandale was like before the great wave of suburban development swept across it in the 1950s and 1960s.  It used to be farmland, once, before the trees were let to grow, and the ruins of old houses and the rusted out hulks of three quarter century old farm trucks can still be scattered in the shadows of the woods.  Those woods are intermingled with soccer and baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, and smattering of playgrounds for the little ones.  It’s got the best sledding hill in the area, a farmer’s market in the summer, and an amphitheater where bands and entertainment play on weekends.

So we geared up, and with our sniffing and snuffling pup we wandered through our neighborhood, across the four-lane, and into the park.  It was busy, bustling with energy, as people played tennis and picnicked.  Under a cluster of shelters, a gathering of Ghanaian immigrants preparing for a shared meal, all wearing orange.  The air was filled with their laughter as they came together, and the rich lilt of their voices filled the air.  Little children ran around, a girl of maybe five or six squealing in mock terror at our utterly unterrifying dog.  “That dog scares me,” she giggled, safely in the arms of her smiling father.

And up ahead in the amphitheater, the sound of music, thumping and insistent.  “Wonder what’s happening up there,” I said, as my wife and I wandered towards it.  I’d assumed, as we walked through orange clad Ghanaians, that it was part of some larger African festival.  That meant I wanted to get closer.

It wasn’t part of that festival.

It thundered and thumped, in the thunderythumpy way of contemporary music, and as I listened, I realized it was hippityhop, or whatever it is the whippersnappers are listening to these days.  I began to pick out the lyrics.  It wasn’t hard.

The lyrics were, well, contemporary.  In the manner of hippityhop, someone was laying down a rap, which can be as elegant and challenging as the best spoken word poetry, only this weren’t no Maya Angelou.  Most of it seemed to have to do with Bentleys and high end alcohol, and the effects of both on women.  Only it wasn’t “women,” but female dogs and gardening implements.  There was reference to how the singer’s opponent’s shouldn’t mess with his excrement, and how they could all, as far as he was concerned, engage in loveless self fornication.  He then them with multiple uses of a contraction referencing an Oedipal relation with one’s mother.

Then, a woman’s voice, a woman with an even more pungent vocabulary, and oh!  I recognized it, the timbre, the cadence.  “That’s Nicki Minaj,” I told my wife, feeling faintly pleased with myself for knowing that.

When we reached the amphitheater, it was just a group of teens, busying themselves around the stage as they prepared for an upcoming event.  Everyone was casually but nicely dressed, as multiethnic as a Target commercial, and working well together, bustling about to prepare the stage.  The music wasn’t the event.  They were testing the sound system, and someone had put on music as background.  

We walked past the sound, and on down a wooded path, and as the stream of objectification and obscenity was gradually smothered by the trees.  We both thought about that little girl, giggling with her father, about those children playing.

As a liberal, I’m a generally tolerant sort, open to encountering new and different things and trying to keep my mind open to ways I might be able to engage with them.  As a trickle of profanity wafted through the woods, I knew it wasn’t intended to be offensive.  It was just background noise, the chatter of a culture with an increasingly adult vocabulary.  But I struggle, I do, with the ever deepening coarseness of culture.

Because ideas do have power.  As a concept or a way of understanding the world is passed from person to person, it has the capacity to significantly transform the way we live and interact with our world.

Over the last month, we’ve been working our way in scripture through various wisdom literatures, both the Book of Proverbs and the Book of James, which is one of the most practical, action-oriented books of the New Testament.  Wisdom literature is radically oriented to the type of “right action” that makes the difference between a real faith and a faith that is dead and lifeless.

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 meaningless.  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.

Language permits us to organize ourselves, to move and think and share in ways that no other creature in God’s creation can manage.  It allows us to plan, to reflect, to coordinate our lives together in ways that either magnify our joy or deepen the brokenness we encounter.  It is fierce and powerful.  

Like a fire.

The tongue is, as James said, like a fire.  Not just a candle, not just a lovely Yule log crackling in the hearth, but a hundred thousand acres of Washington state forest, with roaring vortexes of wind driven flame, zero percent contained, with smoke visible from orbit.

Language is an immensely potent thing, this ability to share knowledge, to speak thoughts and convey potential into one another.   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.  

Wisdom teaches that words burn like fire, and our ability to freely express ourselves can both bring joy and cause harm.   

And in a mass media era, in an era when the broad dissemination of information has grown explosively, the power of language has only deepened and spread.  We’re only 500 years into the experience of human beings with mass media, ever since Gutenberg slapped together that typeface of his.

And information, exchanged rapidly and virally, has made it possible for changes in culture and language to accelerate.  Print media was layered over with broadcast media, which is in the process of morphing into the peculiar mess of the wildness of the internet.

And with each transition, our ability to spread thought has grown and magnified, and our transition from one state of being to another has accelerated.

In that encounter with change, we need to be aware that while change is not always wrong, the common shared assumptions of any culture may be wrong.  That a particular thing is all around us, and that it has become the shared assumption of a society...does that make it valid?

They’re just words, we say, as if words have no power, and are not the bearers of our identity.

In this, I’m not suggesting that the issue is cussing.  I’ve known honest and good souls whose natural vocabularies haven’t been what you would call churchy.  Motorcycle mechanics and military personnel aren’t known for their demure use of language.  It’s deeper than that.

The issue is cursing, the use of language to tell a story of who we are together that diminishes our ability to love and care for one another.  Language can convey hatred, dehumanize, objectify, and commodify other souls.  Language can close out the possibility of loving the other, can shut the doors of our compassion.

And in that, Wisdom says, be wary of how you speak, and attend to how what you hear shapes you.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.