Fairhaven Sermon 9-15-2024

Sometime around, I think, my junior year of high school, one of my best friends was going in for surgery. And he was having some sort of correction done on a malfunctioning tear duct. His eye would always water. So he was going to have this minimally invasive operation around his eye.

He'd gone in Friday morning, and that evening, one of my other friends, Ryan, texted me to ask me if I knew how he was doing. And I said, Why don't you call Alex and ask him? I responded, I hadn't talked to him yet either. Go ahead, call. You're curious.

Call. He said, No, no, no, no, no. He said, I can't. What if something terrible had happened? I wouldn't know what to say.

I just can't do it. I can't talk to him. So we went back and forth on this a couple times, and I rolled my eyes eventually. Okay, I call him myself.

And I talked to Alex. He was fine. He was awake. Everything had gone well.

The surgery had done what it was supposed to do. The problem was fixed, and he'd probably be heading home from Children's Hospital the next day, Saturday. So a few minutes later, Ryan texted me again. What'd you find out? And I started typing out what I had been told, and then I backspaced it all, and I decided that I was going to motivate Ryan to just give Alex a call himself.

And I said, Well, it's honestly not good. I guess they mixed up his chart with somebody else's. And instead of operating on the right eye, they ended up amputating his left foot. And suddenly, Ryan was indeed able to pick up the phone, but he called me.

And I texted him back that I was not able to answer because it was just too painful for me to talk about it. We were all on the cross-country team, after all, and poor Alex would never run again due to this unspeakable medical malpractice. And I told him we'd talk on Monday whenever I hopefully had more information, more answers. We'd know what was coming next.

And now what I did not know is that very same evening, probably within 30 seconds, Ryan had texted virtually every single person in Butler and Mercer counties about what had happened to Alex. And that Sunday, he was probably lifted for prayer in every church from Zillian Opal to Hermitage. And Alex's Facebook wall, which people of my age will know that that was the public square for that couple years, that was like peak Facebook year, was just lighting up with all these notes of sympathy and shock and support. His mom, who was also my doctor, was getting calls from people from their church, one of the biggest churches around, about the tragedy that her son was going through.

And it was the weekend, right? So I didn't know any of this in all these pre-Snapchat days. I didn't know, right? All of his friends were up, but weren't the same as mine, necessarily. I didn't know all this stuff was going on. So imagine my surprise when I walked into school on Monday and heard about what had happened to Alex.

Imagine the look on my teacher's faces when I said, No, that's not quite true. But I happened to know why everyone is saying that he only has one foot now. Imagine my mortification next time I talk to his mother, my doctor. Alex himself was not particularly thrilled.

By the way, his minor surgery had gotten halfway to becoming like a feature on Channel 11. I did not feel bad for Ryan, whom I still blame for texting 700 of his closest friends before bothering to reach out to the one guy who knew. But I definitely would have appreciated staying home for a couple days until this had all blown over. It did.

It was fast. But it was a crazy catastrophe, and it spiraled from one joke text into a short-lived local scandal. It was not good. So think about this, James tells us.

A small flame can set the whole forest on fire. The tongue is a very small flame of fire. Very true, is it not? I sure discovered that that year. And arguably more than any action that we can readily take, what we choose to say really shapes the world around us and the hearts within us for better and for worse.

What you say is probably the most influential thing that you do. James' major concern is that by default, you know, if you're speaking for better or for worse, it tends to be for the worse, unless we are extremely conscientious and careful. You might recall whenever I introduced the epistle of James a couple weeks back, but I want to highlight this again. James' key intention in this book is to align Christians' beliefs on one hand with their actions, and a major way that he does that is by laying down basic standards for Christian behavior.

So if you believe in Jesus, he says, your life should look like it, your words should sound like it. And so here and throughout James, this is one of his key points, he does that by highlighting having control over the tongue, our speech, our communication, our writing, right? Using vivid images to emphasize just how important this is. And we all know. So okay, you believe in Jesus Christ.

If that's what's in your heart, then what's coming out of your mouth should match it. You know, this is a freshwater spring, then there shouldn't be salt water coming out of your mouth. If you believe in this Lord whose character is love, righteousness, holiness, justice, mercy, and peace, then what you say should reflect his character that you're seeking to imitate. And I have to wonder reading this, if James is addressing some particular situation, the way he approaches this with such fire, he spends so much time talking about the evil of the tongue, it's like he's talking about something.

But listen to how intensely he describes the problems that come from the human mouth. People can tame and have already tamed every kind of animal, bird, reptile, and fish. No one can tame the tongue though. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison.

With it, we both bless the Lord and Father and curse human beings made in God's likeness. Blessing and cursing come from the same mouth. My brothers and sisters, it just shouldn't be this way, he says. People can tame all kinds of animals, birds, reptiles, and fish, but no one can tame the tongue, he says.

Do you hear the implication there? I had to read this a couple of times, but people can't tame the tongue, as smart and as capable as we can be. Not others' tongues, not our own tongues, but certainly God can. If it's going to be tamed, it's going to be something that God has to do. And this is something that we have to constantly, prayerfully turn over to God if we want it to be fixed in ourselves.

God can do the taming, just as God can neutralize all the other deadly poisons in our hearts when we invite God to do so. So if we look at today's Gospel reading from the eighth chapter of Mark, I think we get a snapshot of what this looks like. And it's not pleasant. But the Apostle Peter has just spoken something true and right.

I think he's the first of the apostles to say it. You are the Christ, he bravely responds whenever Jesus asks him who people think he is. You're the Christ. Peter's the first one to get it, to know it, to say it.

And he's just spoken this powerful confession, the one that holds up our faith even today, 2,000 years later. Jesus is the Christ. He's the Messiah, the chosen one of God. He is the Lord.

But Jesus then teaches them a little bit more. He explains that he's going to be persecuted by the religious authorities. He's going to suffer. He's going to be killed and then rise from the dead on the third day.

He lays this out plainly, Mark says. He tells them plainly. And Peter doesn't like that. It's not what he hopes for in his Messiah.

And so he loses control of that tongue, that burning fire within him that just moments before was on the right track, the right place. He was igniting other people's hearts in his own to follow Jesus by speaking the truth, You are the Christ. But this time, rather than affirm Jesus' authority, Peter hears something he doesn't like and he scolds Jesus. He tells him all of this talk of suffering and death.

This is incorrect. It's unacceptable. He corrects Jesus, Mark says. And what does Jesus say? Get behind me, Satan.

You are not thinking God's thoughts, but human thoughts. Get behind me, Satan is about as intense of a correction or a rebuke that I can imagine getting from Jesus himself. So why does he lash out like that? Why does he say it like that? Why is he so sharp here? The reason that Jesus shuts Peter up so quickly when he's saying something that's both untrue and unhelpful is something very familiar to James. Words have consequences.

You are the Christ. The words that he said just minutes before has consequences the moment it's released into the world. You are wrong spoken by the same tongue about that same Christ also has consequences if it's allowed to spread. Consequences that in this situation would benefit Satan himself by undermining Jesus' authority.

Words have just as real of an effect as any other tangible action that we can take. Words can build up. Words can kill. What we say shapes what we do, like a ship's rudder, like a horse's bridle, James says.

What comes out of the mouth takes on a life of its own far beyond what we can anticipate, predict, or control. You can never, ever be sure what people will do with anything that you say, ever. Which is part of why preaching is so scary, honestly, because people will say, Oh, I agree whenever you said this, and you're like, Hmm, I don't think I said that. But whenever you let words go, you never know what's going to happen.

And this is why James fiercely cautions those who would be teachers to be extra careful, because people are listening. I'm often shocked how frequently the scripture passages in the lectionary, which were laid down 30 years ago, for every Sunday, seem to line up with what is going on in my life and in the world. I don't know if you have this happen with scripture pretty often. So I have to mention what happened this week and how horrifying it was to see how quickly those rumors spread as fact, you know, that Haitian refugees were eating dogs and cats in Ohio.

This is something that the newspapers, the police said didn't happen at all. It was first cobbled together, it seems like, on Facebook from a few unrelated stories in other areas. And then within two days, whenever I started writing this sermon, it was still on Facebook. By the time I finished writing this sermon, it was on national news.

The Springfield City Council building was closed for bomb threats. The schools are closed. This weekend, Wittenberg University in Springfield is closed as well for a shooting threat. And so you can imagine, whenever things light on fire like this, imagine what it feels like right now to be a Haitian person in America.

I hear the Haitian community in Charleroi is facing the same kind of threat right now. Images that were thrown around either carelessly or maliciously or both have indeed set off a forest fire before our eyes, one that will quite possibly get people hurt. And we have to understand that this kind of thing is only going to get much, much worse as AI becomes more and more common. I don't know what percentage of stuff I see on Facebook is obviously AI-generated images at this point.

But as this stuff becomes more and more common, faked images, videos, sounds, which are really a new technological extension of the tongue, right? The same way it's gotten worse with social media, this is getting dangerous. And followers of Christ better be very, very, very careful not to end up with blood on their hands from this stuff. It's that big of a deal. The fire of the tongue of evil words has kicked off genocide, targeted violence over and over again through history.

You know, we all know about Germany, right? But it happens all the time. More recently, it happened in Rwanda in the '90s. You know, there was the genocide there. Kicked off what people were saying on the radio.

Almost a million people were killed. Same thing happened in India in 2002. There was this mass uprising against Muslims that led to a lot of them being killed in the north of India. And Myanmar in the past decade against another people group that were, there were memes being spread about them on Facebook.

That's what kicked off this genocide was Facebook memes. This stuff happens and it happens a lot easier than we'd like to think. The tongue itself is set on fire by the flames of hell, James says. That's strong language.

Flames of hell in your mouth. And if Peter could do Satan's will with his tongue, we better believe that we can do it too. Peter knew Jesus a lot better than we do. If you don't think that you could be part of something like this, think again.

But this is a phenomenon that can be much smaller, much more localized than these big examples of religious, ethnic, racial violence, right? The fire of the tongue can torpedo a church. If careless criticism, gossip, accusations are flying around, right? How many families and other communities have splintered under the same forces of just what people are saying? Remember what I spoke about a couple of weeks back when we first jumped into James. James focuses so much on controlling the tongue on words because they are the absolute easiest mechanism by which Satan can cripple Christ's church and its witness to the world. Again, this is why Jesus yells, Get behind me, Satan, at Peter.

He's trying to stop something that the devil wants to happen. Never underestimate the damage that can be done by the tongue's restless evil, by its deadly poison, even if it's just a small spark, one or two people, right? You don't have to have a hundred dropped matches to start a forest fire. Just one. One will do it.

You don't have to have an entire congregation saying hateful, inflammatory, or divisive things to set a church up in flames. Just one can do the job fine. And James wants better for us as the church Jesus established, and he tells us so. He has a vision for something better, for freshwater springs, for fig trees blossoming, for vines bearing great fruit.

We cannot speak words that are edifying and uplifting and loving while also speaking evil words. It doesn't work. Freshwater and saltwater don't come from the same spring. Fig trees don't produce olives.

Grapevines cannot produce figs. And neither can our mouths simultaneously speak evil and then blessing and grace. How do you pray with the same mouth that you're hating somebody with? We cannot be what we are called to be unless we are willing to get ourselves under control with God's help. We can't fully tame our tongues.

We certainly can't tame each other's tongues, but we can turn to God and rely on the Spirit to catch us until we reach what James calls full maturity in our faith and we don't make any mistakes in our speaking anymore. But in the meantime, that get behind me, Satan spoken into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, you might get it sometimes, or out of love to one another, that might sting a bit. I'm sure it stung Peter. But it might be exactly what we need to hear.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.