24th Sunday in Ordinary Time
James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38
September 13, 2009

James and the T. C. Bears

        For several years I worked with a group of seminary graduates as they began to serve their first churches as ordained ministers of Word and Sacrament. One was an associate pastor in a large church in North Carolina. One served a small church in Central Florida and another an even smaller church on the northern coast of California. One married couple served a huge congregation in Philadelphia. These new pastors ranged in theological outlook from conservative evangelical to left wing fuzzy, but they all noticed something their churches have in common – besides, of course, the lordship of Christ and worries about meeting the budget.

        "Sometimes people aren’t very nice to each other," they noticed. "In private moments they’ll say some pretty nasty things about each other, and in heated moments they might say those things right to each other’s faces."

        It comes as a surprise to many new ministers that Christians can and do behave badly toward one another. They thought, when they entered the ministry, they were escaping the world of back-stabbing and trash-talking. "Christians don’t act that way," they figured. "In church, people are nice."

        This ecclesiology reminds me of the rallying cry of the "T. C. Bears," the class of two and three-year-olds in the First Presbyterian Preschool. Ms. Belinda, God bless her memory, taught in the Preschool for 30 years. She had her small charges sing:

We are the Bears, the T. C. Bears!
We don’t hit and we don’t bite.
We don’t kick and we don’t scratch.
But we love each other.

Amen, Saint Belinda! If anybody could mold hitters, biters, kickers and scratchers into T. C. Bears who love each other, it was she.

The problem is, as we grow older, our hitting, biting, kicking, and scratching take a more subtle form. Our attacks become verbal. I hear them on the playground from time to time. "Do-do head" seems to be a perennial favorite.

        Sticks and stones can break my bones,
                but words can never harm me.

Brave words, those, but of course they’re not true. Words can hurt. They can hurt a lot worse than sticks and stones. Words can leave scars that last a lifetime.

The Epistle of James is a letter full of what we might call "practical theology." The writer doesn’t pull any punches. "If you say you have faith," he says, "Show me your works." "You say you love Jesus, then show me how you treat the poorest, most shabbily dressed member in your assembly. You say the gospel is good news. Then show me how you put that good news to work."

I once worked on an offshore oil rig run by a sunburned toolpusher named Thibodaux. I was a "roustabout," the lowest form of life on an oil rig. If Monsieur Thibodaux thought I wasn’t working hard enough, he’d say "Fish or cut bait, mon cher. This ain’t no free boat ride, no!"

James says much the same to the church. "Fish or cut bait. Faith without works is dead."

"And while you’re at it," James says, "Mind your tongue." The tongue is like the bridle of a horse. It steers the whole beast. The tongue is like the rudder of a great ship. It’s small but it’s powerful. Great forests are set ablaze by a small fire, and the tongue is a fire.

The tongue is a bridle. The tongue is a rudder. The tongue is a fire. Now that James has got the metaphors rolling, he really cuts loose:

If you don’t believe James, consider Serena Williams’ outburst at last night’s tennis match.

"My brothers and sisters," James laments, "this ought not to be so." But it is so. Christians who disagree with each other are still calling each other names. "Socialist" seems to be the latest one, although God knows what that really means. If I’m over 65 and on Medicare I’m can still be called a good American capitalist. But if I want other people to have the same benefits I have, all of the sudden I’m a "socialist." As epithets go, "Do-do head" makes just as much sense.

In a church I served long ago, a congregational meeting was held on the question of whether or not to sell the manse. It was a long meeting. Lots of people spoke and lots of roasts that had been left in ovens that morning got burned. Generally speaking, the folks who had been members when the manse was built back in the 1950’s wanted to keep it, and the members who had joined since the manse was built wanted to sell it. The vote was close. We kept the manse.

But that wasn’t where the hurt came in. After the meeting, on the sidewalk in front of the church, a woman who had been a member since she was a child walked up to another woman who had been in favor of making the change.

"How dare you," she said. "How dare you come into our church and try to change it? You’ve been here how long? Three years? My parents built this church. Just who do you think you are?"

"My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so."

Why do you suppose the tongue seems to have so much more destructive power within the fellowship of the church than in other settings? Partly it’s because our expectations for one another are higher just because we’re Christians. Christians ought to behave at least as well as T. C. Bears.

James seems to think so. He knows the church is composed of sinners. He knows we wouldn’t be Christians in the first place if we didn’t admit we were sinners, but he expects sinners to shape up once they’re living in the light of the gospel.

We Presbyterians can hardly walk through the door without saying a prayer of confession and telling the Lord what miserable offenders we all are. That’s sound theology, but James seems to think we should put our theology to work.

"Feed the hungry," he tells us. Help the helpless. Welcome the stranger, and for God’s sake, mind your tongue." All the good we do in the Lord’s name can be brought to naught by a few words. Years spent building relationships can be undone by words spoken in spite or anger.

"Loose words sink ships," went the motto in World War II. Words can do more than that. They can sink our witness to the grace and welcome of the gospel.

Years ago, when Andra was teaching public school kindergarten, a child ran up to her on the playground in tears. She had been arguing with a classmate and was devastated by the name her friend had called her. "Ms. Copeland," the little girl said between sobs. "Ms. Copeland, Katrina called me a ‘damn-it.’"

She wasn’t sure what "damn-it" meant, but she knew it was meant to hurt. "We don’t say that kind of thing at school," Andra taught her students. Why do you suppose Christians say that kind of thing at church?

With the tongue, James says, "We bless the Lord and Father," and with the very same tongue "we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.

"Brothers and sisters, it ought not to be so."

As I was writing this sermon, I stopped at this point. I looked back over what I’d written and thought to myself, "Well, here’s a fine example of the kind of sermon you told yourself you’d never preach. You said you’d be prophetic. Timely. Cutting edge. And now you get up in the pulpit just to tell people they ought to be nice to one another? You’re losing your grip, Copeland. You’re turning into your old man."

Then I remembered a sermon my old man preached long ago, when I was just a kid. He’d already delivered sermons about Selma and race relations and a lot of other issues that folks didn’t like to hear from a preacher in the South in the 1960’s. This sermon wasn’t about social justice. It was about gossip and slander and the saying of hurtful things in the household of God.

Dad did what I would never have the guts to do. He admonished his flock to be nicer to one another. I even remember the title of that sermon. "Put a Little Honey on Your Lips."

Well, the gospel isn’t about being nice. It’s about life and death, heaven and hell, despair and hope, promise and fulfillment. It’s about taking up a cross and following Christ. I don’t want the church to become complacent or to retreat into moralist quietism.

But brothers and sisters, wouldn’t it help if we all put a little honey on our lips? James seems to think so. Faith without works is dead, James said, but faith doesn’t need to be sour. A little honey would certainly help.

 

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