Tongues of Fire

Psalm 19; Proverbs 1:20-23; James 3:1-9

September 16, 2012

Do y’all know Godwin’s Law? It’s the dictum that holds that any internet debate will devolve within about six comments to the point of invoking Hitler and the Nazis. I call my corollary David’s Rule for Internet Serenity and it goes like this, “"Never ever ever read the comments on any even vaguely political article on any web site. Ever."

If you break my rule – as I do with regularity – you will discover all too quickly that most folks out there were not raised by my mother, who told us often, “if you don’t have anything nice to say about a person, don’t say anything at all.”

My mom is not a Quaker, but she does seem to have grasped one of the singular pieces of Quaker wisdom: speak only if your words will improve the silence.

Now you might think – and you wouldn’t be wrong – that this is a sermon particularly suited for a political season. I do, in fact, wish that I could share this message directly with Misters Romney and Obama and, especially, their surrogates and all the more so the partisan talking heads who fill the airwaves with wave after wave after wave of vitriolic, vituperative, and vicious broadsides.

But the truth is I’m a lot more concerned with what comes out of my own mouth than with what comes out of theirs. Moreover, I think we all share and bear responsibility for a culture in which we almost instantly and universally recognize Godwin’s Law and understand the need for a rule of internet serenity.

While the means and speed of communication have changed mind-bogglingly in the past 2,000 years, it’s clear from the concerns underscored in the various passages of scripture that we’ve read together this morning that every age has struggled with civility.

The author of James felt compelled to remind his readers that the tongue is a fire, and to warn them about the blazes ignited by small tongues of fire. Clearly, the very early church was not immune from the damages inflicted by such blazes.

Where we might just have trumped our forebears is in the related struggle with cynicism. We’re not only incredibly good and fast at destructive speech, but we’re deeply cynical about the speech even of people we say we admire.

Thus we find ourselves living in an uncivil age of deep cynicism, and the source of that sad reality becomes abundantly clear all too often when we open our mouths to speak.

Against that sad reality, the psalmist lifts up in contrast the song of creation itself: “the heavens are telling the glory of God, the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.”

Recalling such wisdom, Jesus was able to declare that if his disciples should remain silent, “the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing!”

In the midst of our inability or unwillingness to sing praise, creation itself sings out. Not only that, but as the lines from Proverbs tell us, God speaks even when we remain silent, even when we speak destructively, even when we remain mired in uncivil cynicism.

“Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. … I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.”

God speaks a creative and loving word and the rocks and stones and birds and trees, the heavens and the firmament respond telling the glory of God.

Meanwhile we call each other names and set the world in flames with our overheated rhetoric.

Perhaps the Quakers were not quite right. Maybe the advice should be, “Speak only if your words will improve the symphony of creation’s praise.”

Now it will perhaps amuse you – I know it does me – to hear these words spoken. I have no great confidence that I am improving that symphony or even, for that matter, improving a blessed silence. My own doubt is born of knowing full well how often I not only fall prey to “reading the comments,” as it were, but also I give in to the temptation to add to them my own cynical commentary.

I all too easily forget the admonition of James about tongues of fire. At the same time I forget as well the very wisdom that I have oft repeated here: that gratitude is the common birthplace of all authentic religious expression.

Out of anger, or fear, or grasping, or cynicism, or hurt, or grief – from all of those places where each one of us sometimes finds ourselves – out of those places it is often hard to find, much less to express, gratitude, and so the default expression becomes white hot anger, ugly hate, deep despairing cynicism: none of which improves the silence much less the symphony of creation.

So here’s an invitation – one that will probably come as an incredibly difficult one to receive during a political season, but one that I know I need to heed. From now to mid-November, for a start, let’s refrain from cynicism and hate-filled rhetoric, let’s find gratitude in every possible moment, and let’s keep silent unless our voice improves whatever context or conversation we find ourselves in.

As a first step in this practice, I invite you now to take a few moments in the silence and beauty of this time and place to think about things for which you are grateful. I invite you to think about gratitude on several levels: begin close in – family, friends, neighborhood, then expand your circles of gratitude to school, workplace, community, then expand those circles even more broadly, to the metro area, the region, the nation and the world. For what are you grateful in those spheres of our lives?

Keep the silence, and after a few minutes, I’ll invite you out of it into a song of praise. Let us enter a time of silence.