Consider ships: They are so large that strong winds are needed to drive them. But pilots direct their ships wherever they want with a little rudder. 5 In the same way, even though the tongue is a small part of the body, it boasts wildly. Think about this: A small flame can set a whole forest on fire. 6 The tongue is a small flame of fire, a world of evil at work in us. It contaminates our entire lives. Because of it, the circle of life is set on fire. The tongue itself is set on fire by the flames of hell.
7 People can tame and already have tamed every kind of animal, bird, reptile, and fish. 8 No one can tame the tongue, though. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With it we both bless the Lord and Father and curse human beings made in God’s likeness. 10 Blessing and cursing come from the same mouth. My brothers and sisters, it just shouldn’t be this way! 11 Both fresh water and salt water don’t come from the same spring, do they? 12 My brothers and sisters, can a fig tree produce olives? Can a grapevine produce figs? Of course not, and fresh water doesn’t flow from a saltwater spring either. (Common English Bible)
“Reconnecting with a
Loving God: Healing Spiritual Wounds,” Week Five
I
still remember that worship service like it happened fourteen days ago rather
than fourteen years ago. I was in Atlanta, Georgia, for our denomination’s
International Christian Youth Fellowship, the quadrennial general assembly (of
sorts) for Disciples of Christ youth in the United States and Canada, with
several other teenagers from my home congregation’s youth group.
In
what I believe was the first worship service of the conference, a pastor got up
onto the stage to perform an altar call—and it was unlike any other altar call
I had ever seen to date. In my childhood congregation, an altar call was used
to invite forward people who wanted to formally join the church, and in fact I
participated in one when my family joined that church when I was six years old.
This
was different. This was an almost violent altar call. The hellfire and the
brimstone came out. We were promised exclusion from God’s grace. We were told
that this was an imperative for our very souls. And all I could think of were
people like my own dad, back home in Kansas, who was and is one of the very
best people I know, even if he is what I call a CEO (a Christmas and Easter
Only) churchgoer.
A
number of my friends from my youth group were huddled together, hugging and crying,
very clearly moved by this altar call. They beckoned me to join them. I tried
to. I wanted to.
In
the end, though, I wound up walking out.
I
share this story with you because it is exactly the formative memories like
these that can shape a person’s relationship with God for good or for bad, and
it has a lot to do, I think, with why my generation has largely chosen to
eschew a God who compartmentalized them in church and told them that they were
not good enough for God or for Christ. It is a lesson that we carry with us
still.
This
is a sermon series for the autumn season of our church calendar that takes us
all the way to Advent. Earlier this year, my friend and role model, the pastor
and author Carol Howard Merritt, released her latest book, entitled Healing Spiritual Wounds. She wrote it
from a place of vulnerability that I rarely see from any writer—Christian or
otherwise—in print, and she did so, I think, in order to give her readers
permission to be vulnerable to the singular reality that sometimes, church
hurts.
If
that sounds like a depressing premise upon which to base a book, much less a
sermon series, it ought not be. As Jesus says in John 8, you shall know the
truth, and the truth shall set you free. The truth is that the church can do a
better job caring for, and ministering to, each other and the vulnerable, yet
so often, we choose not to. Acknowledging that fact ought to be liberating to
us because it means that a) we do not have to pretend otherwise, and b) we can
actually get down to the sacred work of doing church better than we have
before. Which is what we should have been doing from the off—always working on
being better and doing church together.
We
began this series with a passage from Carol’s first chapter, “A Tree Grows in
My Bedroom,” and then we heard passages from the following chapters: “Finding
Shalom,” “Healing Our Image of God,” and “Recovering Our Emotions.” Today, we
arrive at the fifth chapter of her book, “Redeeming Our Broken selves,” in
which she writes in part:
As the decades went on, I
worked with more people…who felt cut off from God and unworthy of love…The
denigrating images our religious traditions can inflict on people can move us
to imagine ourselves as lowly creatures, undeserving of God’s love. Small
children sit in pews, with combed hair and swinging legs that cannot touch the
ground, and are suddenly told that their little bodies will burn in hell for
eternity. Much of this belief system was designed to highlight the grace of
God, but it is unnecessary to make a creature look bad in order for a Creator
to look better.
People who have been
wounded by religion have often been given messages that they replay in their
minds constantly. They instantly recall a hurtful sermon that they heard when
they were small children thirty years after the fact.
In a scriptural context,
we can think of these messages as a blessing or a curse. There was a sense in
ancient cultures that our words had power, and a blessing or a curse seemed to
be weighted with a bit of magic. We have lost that mythical understanding, but
the power of the blessing and the curse still remain.
Even
without that mythical understanding of words that Carol speaks of here, the
admonition of James 3 to tame the tongue is just as applicable to us today as
it was nearly two thousand years ago when this letter bearing the name of the
younger brother of Jesus was penned.
The
taming of the tongue is typically associated with an eschewing of swearing,
which to be completely honest, I’m awful at. I really am. You don’t hear it
from me here because I believe in edifying my speech before you in God’s house,
but I am by no means above it in other contexts. For instance, when the men’s
national team proceeded to disqualify themselves from the World Cup this past
week.
But
even more than swearing, James is speaking of cursing, and that has an
additional meaning that swearing simply does not. We may use those words interchangeably
to describe cussing, but cursing includes the definition of actively wishing
evil or calamity upon a person.
And
by that definition, telling someone that they are going to hell if they do not
repent and believe in whatever doctrinally specific version of Christianity you
are shouting at them is, well, cursing them. Because you can claim you do not
enjoy it all you want, but if that is what you take meaning from, and claim is
a calling, then you wish it to be real. Which means you are wishing a reality
of hell upon another human being. Claiming that you are not is a version of
talking out of both sides of your mouth that James likewise is condemning here.
If
it seems at all strange to consider preaching as a form of cursing, remember
what it is that we are up against: the image—popularized by the sensationalism
of the news stories themselves—of preachers and Christians spouting forth all
manner of hate, rage, and bile towards anybody: LGBTQ people. Women. Muslims.
Jews. Left-handed Jeopardy aficionados with hyphenated last names who were born
during a gibbous moon.
Our
threats of hell are a cudgel that go hand-in-hand with that sort of
demonization of others based purely upon the identities we are born into. One
tends to follow the other. And eventually, when you reach the point of “everyone
outside this particular church/tradition/denomination” is subjected to such
threats of hell, then the message of your Christianity that you are
broadcasting to the world has stopped being a blessing.
Healing
from spiritual wounds necessarily involves acknowledging that spiritual wounds
are being inflicted in the first place. It is inherent in the process. You
cannot heal from that which is not acknowledged to even exist.
That
is partly why cultures of secrecy tend to dominate around sin—if you do not
acknowledge it, if you continue to lie to yourself, to the world, and to God
about it—then you do not have to confront it.
That
is how the church often operates and has operated—look no further than the
Roman Catholic priest scandals across countries and across decades, or the many
megachurch and televangelist scandals that have rocked American Protestantism
time and again.
But
that was not how Jesus operated—He did not heal a single leper by pretending
that leprosy did not exist—and it cannot be how the church operates now. We
cannot live in denial or in secrecy over the ways in which we wound others, or
over the ways in which we ourselves have in turn been wounded.
Those
wounds, if we have learned nothing from, say, the deep layers of despicableness
to the Harvey Weinstein story, can be carried for decades after being inflicted
upon very young people—including children—before being fully aired, wrestled
with, and struggled over in an attempt at catharsis. Time, as it so happens,
does not heal *all* wounds. More is required of us to reach that catharsis.
May
that catharsis come, individually for you if need be, but collectively for all
of us, within and outside of the church, and soon. Truth is needed today as
much as ever, for lies and the covering up of all manner of wounds and conceits
are similarly curses that we employ with our words.
That
sermon I heard as a youth in Atlanta affected me, badly. But it was just that—one
sermon. Being told, or shouted, that your entire childhood…that’s going to
leave an impression.
We
are still able to choose impression we leave upon those who encounter us and
see our faith proclaimed by our choice of words. And we make that choice every single day when
we decide whether to abide by the example of Jesus and, here, his young brother
James…or not.
Let
us choose wisely, then, in pursuit of the love and truth that Jesus Christ
reveals to each of us.
May
it be so. Amen.
Rev.
Eric Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
October
15, 2017
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