The tongues is also a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire…With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be. (James 3:6ff, NIV)
To say or write anything publicly in the times we live in may very well be met with suspicion. Because we are raw with the occurrences of the past few weeks in our nation’s capital. Whether you are a person of faith, or whether you are unchurched, chances are you have strong feelings about where we are as a nation. Regardless of where you or I stand, or how we feel, we are a nation in disagreement. Of that, we can all agree. What we do about it first involves what we say. Speech: Spoken, written — and, deserving special mention — what we send out via social media. Social media can serve an amazing purpose. We live in a time when we can connect with someone we haven’t seen in 50 years, we can look up recipes and learn how to do repair a dishwasher in the span of a few seconds. We can also receive and dish out whatever comes to mind without much thought to the damage it does. We live in a nation of free speech. It is one of our most highly regarded freedoms. Here is the actual text of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” What we also know is the practice of free speech does not merely mean we can say or do whatever we want, without consequence. In this newspaper a day or two ago was an article about a Waynesboro business owner who was in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, and described were posts by the attendee and alleged posts by a Waynesboro Cultural Commission member who reacted to what the business owner wrote. Neither person had met the other. The comments were full of confrontation, vitriol, threats. There was no interest in engaging in constructive conversation. Their tongues were on fire. We could go on and on with examples where the ability to listen and speak, especially when we disagree, has broken down. A few years ago, I watched a movie from the 1930’s on TCM. It was a story of some young men in their early twenties. They were rivals who bitterly disagreed. I forget the situation that led to their rivalry, but the young men came to blows. What was curious though, was after their brief fight, they paused to light cigarettes and then began to talk about their disagreement, which was not a lighthearted one. Are we able to do this today? In this era of social media, where it is much easier to “let fly” on the Internet, as opposed to looking someone else directly in the eye and saying, “I disagree with you, tell me why you think this way, I don’t understand;” how can we disagree while diffusing the rising tensions of our time? This question is not only for Washington D.C., though I think both Democrat and Republican politicians need to answer this question. The question is for those of us living here in this area. There is always something to disagree about. There are serious disagreements about what the future of our nation looks like. Are we able to disagree and search for ways to move forward together? In the book of Acts the writer Luke speaks multiple times of how “there was no small debate” in the early church. The disagreements were about a centrally important covenant that God had made with the people of Israel. There were confrontations. But the text tells us that the speech — the tongues of those who disagreed — sought to work and find a way forward, through the Holy Spirit working in and amongst them. The wisdom of God in Holy Scripture does not shirk or try to find some easy way around important disagreements. Any jump into the story of Scripture reveals that God’s people rarely found completely unified agreement, and often found themselves in the midst of “no small debate.” But in the freedom we have in Christ that is declared openly and loudly in God’s Word, we hear the wisdom of James, noted above, and the apostle Paul, who in Ephesians writes, “speak the truth in love.” Putting those together (truth and love) can be difficult. And yet these are times for the faithful — whether you and I tend strongly politically one way or another or not — to heed the wisdom of God for living together. Last Sunday, the Church celebrated the Baptism of our Lord Jesus. Before the heavens opened, the Spirit of God descended on Jesus, and the voice of God came out of heaven declaring Jesus to be the Beloved Son, the gospel of Luke (Luke 3:1-22) describes the times the people are living in: a time of Emperor Tiberius, of governor Pontius Pilate, of other rulers like Herod and Philip. It’s in this time that the Word of God comes to John the Baptist in the wilderness. Where do the crowds head? To the capital city, or the governor’s palace or the places where other rulers have their say? Or to Facebook or Twitter or the news channel where they find people who think like they do? No, they head to where the Word of God is proclaimed to ask “what then shall we do?” The times we live in are no different.
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AuthorPastor Paul came to Grace to serve as our Pastor in October 2012. After a first career in product and graphic design, he was ordained in 1993, and has served as a parish pastor in Virginia and South Carolina. He is married to Jill and they have two daughters, one at Roanoke College and one at James Madison University. Archives
December 2021
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