Hilton Head Island, SC – September 23, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 74:10-11,18-23; I Samuel 18:1-9; James 3:1-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – So the tongue is a little member and boasts of many things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! – James 3:5 (RSV)
THE TONGUE: OUR SWORD AND STILETTO
In the past couple of weeks we have learned that apparently an Egyptian Coptic Christian paid to have a movie produced which showed the prophet Muhammad in a very bad light. Not all the details about this sorry episode are yet known. It is alleged that the actors in this very low-budget film had no idea what the movie was even about. But as we all know, it deliberately suggested that Muhammad was a womanizer and a child molester.
Somehow the film was picked up on Arab television, and it has frequently been broadcast throughout the Middle East and beyond. As a result of the unfounded allegations in the film, there have been many violent and peaceful demonstrations at US embassies in several countries around the world, and four Americans were killed at the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, including our ambassador to that country. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!
For years some Americans and others have made unsubstantiated allegations that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and that he is secretly a Muslim. No objective person could say such a thing, and yet millions of people, including some federal office holders or some candidates for federal office, have kept this gossip alive for well over four years now. But then, others claim that Mitt Romney chooses totally to ignore the plight of the poor, despite a number of people from the congregation (or in Mormon terminology, “stake”) he served as bishop (pastor) years ago in Massachusetts having given glowing – and I am sure accurate – accounts of how much he helped them in times of need.. It is one of the dismaying truths of political campaigns that tongues repeat all sorts of misleading or misstated words about political opponents. If ever there was a joy in the political process, contemporary elections have killed it.
In these instances, the tongue is used as a partisan broadsword. It is wildly swung out against opponents, cutting anyone it can in any way it can. Don’t worry about the truth in what you say; just say it, and perhaps the truth will sort itself out later.
On the other hand, the tongue can also be employed as a stiletto. With that usage as a weapon, it doesn’t slash; it sticks. It pierces people at their most vulnerable places, metaphorically sliding quickly between their ribs into their heart. They don’t know they’re dead till they die, but they do die quickly, because the tongue is so sharp.
In late 1962 or early 1963, I saw a movie in Glasgow, Scotland. I know it had to be at that particular time, because that was the only time I lived in the Glasgow area. I saw the movie in a theater facing north. (Lois is both astounded and appalled by the fact that I can recall what way I was facing in nearly every movie I ever saw. Who cares? But what can I say? I have many queer quirks, of which that is but one.) Anyway, this movie was called either The Loudest Whisper or The Children’s Hour. It was called one title in Britain and the other in the USA, and I can’t remember which was which, although years later I saw the movie on television here. But I don’t remember in which house I was living, so I can’t tell you which direction I was facing when I watched it.
The movie starred Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn as the joint headmistresses at a small boarding school for girls somewhere in New England, which they had just opened. One of the girls was depicted as a mean, spoiled brat, who refused to work diligently at her studies. In order to get back at the two women for giving her bad grades, which she deserved, she started a rumor that they were lesbians. This was years before most films even hinted at such things, let alone made such a scandalous suggestion. The result was that nearly all the parents pulled their girls out of the school, and the Shirley MacLaine character committed suicide. “So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!”
Did you see Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt? I first saw it in a theater here on Hilton Head Island, facing southeast. But I also have watched it via Netflix at home, facing more or less west. It is the story of a new priest who comes to a parish in Brooklyn. There he encounters Sister Streep, although that wasn’t her name in the movie, but I don’t recall what it was. She was the mother superior of the nuns who taught in the parish school. From the beginning, she doesn’t like the new priest and the changes he attempts to institute in “her” church and “her” school, and she very quietly and subtly starts the rumor that he is a pedophile. We never learn whether or not he was; hence the title, Doubt. But she manages to get him transferred by the bishop to another parish, and she can continue to control her little traditional fiefdom, unimpaired by outside priestly agitators.
Reputations can be utterly destroyed by gossip. There may a grain of truth in the gossip, a lot of truth, or no truth at all, but that never prevents the gossip from being spread. Is it malicious, or not? Are the wagging tongues careful, or not? Is it a blood sport, or a harmless pastime? Rarely is gossip all black or white. Almost always it represents shades of grey, perhaps as many as fifty shades of grey, you might say.
The first church I served as a minister was in northern Wisconsin, at the tip of the Bayfield Peninsula which juts out into Lake Superior at the northernmost point in the whole state. East of Bayfield, across open water, was Madeline Island. In the summer Madeline had a few thousand people staying there each week, but in the winter there were only a couple hundred people at most. A ferry ran between Bayfield and Madeline for seven or eight months a year, and in the winter a makeshift road was plowed across the ice. Madeline was, and is, a unique place, but it has never been very easy to get there.
When I was in Bayfield a minister served the United Church of Christ congregation on the island. He had been there for several years before I came. And he stayed for a few years after I left. He then was in his early fifties, I would guess. From the first time I met him, I immediately liked him. He was very bright and well read, and he was an excellent pastor and also, I presume, a very good preacher. I will call him Charles Jones. Charles told me something of his background, but only something. At some point “back there,” in a previous church he served, tongues began to flutter about how he conducted himself in certain matters. He never gave me any details about these matters, and I never asked. But clearly Charles was a man who had far more talent than was needed for a very small congregation on Madeline Island in Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin, yet that is where he was. He couldn’t find a pastoral call anywhere else. I choose to believe he never would have done anything improper, and the islanders felt the same way about him. They loved him, and he loved them. But at one point along the line, tongues had killed his advancement in ministry, and tongues also killed an important part of his inner spirit. He was a gifted, wise, intelligent, and very melancholy man.
The Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, presents portraits of various people that are painted, as Oliver Cromwell demanded when he was having his own portrait painted, “warts and all.” For example, we may read between the lines that King David was bipolar. His ups and downs, recorded both in I and II Samuel and in the Psalms, are well documented. David’s predecessor on the throne, King Saul, may have been schizophrenic. At least he was certainly paranoid, because anybody who posed even a slight threat to him was viewed by Saul with intense distrust.
Everyone knows the story of how David killed the giant Philistine, Goliath. After it happened, the story is told that Saul’s son Jonathan was smitten by David. Here is what the text says: “When (David) finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took (David) that day, and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and even his sword and his bow and his girdle” (I Sam. 18:1-4)
I will not comment on any of that, because, frankly, I don’t really know either what it means or what it implies, if anything. But I can tell you this: it wasn’t wise for Jonathan to show any kind of partiality to David, because it was likely to get his father’s paranoid nose out of joint. However, what next happened really threw Saul over the edge.
When David went to the king’s palace after having slain Goliath in battle, all the women began singing a little poetic couplet they had made up. In Hebrew the couplet rhymes, but in English it prosaically declares, “Saul had slain his thousands/ And David his tens of thousands” (I Sam. 18:7).
Imagine how that would go over with Saul, who always thought everyone was out to get him anyway. David hadn’t killed thousands; he had killed only one. Goliath was a big one, a really big Philistine, but he was just one man. Nevertheless, it greatly irked Saul that his subjects were singing David’s praises rather than his own, and from that point on Saul considered David an enemy, someone who perhaps should even be done away with.
The women of Israel meant no harm when they sang of David’s brave exploit. They didn’t intend to send Saul into a rage. But that’s what happened. The tongue can be a sword or stiletto, even when that is the last thing anyone intends. Loose lips can sink big ships, and loose lips can cause paranoid monarchs to do psychopathic flips. It behooves us always to think through the possible results of everything we say.
Psalm 74 is identified in its superscription as “A Psalm of Asaph.” No one knows who Asaph was, or anything about him. Whoever he was, several Psalms are said to have been written by him. In Psalm 74 Asaph sounds for all the world like the radical Salafist mullahs who stir up huge protests over foolhardy and dangerous insults to the prophet Muhammad. “Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and an impious people reviles thy name….Have regard for thy covenant; for the dark places of the land are full of violence….Arise, O God, plead thy cause; remember how the impious scoff at thee all the day!” (Ps. 74:18,20,22)
Clever demagogues can send enraged hordes into the streets or over embassy walls by the clever use of their words and their angry intonations. Mob psychology is a fearful thing, and wagging tongues can transform it into uncontrolled fury.
We first moved to Hilton Head Island in the summer of 1979. Back then the island had a population of eight thousand people. Within a year or two there were twelve thousand. Not everybody knew everybody, but it seemed like most people knew most people, even though it wasn’t really true.
There was a man who even then had been living here for ten years already, and he is still here 33 years later. He loved the uniqueness of Hilton Head, and he loved being a member of this fascinating community of residents. Its people intrigued him, and he has always happily rubbed shoulders with everyone around him. Because he took such pleasure in living among such an interesting cast of characters, he used to say, back in those by-gone days, “On Hilton Head, if you haven’t heard a rumor by noon, start one!”
That was an innocent statement, meant to be funny, which it is. But it also can backfire if the rumors started are not kind or altruistic, but mean-spirited and highly ill-advised.
Living on an island, people can become insular. It goes with the territory, and also with the geographical etymology. Living in a place like this, we need to be particularly careful in what we say, because it may stay right here on these sceptered shores and fester.
Martin Luther didn’t like the letter of James - - - at all. He called it “an epistle of straw.” It contained a few verses which presented an opposing view to his favorite doctrine, justification by faith. “Faith without works is dead,” said James (1:17), which doesn’t really refute what Luther thought, but Luther thought it did.
I just read that Buddhists prefer the letter of James to any other biblical book, because to them it sounds like many Buddhist writings. Whether that is valid I can’t say, not being a Buddhist. Anyway, when James talks about that human organ which is most likely to get us into trouble (you probably thought it was something else), he likened the tongue to the rudder of a ship. Though the rudder and tongue are both small, nevertheless they are meant to steer all of us in the right direction. “So the tongue is a little member and boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire” (3:5-6).
One of God’s greatest gifts to us is our tongue. By it we communicate with one another, and share lofty thoughts and ideas and ideals and feelings. But, like any other part of the body, the tongue can be misused. To the greatest possible degree, we must always try to think before we speak. And we must be careful what we say. Particularly must we be careful in what we say about others. As the great philosopher Philo said, “Be kind, be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Never allow your tongue to make it even harder for them.