We have been having a great time of revival here at Franktown these last two nights. We have heard Jon Cash bring a challenging message and we have seen people respond. We have had great music. Great fellowship. Great ice cream.
Jon’s message over the last two nights has been about getting out of our comfort zone and stepping out in faith, not fear, to be followers of Jesus. He has warned us about being counterfeit Christians who have the form but not the substance of faith. He has invited us into a new relationship with Christ. He has talked about heaven and warned us of hell.
Revival is a time when we go back to what got us here in the first place. Maybe it was your parents who got you here in the first place, but hopefully, at some point, it was a powerful experience of God. And the preaching is designed to pull us back to that first love. So we preachers try to get up for occasions like this.
Now I’ll try not to be like a preacher who was asked to speak before the District Conference one time. The District Superintendent asked this man to speak and she told him, “O.K., you are on the program for twenty minutes.” The other preachers from the district were sitting behind him in the choir section, giving him moral support and throwing in an occasional "Amen" to help the preacher along. The preacher preached his twenty minutes and kept going. He preached for 30 minutes, then forty minutes and then for an hour. He was up to an hour and ten minutes when finally, a man sitting on the front row took a hymnal and threw it at the preacher who was still going strong. The preacher saw the hymnal as it was hurled his way and he ducked. Well, the hymnal kept going and hit one of the preachers sitting in the choir section. As the man in the choir section was going down, you could hear him say, "Hit me again, I can still hear him preaching!"[i]
I’ll try not to be like that this morning. That’s kind of like the story of the boy who was coming out of church one Sunday by himself. Somebody saw him coming out and knew that the service wasn’t over so they asked him, “Is the preacher finished?” And the boy said, “Oh, yes, he’s finished; he just hasn’t stopped talking yet.”[ii] I’ll try not to be like that either today.
What I want to talk about is how this message of having faith intersects with what James talks about which is doing faith. And in particular today I want to talk about how telling the truth is so important to being a person of faith.
So let’s start under the tree. Amazing things happen when you’re sitting under a tree. The legend says that Isaac Newton was sitting beneath a tree watching an apple fall when he discovered the law of gravity. St. Augustine was sitting in a garden, presumably beneath the trees, when he heard a child’s voice telling him to “Take up and read” the Bible he held. When he did he found salvation and never looked back. Amazing things happen when you sit beneath the trees. I know, because I had one of those experiences.
It wasn’t that long ago. Just about a year and a half ago I was at the Festival for Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After one of the sessions I was sitting beneath a tree writing in my journal, one of my practices for listening for God. And just as clearly as Augustine heard that voice in his garden, I heard God…it must have been God…saying three things: Be free. Tell the truth. Don’t do it alone. It was transformative. I heard it as three things I had to do in order to be the person God called me to be.
It’s not always been as clear as it was on that day, but I have been trying to live out those things for twenty years now as a pastor in the United Methodist Church. But I have to say that I often wonder how well I am living up that calling. Those things sound easy. Be free. Tell the truth. Don’t do it alone. But they are a challenge.
And being a pastor? Brother James is pretty discouraging on this point: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” Sometimes I ask myself, in the face of James’ message, “What were you thinking, Alex?”
I remember when I was a teenager I got up in front of my church during a revival and said, “I think God is calling me to be a missionary.” There was the sound of a thud in the back of the sanctuary and I think that was my mother hitting the floor. “I think God is calling me to be a missionary and I’m ready to go.” By all rights the whole room ought to have erupted in laughter at that point. If people had not been sitting there in their Sunday best trying to look proper and be on their best behavior they might have.
Because they knew me. They knew who I was. They had watched me grow up. I went through a painfully awkward stage there that lasted…oh, twelve years. They saw me when I decided to play catch for the church softball team and warmed up right in front of Mr. Moubray’s new car. I missed a catch and he had to get a new windshield. They knew that about me.
They saw me when I tried singing in the children’s choir before I knew how to sing. They saw me when my friend Philip Jaderborg and I used to run through the streets of the small town where I grew up shaking all the vending machines to see if they would give us free stuff. You see, they knew who I was and still they did not laugh. I think they knew. They knew that if God wanted to call me into some kind of missionary work that would be just the sort of thing that God would do. You know what they say. If God could get Balaam’s ass to talk…well, maybe there was hope for me.
But it’s one thing to be foolish…it’s another thing to recognize how dangerous it is to follow God’s call into ministry. Do you remember when Joshua was talking to the people of Israel after they conquered the Promised Land? They had come through the wilderness. Forty years they had been wandering in the wilderness. Forty years of manna. Forty years of grumbling. Forty years of ‘Are we there yet?’ And they finally come into the land and they’re gathered together at the high, holy place at Shechem.
Joshua comes before them and he recites their history going back to Abraham. He reminds them that God had given a promise to Isaac and the promise had continued through Jacob and Esau and into Egypt and out of Egypt and through the Red Sea and into the land of the Amorites, whom they conquered, and into the land of the Moabites with Balaam and his ass who blessed them instead of cursing them. Then God brought them across the Jordan River and into the land. God knocked down the walls of Jericho. God gave them victory over the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the socialites, the crystal lights, gingivitis and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Everything and every one that could oppose them, God delivered over into their hands. God gave them land that had not labored on, towns they had not built, vineyards and oliveyards that they had not planted.
But…the people had something they had to do. “It wasn’t your bow that won the victory,” God said. It wasn’t your sword. It wasn’t your doing that you are where you are, but there is something that they had to do. They had to choose. They had to choose whom it was that they were going to serve. They could choose to serve the god of the Amorites and the Canaanites. Or they could choose to serve the God that had brought them up from Egypt. But now it was ‘fish or cut bait’ time. They had to choose.
You remember that song by Bob Dylan. “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” That’s what Joshua was saying to the people. Then he tells them, “You gotta choose, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
The people say, “The Lord did all of this for us. The Lord brought us to this place. Who else would we serve? We will serve the Lord, too.”
Then listen to what Joshua says to the people, “You can’t serve the Lord! You can’t do it, because you know what’s going to happen? You will forget God. You will serve other gods. And God is a jealous God who won’t tolerate that and then where will you be?”
But these people are a stubborn people and they say, “No, we will serve the Lord!”
Joshua says, “O.K., you are witnesses against yourself.”
But the people say all the more loudly, “The Lord our God we will serve. That is the god we will obey.” And they make a covenant on the spot.
That’s what it’s like to follow God into ministry. You stand up and say, “I will serve the Lord as a pastor,” and there ought to be somebody around to say, “You can’t do it.” So then you say, “No, I will serve the Lord!” And then somebody should say, “Alright, but you are a witness against yourself, because you are going to mess up.” Then you say, “No, I will serve the Lord!” If I were going to redesign the ordination process, I think I would include something like this.
James says that it is dangerous to follow God as a teacher of the Word and this is why: You have to tell the truth. You think that’s natural. You think that’s easy. But do you realize how hard it is to tell the truth in this society we live in? The world has an interest in telling us lies about how the world works and about who we are.
The world will tell you lies like: you’ve got to look a certain way, you’ve to have this much money, or you have to have this kind of job. And let me tell you, none of those is true. You are not what you look like. For some of us that’s a mighty good thing. But you get seduced by the commercials, don’t you? Have you seen that Nutrisystem commercial? “After I lost 40 pounds, my husband jokes that he finally has a trophy wife.” Wow. How many times have you heard commercials say, in so many words, “If you just had whiter teeth… if you just didn’t have bad breath…if you just didn’t wear such out-of-style clothes…if you just got a tummy tuck or a nose job, you would be somebody”? But that’s a lie. And Christians have to say that one another. When your wife comes down the stairs and says to you, ‘Does this make me look fat?’ you might have to embellish the truth. But when your Christian friend sees that you have been seduced by the lie that you are what you look like, your Christian friend needs to tell the truth.
You are also not what you own. No i-Pod is going to give you eternal life. No 28-foot boat is going to make you a man or a woman. No cell phone is going to bring you salvation. Those are all lies and somebody has got to tell you the truth.
And you are not what you do. You are more than the job that makes you money, the role you play in the family, the position you hold in the community. Somebody has to tell you the truth.
There are other lies out there, too. Lies that tell you that it doesn’t matter what you do with your body because it is your body. So if you have sex without thinking about the consequences and outside of a marriage relationship, whose business is that but yours? If you put drugs into it, whose business is it? If you drink till you’re falling down drunk, whose business is it? When somebody calls us on it we might even tell them to get out of our business. But somebody knows that it is God’s business and somebody’s got to tell you the truth. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and we honor God or dishonor God by what we do with these bodies we have been given.
Oh, there are lies out there. There are low-down, dirty lies. There are lies that tell us that it’s a sign of weakness to believe in God. You are a wimp if you’re a Christian. If you believe in Jesus Christ, some people think, it’s just a crutch and man, do you people waste a lot of time in church on Sundays.
But somebody’s got to tell the truth. You know the truth. You know that God’s power is shown in weakness. You know that we are strong when we are standing on the rock that is the Lord. You know that we are strong when we are standing on the cornerstone that the world rejected. You know that he’s got the whole world in his hands when those hands are stretched out on a cross. You know that we are uplifted when we see that the Son of God has been cut down. You know that we are full when we see that the tomb is empty. You know that ‘on Christ the solid rock I stand because all other ground is sinking sand.’ That’s the truth that somebody’s got to tell.
Maybe we’re not up to truth telling, though. Maybe Jack Nicholson was right in the movie A Few Good Men when he said, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” But what does the scripture say? “You will know the truth and the truth will make you…free” [John 8:32]. The truth will make you free.
So Brother James tells us that the sanctified life is about telling the truth but he also gives us this warning. He warns teachers of the word that they will be judged with special harshness – so be careful in your speech. And he warns the whole community to be wary with how they speak. “The tongue is a fire,” he says. It causes division and hurt and pain when we use it to speak words that do not build up the body of Christ. When we speak ill of our neighbors. When we start defining them through the sins that they struggle with rather than looking at them the way that God does – as people struggling with sin but still worthy of all of God’s love and all of God’s grace.
When we use the same mouth to bless the Lord and to curse our brother or sister, we are hypocrites. Now how many times this week have you used that mouth of yours to offer a blessing to someone? And how many times have you used it say something bad about someone else? Does your Mama know how you used that mouth?
It’s not easy telling the truth. I remember the first month I was a pastor. I was serving a church in Dallas, Texas…an associate pastor in a bilingual church and I was barely lingual, much less bilingual. Three weeks in my senior pastor said, “I’m going to Austin for a few days. You’re in charge.”
So thirty minutes into the first day after he left, I was sitting in the church office and I got a phone call. A young man with a severe drug problem who was in the church had committed suicide by hanging himself in a hotel room on his fifth wedding anniversary. I called my senior pastor and he said something to the effect of, “Didn’t you hear me? You’re in charge.”
So I went to the home of the family of the young man’s wife. And I walked in with my Bible and the ten or fifteen Spanish words that I knew. They treated me like the pastor. I’m remembering that verse right about now…not many of you should be teachers…what in God’s name was Alex Joyner doing as a pastor? They gathered everybody up together in a room. There’s the grieving widow. There are the relatives with hollow eyes, red from crying. There must have been some people breathing in the room, but when I remember this scene all I remember is dead silence. They were waiting on me.
They were waiting on me! I could just hear the challenge: Now what are you going to say to us, preacher? How do you say that all things work for good when something like this happens? How do you say that there is good news? How do you stand up in the face of darkness and evil? How do you explain what this young man did? How do you talk about life? How do you talk about hope? How do you talk about redemption and salvation when something like this happens? Because it sure looks to us like death wins. It sure looks to us like what the world says is right, “Life’s a bear, then you die.” They didn’t say this out loud, but I’m hearing it in my head.
They were waiting on me. And you know what I had to do? I had to tell the truth. I had to tell the truth. And the truth was not that this young man’s death was the last word to be spoken over his life. Another young man’s death on a cross in Calvary two thousand years before was the last word. The truth was not that their lives were meaningless because that young man’s death was senseless. The truth was that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to God’s own self. The truth was not that death wins. The truth was that “I have overcome death, and behold I am alive for evermore.” The truth was not that evil and the grave triumph. The truth was that the stone was rolled away. The stone was rolled away and Jesus walked out of that tomb and Jesus busted down the doors of his disciples and spoke peace and sent them forth and ascended into heaven and established his church and lives and reigns forever. And he wants every person to be part of that kingdom. And if that sounds too fantastical to be true, well, you just go try to find a story the world tells that you can stake your life on.
You think the truth is that you’re a user or a loser? You think the truth is that you’re a failure? You think the truth is that you’re a consumer or a victim or a self-made man or an abused woman? You think the truth is that there is no purpose to this crazy universe and we’re just a collection of atoms in a random array? You think your greatest sin defines who you are? You think your success defines who you are? You think any of these definitions is in any way satisfactory to in any way let you know the truth of who you are? Or do you need somebody to tell you the truth about who you are?
The truth is that we should be wary of speaking in God’s name, but we should dare to do it. The world needs some people who will look at its brokenness and failure and see that God has not abandoned it to its sin. You need somebody who will let you know that your hope is found in a savior who died on a cross on Calvary and who rose again to draw all people unto himself. You need somebody who will let you know that you are no longer a child of wrath, but a child of God. You need somebody who will stand by you in the storms and who will not look away when you are in pain and grief. You need somebody who will sit in a room when it is at its darkest and talk about the light. You need somebody who will look squarely into the face of the evil and know that it does not represent the world as God designed it to be and it does not represent the world as it will be when God redeems it. You need somebody who is full of God’s spirit and full of God’s grace. You need somebody who will tell you the truth for God’s sake.
So who’s going to do this with me? Who’s going to get out of their comfort zone and do something stubborn and foolish for God? God needs men and women, boys and girls, who will stand up to tell the truth about this world. And the truth is this: Christ Jesus…is alive. Christ Jesus…is alive. Christ Jesus…is alive. And the world is not ever going to be the same. Thanks be to God.
James 3:1-18 (NRSV)
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!
And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue-- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.
From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.
Jon’s message over the last two nights has been about getting out of our comfort zone and stepping out in faith, not fear, to be followers of Jesus. He has warned us about being counterfeit Christians who have the form but not the substance of faith. He has invited us into a new relationship with Christ. He has talked about heaven and warned us of hell.
Revival is a time when we go back to what got us here in the first place. Maybe it was your parents who got you here in the first place, but hopefully, at some point, it was a powerful experience of God. And the preaching is designed to pull us back to that first love. So we preachers try to get up for occasions like this.
Now I’ll try not to be like a preacher who was asked to speak before the District Conference one time. The District Superintendent asked this man to speak and she told him, “O.K., you are on the program for twenty minutes.” The other preachers from the district were sitting behind him in the choir section, giving him moral support and throwing in an occasional "Amen" to help the preacher along. The preacher preached his twenty minutes and kept going. He preached for 30 minutes, then forty minutes and then for an hour. He was up to an hour and ten minutes when finally, a man sitting on the front row took a hymnal and threw it at the preacher who was still going strong. The preacher saw the hymnal as it was hurled his way and he ducked. Well, the hymnal kept going and hit one of the preachers sitting in the choir section. As the man in the choir section was going down, you could hear him say, "Hit me again, I can still hear him preaching!"[i]
I’ll try not to be like that this morning. That’s kind of like the story of the boy who was coming out of church one Sunday by himself. Somebody saw him coming out and knew that the service wasn’t over so they asked him, “Is the preacher finished?” And the boy said, “Oh, yes, he’s finished; he just hasn’t stopped talking yet.”[ii] I’ll try not to be like that either today.
What I want to talk about is how this message of having faith intersects with what James talks about which is doing faith. And in particular today I want to talk about how telling the truth is so important to being a person of faith.
So let’s start under the tree. Amazing things happen when you’re sitting under a tree. The legend says that Isaac Newton was sitting beneath a tree watching an apple fall when he discovered the law of gravity. St. Augustine was sitting in a garden, presumably beneath the trees, when he heard a child’s voice telling him to “Take up and read” the Bible he held. When he did he found salvation and never looked back. Amazing things happen when you sit beneath the trees. I know, because I had one of those experiences.
It wasn’t that long ago. Just about a year and a half ago I was at the Festival for Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After one of the sessions I was sitting beneath a tree writing in my journal, one of my practices for listening for God. And just as clearly as Augustine heard that voice in his garden, I heard God…it must have been God…saying three things: Be free. Tell the truth. Don’t do it alone. It was transformative. I heard it as three things I had to do in order to be the person God called me to be.
It’s not always been as clear as it was on that day, but I have been trying to live out those things for twenty years now as a pastor in the United Methodist Church. But I have to say that I often wonder how well I am living up that calling. Those things sound easy. Be free. Tell the truth. Don’t do it alone. But they are a challenge.
And being a pastor? Brother James is pretty discouraging on this point: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes.” Sometimes I ask myself, in the face of James’ message, “What were you thinking, Alex?”
I remember when I was a teenager I got up in front of my church during a revival and said, “I think God is calling me to be a missionary.” There was the sound of a thud in the back of the sanctuary and I think that was my mother hitting the floor. “I think God is calling me to be a missionary and I’m ready to go.” By all rights the whole room ought to have erupted in laughter at that point. If people had not been sitting there in their Sunday best trying to look proper and be on their best behavior they might have.
Because they knew me. They knew who I was. They had watched me grow up. I went through a painfully awkward stage there that lasted…oh, twelve years. They saw me when I decided to play catch for the church softball team and warmed up right in front of Mr. Moubray’s new car. I missed a catch and he had to get a new windshield. They knew that about me.
They saw me when I tried singing in the children’s choir before I knew how to sing. They saw me when my friend Philip Jaderborg and I used to run through the streets of the small town where I grew up shaking all the vending machines to see if they would give us free stuff. You see, they knew who I was and still they did not laugh. I think they knew. They knew that if God wanted to call me into some kind of missionary work that would be just the sort of thing that God would do. You know what they say. If God could get Balaam’s ass to talk…well, maybe there was hope for me.
But it’s one thing to be foolish…it’s another thing to recognize how dangerous it is to follow God’s call into ministry. Do you remember when Joshua was talking to the people of Israel after they conquered the Promised Land? They had come through the wilderness. Forty years they had been wandering in the wilderness. Forty years of manna. Forty years of grumbling. Forty years of ‘Are we there yet?’ And they finally come into the land and they’re gathered together at the high, holy place at Shechem.
Joshua comes before them and he recites their history going back to Abraham. He reminds them that God had given a promise to Isaac and the promise had continued through Jacob and Esau and into Egypt and out of Egypt and through the Red Sea and into the land of the Amorites, whom they conquered, and into the land of the Moabites with Balaam and his ass who blessed them instead of cursing them. Then God brought them across the Jordan River and into the land. God knocked down the walls of Jericho. God gave them victory over the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, the socialites, the crystal lights, gingivitis and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Everything and every one that could oppose them, God delivered over into their hands. God gave them land that had not labored on, towns they had not built, vineyards and oliveyards that they had not planted.
But…the people had something they had to do. “It wasn’t your bow that won the victory,” God said. It wasn’t your sword. It wasn’t your doing that you are where you are, but there is something that they had to do. They had to choose. They had to choose whom it was that they were going to serve. They could choose to serve the god of the Amorites and the Canaanites. Or they could choose to serve the God that had brought them up from Egypt. But now it was ‘fish or cut bait’ time. They had to choose.
You remember that song by Bob Dylan. “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” That’s what Joshua was saying to the people. Then he tells them, “You gotta choose, but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
The people say, “The Lord did all of this for us. The Lord brought us to this place. Who else would we serve? We will serve the Lord, too.”
Then listen to what Joshua says to the people, “You can’t serve the Lord! You can’t do it, because you know what’s going to happen? You will forget God. You will serve other gods. And God is a jealous God who won’t tolerate that and then where will you be?”
But these people are a stubborn people and they say, “No, we will serve the Lord!”
Joshua says, “O.K., you are witnesses against yourself.”
But the people say all the more loudly, “The Lord our God we will serve. That is the god we will obey.” And they make a covenant on the spot.
That’s what it’s like to follow God into ministry. You stand up and say, “I will serve the Lord as a pastor,” and there ought to be somebody around to say, “You can’t do it.” So then you say, “No, I will serve the Lord!” And then somebody should say, “Alright, but you are a witness against yourself, because you are going to mess up.” Then you say, “No, I will serve the Lord!” If I were going to redesign the ordination process, I think I would include something like this.
James says that it is dangerous to follow God as a teacher of the Word and this is why: You have to tell the truth. You think that’s natural. You think that’s easy. But do you realize how hard it is to tell the truth in this society we live in? The world has an interest in telling us lies about how the world works and about who we are.
The world will tell you lies like: you’ve got to look a certain way, you’ve to have this much money, or you have to have this kind of job. And let me tell you, none of those is true. You are not what you look like. For some of us that’s a mighty good thing. But you get seduced by the commercials, don’t you? Have you seen that Nutrisystem commercial? “After I lost 40 pounds, my husband jokes that he finally has a trophy wife.” Wow. How many times have you heard commercials say, in so many words, “If you just had whiter teeth… if you just didn’t have bad breath…if you just didn’t wear such out-of-style clothes…if you just got a tummy tuck or a nose job, you would be somebody”? But that’s a lie. And Christians have to say that one another. When your wife comes down the stairs and says to you, ‘Does this make me look fat?’ you might have to embellish the truth. But when your Christian friend sees that you have been seduced by the lie that you are what you look like, your Christian friend needs to tell the truth.
You are also not what you own. No i-Pod is going to give you eternal life. No 28-foot boat is going to make you a man or a woman. No cell phone is going to bring you salvation. Those are all lies and somebody has got to tell you the truth.
And you are not what you do. You are more than the job that makes you money, the role you play in the family, the position you hold in the community. Somebody has to tell you the truth.
There are other lies out there, too. Lies that tell you that it doesn’t matter what you do with your body because it is your body. So if you have sex without thinking about the consequences and outside of a marriage relationship, whose business is that but yours? If you put drugs into it, whose business is it? If you drink till you’re falling down drunk, whose business is it? When somebody calls us on it we might even tell them to get out of our business. But somebody knows that it is God’s business and somebody’s got to tell you the truth. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and we honor God or dishonor God by what we do with these bodies we have been given.
Oh, there are lies out there. There are low-down, dirty lies. There are lies that tell us that it’s a sign of weakness to believe in God. You are a wimp if you’re a Christian. If you believe in Jesus Christ, some people think, it’s just a crutch and man, do you people waste a lot of time in church on Sundays.
But somebody’s got to tell the truth. You know the truth. You know that God’s power is shown in weakness. You know that we are strong when we are standing on the rock that is the Lord. You know that we are strong when we are standing on the cornerstone that the world rejected. You know that he’s got the whole world in his hands when those hands are stretched out on a cross. You know that we are uplifted when we see that the Son of God has been cut down. You know that we are full when we see that the tomb is empty. You know that ‘on Christ the solid rock I stand because all other ground is sinking sand.’ That’s the truth that somebody’s got to tell.
Maybe we’re not up to truth telling, though. Maybe Jack Nicholson was right in the movie A Few Good Men when he said, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” But what does the scripture say? “You will know the truth and the truth will make you…free” [John 8:32]. The truth will make you free.
So Brother James tells us that the sanctified life is about telling the truth but he also gives us this warning. He warns teachers of the word that they will be judged with special harshness – so be careful in your speech. And he warns the whole community to be wary with how they speak. “The tongue is a fire,” he says. It causes division and hurt and pain when we use it to speak words that do not build up the body of Christ. When we speak ill of our neighbors. When we start defining them through the sins that they struggle with rather than looking at them the way that God does – as people struggling with sin but still worthy of all of God’s love and all of God’s grace.
When we use the same mouth to bless the Lord and to curse our brother or sister, we are hypocrites. Now how many times this week have you used that mouth of yours to offer a blessing to someone? And how many times have you used it say something bad about someone else? Does your Mama know how you used that mouth?
It’s not easy telling the truth. I remember the first month I was a pastor. I was serving a church in Dallas, Texas…an associate pastor in a bilingual church and I was barely lingual, much less bilingual. Three weeks in my senior pastor said, “I’m going to Austin for a few days. You’re in charge.”
So thirty minutes into the first day after he left, I was sitting in the church office and I got a phone call. A young man with a severe drug problem who was in the church had committed suicide by hanging himself in a hotel room on his fifth wedding anniversary. I called my senior pastor and he said something to the effect of, “Didn’t you hear me? You’re in charge.”
So I went to the home of the family of the young man’s wife. And I walked in with my Bible and the ten or fifteen Spanish words that I knew. They treated me like the pastor. I’m remembering that verse right about now…not many of you should be teachers…what in God’s name was Alex Joyner doing as a pastor? They gathered everybody up together in a room. There’s the grieving widow. There are the relatives with hollow eyes, red from crying. There must have been some people breathing in the room, but when I remember this scene all I remember is dead silence. They were waiting on me.
They were waiting on me! I could just hear the challenge: Now what are you going to say to us, preacher? How do you say that all things work for good when something like this happens? How do you say that there is good news? How do you stand up in the face of darkness and evil? How do you explain what this young man did? How do you talk about life? How do you talk about hope? How do you talk about redemption and salvation when something like this happens? Because it sure looks to us like death wins. It sure looks to us like what the world says is right, “Life’s a bear, then you die.” They didn’t say this out loud, but I’m hearing it in my head.
They were waiting on me. And you know what I had to do? I had to tell the truth. I had to tell the truth. And the truth was not that this young man’s death was the last word to be spoken over his life. Another young man’s death on a cross in Calvary two thousand years before was the last word. The truth was not that their lives were meaningless because that young man’s death was senseless. The truth was that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to God’s own self. The truth was not that death wins. The truth was that “I have overcome death, and behold I am alive for evermore.” The truth was not that evil and the grave triumph. The truth was that the stone was rolled away. The stone was rolled away and Jesus walked out of that tomb and Jesus busted down the doors of his disciples and spoke peace and sent them forth and ascended into heaven and established his church and lives and reigns forever. And he wants every person to be part of that kingdom. And if that sounds too fantastical to be true, well, you just go try to find a story the world tells that you can stake your life on.
You think the truth is that you’re a user or a loser? You think the truth is that you’re a failure? You think the truth is that you’re a consumer or a victim or a self-made man or an abused woman? You think the truth is that there is no purpose to this crazy universe and we’re just a collection of atoms in a random array? You think your greatest sin defines who you are? You think your success defines who you are? You think any of these definitions is in any way satisfactory to in any way let you know the truth of who you are? Or do you need somebody to tell you the truth about who you are?
The truth is that we should be wary of speaking in God’s name, but we should dare to do it. The world needs some people who will look at its brokenness and failure and see that God has not abandoned it to its sin. You need somebody who will let you know that your hope is found in a savior who died on a cross on Calvary and who rose again to draw all people unto himself. You need somebody who will let you know that you are no longer a child of wrath, but a child of God. You need somebody who will stand by you in the storms and who will not look away when you are in pain and grief. You need somebody who will sit in a room when it is at its darkest and talk about the light. You need somebody who will look squarely into the face of the evil and know that it does not represent the world as God designed it to be and it does not represent the world as it will be when God redeems it. You need somebody who is full of God’s spirit and full of God’s grace. You need somebody who will tell you the truth for God’s sake.
So who’s going to do this with me? Who’s going to get out of their comfort zone and do something stubborn and foolish for God? God needs men and women, boys and girls, who will stand up to tell the truth about this world. And the truth is this: Christ Jesus…is alive. Christ Jesus…is alive. Christ Jesus…is alive. And the world is not ever going to be the same. Thanks be to God.
James 3:1-18 (NRSV)
Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire!
And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue-- a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God.
From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.
Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not be boastful and false to the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.
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