When I was a teenager, my parents owned a house at the Jersey Shore.  I was fortunate to spend most of the  summer there every year.  Life in a vacation town is different.  I had friends that I would only see in the summer. Sometimes a new family would rent a house in town and another family would not return.  Each year new friends were added to the mix and each year some were subtracted from the mix.

Kathy was girl that used to hang out in our group when we were in eighth grade.  She would sit on the beach with us, play volleyball and hang out with us on the boardwalk at night.  We would often tease and bust on one another.  All in good fun or so I thought.  And then the next summer, she was gone.  Her family stopped coming to the shore and she spent her summers working a summer job back in the Midwest.

Flash ahead to the summer after senior year in high school.  I’m with my friends on the boardwalk, some of the old gang some new, and who shows up but Kathy.  We didn’t recognize her at first,  It had been four years.  Girls change a lot in four years.  So we all hung out that night, went out to our favorite pizza place, and caught up on one another’s lives.  However, over the course of the night, I had this uneasy feeling.

Now teenage guys are not the most perceptive people in the world.  Eventually, I figured it out.  Kathy never spoke directly to me the whole night.  She never even acknowledged when I spoke.  At one point everyone got up from the table and just Kathy and I were sitting alone.  So I struck up some idle conversation and was surprised when she responded, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Excuse me?” I thought.  What in the world could she possibly be mad at me for?  We used to be best friends.  I hadn’t even seen her in four years.  What could I have possibly done in the past hour to upset her?  I asked her what was wrong and she replied, “How can you not know?  You think I forgot what you said to me the last night I was here?”

She then recounted how, four years earlier, I made what I thought was a joke and she took as an insult.  “Well what do you have to say for yourself?” Kathy asked.

Like a typical fumbling seventeen year old guy I said, “Oh ­ um ­ I’m sorry ­ I guess.”  I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to women you really want to be more definitive in your apologies than that.

Whether we are children, teenagers or adults, we are so unaware of the potential harm our words can cause to someone.   Here were my friend Kathy and I, who I hardly had thought of in the intervening four years, sitting in an Italian restaurant in 1980 and for her it was still 1976.  It was as if my words to her were just spoken and hour ago.

Our tongues can devastate people.  In his letter James says our tongues are like poison, like a fire that can burn down a whole forest.

I was never so scared in my life as one time when I was at a party in New York City and the subject of crime came up.  All of a sudden this very quiet man standing by the cocktail franks tells everyone, “Oh I don’t worry about that any more since I bought one of these.”  And he pulls a gun out an ankle holster.  Then to make matters worse, he just kind of casually held as he spoke, sometimes pointing the barrel at me, or someone else in the room.  Needless to say, that is not the proper way to handle a loaded weapon.

Our mouths are loaded weapons.  Yet we casually say words with careless disregard of their consequences.  We voice our opinions or our anger.  We tell people what we think of issues and of them.  We speak as if our own personal experience is somehow universal.  We boast of our perceived achievements and arrogant plans for the future.  We do it all with same flippant disregard as some testosterone-filled guy at a party, casually waving his gun around.

Ancient philosophers wrote a lot about the tongue.  In their writings, people like Aristotle and Philo advised their students to value brevity in speech and self-control over emotional words.  They would be in agreement with much of what James writes in Chapter 3.  There is nothing distinctively Christian or even religious about it.  As I mentioned a few weeks back, it is this seemingly unreligious quality of the Letter of James that has led many Christians over the centuries to simply dismiss it as mere ethical instruction.  It’s nice ideas, but it certainly has none of the theological weight of other New Testament writers like Paul.

However, when I look at James I see something much deeper.  Guarding our tongues, for James, is not just some secular philosophical idea.  It is a deeply sacred duty.  Our speech is important not as some nice add-on to the Christian life.  Our speech is a profound part of our Christian identity.

As we have journeyed through some of James’ writings in the past few weeks, you have probably noticed that the theme of being “double-minded” comes up often.  Doubters are double-minded.  Friendship with world, more specifically adopting the culture’s values over those of God is being double minded.  Believing but not doing is being double-minded.

James tells us that our speech too falls prey to this double-mindedness.  One of his pet peeves is Christians who pay lip service to their beliefs but lack the conviction and commitment to act on them.  That kind of religion, James says, is dead and worthless.  But in James, speech itself is an action too.  Our faith must impact how we speak.  By this I don’t mean talking about our faith, I mean our faith transforming how we speak.

The Gospel of John says that the Word, the wisdom of God, became flesh in the person Jesus.  It is what we call the incarnation.  We are called to take that even further.  If the Word became incarnated in Jesus, then we as his followers need to have Jesus incarnated in our words.  Followers of Jesus are meant to speak differently and need to speak a new word to the world around us.  Having our speech unaffected by Jesus is just as bad as our actions being unaffected by Jesus.  In the church we speak of Jesus as Lord of our lives, but not often enough of Jesus as Lord of our tongues.  If Jesus is Lord then Jesus is Lord of our speech as well.

When you were a little kid, adults taught you how to speak.  They instructed you on what were appropriate words to say and what were not.  Adults taught you not to use certain bad words ­ usually defined by George Carlin as “the seven words you can’t say on television.”  Depending on what church you went to there were even more words added to that list.  I was taught not to use phrases like “Oh God” or “I swear to God.”  And certainly for some reason using the word “Christ” in a non-theological context was even worse. 

Although omitting certain offensive words from our vocabulary is a good thing, having Jesus as Lord of our speech means something much deeper.  It goes back to James’ concept of double-mindedness.  He says, “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.”

Once again we see this double imagery ­ bless/curse, fresh/brackish, olives/figs, salt/fresh.  To have integrity in our speech is to speak holistically, not dualistically.  Otherwise we are speaking with a double mind, out of both sides of our mouth, or with a forked tongue.  Christianity is a religion of incarnation, of flesh and bodies.  It is lived out in how these bodies speak with one another.

The first creation story in Genesis says that God created us in God’s image.  Each of us bears a reflection of who God is.  Jesus said that how we treat one another is how we treat him.  James says when we speak to one another, when we curse one another, or injure one another with our words, we’re not just doing it to one another, we’re doing it to God.

That is a radical shift in thinking for us to make.  That means our conversations, even the most casual, are not merely casual conversations but encounters with the sacred, encounters with Jesus.  Think of the last time your words hurt someone.  Ask yourself, would I be comfortable saying those words to Jesus?

Now that doesn’t mean we can never be angry with someone or express that anger or frustration.  After all, it’s all right to express our anger and frustration even to God.  It is OK and even necessary to stick up for ourselves, or confront someone to see the truth about themselves.  Jesus did that all the time.  But Jesus never demeaned or belittled people.  He never diminished the image of God that was within them.  When people conversed with Jesus, he always led them to a place where they reflected that image even more.

That was the ministry of Jesus’ speech and that is the ministry to which you and I are called.  If I say the phrase, “church talk” you most likely think of Dana Carvey as the church lady.  But if Jesus is to be Lord of our Speech than it is only natural for that reign to be embodied in what we call the Body of the Christ ­ the church.  So I would like to share with you a few guidelines about speech that we use here in this church.  My hope is that this will help some you understand why we do things the way we do them here.  But also, I think these are some guidelines you may want to incorporate into the conversations you have during the week, at home, at school or at work.

I know many of you left a church a long time ago because of something hurtful someone said to you in that church.  That is an unfortunately all too common story.  While it can be comforting to say “Oh I’m glad Vision is not the kind of church where that happens,” the truth is we just don’t know.  When people are hurt in a church, they often just slowly fade away and never tell anyone in that church.  If we don’t want to be a church that hurts people with our words, we need to be intentional about it.  And by extension if we don’t want to hurt others with our word in other situations, we need to be intentional about that too.

One of the ways we are intentional here is to make every effort to keep out the sin of gossip.  Gossip is not just something snippy old women do.  If you are ever in a conversation about Person A with Person B and you find yourself saying something about Person A to Person B that you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying in front of Person A ­ that’s gossip.  Just stop - in mid sentence if you have to.  And if you’re listening gossip, by implication you’re agreeing with what you’re hearing so walk away.  There is no more destructive influence in churches than gossip. 

At Vision we call joining or becoming a member, being a Covenant Partner.  If you would like to take the next step in your relationship with our church, we invite you to do it.  We’ll be welcoming new Covenant Partners here on Easter Sunday.  If you would like to be one, take a look at the handout on the back table.  When people become Covenant Partners, one of the things we ask them to covenant is that they will not gossip about others in the church.  We didn’t invent that idea.  Actually it was a requirement for membership in Methodist churches 200 years ago.  Our ancestors were much wiser than we give them credit for. 

This goes beyond the walls of this church too.  Talking about people is a sure fire way to get into trouble your job, with your friends at school or even your family.  At church we model the behavior we want to practice in the world.

Making Jesus the Lord of our Tongues is hard.  If you have a conflict with a brother or sister in this church, don’t talk to someone else about them.  Go talk to them directly.  That’s the advice Jesus gave.  Go to the person directly.  It’s healthier for them and it’s healthier for you.  I include me in that as well. I am not perfect and I make mistakes as a pastor every week.  If I say something that hurts you or you think is inappropriate, come tell me.  If that is too uncomfortable for you, then go to a member of our Human Resources Team.  

The only way we can I can grow as a your pastor, that we can mature as disciples, or grow as a church is to be honest and open in how we speak to one another.  That is very countercultural.  Office politics and the outside world tell us that the only way to get ahead is to manipulate events from behind the scenes.  The church is meant to be a transparent place.  It is transparent so that we can more clearly see the image of Christ in one another.

The way we ensure that here is a simple rule.  I very wise pastor taught me this principle, in the church all input should be owned.  I have sat in many meetings in other churches, maybe you have too where one commonly hears the phrase, “Well people in the church think, or there’s a group of people saying…”  Uh-uh.  We don’t do that here.  The church cannot be governed by mysterious unnamed persons who never show up for the conversation.   If you have something to say, show up and say it in person and take accountability for saying it.

This is a good rule in church and it’s a good rule in your life..  We can drive ourselves crazy with anxiety over the words of anonymous critics.  Don’t let you life be ruled by mysterious unnamed persons who never show up for the conversation.  Sometimes the best thing to do when we encounter these mysterious faceless people is quite simply to ignore them and move on.  One time Peter came to Jesus and said, “You know there’s people saying this thing about you and that thing about you.”  Jesus responded in a way we would all to well to emulate. He simply said, “Really Peter. What do you say?”

Not just in the church, but in our everyday lives, let us be authentic people.  Let’s take ownership of the things we say and not hide in the shadows.  Let’s not use our words to manipulate our workplace, friendships or families.  There’s no Super Bowl trophy for armchair quarterbacks and no Nextel Cup for backseat drivers.

In the past two decades, postmodern philosophers and theologians have spoken about how our words and language actually create our reality.  Our thoughts and perceptions of the world around us are shaped by the speech of others and in turn, our speech shapes their world.

In the New Testament the church is instructed to build up and encourage one another.  Our speech is to build up the Body of Christ.  Our talk needs to build up and grow the church.  Our conversations need to motivate one another to lead more Christ-like lives.  Imagine what our churches would be like if before we ever spoke a word in worship, or over coffee or in small groups, we asked ourselves, “How does what I am saying build up the Body of Christ?  Will my words further the mission of the church?  Will my words grow the community and make more followers of Jesus?  Will my words deepen this person’s journey with and commitment to Christ?”

Beyond that what if we entered conversation our coworkers, family and friends asking the same sorts of questions.  Is what I am about to say going to help this company, this group, this family fulfill its purpose?  Is this person going to leave this conversation a better person because of the image of God they encounter in me? 

Our words create our worlds.  What kind of world are we creating?