The Risk of Speech (Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost)

Awet Andemicael and Greg Sterling discuss the power of speech, risk in hymnody… and middle school!... in James 3:1-12. The text is appointed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, in Year B of the Revised Common Lectionary.

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Awet Andemicael is Associate Dean of Marquand Chapel at Yale Divinity School. Gregory Sterling is the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament at Yale Divinity School.

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Transcript

Voiceover Voice:

That power can really hurt people. You can be devastating if you’re not careful.

Helena Martin:

This is Chapter, Verse, and Season: a lectionary podcast from Yale Bible Study. Join us each week as two Yale Divinity School professors look at an upcoming text from the Revised Common Lectionary.

This episode, we have Awet Andemicael, Associate Dean for Marquand Chapel and Assistant Professor (adjunct) of Theology, and Gregory Sterling, the Reverend Henry L. Slack Dean and Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament. They’re discussing James 3:1-12, which is appointed for the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 19, in Year B. Here’s the text.

[James 3:1-12]

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will face stricter judgment. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is mature, 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 and are driven by strong winds, 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 such 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 life, 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 people, made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth comes a blessing and a curse. 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.

Awet Andemicael: 

 Greg, I have to say, this passage always feels like it's a warning label for all professors of theology or any kind of teacher, right? It starts with, not many of you should become teachers, and I shake in my boots when I read this passage. It's about speech, of course, right? And I know we've talked about this before. What are some of the aspects of that that you've highlighted when you think about this as a New Testament scholar? 

Greg Sterling:

Well, thanks Awet. It is a very interesting passage. So, it's one of the few texts in James, not the only one, but one of the few that actually makes a self-contained unit. And it's marked with an inclusio, and it starts with a reference to my brothers and sisters, and it ends with a reference to the same. It's just in the masculine in the Greek, but I'll be inclusive. So, it focuses on speech, and you're right. But this is a theme that's already been introduced in James. It's not the first time it's come up. There's that famous statement, let every person be quick to hear and slow to speak, slow to anger. Like my grandmother used to say, you have one mouth, but you have two ears. [Awet Andemicael laughs] Remember that. So, when you look at this text though, I think you're right, it's largely a warning about speech. And the way it does it is by drawing contrast. So, it draws a contrast between a bridle and a horse, a little tiny thing, and the size of the horse. And it contrasts a rudder on a ship with a whole ship. The tongue being the small part and the body being the large part in this analogy. Or it's like a fire, and it can be a forest fire versus a small fire. Or it's like wild animals that can be tamed, even a lion can be tamed. But how hard is it to actually make sure we don't say what we don't really want to say under some circumstances? And it warns us that we use the same instrument of our bodies to bless God and to curse people. And that you just can't get fresh water out of salt water. Well, we can now, [laughter] but they couldn't without, they didn't have the refining processes. 

So, I think the contrasts are a deliberate way of saying, this is one terrific challenge in life. How do you live without regretting what you've said?  And how do you speak? And I will say it's a topic, you find it in Proverbs, the language of speech. There's a whole little dialogue or I shouldn't call it a dialogue, but a little section excursus on speech in Sirach as well. And Hellenistic moral philosophers would write about it. I think of Plutarch's treatise on talkativeness, the person who can't shut up. So, everybody's been aware of it, but we haven't solved it. So, I will ask this question, I've just talked about the easy part, just describing the text. The hard part is now to say, theologically, what resources do we have to actually work to think about how we might control our speech?

Awet Andemicael:

Mm. Yeah, that's a good question.  There are two dimensions to how I read this passage, or two aspects to it that I think help me think through this. One of them is the idea that the tongue or speech is a small thing that can make a huge impact, and it can make either a positive or a negative impact. So, just the idea of being aware that this physically small thing, but you can just generally say speech is very powerful and can be wielded in different directions and needing to be aware of that. And part of that reminds me of some of the early Christian conversations around music and the idea of music as being a really powerful vehicle that can be used for good or for ill because it influences people so much and it moves people so much. But it can either move them away from God or move them toward God. So, someone like Augustine in his Confessions writes about how much he loves music and how much it had really enhanced his devotion and enriched his experience of worship. But at the same time, he was also concerned that it could become an idol or almost an addiction in itself that could draw people away, draw him away from God and in a sensual sort of concern. So, we always had multiple, he was of two minds about music and continued to engage with it, whether it's from his early text, De Musica, or later on in other texts. So, this is always something of his interest. He was always interested in and was invested in, but at the same time was aware of the multiple, the wide range of impacts that music can have. And the fact that it is this specific thing that can have a huge influence, that you had to be really wise about how you used it. The second aspect of thinking about this passage is, what is the source of the tongue, right? The tongue is used as, it's not literally the tongue, it's our brain, our mind, our heart that is the source of what comes out through the tongue. So, when James talks about both fresh and brackish water coming from the same spring, one would assume that he's not talking about literally the tongue, but it's that the heart can bring forth good and evil speech. So, presumably, one way of addressing that is as much as possible to align our hearts appropriately and to align our speech with our hearts. So, seeking transformation of the heart as well as alignment of our speech with our values, our priorities, the people God is forming us to be.

Greg Sterling:

Yeah, I appreciate very much what you've just said. I've had two thoughts just hearing you. So, I think that the power of speech can never be underestimated, and I think in World War II of Adolf Hitler whose rhetoric was incredibly powerful but was used for all the wrong reasons. And Winston Churchill, whose speeches basically rallied Britain and can be seen as speeches that helped save a nation. But they're both using rhetoric, but for very different reasons and it shows a real power. And that makes me think of, I've always thought when I read a text like this that when you're in middle school, you've developed the capacity to speak and to speak with some real power. But what you have to learn is that that power can really hurt people. You can be devastating if you're not careful. And I don't think that middle schoolers often understand just how deadly their speech can be for another person.

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah.

Greg Sterling:

And one of our problems is sometimes we don't get past middle school. [laughter]

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah. No, that's so true. Yeah.

Greg Sterling:

Yeah. So that was one thought. And my other thought, listening to you, in the ancient world both in philosophy and in Christianity, in fact, we use it even in our liturgy today, we talk about thought, word, and deed. And it's the union of those three that what we think we then express, which leads to actions. And it's trying to bring all three into sync with things that will work to help people. So, I want to come back and just ask you, you're an exceptionally talented musician. I always love hearing you sing. I don't mind saying that in public because you're so good. So, do you think about the power of your words in music in a worship context? And how do you as the person leading and performing think about that in that context?

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah, that's a very good question because that unites what I was saying before about the power of music and this idea of speech. Absolutely. One of the reasons why, for example, in the Lutheran Reformation, or the Protestant Reformation, Luther was so invested in having hymns in the vernacular and using that, among other people, using it as a way of teaching the community because you can learn doctrine very deeply and almost by osmosis by singing hymns. You may not even know what you're saying, but you get used to the combination of the liturgy of saying the creed, that sort of thing. It's different. Or hearing, teaching, reading, if you were able to read. You know, in Christian, in past history, only a small proportion of any given population had the ability to read. But in general, all these other ways of learning doctrine, really don't have the same power as uniting that with song because that comes to you in, there are some people who on their deathbeds or when they're struggling with their mental and and cognitive capacities, they can, some of them can still sing hymns that they learned from when they were children. So, it has a remarkable staying power, and it goes deep into the heart. If you ally a hymn with a troubling text, a problematic text, a text that has a theology that's really dangerous, then that goes just as deep. And it's very hard to undo the theology that you've imbibed through hymns. Much more than if you just sort of had a text that you were hearing you disagreed with.

So that is a big responsibility to choose hymns that have texts that are theologies that are not going to be damaging to the people who sing them because that will go deep. Yeah, so that's a very good question. That's something we think about in Marquand Chapel and for me as a singer, as a soloist, a performer, I do often think about the texts, the music that I choose to sing and the opportunities I choose not to take because I don't want to reinforce in the minds and spirits of the people listening to me a kind of worldview that I think would be damaging to their souls and to my own. So, I do actually take that in consideration. It's a good question.

Greg Sterling:

Yeah, it's a powerful warning. And I think James is more negative, this text, than most, I would say, most Hellenistic philosophers were. Who thought you could actually tame the tongue. And this is a pretty stark warning. Be careful. You are playing with fire when you think of the power of your speech.

Awet Andemicael:

Yeah. So true. Thinking of middle school, what you said before, maybe elementary school, people used to say sticks and stones can break your bones, but names will never hurt you. I think it's almost the reverse. You can recover from broken bones, but once you've heard speech that really breaks your soul or puts a negative idea in your head about who you are, that can last for the rest of your life, and it can damage you deeply. So that is part of the power, the responsibility. I guess that's the thing. With the power to use speech, those of us, especially we who have platforms to speak, it comes with such tremendous responsibility. That's probably the bottom line of what he's trying to say. So, we're responsible for what we say, but also the heart that lies behind it. Because as you say, of course, fresh and brackish water can come out of the same mouth, but he's saying that it should not be the case. It's not fitting that that should be the case, and we should strive to do better. And recognize that we don't have the capacity to control it, and we need the grace of God to bring our hearts and our words in alignment.

Helena Martin:

Thanks for listening. Please check out YaleBibleStudy.org for events, study guides, videos, and plenty of other resources, including a transcript for this episode.

Chapter, Verse, and Season is a production of the Center for Continuing Education at Yale Divinity School. It’s produced by: Creator and Managing Editor, Joel Baden; Production Manager, Kelly Morrissey; Associate Producer, Aidan Stoddart; and I’m your Host and Executive Producer, Helena Martin. And our theme music is by Calvin Linderman.

We’ll be back with another conversation from Chapter, Verse, and Season.