Sermon Prep
Dan Metzger, pastor at St Marks United Methodist Church in Findlay, goes behind the scenes of weekly sermon prep, addressing cultural and spiritual issues, and what happens the other 6 days of the week.
Sermon Prep
Episode 26 - The Power of our Words
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Pastor Dan chats with SMU journalism professor Chip Mahaney about the book of James and the way we use words in our culture today.
Hey everybody, welcome to the Sermon Prep Podcast. I'm Dan Metzger. I'm the pastor at St. Mark's United Methodist Church here in Finlay, Ohio. And uh today uh we're gonna be talking a little bit about words and the power of our words. We're going through the series on the book of James, and James has a lot to say. About 20% of the book of James is about how we use our words. And uh so I was thinking about in my life who is one of the people that um maybe might have the most to say about the power of our words and how we use language. And uh that's a friend of mine, his name is Chip Mahaney. Chip has a 45-year career in journalism. He's worked as a sports and news producer, executive producer, he's been a local news director, which is like the TV equivalent of a newspaper editor-in-chief. He's uh been a corporate executive, a recruiter. He uh right now is at SMU Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and he is their media executive in residence and is a professor of journalism. He's also done some really fun stuff uh with the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which I always love to talk with him about because I think that's so interesting. Um, but he is calling in from Dallas, and uh Chip, thanks for being here today.
SPEAKER_00Hey Dan, thanks for inviting me. It's great to hear from you personally, and I look forward to diving into this material.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. And also, Chip, so I uh we met, um man, I was trying to think of how many years ago it was now. It's probably about 15 years ago uh or so down in the Cincinnati area when I was pastoring down there and you were living there, and uh we got to know uh each other a little bit there, and um yeah, just always really uh appreciated and admired um the work that you do. And I know that you've got a lot to say uh about journalism, but you also did a paper during COVID uh through Kent State University on James, on James the Just.
SPEAKER_00You know what? Uh I had to do a paper on one of 50 topics that the professor gave us. The class was called Ancient Christianities, and so it dealt with a lot of the culture of the time and the different uh figures of the time and the in the immediate, you know, uh half a century after uh Jesus. Um and I had never really, really studied James at any level, and I thought, well, he'd be really interesting, you know, the brother of Jesus, and then going into his background, it was a 13-page paper, so not like I'm talking about a dissertation, it's not a book, um, but it was really good study around, you know, A, who was he and who do other people think he is, because you know, there is some uncertainty about again which of the Jameses he was. Was he James the brother of Jesus? And that's where the primary scholarship goes. But there were other Janges, James is mentioned. And and so um uh, you know, so that's uh, you know, that is a uh uh it was a fun topic to study and to learn. And then you put in some of the things that are attributed to him in his book, uh his epistle in the New Testament, um, as well as other writings about him, uh, not just from biblical writers, but also uh from those uh in the culture then or or later on?
SPEAKER_01It yeah, I read I I read your paper. I uh I told you I didn't find anything blatantly heretical. So I'm I'm pretty excited to uh hear what you what it is that you have to say about this. But um I thought we'd start off just kind of talking about you've been in journalism for a while now, I think it said 45 years in journalism. Um, how have you seen the way that we speak with each other evolve over that time? I feel like language changes all the time and the ways in which we speak uh evolve. But like how how just how we talk to each other, how have you seen that change?
SPEAKER_00I'll give you a very specific example from my business. And actually came up, I was at a broadcaster's convention in Lincoln, Nebraska yesterday. So talking with people in my business, I did a presentation around resilience and mental health and tough times, and it was a really good talk. But one of my friends who was also there teaching on another topic, AI in particular, um, you know, he's a reporter and anchor. And, you know, one of the things that always has been the case in the television world is that we have these big television voices. And, you know, when when television was the primary way that people got their news, you know, newspapers were there, but if you wanted something live, it was television. Often your local television anchors were among your community's biggest celebrities. Um, that the anchor voice, you know, came about. And everyone wanted to be Walter Cronkite, or if you were in the 60s, 70s, early 80s, or uh, you know, people who've come since then. And and so much now in our world is is has to go away from that because a local television doesn't have the influence it used to. Many people don't even watch local television anymore because they're streaming everything. Um there's there's the students I meet with at SMU, just like any college students coming in this year, they'll they were turning uh 13 um in the pandemic. Um and they were, you know, uh in the pandemic is when all streaming really took off. And so if you were 13 or 12 going into the pandemic, you probably don't have much of a connection with a favorite show of any type on CBS, NBC, ABC, or Fox. You know, all of your favorite shows have been in the streaming era, and so they don't have a connection with local TV, and even their parents, you know, people are in there uh oh 40 to 55 for these people's parents, they quit watching local TV at a point. So, really the people who at our age group who only understand local TV are those who grew up with grandparents, and the grandparents still have a deep connection to local TV. All right, what does that mean? Well, we were just kind of kidding ourselves with our group of students, students, our people in our in our room that were adults as well, you know, talking about the anchor voice really has to go away. Because in the world today where trust is very low among any institutions, including journalism, then we have to be as authentic and as real as we can. And the best we can do for our business and for our reputations and for our industry and for our communities is to start get rid of the anchor voice and just start talking like real people. You know, the thing about the generations too, and again, I work with I work now uh with 19 to 22-year-olds primarily. Uh, and you know, I just fun to listen to in class when they, you know, come up with a phrase that I've not heard of before. Um, I've got a lot of athletes in my classes who come from very different backgrounds, and you know, just uh I can't even make out some of what they're saying, which is scary in some ways, but also fun to try to decipher what it is they're trying to talk to each other about. So there is a lot of change. There's a lot of change going on, and some of it's kind of enforced by the bit my culture and the business I've been in. Um, but some of it is, you know, obviously a lot of it is the culture we live in and the words we choose impacted a lot by pop culture, by music, by entertainment, um, you know, by social media. You know, the trends and language are part of trends that emerge on social media. So much of what we say today and how we communicate is just developed either organically, well, typically organically, um, by some random person in some corner of the internet, but just got something out there that became viral, and that created all new language, uh, phrases or words that are new that come entire, you know, paragraphs or more beyond that in terms of how we speak.
SPEAKER_01I I think it's such an interesting thing. I I love kind of going back. I mean, we the Bible is actually a great example of how language changes over time. Uh, I mean, uh, we have new translations that are coming out all the time. Um, because language changes, language evolves. I mean, we don't speak like the King James language anymore. And before that, it was something else. And before that, it was something else. I mean, we it our language, just the way that we talk, the words that we use, we know that all of that evolves. And um, I I think you are right that social media and uh things that go viral, whatever it might be, all of these different places where new phrases show up and emerge, or or just ways of speaking emerge. Now, because we all have access to this, it's almost it does it almost feel like we're getting like this global, uh, I almost want to say like a global accent, um, where we all uh our our language is heard all around the world. The way that we talk is heard all around the world, and just the way that we speak to each other. Um it seems like it's all kind of meshing together in some ways.
SPEAKER_00It certainly creates cohesion among people who are kind of in that group, which if you're on most people are on social media of some sort, and it certainly creates acceleration and speed where things can just pop and then be big within a matter of days, where it used to take a generation sometimes, or it was very colloquial. You know, what we talked about in in uh Ohio would have been very different about how we talk about things in Texas. So that's not longer the case. I mean, and soon our dialects, you know, the I think over another generation or so, you know, given the way that social media works and the way, you know, there'll be much less of kind of regional dialects and much more of kind of a national dialect. Um, because what is regional anymore? I mean, your social media people are just as close to you as your own parents. They're just on a screen, but you're hearing them more than you're hearing your parents. And so those local dialects, I worry we'll lose those. Uh good thing we have all these recordings and people can still practice them, but they won't be mainstream anymore. You know, the the people from Wisconsin versus the people from you know somewhere down Alabama. You know, so you know, I that that may be a uh a kind of a victim of uh this kind of mass assimilation into the language we all share.
SPEAKER_01I think one thing that'll never fully assimilate um across these cultures is what we consider chili to be. I mean, your Texas chili versus Ohio chili and then Cincinnati chili, it's a whole thing. Um and I don't know if we have time to go down that rabbit trail or not.
SPEAKER_00Um give you that one sentence. Yeah, I I I I'm a skyline fan. I just don't call it chili, it's a soup. You know, if you call it skyline, I'm perfectly good with that, but because chili in Texas is a very different thing than very proud of it.
SPEAKER_01Well, even in northern, even in northern Ohio, I mean Skyline, that's a condiment. It's a condiment for things that is not a chili, so but we're not gonna we're we're talking about words. Okay. So you mentioned uh social media and uh you mentioned AI a little bit that you were at a conference about that. Do you think with with the rise of things like large language models, chat GPT, all this stuff, the the role of social media, all this stuff, do our words still have the same power as they as they used to? James talks about just the the power of the tongue and um how how much our words mean. Do you think that's still the case today?
SPEAKER_00You know, I heard something interesting yesterday from my friend at this conference who talked about, you know, AI has now gotten so good that even if you misspeak when you type into it or talk into it, it knows what you're saying. You can give it a whole different verb and because you just mistyped something, and it knows exactly because it can read the context, right? So, you know, there's there's advancements in that are happening every day. Um, I I want to point to a different side of this with regard to how we learn and how we take in information, and that's driven all by video now. Um, I just taught a media literacy and democracy class this summer, and uh, 18 students at SMU, 10 more athletes. It's a kind of a uh a starter class to get people involved in understanding the media around them. The goal of the class is to make them better, uh more media literate, like you might take a financial literacy class so that you can manage your money better as an adult, right? This is how you manage your information better. Um, and so it's a very useful class. And and one of the things I talked about at the very beginning is something, a concept called the Gutenberg parenthesis or parentheses. And and it's a it's a theory, it's you can find it online. Uh, there's a great book by a uh a noted journalist and scholar named Jeff Jarvis, who's written all about this, but he didn't come up with the concept. The concept has been out there for a few years. And the notion is before Gutenberg. So Gutenberg gave us the printing press, he gave us the written word at mass scale. Now everyone could read. Back then it was only the elite and often the priesthood could read. Um, then it became everyone could read over a period of centuries, so that reading was now the foundational way we shared information. You know, reading could be stored, books could be made and kept for hundreds of years. You know, we never lost information anymore. We gave up, however, the lore, the folklore, the stories that changed over time. And of course, the Bible is a big part of that. You know, those stories were handed down, they weren't written on parchment or paper. Now, what we're getting to now is the other end of the parenthesis. And and that parenthesis is coming with the emergence of video and social media. And and the fear for some, and the reality I think is happening is that the more we rely on video, the less we read. And where before we had Gutenberg in the in the printing press, you know, dialects, you know, you you might have had different entire languages um 10 miles away because if they couldn't connect each other for commerce, there was no reason or no way for them to communicate. So they might have had a very different way of speaking and called things differently. Um and it wasn't until the Gutenberg printing press came around that languages became standard. And and Martin Luther, you know, wanting to get the Bible into a local language was a big part of that as well. Christianity had a massive influence on the spread of the language. So um these days, however, with everything, so much of our information consumption comes through video. And the young people of the day not that they can't read, but they don't read. And that will lead, we think, or at least what the hypothesis is of this notion called the Gutenberg parenthesis, is that we will go back to tribal languages again that will be in our social communities. They won't be geographical, they won't be hyper-local, they'll be around the world, they'll be by interest or by commonality in terms of you know how we feel about ourselves or how we present or the things we're interested in. That that the written standardized word, and that by the way, spelling is a big part of all that standardization, right? Um, that that written, standardized word that became the foundation of our learning for 600 years will drift back into a whole different set of learnings based on tribes again. And those tribes will be very, very different. And the the way that um the standardizations we have right now in spelling, for instance, uh might not matter so much anymore.
SPEAKER_01Sure. That's that's such a fascinating thought. Like this idea of like you're talking about like a closed parenthesis to correct to the the written word, like it had its time, and is its time kind of coming to an end where there's uh a whole different media, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the age of print is the inside the parenthesis, and and if we are at the end of the parenthesis, we are exiting the age of print and now going into communications off of all different other kinds of media.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's fascinating. And so, like, I it makes me think about like what's the role of the church in this. I mean, we call ourselves people of the book, right? I mean, we are the Bible is our thing, it's a it is print, and so what is yeah, where does the church fit in all of this and how do we how do we adapt with the time? I mean, when when the time of you know the the printed word came out, that's when that's you know the Bible was the beginning of all of that, it was the beginning of that parentheses, right? It's that's Gutenberg, and so where do we where do you see us now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I would like to think that Martin Luther was Gutenberg's first customer, right? In that sense, right? And I grew up in a Lutheran church, so I have some loops of favoritism there, but you know, right. I mean, what what's gonna happen to our language if if the written word is no longer valued and prized, esteemed and held as the sanctity, the official source of things, right? Um and because video is permeable, video can change, ai can change all of that as well. You know, I have a Bible in front of me, I've got I've got uh textbooks near me, I've got files over here, they're all printed, and what's on that paper is never gonna change. I can cross it out, I can cut it out, but I can't change what's on the paper. And now we're gonna go back into a world where information is completely relative and AI can change it on the fly. You know, so what was there five seconds ago won't even be there now. So, you know, it's just I think we're on a I think we're really moving into a world of uh I I won't, I mean, it'll create confusion in lots of places, but I think the the the the lack of standardization will be the one thing that will be a uh a notable effect if this trend in AI is certainly not going to go away and it's gonna get bigger, smarter, richer, and and more powerful. Um, and we're gonna go along with it. Um, but the notion of how people communicate today, like I said, the the some of these members of my of the athletes in my class, you know, really talk a whole different language. It's not a language they read, it's just a language that in their communities, that's how they speak. Very different from the language that you and I are speaking here today.
SPEAKER_01That's fascinating. So I want to kind of drill down into a little bit about what this means for us as as uh Christians and as um as people who are uh seeking to be faithful in the way that we use our words. Um and uh, you know, one of the things you do as you help teach journalism and have worked in that industry for a long time. One of our main scriptures this week is we're gonna be talking about uh being quick to listen and slow to speak. And that's uh which comes right out of uh the first chapter of James. And it feels like that might be uh a good lesson for an aspiring journalist. I we in a world that's just putting content out all the time, um maybe the art of listening is going away a little bit, but I think that's maybe a part of what could give our words a little bit more weight and uh a little more importance, is if we're actually hearing someone else and being able to say something out of that that comes from being good at listening to another person. Is that something that you guys talk about in journalism very often, like the art of listening and being quick to listen?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it's it's imperative, right? Um, the old saying is you never learn a thing while your mouth is open, right? So you if you want to learn, and our job as journalists is often not to repeat what we already know, it's because news is new. You have to go learn the thing that you can report on that night. And many journalists are what we would call general assignment. You know, your local news reporters, almost all of them are general assignment, which means they're gonna go cover the story that's in front of them that day that is news. And so journalists, good journalists become very good about learning a few things about a lot of topics over a period of a year or two or longer, right? You can you can always talk about something because you probably covered it at some point. Um, and so, but you don't learn anything, you know, none of us are reading that often. You're getting your information from interviews or maybe from a press release, but oftentimes it's coming from somebody's original source, which is out of their mouth. And so, um, and and one of the great, you know, if you ever watch an interviewer, you know, a 60 minutes interviewer, somebody like that who can really get to the bottom of a subject, um, then you know, the listening part uh is is absolutely critical. You know, you come in with a list of questions, but but one of the joys of interviewing is also one of the key parts of interviewing, is that you really have to let uh you really have to let your ears do most of the work uh and and know when to follow up with a new question rather than just move the next question on on your list. And so, you know, the art of listening, the art of of of um, you know, being in the moment with what that other person's saying, the more you do that, I guarantee you the better of a story you're gonna come up with because the more deeply you're gonna get in your answers. Um, this is equivalent to something I've always talked about in a disciple class that I've taught. I've taught disciple for 15 years, haven't done it in a while, but love doing that. And I'll always tell the class in the first week uh of disciple Bible studies like, I'm gonna let the silence do its job, which means if I ask a question for the room, maybe 10 or 12 people in the room, I'm not gonna sit there, wait 10 seconds, and then answer it myself. I'm gonna let it hang out there for 20 or 30 seconds, and it will get really uncomfortable for some of you. But the silence has to do its work so that others can speak and others will think more deeply because they've had the time to process what they want to say.
SPEAKER_01Oh man. And that is I think that is such a great lesson, not just if you're teaching a class, but just an everyday conversation with people. And I I find myself I'm doing it right now, by the way. Um, making sure I'm actively listening and not just um thinking about what I get to say next, because I think that's oftentimes what we do. We we only pause to listen to give ourselves a break before we get to talk again. And um Um but yeah, letting the silence, letting the uh really listening to what someone else has to say, uh I think that's so important not just in in a journalism way or or in a teaching kind of way, but um just as a just in a relationship kind of way. And that's a part of what we're supposed to do as followers of Christ. We're forming relationships with one another, real authentic relationships. There is plenty uh another way of talking about this is uh content versus community. If if Christianity was just about absorbing content and making sure that people are hearing the content that you need to to, you know, just get out and just speak and that kind of thing. If it was that, we'd be, you know, it's fine. That's easy. Anybody can just put out a bunch of content, but to really have community and relationship means that you're listening to one another. And I think that's a part of what Jesus calls us to is to have those kinds of conversations and those and the relationship aspect of all that I think is just um and super vital and and that we miss out on a lot. And it's been a something that I think, especially since COVID, uh, we've noticed a huge shift in that. That there is, and with the rise of AI, there's content galore now, and community is getting less. And so we have a harder time knowing how to listen to one another and communicate and be in community with one another.
SPEAKER_00And I have two points to say to that. One is, you know, when we're so distracted by our devices, again, we find community all day long. It's just not near in our presence, right? It's always on and always distracting us, or sometimes it's doing us good. But the trouble with in a church, which is often built around a local community, sometimes the local community gets the shorter shrift over the latest flashy thing that's on my phone today, the latest viral meme, the latest tweet, somebody, one of my friends in far away or nearby texts to me, and that interrupts my train of thought with the person standing in front of me. Um, on a business side, that also feeds into that any kind of group dynamic. Um, if you've taken any one of the uh Myers-Briggs uh type indicator tests or something else involving these 16 personalities, there's several online you can take for free, and the Myers-Briggs is one you pay for. Um, but one of the scales that kind of helps you in the helps you understand your personality preference is extrovert versus introvert. And extrovert is not just about talking, although that comes with it. Extrovert is how you process information. I'm a total extrovert. I like meetings, I like to decide things in a group where we can all share. Uh you know, but I'm also an extrovert that like to talk. And one thing you have to learn as an extrovert is to shut up because the introverts won't speak at the same force and the same speed you will speak. They need the silence to process what they want to say. And often when the extroverts actually be quiet for that uncomfortable 20 or 30 seconds, then the introverts in one sentence will come up with the smartest thing that's been said in the last 10 minutes because they can process differently. You know, they like to be in their mind, and their minds sometimes take a moment to kind of get exactly what they want to say, but it's perfect the first time. Whereas an extrovert like me, I'll waste 200 words to get to my point.
SPEAKER_01I do the same thing, which probably makes us good for recording a podcast because we just talk through our thoughts.
SPEAKER_00So that's that's how you process, right? Yeah, absolutely. How do you process uh information? Extroverts process externally. Introverts want to be told something or read something, and then they want to process it in their mind. They don't need other people to help them think through because they're far more core valued in a sense. That's not good or bad either way, but they're far more comfortable with their core. Whereas an extrovert is far more comfortable being in the community of ideas in that moment and then dealing with that chaos sometimes, uh, when you're kind of trying to figure out, well, who's got this idea and versus that idea? But they got to shut up and let the introverts do their job, which is often their minds are working much harder than ours to come up with a deeper thought that maybe none of us would have thought of.
SPEAKER_01That's so good. All right, I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. I I kind of prompted you on some stuff we were gonna talk about, but I want to skip ahead and think about James himself, the half brother of Jesus. Uh what do you think? As he's writing this thing and he's talking about the power of speech and all of this stuff. I'm trying to imagine myself being the half-brother of Jesus, what that must have been like. And everything that Jesus said mattered and was important, and people are writing it down, and all of the things that go along with it, quoting him forever and ever. And then you have James. Uh, I just wonder, what do you think he felt about the power of his own words?
SPEAKER_00So, my very short and again graduate level paper, it's not a dissertation, not a book, you know, talked about, you know, well, what was James's relationship to Jesus when Jesus was a human being on earth? And you know, the literature is that that you know, James's uh uh Jesus, you know, his brothers were not believers perhaps until the resurrection. And so in that, now they might have been, you know, there's some thought around they maybe have been hangers on or kind of traveled with them some, but but you know, the scripture says that they they were not all believers. Um, and the other notion about James, now it's it was a good 12 years, but James, according to the scholarship I've referred to and what the Bible I've got in front of me says, you know, James was written very early in the New Testament. It may have been the earliest book written, uh AD 45, you know, so 12 years after, you know, 12 to 15 years after the crucifixion. Um and so he wasn't using perhaps other scriptures, like he was actually coming at this from his own self. Um, and by this point, he had likely become, if this is all the same person, you know, the leader of the church of Jerusalem, uh, succeeding Peter. Um, so a very prominent place. And obviously, by this point, you know, the resurrection of Jesus became his own salvation and resurrection, too, that he had been born again into the faith, even if he was a disbeliever at the very beginning, or at least while Jesus was doing his ministry. So there's a lot about James that kind of goes into all of this. And you know, you look at James in writing this very passionate uh um sermon here uh about his words. And by the way, you know, people will call it a contrast to what Paul writes in Romans, but James was like a written before Romans, so he wasn't calling out Paul as a as a writer. You know, there may have been discussions between the two of them in that era, and there certainly probably were, but you know, what did what did James know what were his influences at the time inside Jerusalem? Uh, what was going on in that in that community of of believers uh inside still the center of the Jewish faith? So there's a lot I don't know, right? I mean, there's a lot I'm kind of trying to figure out outline. An extrovert is processing out loud, right? This is what I do. Um, but that is that is all very curious to me about where did James come up with this? Now, you know, if if if if Paul in Romans, you know, talks about salvation through faith, and then James counters that with, well, okay, faith without works is dead, you know, then you have a pretty good contrast about how we understand, you know, our responsibilities as Christians, our opportunities and responsibilities as Christians. Um, but James, just simply on the tongue, right? I mean, James is so smart about you know how powerful the tongue is. And I'm just really curious about how why that came to his mind and what the community was at the moment he was writing this, or what he had experienced in his lifetime around why he felt it was necessary to do this. Um, but he certainly writes as powerful as anyone does in the Bible around the power of the spoken word.
SPEAKER_01I I wonder if a part of his uh you talk about the community around him. I wonder if a part of it might be the way in which they had always seen the church and leaders within the church try to um exercise their power or their authority. Uh it's it's who gets to stand up and be the teacher, who gets to to stand up at the steps and everybody else is listening. And I wonder if there was kind of this jockeying for position in the early church a little bit of um almost kind of like there is today, uh, where everybody's trying to create that viral moment. Um there's maybe this uh this void that's that's happened because Jesus is now ascended into heaven and and the church is trying to figure out who they are and whose voice are they listening to now. And there's a lot of people who are probably trying to kind of assert a little bit of um uh of their their position in the church and wanting to be heard. And so, you know, James will end up talking later in I think it's chapter three where he he talks about um teachers. Like maybe not all of you should be teachers. Maybe some of you you're gonna be judged more harshly. Maybe some of you should take a backseat a little bit. Um so yeah, I wonder if there's just some things going on around there, and then also I wonder if just just the whole dynamic of um you know his his brothers given three years of incredible ministry, the Sermon on the Mount, all of these things. And now who is James to say, and might I add just this? And and may I also just add my two cents? Um, that there has to be a little bit of kind of this dynamic of do my words carry that same weight? Um and are they are they always are my words always necessary?
SPEAKER_00But he also again through his writings again talks about you know the appreciation of the words you do give, how they are powerful, how they are special. And whoever's speaking should know of the influence that you're having when you have the opportunity to speak. Yeah, uh, and that again that conveys authority, and we don't know, again, we kind of have an idea about how the church was built. Acts tells us a lot, doesn't tell us everything. Um, but how the church was built, how it was uh, you know, obviously started in the Pentecost and those early days and early months, and then how it matured um and how it became its own institution, you figure, uh, by the time we get to AD 40 and the time that James might have been written. Uh, this is all still right before Paul began his voyages. So, you know, the church was largely centered around Jerusalem. Um, and you know, there's just again, uh yeah, I would imagine the community was active. Uh, it's now been 15 years since Christ was walking with his disciples and others on earth. Uh, there have been a lot recorded, but a lot yet that where people were still trying to to um understand, particularly those that they were able to convert, uh, those who are new to the faith. And they always have ideas as well. People who are new to the faith who don't understand it, who don't have the you know, the scholarship that you have or the scholarship that I have in our different ways. Um, and they're brand new, you know, they but they've grown up around either people of the faith or other faiths and have those influences in them as well. Um, you know, and that's you know, where the church, that certainly the Jewish church um and the Christian church, you know, we know that authority, you know, there was authority. There was authority, you know, and and and so it wasn't just simply a, you know, maybe like in that first moments of Pentecost and everyone's speaking different tongues, and that was not authority outside of the Holy Spirit, but now there's structural authority in the church by the time that this is written. And so, you know, James might have been talking to the leaders, the authority leaders, or he might have been talking to people in general, but it's a powerful message for both.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. We're we're running low on time, but I I've got to ask this question because I think this is a really important one. Thinking about being um, thinking about the importance of our speech, and uh James also says he doesn't just say be quick to listen, but also um be slow to speak and slow to anger, and there's a lot of vitriol and sensationalism and uh rage bait and all these things. Uh, how do you think for us today as a as a as a person of the book today, as uh follower of Jesus today, how do we what what is just a word that you have for us about how we use our language and use our words um in our in in our witness today to the world?
SPEAKER_00If I had to put this into one word, I'd say breathe. Like take a breath, take a moment, don't respond out of a rush, don't respond out of the instant emotion that you feel when someone says breathe. Um, that breath, if you're doing it the right way, will give you a moment to think with Jesus as your filter, right? With the Bible and the scriptures as your filter. If you can find a way in that moment, no matter how you feel or how urgent you feel like you need to speak to address a situation, and maybe it's just simply a post on social media, and I fail at this all the time. Um, because I like to get my words in and I think I'm right about everything. Um, you know, and and it's even though it's my name out there, I don't post anything under anonymous name. People know it's me, and even if they don't know me, they know they can click on me and to find out who I am. And I don't mind that. I like living in public, but but it's to take the breath to pause to check yourself, remember who you are as a child of God and as a Christian. If you do that, I guarantee you better things will happen.
SPEAKER_01What what's really beautiful about that is that the this idea of taking a breath, I love that. And that the word breath and the word for uh wind or spirit in the New Testament, talking about the Holy Spirit, it's like it's all related to one another. That maybe there's something in the Holy Spirit in taking that breath, in taking that pause and letting the Holy Spirit direct your words a little bit and direct your thoughts and calm your heart. I think that's a beautiful word. That's great.
unknownAll right.
SPEAKER_00I give you one story real quick. Sure. Because um I in my TV station life, I I probably answered 15,000, if not 20,000, viewer emails. People calling in, sometimes are asking questions, hey, what did you talk about this story? Can I get that phone number? You know, I didn't find this, you know, why is so-and-so wearing that dress today? Or, you know, you got this story wrong, or I hate you guys because you're biased, or whatever. And sometimes the angry people, and I would, whenever I'd see an angry email and I respond, I would not write back into the email. I would not be back, I'd not be in Outlook, I would not be in the web form if I was using a web uh interface. I would open up Notepad and I would write the email that I really wanted to send. And it would be it would be clean, but it'd be ugly. And then I would, because it wasn't in the original format, it wasn't in the original tool, I would delete that email. And then after that moment of getting that out of me, I would write, Dear Mrs. Johnson, I really appreciate you watching and taking time to write us today. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. Thank you very much. Have a great day, and be done with it. But I had to get it out, yeah. I had to get it out, and knowing that there's a way, a kind of a way to let the valve release the pressure, uh gave me some satisfaction on my end, but did not let that word come out of my mouth so one else could hear it.
SPEAKER_01That's that's a good word and a good practice because you don't want to accidentally send accidentally hit send after typing after typing that email out, that's for sure.
SPEAKER_00That is your friend or a text editor on a Mac or whatever. It is your friend.
SPEAKER_01All right, I'm gonna ask one last question, then I'll get you out of here. You spent a lot of time, this has nothing to do with anything else we've talked about, but you spent a lot of time at the the national spelling B. And I just wondered, do you have a favorite memory or a word that stuck with you that you now use?
SPEAKER_00Um, you know, I so I worked for the EWS scripts company for 16 years, and 14 of those years. I'd missed one for graduation. I missed one last year because I was leaving the company. Now I work at SMU, but I came back this year. Great joy. Um, one of the joys about the spelling bees you're around all these wonderful uh young human beings who have studied really hard to get where they are. And it's not so much the words for me, it's the impressions that these young people make. Um the ones who are at the best, the ones who are on stage at the end, who are fighting through 20 rounds to get two people knocked out, they are the most confident people. You can't cram for a spelling bee. It's like you can't cram for a marathon. You have to take it slow and steady and learn as you go. And those people never, I never see them studying in the halls of the spelling beats. The kids who come from a small town that never know they got lucky and won the spelling beat because no one else showed up, or because you know, they're a small state and they don't really have a spelling culture there. Um, you know, they they're the ones who are in the hallways like 24 hours a day studying. It's like, no, the Dublins have figured this out. And it's how much you put in six months ago uh to get you to where you are today. Um, and my favorite memory is really something I get to every year. And so there's a guy who is the public editor or editor at large for Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and his name is Peter Sokolowski, and he was a big deal on Twitter in the Word World. Now he's moved over to Blue Sky and the X World. He's over on Blue Sky, the other social kind of intermediate network. And Peter, um, Peter and I go running one morning a year in DC, and I just hammer him with all this questions about the words that are coming around these days. They're always adding words to the dictionary, by the way. And if you follow Merriam Webster Dictionary on X or any other social media, they always will tell you, we've added this word to the dictionary because it's so common in culture that it needs to be standardized. What a dictionary does is standardized. It needs to be standardized and acknowledge that is now a part of a dictionary of the English language. And that whole process of how we get words that come out of culture to become now standards is a fascinating process to me. And probably my biggest lesson coming out of all those years working with the bee.
SPEAKER_01That's so interesting. So, do they take words out? Like if they've become if they've fallen out of use of the lexicon, do they take words out of the dictionary?
SPEAKER_00I think they're more likely to say archaic or obsolete. They don't take words out, to my knowledge, but they will put labels on there saying that this is not a word in common, or it's been replaced by a new word. Okay, uh, whereas the old word. And again, some of it comes out of Old English, Middle English, or or even like English from 100 years ago. Um, but the words don't disappear, but they will annotate them with some other marks saying, Yeah, you're not going to hear this around the the backyard this week.
SPEAKER_01So I could talk about this stuff all day, but I'm gonna let you go on that one. Chip Mahaney, thank you so much for being a part of this conversation today and uh all of your wisdom around the way we use our words and our culture today.
SPEAKER_00Dan, I appreciate the invitation. Listen, you're a great friend. You've always been a great friend, you're super interesting, and I'm really glad that you're using this medium, this great podcast medium which anyone in the world can hear what you're talking about. Um, and you've got great things to say, and I hope that you keep doing it because you never know where your words are gonna land on somebody that day. Somebody needs to hear what you're saying. And your pulpit's important, but your podcast is important too.
SPEAKER_01I appreciate you saying that, Chip. And uh you're a great friend and uh miss you, and hopefully we get to catch up sometime soon. And if the buckeyes ever end up playing the Mustangs, I'm not gonna root for you, but um I will have a little soft spot in my heart.
SPEAKER_00Well, we're Methodists after all. There you go. You are Methodists. And yes, you know, we're an outside contender. We were in the CFP two years ago, and we're a shot to get there again. So maybe we'll see you. And I hope we get to play you in Dallas, not in Columbus in December, because that would be pretty cold.
SPEAKER_01That would be pretty cold. Yep, yep, absolutely. All right, Chip, thanks for being with us. And uh thanks to all of you for joining us on another Sermon Prep podcast.