Sept 15, 2024
I speak to you in the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
When I started seminary, I was more than a little daunted by the idea of taking theology classes. As Christians, our imagination about theology tends to be dominated by people like St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas. Martin Luther or John Calvin or Richard Hooker. Systematic theologians whose deep thinking and critical writings can be difficult to understand.
But here’s a secret. We’re all theologians. You, and me, and the person sitting next to you in the pew. Because in the end, theology is all about our religious beliefs. Who we think God is, for example, or what we think God does. And whether we’re aware of it or not, we make theological assumptions all the time.
So today – at the risk of turning you off right now with the prospect of being dreadfully boring – I’m going to invite us to claim our role as theologians. I’m going to invite us into thinking about the theology of words and conversation. And here’s where we’re going to end up today: our reading from the Letter of James demands we treat speaking as a spiritual practice that’s informed by our theology.
Now, James is an example of what’s called “wisdom literature” – like the Books of Job, or Proverbs, or Ecclesiastes. The Bible’s wisdom literature is an ancient version of a self-help book – teaching us how to live happily under God’s rule. James’ letter doesn’t introduce any new theology, but it is filled WITH theology. And whoever wrote James was very, very familiar with the Hebrew Bible.
Today’s passage from James is shaped by an understanding of humanity that goes back to the first chapter of Genesis, where God says “let us make humanity in our image to resemble us” . So here’s the question – what does it mean to be made in God’s image? Now this is a big question with a lot of answers. For James, the answer doesn’t have anything to do with whether we physically look like God. Instead, it means that we resemble God in at least two important ways. First, we have the power to create. And second, we are created to be in relationship.
How did God create? The first verses of Genesis tell us that God created through speech. “Let there be light” , God says, and light appeared. The words God speaks have power. And then the first gift God gives humans in Genesis is the power to name the animals – to create language. So when we use language we continue God’s creative activity in the world. Because we use speech in similar ways. While we can’t create something out of nothing, we do use words to create ideas and interpret the world.
We also resemble God because we’re created to be in relationship. If there’s one thing we know about God, it’s that God is a relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s at the heart of the mystery of the Trinity. The three are inseparable, and they’re defined by their relationship. The Father can’t be the Father, for instance, unless there is a Son. So being created in God’s image means we’ve been created to be in relationship, too. The yearning we have for closeness – the harm done to people held in isolation – the devastation caused by our modern epidemic of loneliness is all the proof we need.
So James warns us today about the need to tame our tongue. Speech, he tells us, has great capacity to do evil when we misuse this gift of words – this resemblance to the divine – to create distorted truths. When our language poisons through dehumanizing someone, or belittling them, or demeaning them, we try to rob them of their ability to be in relationship with others. And when we do that, we deny that they’re created – just like us – in the image and likeness of God.
So we need to approach speaking as a spiritual practice. It’s easy to think of spiritual practices as something difficult or weird – like fasting or making a pilgrimage or a strict prayer regimen. But more often than not a spiritual practice is simply connecting the mundane pieces of our lives to our theology. Doing something good not because it’s “right”, but understand that it aligns with what God cares about.
One of my spiritual practices is to save pop can tabs for the Ronald McDonald house. Now, donating something to the needy is the “right” thing to do. But what makes it a spiritual practice is that, every time I pull the tab from the can, I say a short prayer. I pray that God will offer healing, and comfort, and peace to those who stay there. I give thanks for the generosity these families experience. And over time, I’ve found that my giving is no longer just giving. Rooting it in theology makes it a spiritual practice that opens my heart to the compassion God has for all of creation.
And so today James cautions us to remember that language is a gift from God. He calls us to treat language as a spiritual practice – to remember that those about whom we speak are also made in the image of the God who loves them.
So how do we do this? We do this by remembering that our primary identity is not Jew or Gentile. Not man or woman. Not slave or free. Not rich or poor; right or left; urban or rural; or any of the other identities society pressures us to claim. Our primary identity is as apprentices to Jesus Christ, made to be in relationship with each other through the Body of Christ. When that theology informs our language, then our speech can become a spiritual practice – an opportunity for our hearts to change as they’re filled with the Spirit of God that breathes new life and reconciliation into broken people, broken relations, and broken creation. Amen.