Tongue Taming in James and the Church

“A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong time, can destroy more than you would ever imagine. Above all, mind what you say. ‘Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire’ – that’s the truth.”

- Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

On my desk at the church is a book loaned to me by one of the folks from my Bible study as we read through the Letter of James this spring. The book is called “30 Days to Taming Your Tongue.” As we approached chapter 3, it struck me as odder and odder that I had heard this type of thing many times before – “How to Tame the Tongue,” etc. – despite the fact that we are given a pretty dire message about the tongue in James: “No one can tame it.” There is no suggestion that anything we do to take control of our own tongues as they set themselves loose on our friends and family will ever work. We are told the opposite. You can’t win this one; the tongue is too wild.

But the grim position we’re in is not a hopeless one. James’ letter is throughout concerned with the problems of good and bad speech being mixed in Christian life. He certainly gets a good handle on the situation we’re in, but by the end he also mercifully gives us hope. There is a type of speech that is right, and God has introduced us to it.

The last section of chapter 5 outlines a new set of activities in which we can engage our tongues that God will use to overcome the dangerous, destructive speech that we are all too familiar with.

These new speech activities? “Pray…sing songs of praise (v. 13)…call the elders to pray (v. 14)…confess your sins to each other and pray for each other (v. 16).”

The destructive speech of chapter 2 (gossip, lying, cursing, and so on) comes from people who put their own way above those in need (1:26-27) and the rest of the community (4:1-3), people who ignore “the law that gives freedom” (“Love your neighbour” in 2:8, with love of God implied in 2:5-7). At its heart it is the sin of an individual, acting as an individual.

Proper speech, as seen in chapter 5, is done by and in community. The community of God in Jesus Christ, the community that doesn’t show favouritism to any (2:1-4), is the community that will sing praises to God, confess sins to one another, and pray to God for the rest of the community. The contrast is striking between these two types of speech and the setting in which each is found.

Living in a small community the last several years, with the inevitable gossip that grows in that terrain, I have increasingly believed that the solution to gossip is not more privacy but conversation. If we share our burdens and listen to others share theirs, we'll be much less excited about telling stories about those we don't know, and much more likely to take the concerns we have heard to God in prayer.

None of us can ever tame our tongues, but God in Christ has placed each of us within the church, the community where a new type of speech, the language of praise to God and open-heartedness toward one another, takes root and grows.