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Taming The Tongue
Sermon by Brigid A. Boyle
July 25, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Proverbs 25:7b - 23
James 3:1-12

“For every species of beast and bird, or 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.”

I’m sure it won’t surprise any of you that, as a minister, I get an abundance of daily emails having to do with life in the church. Covering everything from simple, sweet stories about children’s comments on God to strong liberal or conservative messages about faith and politics, to church bulletin bloopers, each day I can count on several of them landing in my inbox. In the category of simple and sweet, but mostly corny, one that I received from a church member was entitled, “A Recipe for Good Gossip.”

A bit corny indeed, but nonetheless, two things struck me about the email. First, it came from a church member, a church member who sits in these pews, so as to acknowledge, in some way, that even these hallowed walls are not immune from gossip. Hard to believe isn’t it? Second, although this “Good Gossip” has to do more with its juiciness than its benefit, the idea that some gossip can be beneficial for a group or a community started me to thinking about how it is, for good and for ill, gossip functions in the church, of how it is, that gossip does and does not serve the gospel.

You know and I know that the reality of gossip is undeniable. From politics to entertainment, from neighborhoods to families, from the office water cooler to the church parking lot, “idle talk or rumor, especially about the personal or private affairs of others,” Webster’s first definition of gossip, is simply everywhere. From a governor suspected of ethical impropriety to a couple’s suicide in Chestnut Hill to who the latest scandal of who is marrying whom to the reproductive future of the Associate Minister, idle talk about the personal and private affairs of others seems ever present these days.

There is much about gossip, from the somewhat judgmental comment made over coffee about someone else, to the spinning of truth that happens as tales travel from person to person, to the simple untruths that get added in along the way, that has made it land, over the years, on the list of supposedly forbidden practices for good Christians. Give our human nature, once started, stopping gossip is about like trying to unring a bell. To the point, there is a story about a man in a little Jewish village, who went to his Rabbi for help with a problem. "Rabbi", he said " I have a problem: I just can't stop myself from gossiping." The rabbi thought for a moment, and then gave him some sheets of paper from his drawer. "Take these" he said, "tear then into small pieces. This evening, go round the village and put a handful of pieces on the doorstep of each person you have gossiped about. Then come back and see me." The man did as the Rabbi told him. When he came back he asked the rabbi what he should do next. "Go round the village again tonight, gather up all the pieces, and glue them back together again" "But that is impossible." said the man, "The wind has blown them all away" "Yes," replied the rabbi, "Now you know why gossip is so deadly."

Words can never be taken back, really, and words can harm, one by one, life by life, heart by heart. James knew that when he wrote his letter, which is actually more than a sermon than anything else. James, or whoever really wrote these words, was down to earth kind of guy. His words were about living the faith, not just about believing. For James, there were two conditions for Christian piety: caring for the poor and afflicted and proper speech. Confessing the name of Jesus Christ as Savior wasn’t enough, grateful response required committing one’s life and work to him. They went hand in hand and faithful living took hard work. And for James, there was no place for mediocrity. James is refreshing in that way. He never minces words and, of speech, writes this “… 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 nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. 7For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, 8but no one can tame the tongue-a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”

James knew what words had the power to do. Like a rudder on a ship, the tongue, the mouth, our speech directs where we go, for good or for ill. James knew that the tongue had the power to hurt more than anything else. And he knew that gossip, or idle chatter, or an untamed tongue had the power to be ever so detrimental to the Christian individual and the Christian community.

George Eliot once said of gossip that it is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. Gossip, or really any talk about others that serves only to elevate oneself and put down another reflects on our own personal integrity, whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or not, and whether we like it or not. Especially for “good people” like us, how hypocritical, I dare say how sinful we are, we are when talk about our understanding of the value of each human being as God’s child and then contradict that understanding over and over again by our “cursing those who are made in the likeness of God.” Such contradiction happens by our idle talk of other’s personal and private affairs, by our whispering down the lane and getting the story all wrong (like what happens in the children’s game), by our refusal to say to others what we easily say about others. And because we tend to operate with the illusion that what we say about others behind their backs, what we gossip about, stays behind the back, we also have the illusion that the public perception of our integrity is not damaged one little bit. The trouble with those illusions, though, is two fold. First, what we think stays behind the back rarely does. People who are gossiped about almost always find out, and most of the time they can trace the story and get a sense of who said what. But second, concerns about the public perception of personal integrity are simply wrong headed. The question, “What will people think of me if they found out I said that?” is not the question of the one whose integrity is wholly intact. Maintaining one’s personal integrity is not about what is out there, but about what is in here. Of course, it is not good works but grace that saves us and I believe in the forgiveness of sins for those who have lapses in personal integrity and I believe that there is grace even for those who gossip. But shall we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? By no means, Paul would tell us and by all means, it is the duty of grateful response to live and act in the most just and faithful and joyful ways we know how. That is personal integrity and that is the faithful life of good works to which James would direct us.

But more than just an insult to our own personal integrity, an untamed tongue, even a single untamed tongue, reflects on the community. For us, it reflects on the Christian community. I think of what happens when, more and more, visitors come to the church having little background in religion or in the organized church. I think of what happens when one of those visitors dares to show up at something other than Sunday morning worship, be it coffee hour, women’s group, or even a committee meeting. I think of what happens when that visitor listens in on critical commentary generously offered about this person or that, about this event or that, about this situation or that … mostly with little factual information included. It happens in this church and in every church, I am sure. The result is that the poison either infects and then spreads, or it repels. But in either case, gossip or idle chatter, bitterness or poisonous words, reflect on the whole of the Christian community. If the church, then, wants to be the church that grows and is seen as a city of a hill, a light to the nations, a beacon for those dwelling in darkness, the church, then, and those in it, need to, quite simply, be careful what they say.

Our words have real power, my friends. They have the power to praise God; but they also have the power to destroy-to dissolve our integrity, to dishonor the community of Jesus Christ, and worst of all, to devastate the very people whom God claims as his beloved children. I need not rehearse the ways in which hearts have been hurt, people have been broken and lives have been shattered by the untamed tongue, for all of us have doubtless been on both sides. Our words have real power, and their damage can be great indeed.

But if that is all true, and it is true, then surely the reverse is true too: if words have the power to tear down, they also have the power to build up; if words have the power to hurt, they also have the power to heal. Even gossip itself, I say with the greatest of care and caution, need not, in and of itself, be entirely destructive.

Much has been written lately on the evolutionary psychology of gossip. Gossip, it has been said, developed first and long ago as a survival strategy. Gossip told early humans where food was, where water was too be found, and where danger lurked. Having moved from the Stone Age to the current day, some have also pointed out the good that gossip does, such as group bonding, community building, developing, enforcing and subverting norms, challenging power, and overturning institutions.

In her essay, “The Holy Use of Gossip,” Kathleen Norris looks at the function of gossip in her small North Dakota town and in her smaller still North Dakota Presbyterian Church. She talks about the gossip around various characters in town. There was Rattlesnake Bill who carried rattlers in a paper sack in his pickup truck. There was “poor Ida” who nursed her husband through a long illness and whose delayed adolescence after his death- dyed hair, provocative dressing, dancing at the local steakhouse, turned the town gossips sympathetic cooing into outrage. But rather than simply setting aside gossip as venal, petty and simply mean, Norris argues that gossip serves a different purpose.

You see, the word gossip, at its origin, is derived from the words for God and sibling, and originally meant “akin to God.” It was used to describe one who has contracted spiritual kinship by acting as a sponsor at baptism. Gossip used to be words shared among those who were connected in God. “We are interrelated in a small town,” writes Norris, “whether we like it or not. We know without thinking about it who owns what car; inhabitants of a town as small as a monastery learn to recognize each other’s footsteps in the hall. Story is a safety valve for people who live as intimately as that; and I would argue, she goes on, “that gossip well cone can be a holy thing. It can strengthen communal bonds.”

You and I do not live in small town North Dakota. You and I do not live in a small town at all. But you and I do exist in a community that, in many ways, functions the same. The community is, of course, Christ’s church. We know each other, many of us, parts of us, very well. And our talk with and about one another is not only idle chatter about the personal and private affairs of others. For you see, we are those who are connected in God, we are siblings in God. Gossip then, not the mean, backbiting, resentful, bitter kind, but the kind that is composed of words that honor our connection in God, can serve a purpose.

No doubt gossip sometimes provides comic relief for a community that sometimes takes itself to seriously. As an example, I think of the sympathetic cooing of our own gossips who were so impressed at the virtue of one of the men in the congregation who dutifully brought his two daughters to church by himself each week after he and his wife had separated. Well, the truth was that the couple had separated in so far the husband was in the pew and the wife was singing in the choir. It is comic relief sometimes for we who take ourselves too seriously.

But there is more. For gossip well done can give us a sense of identity in a community that can sometimes let us be too anonymous. Talk at sewing circle, for instance, that puts someone by name on the prayer chain can be a very powerful tool for connecting someone to the bigger body and to a larger sense of God’s presence. Chatting while the offering is counted on Monday mornings that moves all to send cards of well wishes and earnest prayer to one who is struggling can grant that one a new sense of identity as a child of God. Conversation over lunch among a few church members can pass the joyous news of the birth of a new babe and so, over time, can shape that babe’s understanding of who and whose they are.

Gossip also, and finally, can express solidarity among a people that are sometimes too disjoined, too isolated and too divided. “I recall a marriage that was on the rocks,” writes Norris. “The couple had split up, and gossip ran wild. Much sympathy was expressed for the children, and one friend of the couple said to me, ‘The worst thing she could do is take him back too soon. This will take time.’ Those were healing words, she continues, a kind of prayer. And when the family did reunite, the town breathed a collective sigh of relief.” Gossip, the words among those connected in God, siblings in God, can bring us together in common prayer, common struggle and common celebration. And sometimes, when the church or the people in t go through periods where it seems like there is so little to hold them together, gossip can be a vehicle for grace.

The hitch about good gossip, as I see it, is this. The critical ingredient for gossip to be good at all, for any or for all, is trust. It requires trust in God’s goodness and in God’s good creation and in God’s hand that works to weave the likes of us together as one. Only in such trust, can the words of gossip, or conversation, or concern, or connection, be words that build up rather than break don. So may we, by God’s grace, find such trust that even this community might find itself more and more connected in God, more and more as siblings of God, that the words that tear down be replaced with words that build up, and then even our gossip may serve a holy purpose. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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