The divisions and conflicts in our world are real and we feel the impact every day. In this sermon, preached on February 23, 2020, at Davis Community Church (audio sermon recording here), reflects on James 3.3-18 and addresses the ways we can use our words for healing rather than injury.

One of the usual readings for today is this story of the Transfiguration of Jesus: one day Jesus took his friends on a hike up a mountain. When they got to the top, no one else was there. Suddenly, everything about Jesus changed; he was transfigured and even his clothes shimmered with light. They saw Elijah and Moses standing beside Jesus, talking quietly with him. Peter, not knowing what else to do or say, said to Jesus, “Teacher, it’s a good thing we were here. If you’d like us to, we can make three small shrines to commemorate this moment—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Just then, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice spoke, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ At this, they were filled with fear. Seeing this, Jesus came close to them and touched each of them and said, “It’s okay; you don’t have to be afraid.”

“You don’t have to be afraid.”

Maybe, but we are. Jesus, we are often afraid.

I don’t think Jesus was minimizing our fears. He knew, first hand, how real fear is. But he also knew that fear doesn’t have to rule us.

Each Lent we engage in a congregation-wide experience of study, reflection, and, hopefully, some kind of personal transformation. We usually study a book, individually and in small groups; we reflect on the implications of its message for our lives, and we make some changes—personally and collectively—based upon what we study.

Six years ago, we read The Rebirthing of God, by international spiritual teacher, scholar, and peacemaker, John Philip Newell. Our study motivated us to participate in the new era of God’s movement in and on our planet. Much of what we reflected upon then is becoming part of us now.

Three years ago, we read Grounded: Finding God in the World, by Diana Butler Bass. Butler Bass argues that what appears to be a decline in religion actually signals a major transformation in how people understand and experience the divine. The distant God of conventional religion is giving way to a more intimate sense of the sacred in us and in the world.

This year, we’re not reading a book. We’re listening to a collection of podcasts we call: Six Civil Conversations to Restore Hope in Humanity. Each week many of us will meet in groups to explore what we’re hearing. Some of us will do it on our own. And each week during Lent, I’ll introduce the theme here.

The six-week series is adapted from the Civil Conversations Project from Krista Tippett’s acclaimed web audio journal, OnBeing.Org.

Many of you are participating, and I hope more will—either formally in our groups (sign up afterward) or individually—listening as you drive to work, when you garden, when you exercise. Maybe you’ll read the transcript with a cup or glass of your favorite beverage. Hopefully, we’ll each talk with others about what’s coming for us and how our lives might change so that we’re helping shape a human experience on this planet that’s benevolent and beneficial, a way of being human that’s an embodiment of what the Divine intends for us and for all of nature.

This week, we’re eavesdropping on a conversation between Krista Tippett and Dr. Brené Brown. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston. She consults widely with corporate, military, and athletic leaders. Her TED talks have come into millions of homes, as have her books — The Gift of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, Braving the Wilderness, and most recently, Dare to Lead.

This week’s episode is called “Strong Back, Soft Front, Wild Heart.” Krista and Brené reflect on the current state of our social and political life, and the fears that drive us apart, dividing our society, fragmenting our humanity, and endangering the planet. They not only talk together about what’s hurting us, but they also talk about ways people are helping each other defy those forces and change human behavior.

With echoes of my sermon last week about the “wood wide web” and the science behind our Christian spirituality that affirms the interconnection of all things, Brené Brown, a sociologist, says that her research indicates that people who help others rather than hurt them, people who heal others rather than hate them, know deep in their souls that we all belong to each other, no matter who we are or what our differences may be.

And yet, most of us, she says, have “sorted ourselves into ideological bunkers. My research,” she reports, shows a direct correlation between the bunkering of our lives and the increasing rates of loneliness among us. Nine times out of ten, the only thing we have in common with the people behind those bunkers is that we all hate the same people. Having shared hatred of the same people is what I call “common enemy intimacy.” “Common enemy intimacy” is not what any of us are really looking for; it doesn’t satisfy and it doesn’t create a better humanity. An intimacy created by hating the same people is absolutely not sustainable and it’s never actually good for us.

Behind this bunkered life is the reality of fear. And where fear is left unaddressed and unmetabolized inside us, it becomes militarized outside us. Fear begets hatred and hatred begets violence—physical and virtual.

Jesus said, “You don’t have to be afraid.” But we are. And when we’re afraid, it’s too easy to hate. And when we hate it’s too easy to hurt each other.

What do we use most often to hurt each other?

Our words.

When our fears are unaddressed and unmetabolized inside us, they become militarized outside us; first we weaponize our words, then we weaponize ourselves for war of one kind or another.

What might happen in our world if we took greater care in our words?

“When we put bits into the mouths of horses,” says the Letter of Saint James,“we can make them obey us; by putting a little bit into their small mouths, we can guide their big bodies. So too with ships: a tiny rudder turns the whole thing. True too with the tongue: it’s a tiny thing but even a great forest fire is set ablaze by a spark. The tongue is such a spark.”

The tongue is a fire. It can just as easily and all too frequently burn for hatred rather than love. It can just as easily and all too frequently demean and destroy rather than cure or create.

And when fear moves the tongue, bad ideas become hateful words, and hateful words become crimes against humanity. When our fears are unaddressed and unmetabolized inside us, they become militarized outside us; we weaponize our words.

There is a saying in the Christian spiritual tradition of the deserts of North Africa: “It was said about Abba Agatho that for three years he carried a pebble in his mouth until he learned to be silent.”

Agatho became a monk after leaving one of the cities of the ancient world. He knew the power of words and the way words were wounding the world. He knew the tongue could be a fire, words could be weapons. But hatred and violence are not what words are for. With words God created all things; with words Jesus preached good news to the poor, with words Jesus healed the sick, with words Jesus blessed the dying with new life.

Words are the great wonders of the world; they must never become weapons.

“Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water?” asked Saint James. Of course not.

“Can a fig tree yield olives or a grapevine figs?” Of course not.

So how then, child of God, can the mouth you use to bless and love, become a weapon for hating and hurting?

“My brothers and sisters,” says Saint James, “this ought not be so.” You were not made for this. God did not make your mouth for this.

On Thursday, California lawmakers voted unanimously to formally apologize for the role the state legislature played in the incarceration of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent in internment campus during World War II. Seventy percent of those incarcerated were American citizens, including the family of our own Alice Nishi, who was a freshman at UC Berkeley when she was sent to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. The parents and grandparents of Jerry Ito were incarcerated at the Tule Lake internment camp; Janet Mukai’s family as well as several others among us were also incarcerated. The mandatory relocation came immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

My own grandfather, a German immigrant and pastor of a German speaking congregation in Chicago, while not interned in camps, was the victim of hate crimes against German immigrants and citizens during and after World War II.

I wonder how fear weaponized the words of the self-proclaimed true Americans who perpetrated and justified such actions then. I wonder how tongues wagged loose and untamed in homes and neighborhoods, schools, businesses, and churches; how tongues fueled the fires of fear, suspicion, and hatred.

It’s clear, isn’t it, that fear is moving, unchecked, among us today?

Maybe we ought to put pebbles in our mouths, pebbles that can cause us to think twice before we speak, pebbles in our mouths to slow us down, face our fears, and halt the hate and help us find another, better way to use our words.

Wherever I am and whoever I’m working with, says Brené Brown, and I’ve been in front of tens of thousands of people by now, I ask the audiences, ‘Raise your hand if you deeply love someone whose vote in 2016 you find incomprehensible.’ And 99 percent of hands go up. Then I ask, ‘How many of you are willing to sever permanently your relationship with the person you love, because of their vote?' And maybe one or two hands goes up. That’s brave, I suppose. But I’m not willing to do that; I am personally not willing to sever a relationship over politics, not when I live by a higher or deeper sense of the inextricable relationship I have with them. Now, I’m not going to tolerate abuse; I’m not going to tolerate dehumanizing language. I’m not going to have a curious and open dialogue with someone whose politics insists on diminishing my humanity. In fact, people who have those kinds of safe boundaries also show up very clearly in my research. But short of that, I’m going to lean in, and I’m going to stay curious because my humanity—our humanity—depends on it.

Our humanity depends on what we do with our words and with the fear that can easily turn them into weapons.

How many times this week have you heard words used a weapons?

How many times this week have you used words as weapons?

Behind the weaponizing of our words is fear, unexamined, unmetabolized.

10.

We will be afraid. But we don’t have to be dominated by our fears, we can acknowledge them, be curious about them, learn from them. We can do the same with the fears of others. And when we acknowledge them, remain curious about them, and learn from them, our fears will have less potential to weaponize our words.

Our words are not intended to be weapons; they are the great wonders of the world.

Let us choose them wisely.

[transition to meditation]

Now as we go into stillness . . .

as we grow quiet, prayerful,

let us notice what we’re feeling deep inside—

our mixed feelings about words,

words spoken to us

words we’ve spoken to others

words that have helped

words that have hurt

Nelson Mandela once said: “How precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die.”

your words are precious;

your words are wonders,

and so, maybe you’d consider placing an imaginary pebble in your mouth, hold it there upon your tongue, letting it slow you down, think twice before you speak, and examine the fear that’s in you,

the fear that’s around you,

the fear that doesn’t have to rule you,

the fear that, unchecked,

could weaponize your words,

precious, wondrous words that could be used for such grander things . . .