James 3:1-12
Proper 19 (24) - Year B
It is good to have you along for the journey, we can share the responsibility of teaching. As we encourage and support one another, as we bring awareness and correction to one another, we can make the appropriate changes in our syllabi.
In this process we are able to better use our tongues as rudders rather than flame-throwers. We increase our blessing and diminish our cursing (not just language, but attitudes and prejudices).
Don't forget that tongues also can be trained to crave and to substitute for other parts of life. Thus the issue of obesity. Also, tongues can be corporate. How does political discourse, the tongue of the body politic, run these days and can the warnings of James be applied here?
You may find it helpful to remember some teachings from the Buddhist tradition that help us grow beyond the wheel of existence, the wheel of birth, the cycle of nature.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2003/september2003.html
James 3:1-12
Proverbs 1:20-33 or Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 19 or Psalm 116:1-9
Mark 8:27-38
Physiologically, tongues are strong and flexible, made up of sixteen muscle groups. Metaphorically, tongues are also easily bitten and easily biting.
Tongues are equally at home carrying a blessing or a curse. They can cut to the quick or lovingly caress one another. They are a source of encouragement and a keener of despair.
Presume again an original blessing of "It's good." We heard it from our teacher leading us out of chaos, into life. In such an image we honor our teacher by offering a sustaining word tot he weary - those caught in moments and millennia of chaos.
The tongue of a creator becomes a tongue of the nursling. [I have long enjoyed an out-of-print book, The Tongue of the Nursling by P.E. MacAllister - here is a brief bio and an online article by him you might enjoy that could take you far afield of today's reflection (and yet have enough tangents to be instructive).
- - -
we see a forked tongue
and suppose we are
hearing a forked tongueour senses aren't sensible
we mistake one another for hats
magnify molehills and ignore mountainswe execute desperate thieves
and reward those who contract to steal
missing what's behind the surface
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
Check your eyesight, it may just cleanup your mouth.
To see G*D or a likeness of G*D sets loose a blessing.
Now, go ahead, look around. Dee a likeness of G*D? Feel a blessing moving back and forth, to and from you?
Did you notice a lackness of G*D? Go ahead, let loose a curse.
Now comes a diagnostic tool for the refrigerator door - a scale with "G*D's Likeness" on one end and "G*d's Lackness" on the other. Note your day's location with a dot and a date. After a week, see if you've clustered more toward "Likeness" or "Lackness". After a month or year of recording, your location should be more definable. After a lifetime, may you find blessing after blessing.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html
Why should a select few be known as teachers? This begins to rank and thus to breakdown the value of gifts given by one spirit or to enforce an economic ranking of them. Surely value is not based on being judged with a greater strictness. If we begin to vary the strictness or flexibility of gifts usage, what little community we have falls further apart.
A better clue is given with the example of a forked tongue that can shift in a moment from praise to blame. Teachers have a weird ability to parcel out encouragement and beckoning forward in a variety of styles to meet the resistances of those willing to learn with them. Teachers also have an ability to refrain from speaking more than they know.
So many of us want to be perceived as wise and so we make up things when asked about what we don't know. Speculation and over-parsing nuance make up so much of our time together. Even when asked about what we do know we get so wrapped up in our explanations that we lose track of who asked a question and whether our response has gone so far past their ability to follow that we would go on forever, piling detail upon detail.
One model seldom tried is for teachers to teach how to teach that everyone might teach about their own gift. In this sense, we need more and more teachers, not preparers for tests or spreaders of information without context.
Here is a strict judgment perhaps equivalent to being a strict conservative: We are in the cultural quandaries we are in because we have devalued teachers by idealizing them. Each of us is accountable for the current state of affairs. We have not been willing to be taught or to teach basic community processes and our place in them. To this end, pray for those who can be clear about questions and responses (not answers) and next questions - teachers.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/09/james-31-12.html