The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

James makes a really extraordinary claim in his letter in the passage we read this week. He asserts that anyone who controls his own tongue can control his entire body, just as a horse can be led by a bit and bridle. I doubt you are going to see anything like that in a contemporary self-help book. I do not think it will sell very well to tell people the way to fitness, health, or happiness is to bridle your own tongue. But maybe we dismiss James’s insight too readily because we do not really appreciate the scope of what he is saying.

It is true that it is better for you, and for the church, if you do not gossip, or spread rumors, or say bad things of others. But you should keep in mind that for James, how we live our lives is how we show others the depth of our faith in God and in Christ. True faith will show itself as absolute devotion to truth and to love. “Setting your face like flint,” as Isaiah puts it, against the misinformation and misdirection of a world that wants to pull you away from God is one aspect of being faithful to truth. But there is something else, something no one gets to see, that is also a part of devotion to truth. The tongue is only the means by which falsehood makes its way out of us. It is the heart that is the fountain of truth or of deceit. Being faithful to truth means we must chase away from our hearts all of the little lies we like to tell ourselves. If we keep evil out of our hearts, our bodies will manage to show the world the true glory of God.

- Charles Fehrenbach