James 3:1-12
We spend a good bit of time trying
to convince people to become teachers.
There’s the Sunday School, where each of which needs a teacher and at
least one other adult. Then there is the
confirmation class, which is part of my role as pastor, but which also involves
several adults as mentors and sometimes chaperones. This year it’s combined with one of the adult
classes, and there is a teacher for that.
Of course, the high school class has its own teacher and a youth
director in addition, who work together in various ways. Then we need to have substitutes on call
because there will always be that Sunday when someone wakes up with the flu and
(rightly) decides that sharing it with everyone at church is not a good idea.
In fact, we need more than one substitute because there are also those Sundays
in January and February when the roads are black with ice or white with that
other stuff, and there’s no getting up or down Collegeville Road in Mont
Clare. Vacation Bible School is intense
in its use of personnel: group leaders and craft people and story tellers and
game leaders and kitchen staff. A good
educational program asks us to have a pretty hefty number of people available.
James undermines that.
“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and
sisters,” he warns [James 3:1],
and I find myself hoping, for once, that nobody out in the pews
is listening.
“Don’t say that!” I
want to scream. “We’ve just recruited
enough people, and you have no idea how often I hear people tell me they cannot
teach. They don’t know enough, or
they’re not good with teenagers, or they travel for work, or they have trouble speaking
in front of people their parents’ age, or they are allergic to crayons, or
whatever. Don’t discourage them any
further!”
But I cannot deny that it is right there in the Bible:
“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters.”
I think back on the fact that Martin Luther had his questions
about whether this letter should ever have been allowed into the scriptures in
the first place and almost want to say he had a point. To give James his due, though, the reason he
said that had nothing to do with the usual objections that people offer to
becoming teachers.
The reason was one that probably would scare off even more.
“Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and
sisters, for you know that we who
teach will be judged with greater strictness. For
all of us make many mistakes.” [James
3:1-2]
Then he goes on to
describe how serious a slip of the tongue can be.
“Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking
is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of
horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so
large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very
small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member,
yet it boasts of great exploits.” [James 3:2-5]
As
he continues, though, it doesn’t sound like he’s thinking about mistakes that
amount to misinformation or getting doctrine wrong. It sounds like something more from the gut than
from the head.
“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And 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.” [James 3:5-6]
Maybe
it’s just me, but I don’t think he’s just talking about getting the words of
“Jesus Loves Me” mixed up with “Kum By Yah”.
What’s going on here?
James is concerned about teachers
being able to teach, above all, by example.
What he expresses is an example, which is what happens when someone
cannot hold their tongue, but there are other ways that are important. We learn, all of us, from the way that the
people who teach us formally and informally lead their lives. The most striking lessons may not come with
words.
In high school, we were required to
take a course called “American Studies” that put literature and history
together, so, for instance, you’d learn about the Civil War while reading The Red Badge of Courage. There were lectures on economics when you got
to the Great Depression and read Of Mice
and Men or The Grapes of Wrath to
get a feel for what people lived through.
One of the teachers on the history side had a warped sense of humor that
you either got or didn’t get. On one of
his tests he had a question: “True or false?
As part of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Congress to
repeal the law of supply and demand, as recommended by John Maynard
Keynes.” When the test was graded and
returned, one of the students in the class was really upset about this one, and
I still remember him arguing the point (which was not generally done in those
days).
“You told us that
Roosevelt took Keynes’s advice.”
“Yes, I did.”
“So this had to have been
true.”
“It’s false.”
“How can it be false?”
“Do you know what the law
of supply and demand is?”
“No.”
“Did you think to ask?”
“No.”
“Then next time you don’t
understand a question, ask about it.
That’s a far more important lesson than anything on this quiz.”
I
doubt that those teaching methods are encouraged under the Common Core
system. Still, isn’t that what
happens? A real teacher teaches more
than simple content. A real teacher
teaches ways to live.
For James, the gospel itself is what
is to be taught. Christianity, for him,
is a way of life. That’s what annoyed
Luther about James. Luther insisted that
it is our faith in Christ that leads to salvation. The medieval Church had taught that doing
good works was the key to heaven. Luther
wanted to say that works are not enough.
It’s the mercy of God that opens the door, and it’s on us to trust that
mercy as shown to us in Jesus. James
insisted that faith isn’t just your understanding of Jesus’ role, but your
willingness to follow his example and to lay down your own life the way that he
lay down his. To teach the gospel is to
live the gospel. He said,
“What
good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have
works? Can faith save you? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks
daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your
fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of
that? So faith by itself, if it has no
works, is dead.” [James 2:14-17]
You
cannot split them neatly apart.
That’s why I just want to point out
something that I hope disturbs you. Just
as faith and works are connected, so is life and teaching. You may not think that you are teaching anyone
anything, but someone somewhere is learning from you what it is to live a
Christian life and
“you know that we who teach will be judged with greater
strictness. For all of us make
many mistakes.” [James 3:1-2]
All
of us make mistakes, not only in speech, but in action. Whatever you teach, make sure it includes a
lesson on forgiveness and mercy. James,
the apostle who wrote about bridling your tongue, is recorded to have had some
pretty nasty arguments with Paul, the apostle who wrote about love, and in the
end they agreed to let each other go their separate ways. The writers of the Bible were far from
perfect. They were like us, people who
try to live the gospel but who get things wrong a lot of the time, and could be
judged by that. Yet everywhere in the
Bible people come back to the belief that, as James put it,
“mercy
triumphs over judgment.” [James 2:13]
And
it’s mercy that we really want to teach people about. There’s enough judgment out there already.
Once again, though, the important
lessons are the ones that are taught by example.
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