How many words does the average person speak in the course of a day? Anyone want to wager a guess? The research varies, but most agree the typical adult speaks around 16,000 words per day, with a range existing, between as a few as 6,000 and as many as 20,000. Interestingly, although we have a vocabulary of around 30,000 words, we only use about 3% of the words we know in that 24-hour time period. Instead, we tend to repeat the same words over again.
Good morning. Have a good day. I’d like cream in my coffee, please.
Can I get some help here? You’ll never believe what I just heard.
Such speech –and with it, the give and take of conversation – is primary to our connectedness to one another.
In 1959 John Austin published a book titled, “How To Do Things with Words,” a book whose basic premise is that speech is performative. To put it more plainly, words do things. Rather than simply making a statement, words cause things to happen. Will you have this person to be your spouse? I will. Do you promise to love, honor, and cherish them? I do. A marriage begins. Watch out! Be careful and the person steps back onto the curb. You are invited reads the card and suddenly you are driving up to York on Saturday evening. Words do not simply describe; they enact relationships, events, activities. Words do things.
Although Austin’s theory is relatively recent, the idea that words create is as old as our faith. Genesis begins with God saying, Let there be light and the brilliance of billions of particles, charging through space, emitting their glow, came into being. The world was formed by the speech of God. Jesus is known as God’s Word, the Logos, God’s communication of saving love. Jesus’s parables, healings, body, and life altered the world. As God’s creatures, we inherit a portion of this creative skill. We are stewards of that life-making speech. We have the power to shape the word by the words we use.
The letter of James contains the longest reflection on human speech in scripture, found here in the third chapter. Even before James dissects the dangers of the human tongue, he has already laid a framework for thinking about the words we use and their relation to the faith we profess. Be quick to listen and slow to speak he writes in the first chapter. Solid advice. Later in the final chapter, James will say, Let your Yes be Yes and your No be No, a solid assertion for being truthful. James takes human speech seriously. Our words have power. A tongue can harm: You are stupid. I don’t want to see you ever again. Your tongue can heal: I am wrong, Forgive me. You make me proud, every day.
This is the heart of James’s message. The 16,000 words you utter each day have the capacity to harm or heal, welcome or exclude, curse or to bless. What you say can lighten someone’s load or break someone’s spirit, can cast a line of hope to someone drowning in despair or push someone out deeper into an isolation. Come, sit beside me. Don’t be scared. You are not alone. OR Who are you again? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard. Never forget the power of your words By them, we create a world.
Because the tongue is capable of goodness and evil, it needs training. James names the trickiness of the tongue, the ways our speech can get out ahead of us, causing us to speak without thinking or using words we don’t fully mean. How often do we reflect, Why did I say that? What was I thinking? Like a bridle on a horse or a rudder on a ship, this small yet mighty instrument guides bigger things, thus working best when well-controlled. Our task, then, is to learn to harness our words for good. James offers these tidbits of advice. Listen more than speaking. Guard against lies. Mirror your faith in your speech.
But as he dwells in practicality, James names the spiritual dimensions of our speech. It matters what kind of world our words create. God spoke into being dry land, crawling insects, the soaring birds and jumping dolphins. Afterwards God declared, they were all good. Too often our speech, rather than affirming the goodness of others, demeans and destroys. The tongue is a fire, writes, James, and the fire he describes is a chaotic one that spreads faster and farther than intended, taking on a life of its own. Alan Culpepper writes, “the tongue can do more evil than we intend. And the tongue reveals an evil persists within us.”
What clearer illustration do we need of James’s warning than what has transpired this week in Springfield, OH? An unsubstantiated rumor, with racial tropes, against a vulnerable, immigrant population. Lies spoken, repeated, and taken up by others, spreading fear like fire, causing bomb threats to kids’ schools and public buildings, degrading human beings made in God’s image and beloved by God. These false words altered how some see the world. They offered a curse rather than a blessing. As the United Methodist bishop of Florida, Tom Berlin, wrote, – and here I paraphrase – persons of faith reject speech that dehumanizes our neighbors, for it harms them, and leads to violence, and as it harms our siblings, it harms the whole body of Christ.
The first intention for human speech was that we use our words to bless our Creator, saying Thank You, Praise Be and I see your glory, God. But when we bless God in some of our speech and then choose to speak harm to a neighbor with other words, then we’ve fractured our faith. As Mary Hinkle notes, if we bless the Creator God and then curse someone created in the image of God, we not only say something unfavorable about another human being, we say something untrue about God. It is this dual capacity – praise God while speaking evil of others – that the habits of our speech can reveal. It is this spiritual wrestling – what God is revealed by my words, what truth about my Creator, my neighbor and myself does my speech affirm – that James is driving toward in these verses. The tongue is a fire. Fires can consume, destroy, and wound the flesh. Fires can also illumine a space, warm the body, and make a place for connection. Fires can inspire speech and understanding, as they did on the day of Pentecost.
That is the good news among these somber verses. Your words have power. Our words create a world, hopefully one that reflects God’s world. You can put your tongue to work; to bless, to praise, to pray, to encourage, to protect, to love. Claim the creative power given to you to bless.
I’ve experienced such power to reveal and bless myself. As a junior in college, I started worshiping at a church that regularly used the full communion liturgy, just as we typically use here at Grace. I wasn’t raised in a liturgically-minded congregation, so I was unaccustomed to the congregational responses throughout the Great Thanksgiving. The middle response, spoken after Jesus’ sharing of his body and blood, initially troubled me. Christ has died. Christ has risen. Christ will come again. I was a serious, science-minded college kid. We live in a rational world. Christ, I thought, was not coming again. So in the beginning I choose not to say those words. But over many months on weekly worship, the words found a home within me. I found myself joining in, and with each instance of saying, Christ will come again, I received a slightly deeper glimpse into the world God is still creating, that world where justice rolls down like a mighty river, where tears are no more, cities are rebuilt, and love, real life-changing love, reigns supreme. In a slow but profound way the words changed my vision of God’s world.
The second instance happened over a decade later. I was in my second congregational appointment. It was Easter Sunday. I was nervous, excited, and worried not everything would run smoothly. After the first service an usher handed me a folded note. In my anxiety, certain I had made some mistake in the service, I put the paper in my pocket. Only after the second service had ended did I summon the courage to read the note. It was a hand-made drawing of the sanctuary, filled with people, made by a young child, with the words, “Happy Easter, Pastor Amy, I love this church.” I had convinced myself there was a curse in my pocket, but instead I opened a blessing. That picture still sits in my office today. Never underestimate the power of your words. Use them to bless, pray, and praise. Amen.