Avoid "Kata-Speak" & Let Freedom Ring ~ James 4:11-12 (a series on James)

¹¹ Brothers and sisters, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister or judges them speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. ¹² There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor? ~ James 4:11-12

It’s always interesting yet hard to remember that the early Christian world of which James was a part did not have the New Testament. Their Bible was the Tanakh, the Scriptures of Israel or what we call the Old Testament. And many texts that make up the New Testament are commentaries/sermons on the Old Testament, a practice which Jesus himself started. When Jesus pronounces “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” to be the second greatest commandment and a restatement of the first commandment to “love the Lord” (Matthew 22:37-40; see Leviticus 19:18), he sets up a way of reading and understanding the Hebrew Scriptures that marks his own faith and shapes ours forever (James 2:8). Had he chosen, for example, “You shall not ... tattoo any marks upon you”

(Leviticus 19:28) as the second commandment, we would be in an entirely different religion (and we would have a lot fewer young adults in church). And like big brother Jesus, James’ remarks about "not slandering others" (4:11-12) come right out of Leviticus 19:16-18. How are we to understand our faith in which “love of neighbor” is placed front and center? How are we to speak if our love for God is demonstrated by how we talk to others?

[Note: After I wrote my sermon but before I preached, my wife threw a bit of a wrench into my sermon by asking about toxic individuals who use both Scripture and the niceness of Christians to abuse others. It was a good a good question but rather than rewrite my sermon I chose to offer a brief caveat to what I am about to say. 1) James text is not all the Bible has to say about the topic of toxic communication. There is plenty to think about in terms of communicating with people, even abusive people, and we should not too quickly lump together all kinds of problems or communication styles. 2) The second caveat is that James is primarily concerned with “how” Christians should communicate but doesn’t focus too much on content, which leads us to the third caveat. 3) James is not advocating a “doormat theology” which settles for abuse. Yes, we are to love our neighbor which certainly curtails certain things but love can and should oppose other things, as well. James, for example, is himself opposing zealous teachers who are promoting division and violence in the church, as well as opposing rich Christians who are oppressing the poor.]

          1.    Avoid “kata-speak”

The word in our passage which is often translated “speak against” or “speak evil” or “slander” is the word katalaleo. It’s a compound word which joins a preposition to a verb. In this case, kata – against, down to or upon; and laleo – to talk or speak. So two meanings stand out that we are not to do.

First, there is the kata that means “against” – translated as slander, evil, speak ill of. It’s negative speech that opposes someone, verbally treats them like an enemy rather than a child of God, brother, sister, or friend. It’s speech that seeks to offer nothing good, spreads harm (e.g. to speak ill of, like you’re spreading disease intentionally), but that doesn’t mean it’s lying or deceptive. A kata-word may be perfectly true: we do not have to tell lies in order to harm another. If you tell a slanderer to stop slandering, 99% of the time he/she will respond with, “Well, it is true!” People think that as long as something is true, it is free to be said. But the fact that it is true gives us no right to say it. James has already noted that the truth can be weaponized.

But kata can mean more than “against.” There is also a second kata that means down to or upon – think belittling, or speak condescendingly to. It’s a reminder that we can also misuse speech when we speak from the wrong place – from above, as if we know more than others, or believe we can see all that we might need to see. It imagines that we are better, immune from the things that so easily seem to trap others. It’s when we think we can speak like God.

In my previous church, I was lucky enough to have a number of college volunteers

who were often eager to help with the youth program. I was surprised, however, by the odd way that so many began their volunteering. Rather than focus on relationships with the kids, which they were perfectly suited for given their age, many of them would become overly worried about discipline, constantly correcting the kids only to be utterly ignored. I would often advise these volunteers – “You’re trying to take the role of the cop. Unfortunately, you don’t have a badge or gun. Without authority or a weapon, you look pretty silly trying to get people to obey. It’s not your job to get people to obey, it’s your job to know them and love them.”

Last week James said to “resist the Devil.” Do you want to resist the Devil? Then don’t talk like him. It’s so interesting to me that we imagine a foul mouth as one who uses “bad language” and when the Devil possesses anybody in a movie one of the more common features is that the possessed person spews curse words. But if the Scriptures are our guide as to how the Devil talks, we should be sobered by the fact that the Devil or “Satan,” which means “the Accuser,” is often revealed to be a pious, religious figure who quite enjoys quoting Scripture. To “resist the devil” then we need to recognize that you can do both “katas” (speaking against or belittling) using Scripture – the Devil did so in the temptations of Jesus. You can use the Bible to talk to neighbors in ungodly ways.

          2.    Speak Reasonably

The one who speaks down to, or against another, James says, is one who sits in judgment but James go on to say that such a person also slanders and sits in judgment over the law. What does that mean? Well, we are helped by remembering how Jesus summarizes the law with the two greatest commandments: loving God whole-heartedly and loving our neighbor as ourselves, which James calls the “royal law” (2:8; c.f. Leviticus 19:18). James the brother of Jesus, follows Jesus’ lead. He loves the Old Testament, and you should too. Leviticus is James’ book and he is carefully restating it. Let’s reassert Leviticus 19:18 in some context:

Leviticus 19:16-18: ¹⁶ You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor: I am the Lord. ¹⁷ “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. ¹⁸ You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. (English Standard Version)
When we recognize that James’ own letter is a commentary on Leviticus 19, a number of things become helpful. We recognize that we aren’t simply being told to say nothing but to speak in a certain way – to “reason frankly.” A couple of practical things stand out:

a.     Speak as a brother and sister – there is an

intimacy that is very much a part of Leviticus and James’ own letter. We are talking about our “neighbors,” “your people” and James will say in vs. 11, “brothers and sisters.” If you are struggling to talk with someone about something, if you’re worried about how a conversation might actually go, focus on the relationship. The better the relationship, the easier it will be to have a good and helpful conversation. You most likely will learn something that you did not know that will make your conversation more fruitful. Love is the key. If you don’t love, don’t speak because the goal is making “brothers and sisters.” You can’t talk like an enemy and accomplish that.

b.    Don’t gossip. Go to them. – Slander is a corporate sin involving speaking to others about someone. In Jesus’ own playbook about how to handle to conflict in the community – Matthew 18:15-20, he says, ¹⁵ “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.” The going is important. To speak about difficult things demands a going that brings us face to face. Don’t try to speak of difficult or intimate things in an impersonal way. And listen to this command, “Don’t use email to talk about a difficult topic!”

c.     Don’t speak like God. To “reason frankly” is to recognize that that we are commanded to do these things because God says, “I am the Lord.” So we do so with a great amount of respect and nuance for who God is and whom God loves. This also means that we should repeatedly remind ourselves – “I am not God.” I find it helpful to be careful of my language. I try and ask questions, use words like “I wonder . . .” or “I imagine . . .” because I don’t know like God. I try and restate what I am hearing because I don’t reason like God. James is right to ask in vs. 12 – “who are you?” - you aren’t able to save or destroy. You shouldn’t judge, because these are God’s “special” activities and only God can do them well. We (and we can all admit it) make terrible gods.

          3.    Let’s give them something to talk about. Holiness!

But let’s take a look at an even bigger context. Leviticus 19 is all about holiness: God's holiness and the holiness of God's people. The word “holy” appears in Leviticus far more frequently than in any other biblical book. The backdrop for the commands from Leviticus 19 is found in vss. 1-2: “The Lord said to Moses, ² “Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

 If holiness is in God's nature, it is important to understand that nature. Leviticus 19 begins with a call to be holy, for “I the Lord your God am holy,” and it ends by telling us what this means: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (19:36). True, God is holy simply because God is God, but -- even more important for biblical theology – God, unlike other gods, is holy because God liberates captives, sets people free, stands opposed to tyrants and oppressors. If Leviticus 19 is the backdrop for our text from James then our speech is not simply policed speech, it’s not simply about what we don’t say and how we shouldn’t say it. It also should be liberating speech, love of neighbor speech, speech that advocates for others rather than accuses. Does your speech liberate people?

If we are going to be holy and if we are going to love our neighbor, we are going to have talk about how we do it without falling prey to the divisive forces of hateful rhetoric. By linking holy speech to Leviticus 19, James is doing more than asserting how we are to talk but what we must talk about. If we wish to be holy as God is holy, we will have to engage difficult topics without slander or backbiting, without condescension or sarcasm, and without a claiming that we can’t have these conversations at all. 
If Leviticus 19 and God’s holiness inform us about what we need to be talking about with one another, then as a holy community we should be talking about 

• how to care for the poor and immigrants (19:10), 
• fair wages for workers (verse 13), 
• care for the disabled (verse 14), 
• better laws and justice (verse 15), 
• how to avoid hate or vengeance (verse 18), 
• care for the aged (verse 32), 
• not cheating on the poor (verses 35-36), 
• and--again, surprisingly, for a people who understood themselves to be uniquely the people of God -- love not only each other but also the immigrant as ourselves (verse 34). Speaking about these things and for these things is what mark us as a holy people.

This week is the four hundredth anniversary of the first enslaved Africans being brought to this country. We need to talk more about this painful legacy if we are going to be a holy people. And we must talk about it in such a way that liberates without sarcasm or condescension. Many of us may have to repent but we do so that we may be holy and free. Let's talk and let freedom ring!

James: the Rated R version ~ James 4:1-10 (a series on James)

4 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? ² You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. ³ When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. ⁴ You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. ⁵ Or do you think Scripture says without reason that he jealously longs for the spirit he has caused to dwell in us? ⁶ But he gives us more grace. That is why Scripture says:

“God opposes the proud
    but shows favor to the humble.”

⁷ Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. ⁸ Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. ⁹ Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.

There’s a funny story about our oldest child playing with other kids in faculty housing at Westmont College. Our son, Jeremie, was running through the neighborhood in a game of “cops and robbers” with other kids when the game was paused and everyone was switching roles (the once cops were now robbers, etc.). When Jeremie was told that he was now supposed to be a robber, one of our friends heard him exclaim: “What about the morally ambiguous person?” Well, James doesn’t seem interested in the morally ambiguous peson and his concerns are hardly cute. No, they’re Rated R. He says,  

             1.    The bad guys are us!: Zealousness the sequel, vss. 1-4

James 4:1-10 might be the most searing part of James’ letter.

The language and accusations are direct. To make it more poignant, he switches from third person pronouns to second person pronouns. He continues to hammer away at teachers and a church whose hateful speech and pride, particularly when using the God’s Word, foment hatred, division, discord, and now, death.

His question is rhetorical in vs. 1 but not hypothetical. Bad things are happening, he acknowledges. Right off the bat, a pressing question has to do with what James means by “conflicts and disputes.” Now the most common meaning for NIV’s translation “conflicts,” for example, is outright war or battle (Matt. 24:6; Luke 14:31; 1 Cor. 14:8; Heb. 11:34; Rev. 9:7, 9). The desire that these people have, James says, is to acquire their desires through zealous violence and “wrong motives”: “so you commit murder.” Many commentators think it unthinkable that Christians could murder. They choose, rather, to believe that such language is metaphorical. History, however, reminds us otherwise – Crusades, witch-hunts, brutal oppression and slavery, even lynchings – these happened among Christians by Christians. Religious violence, anchored as it was in both the Old Testament and ancient societies, was more common than most of us care to admit. Take the Apostle Paul, as an example, who himself was willing to kill for the sake of God: Acts 8:3; 9:1-2, 21; 22:4, 19; 26:10-11; Gal. 1:23. Other Christian sources, written at the same time of James, attest to this as well, e.g. the Didache, a Christian document also written in the first century, states in 3:2, “Do not become angry for anger leads to murder” and “Do not be zealous or quarrelsome or hot-tempered, for all these things breed murder.” This is why, while clunky, it perhaps is a better translation to have vs. 1 read: “warring and swording” or less clunky would be “attacks and violence.”

While I believe that the teachings of Jesus are decidedly non-violent, it is nonetheless true that Christians can be. For James, what is the cause? Vs. 2 says cravings/desires and zeloute -  zealousness. That’s the word we talked about last week. And as we saw last week, such zealousness is often connected to obedience of God and the scriptures, which, when misdirected by dispositions of hatred, refusal to listen or love our neighbor, can lead to murderous attacks on others. As the next verses will show, these leaders were praying. Yet, zeal, ambition, cravings, and selfish desires ruled their hearts and prevented them from receiving the very things they needed: humility and grace. An example of such graceless zeal is the image of Santiago Matamoros, Saint

James the Killer of Muslims, which found its way in shrines throughout Spain after the Reconquista. It’s hard to imagine Jesus approving of this.

So many Christians worry about the state of truth, God in public life, external forces (whether real or imagined) that wish to hinder, hamper or harm the gospel. James, however, has a different worry. He’s not worried about the gospel, the Bible, or God. Why would God need defending anyway? No, what worries James are Christians who aren’t aware or worried about their own violence, their own zealousness and pride, their own warring both personally and publicly.

He worries about Christians who refuse to be wise. He worries about their “friendship with the world” in vs. 4. Now, here’s where it gets interesting.

One of the most oft-cited verses of my childhood was from vs. 4 “friendship with the world means enmity with God” and, I was told, both explicitly and implicitly, that fleeing such friendship with the world was a simple moral calculus: “Don’t cuss, don’t drink, don’t chew. Don’t go around with girls that do.” Forego Rated R movies, avoid the very appearance of sexual impropriety, and hate secular things, like music, government, etc. But that’s not what James is saying. Avoiding “friendship with the world” is not about hating the world (that doesn’t make sense of the gospel at all, remember John 3:16). It’s about refusing to buy into a system that the gospel seeks to overthrow – the belief that by my own desires and designs, using violence, I can bring about what’s good or right. When James warns the church against friendship with the world he’s warning them not to believe that they can bring about what they want and what God wants if they just have a bigger stick or harsher word, in service of the truth.

          2.    Put your hands down (and out) or How to receive a gift, vss. 5-6

James diagnoses the problem not as a problem of knowledge but disposition and goes on again to offer a brief, impromptu Bible study by bringing up Proverbs 3:34. First he give us his explanation and then the scripture itself. In vs. 5 he states that the Scriptures teach us that “humans yearn toward envy/jealousy/zealousness/doing our own thing” – just to clarify. Given the sense of the passage, the best translation is that “spirit” is not the Holy Spirit but our own human spirit. Thus, it says, “the spirit that dwells in you yearns with jealousy.” (jealousy always being a negative word in the Greek Septuagint). It’s a spirit that is given by God and supposed to be used for God’s glory but we often use it for own glory and designs.

           Humans yearn with jealousy/zealousness/pride/cravings

           God gives (more) grace

           God opposes the proud

           But gives grace to the humble.          

Why does God oppose the proud and give grace to the humble? Have we been tricked? Is grace only undeserved and free in the telemarketing sense of the word, where “free” becomes a gimmick to get us to spend all that we have. A few points deserve mention.

·       Grace appears before the commands of vss. 7-10 and is “more than” our own human frailty and jealous spirit. 

·       We’ve already heard James discuss that wisdom, grace and humility aren’t earned but gifts that “come from above” to be received.

·       And that requires that we surrender and submit to God, which he reminds once again in vs. 7 of our passage. To surrender and submit is to open our arms and unclench our fists.

·       So when it says that God “opposes” the proud, I tend to read that theologically as suggesting that pride and grace cannot occupy the same space. He’s not saying that God hates the proud or refuses to love them. No, Jesus died for sinners, including the prideful and God is always a willing gift-giver, particularly with grace. But the craving to control our lives and the pride that we are somehow in control means that our hands our often full with worry, anger, bitterness and fear, making us incapable of receiving God’s free gift.

·       Perhaps an analogy will help. We approach God like this (arms clutched around ourselves) or

 like this (dukes up). And God says, “I want to give you a gift” but if I refuse to open my hands what can God do? I am incapable of receiving what is free I must open my hands or put down my dukes and I must do that again, and again, and again.

·       In other words, you can’t ultimately believe that God is the who lifts you up (vs. 10) while patting yourself on the back for doing it yourself or by fighting to achieve God’s ends. The hardest work I’ve ever done in my faith walk was surrendering to God and allowing him to transform me.

          3.    Don’t cry pretty, vss. 7-10

There are 10 commands in the final three verses: submit, resist, draw near, cleanse, purify, lament, mourn, weep, let laughter be turned, and humble. Four are sad things: grieve, mourn, wail, change laughter to mourning. The largest grouping of these imperatives have to do with lament. The antidote to pride, James says, is a bit of sadness, to weep at the state of our world, but more importantly at the state of our own soul.

C.S. Lewis understood the power of lament: “We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.” We must trust God with what God already knows. We will never be humble if we cannot be honest. And we will never be honest if we cannot openly admit and cry about the state of our soul and the pain of sin.

Humility is not so much a command, it seems to me, but the culmination of a life of surrender and the ability to confess sadness. It is the ability to state honestly where we’re at. It’s the ability to admit – we’re human. One of the most painful experiences I’ve witnessed as a pastor was a funeral for a beloved faculty member at Westmont. It was all triumphalism. The tears were getting wiped away before anyone had a chance to weep. There was no chance to engage with the fundamental reality that it’s a fallen world and people get sick and die, hurt each other, refuse to love, engage in hate —and that it hurts. The beginning and ending imperative are the summation of what we’re after. Not to look good but to submit to God. Not to work harder but become humble and we cry because we can’t.

Upper middle-class, white churches aren’t criers. I’m always

amazed, however, at the underlying pain that fills this place, that simmers under the service, because we refuse to weep at our sin, our frailty, our brokenness. Maybe you can’t cry. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make you but simply tell you two things in closing. First, if you can’t cry, you will not grow. You will not be capable of receiving the grace that God is ready to give. Second, if you can’t cry. Don’t fake it. Tend to the painful stories of others. Sit with the aching hurt of others – pick one person to listen to and love on without trying to fix it. Stop trying to make yourself look pretty. Stop trying to put on a brave face and listen to this: On the night when he was betrayed . . .