Hello there,
This week I have a favor to ask! Every week, I notice that there are “shares” after publication. If you are someone who often emails this newsletter to someone else, I wonder if you’d instead ask them to subscribe? It would serve me so much. Thanks!
The Part Where There’s an Essay: No Mere Mortals
For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it, we bless our Lord and Father, and with it, we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. - James 3:7-10
This summer, I am studying the book of James alongside two other sisters from my church. It was just a few days ago that we got to chapter three. I was bracing myself, and sure enough — on the first day of this week’s study, I rammed right into a conversation where the Lord was reinforcing how I curse people who are made in the likeness of God. There it was, fully on display. I wasn’t openly cursing people, but I was harsh. I was unkind. I jumped to conclusions. I had to apologize.
A long time ago, I heard it put this way: is someone’s name safe in your mouth? Will it travel safely with you? Do you honor me when I am away from you?
Under the guise of “asking for advice,” “requesting prayer,” or “recommending discernment,” we Christians justify all kinds of slander. James reminds us of two things in the passage above:
We are right to bless God. He is our Father, our Lord. When we acknowledge Him as such, we are likely to bless Him with praise.
We are wrong to curse people, who are made in God’s image. What sets humans apart is that we are “little gods,” images of Him, made to reflect His likeness as recounted in Genesis.
So the point here is — we are dishonoring the very image of God by slandering people around us. James leaves aside for the moment any idea of horizontal, person-to-person fellowship, and casts this issue entirely as one that’s vertical: how you talk about people1 reflects your view of God and His creation.
In the same vein, Lewis reminds us in “The Weight of Glory:”
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
“Everlasting splendors” — I do not regard my neighbors this way. Do you?
It’s no secret that we often talk badly about others because we are afraid of them. At the heart of the matter, we are a fearful people. We worry that others are outpacing us; we feel the need to scramble for a good reputation — one in which we “measure up.” We are insecure about our place in the world, so we get ahead by putting others down. But we are only sowing more fear, more insecurity by doing so.
Instead, James tells us, we ought to joyfully accept the image of God in other people by refusing to slander. More than that, he says, we can use our tongues for good:
And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. — James 3:18
For the Anglophiles
This week we’re all about football! The Lionesses of England secured the Euro trophy this past Sunday, beating Germany 2-1 in extra time. And it should not be ignored that the winning goal was scored by a player named “Kelly” (Chloe Kelly to be more precise). If you’re not familiar with the Euro, think about the World Cup, but constrained to the countries in Europe. It was a big deal that Germany was the team they beat; Germany has been the source of a great deal of English football misery over the years (decades, really).
Tomorrow is the official start of the Premier League season in England. I told you it was a short off-season. We will have a full English breakfast on Saturday morning to celebrate the kickoff. By way of review, in our family, we have two Manchester City fans, one Liverpool fan, one Chelsea fan, one Wolves fan, and two people who don’t really care. Cheers!
Reads & Listens of the Week
Tsh Oxenreider with some good reminders about why she takes a month off the internet…and she thinks all of us should, too.
Bill Simmons honored the life of Bill Russell by releasing the audio of the portion of his Book of Basketball 2.0 about Russell. Simmons spent two days with him a few years ago. It’s a wonderful picture of the man and features some of Simmons’ best writing, in my opinion.
Matt Martens threads the needle nicely here on the role of government and the Christian. “The challenge in a fallen world is to identify a role for good government to restrain evil alongside other God-given institutions while at the same time establishing robust means to check the evil of government.”
And we will conclude with a shiny happy tweet, in celebration of good neighbors:
Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world. And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary and not altogether possible. - Wendell Berry, from “Family Work”
and possibly, how MUCH you talk about people, but that’s another topic for another day.