After being ordained earlier this summer, I was added to my home congregation’s preaching rotation. Today was supposed to be the day that I gave my first sermon there, but once I started to make plans to attend a family funeral, I reached out to ask if someone could sub for me. Before getting the bad news, though, I’d already written most of the sermon, and so I figured I should post the text here so that I get some use out of it. That said, I don’t want to post the text as my last draft had it—while reading the news today, I came across a story about the 2024 U.S. presidential race that would have made a better addition to my sermon than what I had written at the time, and I want to think about that connection.

context!

First, some context! The assigned text for this week comes from James 3:1-12, which reads:

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will face stricter judgment. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is mature,[a] 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 and are driven by strong winds, 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.

How great a forest is set ablaze by a such 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 life, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse people, made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth comes a blessing and a curse. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

There’s a lot in this passage, and I mean that in two ways: First, there’s a lot of material, and it’s also kind of heavy. I’ve heard references to James 3 plenty of times, but I don’t recall ever hearing the comparison to forest fires or the reference to the tongue being “set on fire by hell.”

introducing the sermon

With that in mind, I decided to begin by focusing on those images. I began by making reference to the 2024 Park Fire:

On July 24th of this year, a man in Northern California got his car stuck in the long grass on the side of the road in a city park. As he revved his engine to try to get free, the grass underneath the car caught on fire, which set the car on fire, which—although the details of this next step are disputed—caught the park on fire.

Within just four hours, this park fire had spread to 1,500 acres, and local officials were asking residents to evacuate their homes. A couple of weeks later [as of 8 August], the fire had spread to over 400,000 acres across four counties, burning down 636 structures and damaging 49 others. Although over 6,500 personnel, 30 helicopters, and 500 fire engines were assigned to the fire, it was at that time only 34% contained. It had become the fourth-largest wildfire in California history.

In my draft, I then introduced the passage I’d be focusing on (James 3:5b-6—the first couple of sentences in the second paragraph quoted above) and said I wanted to talk more about the tongue and hellfire before getting into it.

defining hell

Then, channeling some ideas I’ve previously blogged about (in fact, that post was written thinking forward to this sermon), I laid out an argument for how I think Christians should understand hell:

When Christians use the word “hell,” we are often referencing a fiery place, kind of like a forest fire, a place of punishment and suffering that is waiting for the wicked after death. I think there might be productive ways of thinking about this word, though.

In fact, if you read the Bible carefully and closely, you’ll notice that this fiery idea of hell wasn’t always around—the earliest Biblical authors believed in an afterlife, but it was kind of a generic one with no sense of reward or punishment.

As we follow the Biblical story, though, God’s people go through a lot of suffering at the hands of a lot of wicked people, and God’s justice doesn’t always seem to be present for them in this life. In the words of a French Canadian band I really like: « La seule justice sur la terre, tous égaux dans le cimetière » ; “the only justice on this earth, is we’re all the same when buried in dirt.” That’s a pretty pessimistic outlook, one that I hope isn’t really true, but I think it’s one that resonates with all of us at one time or another, and it certainly resonated with our spiritual ancestors who struggled with why God didn’t seem to intervene in their suffering. And so, faced with all these injustices in this life, believers began to wonder how God might make up for things by rewarding or punishing people in the life to come.

One thing that stands out to me is the inspiration that these believers turned to as they begin to think through what that might look like. The word translated as “hell” in James 3 is “Gehenna,” a Greek word that comes from a Hebrew phrase meaning “the valley of the son of Hinnom.” That’s an oddly specific geographical reference for the idea of “hell,” but as my study Bible points out, this valley was historically “a place outside of Jerusalem where children were burnt as sacrificial offerings. Its associations with burning and evil developed into the image of a place of fiery punishment.”

Isn’t that interesting? As believers are trying to imagine what a place of eternal suffering might look like, they turn to their own history for examples of suffering right here, right now, during this life. In a way, they don’t even need to use their imagination, because they can point to specific places and specific events where suffering beyond comprehension already exists among us.

To be honest, I’m not really sure what is waiting for the wicked or the righteous after this life. I am personally more interested in our church’s vision for both this life and the next, which we can find In the Sharing in Community of Christ booklet that we have on display out in the foyer:

“We share God’s vision of reconciliation, salvation, wholeness, justice, and peace expressed in the scriptural definition of shalom. Shalom means a fullness or completeness of peace. God yearns to establish a lasting covenant of peace with humankind and with all of creation.”

That sounds like heaven to me, and too often the world that we currently live in feels like hell in comparison. So, even if I don’t know what’s waiting for us after this life, the idea of our tongues being set on fire by hell is one that still resonates with me. I can see—we can all see—the suffering and pain that already exist in this world. What’s more, I see—we can all see—how the words that we use are so closely tied to that suffering and pain. Are our words contributing to God’s vision of reconciliation, salvation, wholeness, justice, and peace? Or are our words keeping us from getting there?

Even if this felt like a bit of a digression, it felt important to me to establish. I didn’t want to talk about “bridling our tongues” in terms of not swearing or not gossiping—I was interested in how our speech can make other people suffer, and what I see as a Christian duty to avoid that.

examples

In my draft, I then continued with some stories about how language—especially everyday language—could create hell for others.

For example, I shared an anecdote about hearing Dire Straits’s Money for Nothing for the first time as a teenager, struggling to reconcile the “bad language” in the song with the catchy tune, and then slowly realizing that the language in question wasn’t just a swear word that I wanted to avoid so God would be proud of me but something much worse: a harmful slur toward gay people. As I wrote:

James warns that “With [our tongue] we bless the Lord and Father, and with [our tongue] we curse people, made in the likeness of God.” I had been eager to do right by our Lord and Father with my taste in music so that I could access some heaven in the world to come. I had not been as careful to think about whether that music denied the likeness of God present in other people, creating for them a hell in the world we live in now.

I also tried to talk about systemic issues in the French language, how la langue de Molière implicitly (or even explicitly) values men above women and how it enforces a gender binary even more than English does. I like past-me’s emphasis on everyday language; as I wrote in concluding that example,

I’m picking on French here, but if we looked hard at the American English we use every day, I’m sure that we could find examples of prejudices creeping into everyday expressions and phrases that we use. We don’t mean to express those prejudices, we probably don’t agree with those prejudices, but each one is a spark that risks contributing to a much larger fire.

I like both of these examples, and I think that they’re important, but I also had the nagging feeling that I wasn’t sticking the landing.

James vs. the Trump-Vance ticket

This afternoon, while reading the news, I realized that some of the nonsense that Donald Trump and JD Vance have been up to over the past week provides a compelling example of the idea that I was trying to get across—that we can use our tongues to create hell on earth. By the time I read the article, my substitute had probably already finished giving the sermon, so I obviously don’t know how I would have rewritten things if I had still been on the schedule, but I want to think about some of that here.

To begin, here’s a gift link to the specific New York Times article I was reading, along with some relevant excerpts from it:

Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said Sunday that he stood by the debunked claims he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets, saying that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”

And Mr. Vance responded indignantly when asked about the bomb threats that have upended life in Springfield, Ohio, the city where he and Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the pets were being eaten.

“I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months,” Mr. Vance said on CNN, referring to strains he said that a large influx of Haitian migrants had placed on the city’s public services. He went on: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

No one needs me to preach (or hypothesize) a sermon to recognize that Vance and Trump’s speech over the past few days has not just morally vacuous but also actively creating hell for others. Literal Neo-Nazis provided the sparks, the GOP presidential ticket has been happy to fan the flames, and an entire forest fire is burning in Springfield right now in the form of bomb threats and a bunch of other racist, xenophobic nonsense. As an aside, this Twitter thread recommends pushing back against this vitriol by supporting the Second Harvest Food Bank, the Rocking Horse Community Health Center, the Haitian Community Empowerment Center, and St. Vincent de Paul. I’ll admit that I have not yet looked into these organizations, but I’m planning to do my research and make a donation soon.

One of my favorite things that Kentucky governor Andy Beshear has ever said is “you cannot fan the flames and condemn the fire.” Beshear was speaking in the context of local Republicans who made incendiary critiques of his COVID-19 policies and then were shocked, shocked, I tell you when “armed protesters gathered near his home and hung him in effigy,” to quote AP coverage of the incident. Yet, even condemning the fire after starting it would be better than what the Trump-Vance ticket and their supporters are up to. As I quoted above, Vance is entirely unapologetic, and as Ken White has written on Bluesky, others’ response can be summed up as “If you don’t like pogroms go somewhere else.”

conclusion

I can’t think of a better—or more depressing—example of James’s condemnation of hellfire tongues than what Trump and Vance are up to right now. I think the original examples from my draft are also important, because it’s important to see how accidental sparks can also lead to raging fires, and I don’t think Christians’ work in applying James 3 is done once we clear the very low bar of not encouraging threats against immigrants by spreading blatant, racist lies. Yet, it is just as critical that Christians stand up against terrible speech like what’s coming from the GOP ticket right now, and just like I’ll always now associate Epiphany with the January 6th insurrection, when I next encounter James’s warning against our speech, I’m sure I’ll flash back to this shameful episode of American history.

• macro
• Communities
• priesthood
• Donald Trump
• JD Vance
• 2024 elections
• hell
• heaven
• Sharing in Community of Christ
• French
• Andy Beshear
• Kentucky
• COVID-19
• homophobia
• queerphobia
• LGBTQ
• Epiphany