Words can be painful

By Erin Conaway, Associate Pastor

A member of the House of Representatives yelled at the President of the United States during his speech to Congress about health care reform.  Representative Joe Wilson from South Carolina yelled, “You lie!” in a moment of frustration about a point the President was making.  As I watched in disbelief and then saw it played over and over again after the speech by various news stations I was mostly sad that the level of conversation and debate in our country has sunk so terribly low.  We’ve just been screaming at each other about health care reform and the interesting thing about screaming or yelling at someone is that while it is happening, you can’t hear anything and don’t really want to—otherwise you wouldn’t be yelling.  I think about our Baptist heritage and how much yelling and screaming we’ve done at each other throughout the years about all kinds of things—some crucial Theological concepts like the way we read the Scripture and the role of women in the church, and some very petty and stupid things like trimming a tree over a playground or who gets to use our bathrooms.

Generally, we make amends and move on to different issues, but there are many times when our fights have led to painful and drawn out divorces—where alliances are formed and broken and the power and influence we had as a larger group splinters into differently effective, smaller factions.  Our words can be so painful and cause such enormous fissures in our world.  I guess that’s why the writer of the book of James says of our tongues, “It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison,” (James 3:8).  James goes on to say that the same mouth we use to praise God ought not be used to curse our sisters and brothers.  Joe Wilson isn’t the only one who has said something he regretted—he just did it on TV with a lot of people watching.  All of us have said things to our children or parents or friends, in a moment of frustration that we would like to take back, and I wonder if we thought of our tongues as sacred objects of worship, used to praise God and pray prayers, would we use them more carefully with one another?