James 3:1-12 & Mark 9:14-29

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost | September 12, 2021 | A Sermon Based on James 3:1-12 and Mark 9:14-29 | by Paula Murray |

¹Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. ²For we all stumble in many ways. And if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body. ³If we put bits into the mouths of horses so that they obey us, we guide their whole bodies as well. ⁴Look at the ships also: though they are so large and are driven by strong winds, they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. ⁵So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! ⁶And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. ⁷For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, ⁸but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. ⁹With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. ¹⁰From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. ¹¹Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? ¹²Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.            James 3:1-12

¹⁴When Jesus, Peter, James and John came to the disciples, they saw a great crowd around them, and scribes arguing with them. ¹⁵And immediately all the crowd, when they saw Him, were greatly amazed and ran up to Him and greeted Him. ¹⁶And He asked them, “What are you arguing about with them?” ¹⁷And someone from the crowd answered Him, “Teacher, I brought my son to You, for he has a spirit that makes him mute. ¹⁸And whenever it seizes him, it throws him down, and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid. So I asked Your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” ¹⁹And He answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to Me.” ²⁰And they brought the boy to Him. And when the spirit saw Him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. ²¹And Jesus asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?” And he said, “From childhood. ²²And it has often cast him into fire and into water, to destroy him. But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” ²³And Jesus said to him, “‘If you can’! All things are possible for one who believes.” ²⁴Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!” ²⁵And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, He rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.” ²⁶And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, “He is dead.” ²⁷But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose. ²⁸And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked Him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?” ²⁹And He said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”                                    Mark 9:14-29

The morning’s Gospel lesson includes another account of Jesus lifting up someone who is seemingly dead.  The difference between this story and the stories of the widow’s son or Jairus’ daughter is that those two individuals were most certainly dead.  The body of the young man was being carted towards his grave when Jesus stopped the funeral procession and lifted the young man from death to life.  The body of the little girl was not yet being toted to her grave but was being prepared for it.  The professional mourners had already been called and all else was waiting for the arrival of her sorrowing father.  It was that father who had made the last ditch run to find the man Jesus who had a reputation for healing, and it was her father who gave permission for Jesus to return home with him although he had already been notified that his daughter had died. But it was Jesus, who, in the sad quiet of the dead child’s bedroom, picked up the hand of that pitiable corpse and lifted her up by it as she, receiving His gift of life, opened her eyes and looked upon her Lord and Savior. And, of course, there is Lazarus, the best-known case of Christ’s raising the dead, who was most certainly dead in that he was four days in his grave and stinking with it.  The boy of this day’s story suffered a terrible seizure, but he still lived, waiting only for his Savior’s loving hand to lift him from the dust of the earth and into the light of what would be, for him, new life, freed from his dreadful seizures and the promise of death they held.

We all know that there will soon come a day when we too are waiting for the hand of our Savior to lift us from the dust of our earthly graves and into the light of a new and vibrant life. What we call the Gospel or the Good News of Christ crucified and raised from the dead is precisely this: that our lives are no longer circumscribed by the gravity of sin and the stark nothingness of death.  Jesus’ death on the cross paid in full the price for our sin and His resurrection from the dead foreshadowed the day on which He will lift each of us from death. There is nothing greater to look to than a life that is not limited by failing bodies and spirits.  We do not, like modern day atheists put it, live in despair, waiting for the end of it all, an end to thought, to memory, to love, to life.  We wait, all of us, to be lifted up.

As fine a promise as being lifted from death to life is, that is not the only lifting up Christ does.  The Bible speaks to heaven frequently, as one might expect, but it speaks to a more mundane lifting up as well.  For as often as Scripture speaks to eternal life, it speaks also to this present life.  As this morning’s psalm says, God lifts us up when we need help.  Illness or injury, anxiety or despair, loss of material necessities or the love of our lives, God is present to lift us up. Our lives are filled with God’s blessings, blessings that come in the form of family and friends, goods we need, the beauty of a fall afternoon, a helping hand from a well-placed stranger. All of these blessings and more are the means by which God lifts us up when a sin stained world is bent on tearing us down.  And as God blesses us, it is His desire that we be a blessing to others as well.  Remember from earlier readings this summer, we are to be imitators of God in Christ, so it is God’s will that we lift one another up, not put one another down.  God is as concerned for our behavior towards one another on a daily basis as He is concerned that we see Him some day fact-to-face.  This ought not to be a surprise to us.  God’s Word is not afterlife insurance; it is guidance to a forgiven and redeemed people whose very existence now and in the future is a direct result of the grace of God and an enduring sign of His love.

This is why our Scripture readings are divided up neatly between the festival seasons and the non-festival seasons we call ordinary time or the season of Pentecost. During the festival seasons we hear of Christ’s incarnation and birth, His ministry and crucifixion, His resurrection and His ascension, and we learn about Who He is and what He does.  Over the course of the season of Pentecost, we hear about how the resurrection of Jesus Christ changed the terrified disciples and made them evangelists and witnesses, formed the family of faith that is the Church, and gave us the means by which our minds can be conformed to the mind of Christ.  Now is when we look to the examples of those first disciples, even if they could not heal the boy with seizures, for what their example tells us about living as people for whom the resurrection is real, so real, that it changes how we would otherwise treat one another.

In other words, the festival part of the Church year is all about learning Who our Savior is, what He does for us, and what He asks of us.  This is the preaching part of our life together as the Church.  The non-festival time of year, these weeks following Pentecost Day, are all about how we practice what we preach as individuals and as a local church.  So, we are not merely hearers of the Word, but also doers of the Word.

Like St. Paul, whose words set us on our journey through the Scripture readings of the season, James focuses not only on our hearing of God’s Word but also on our doing of God’s Word.  For reasons of the day, this infuriated Luther, who saw first hand in his own parish church the consequences of misusing the Bible on the peace of his flock.  They were not happy sheep, trusting in the grace of God for their salvation.  Rather, they were anxious, thinking that they had to earn their eternal life from a God Who was loathe to give it to them.  So, they tore up their backs with whips and hair shirts, blew their knees by walking on them instead of their feet on pilgrimages to holy sites, sold their businesses and their homes to give money they did not have to both the local Roman Catholic bishops and the pope to buy their way or a loved one’s way out of purgatory.  So, Luther did not much appreciate James focus on behavior as a sign of faith in the grace of God.  But James was not responsible for the misuse of his book by men intent on using the Church and the Church’s Bible for their own benefit, and the Lord Himself tells us elsewhere that to receive faith is to incarnate that faith, make it real, in our lives.

This morning’s reading from the third chapter of the book of James goes really well with our Gospel reading.  Remember, the father of the child the disciples could not heal begs Jesus, “If you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”  Jesus responds, “that all things are possible for one who believes.”  This seems to put the responsibility for the child’s healing on his father, who must “believe” or trust in Jesus’ capacity and willingness to heal the child.  His despairing response is, “I believe; help my unbelief.”  When Jesus heals the boy, He heals the boy’s father’s faith as well and makes it clear to all of us that faith is God’s gift to us, as is forgiveness when our faith is not up to the challenges we face.

This is where James begins today’s second reading, with an acknowledgement that we all stumble when it comes to believing and to doing what we believe.  He picks what is, to us in this day a timely example of the failure to practice what we preach, and that is what we say.  James compares our tongues to the small rudders that control the direction of large ships or the small bridle that controls the actions of a much larger horse.  The tongue, although one of the smallest parts of our bodies, can nonetheless “…boast of great things.”  James is only reminding us that what we say can either be a blessing to another or a curse, and that too often our words operate more as a curse than a blessing in that we use them to cut another, hurt another, push another down rather than encourage another, heal another, or lift another up.  In the close confines of your own mind, think on this past week, and look for the number of ways in which your words have not lifted another from grief or despair or loneliness or confusion or self-hate, but instead have confirmed their lack of worth in your eyes.  A grocery store clerk, a friend or neighbor, a family member, a doctor who irritated you or just wasted your time – did you curse them for their failures and thereby demonstrate your own lack of belief in the grace of God?  Or did you choose rather to ignore the irritant, and bless them instead with forgiveness or a bit of cheer?  Gossip, oh my heavens, the damage we do with speculation on the motives and actions of another.  Have we gossiped this week?  Did we curse a child or a spouse when there was a spat with them, not necessarily with bad language but with words meant to hurt not just to instruct or correct?  When it comes to sin controlling what we say may seem the least of our misdeeds, but James reminds us that great harm can be done to the faith and the person of another when we use our mouths to curse and not to bless.

Control of what we say, especially when unhappy or irritated, might be the greatest obstacle to our faithful practicing of what we preach.  Most of us will not follow through with lusty thoughts about people to whom we are not married, or rob the branch of the bank that holds our mortgage, or slap someone silly just because they accidently trod on the back of our heels.  But we will curse, and not always with swear words, to make another suffer like we do or for the joy of it.  But we are, as disciples of Jesus Christ, called to bless another even when they do not deserve our blessing, for neither are we worthy of the blessing of the grace of God.