In September 2017, fifty four weeks ago yesterday to be exact, during a burn ban caused by dry weather and high winds, a 15 year-old boy with a firecracker started a forest fire in the Columbia River Gorge on the Oregon-Washington border. We’re not talking a flame thrower or a napalm bomb, just a firecracker a kid could easily lay his hands on. One hundred and fifty three hikers were trapped by the rapidly advancing flames, requiring rescue. By the time it was declared contained, two months later, more than 50,000 acres had burned and an inch of ash had fallen on Portland. Hot spots were still being discovered as recently as late May.
Wildfires occur in nature, and are part of a cycle of renewal, of death and regrowth, though they have been exacerbated in recent years by over-development, mismanagement of forests, and the effects of human-caused climate change. It seems as if the entire West Coast is on fire at times, and when the fire is finally out, the rains come and the denuded hills slide down, mud engulfing homes, businesses, and bodies.
One of the first to discover that particular wildfire, according to Forbes, was Kevin Marnell, who was hiking along Eagle Creek. Around 3:30pm, he heard a series of loud banging sounds that he at first thought might be gunfire. Then he saw the smoke.
Forest fires are loud. There is the crackle and sometimes explosive combustion as the fire’s fuel is consumed, as sap ignites and trees fall. But the burning does not cause most of the noise. Superheated air moves up and new air rushes in, bringing fresh oxygen to feed the fire. It is this air movement that we hear, effectively localized high winds. And they roar. Wildfires roar.
The author of the text traditionally known as the Epistle of James knows a thing or two about wildfires. He warns that like a firecracker thrown into a gorge, the tongue can start a blaze bringing tremendous destruction.
The author of this ancient circular letter is unknown. There are two or three men named James who are important in the apostolic age. One, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, is among the first disciples, is a major character in the gospels, and is traditionally referred to as James the Great, to distinguish him from a second disciple named James, called James the Lesser, the son of Alphaeus, who may or may not be the same man as James the Just, half-brother of Jesus and brother of Jude, for despite the ancient cult, scripture tells us Jesus had siblings.
James the Just became the leader of the Jerusalem church after the death of Jesus, and played a significant role, along with Peter, in the Council of Jerusalem that ultimately endorsed Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. In other words, James the Just is one of the leaders that makes the decision to adapt the faith to changing circumstances, allowing it to survive and thrive, to spread, if you will, like a wildfire. James the Great, the disciple, was martyred under Agrippa the First, so we know he was dead before 44 CE. James the Just was executed by the Jewish authorities in a period between Roman governors around 62 CE, shortly before the great Jewish War. We suspect that the authors of the epistle intended this latter James when they were seeking a name that would lend authority to their teaching. Attaching an authoritative name to an otherwise unrelated text is common in scripture and tradition.
No matter which James those authors intended, it is clear that neither James the Great nor James the Just is the actual author, for the real author wrote in a sophisticated Greek, seemed familiar with Stoicism, and only knew the Hebrew scriptures in the Greek translation, the Septuagint. Neither of the Galileans, a fisherman and a craftsman, both likely fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic, fit this description.
Whoever the author is, she or he appears to be responding to an overreach in Pauline theology, one Paul himself would also address, the misreading that would make faith and works opposites. Unlike the other letters in this group of small texts gathered at the end of the New Testament and known as the Pastoral epistles, the author or authors of James have little interest in church structure and authority. This text is far more interested in questions of character, advising communities that received the letter to be doers, not hearers, of the Word. There is a call to humility and action, and a warning against showing partiality to the rich. Then there is today’s first reading about our tongues. It is very much in the same Spirit as Jesus’ teaching that it is what comes out of our mouth, not what goes in, that makes us unclean.
The teaching here reminds me of the slogan “Loose lips sink ships,†developed by the War Advertising Council during the Second World War, and popularized by a poster produced by Seagram’s Distillers. In that case, the enemy was foreign spies that might figure out the movement of naval convoys from small talk in places like port-of-call taverns. In the case of our ancient epistle, the enemy is, as Pogo warned us in 1971, ourselves.
When to speak and when to keep your mouth shut is as much an issue today as it was two thousand years ago, though we might add when to put down the smartphone and sign out of Twitter to the necessary spiritual discipline. Add to the mix the American value of free speech and the misconstruing of this as speech without consequences and you have a slow-motion but very noisy train wreck where those who would silence others claim that they are being silenced, where abusers claim to be victims, where, as Dave Matthews sings in “The Space Between,â€
We waste the hours with talking talking
These twisted games we’re playing
Or maybe
We waste the hours with tweeting tweeting
These twisted games we’re playing
I know a thing or two about being silenced. I spent my childhood being told to shut up. Women have been silenced throughout history, and still are today. Victims of sexual abuse have been silenced. People of color have been silenced. Silence is not always golden.
But being silenced and choosing silence are two different things, and as an opt-in spiritual discipline, there is a lot to be said for silence. Or not said. The Right Reverend Rowan Williams, retired Archbishop of Canterbury, notes the irony of words about silence in the most recent issue of “The Christian Century,†the journal of record for Mainline Protestants. The practice of silence is always necessarily separate from teaching about silence, just as you are taught how to dive before you are underwater, how to use a parachute before you jump out of the plane.
Many experience the transcendent divine in immense sacred spaces, others in music. Some, hopefully most Christians, experience the immanent divine in encounters with other humans, each a reflection of Christ. And some, for as long as we have records, have experienced the divine in silence. Take this passage from 1st Kings, describing events in the 9th century BCE:
“Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.â€
Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.
When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?â€
Silence as a lifestyle and silence as a retreat away from chaos, both of these have been a part of Jewish practice and tradition, of Christian practice and tradition, of Buddhist practice and tradition. There is something universal here, an escape from monkey mind and from hubris.
The term monkey mind has been around since 402 CE, when it was used in the Chinese translation of a Buddhist sutra. It is a mind that is grasping and unfocused. We can have monkey mind in the middle of the night, and indeed many of us do, our brains spinning out of control, preventing sleep. But in this multi-tasking over-stimulated age, monkey mind afflicts almost all of us, the buzz and beep of incoming texts, streaming screaming 24-hour talking heads and an endless supply of experts, an infinity of opinions.
The Washington Post reported on Monday that the rate at which children are diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder continues to grow, and while that may be explained by better access to healthcare under the Affordable Care Act and a growing awareness that girls, too, can experience this condition, the reality is that I do not think as clearly as I did ten years ago, as I did twenty years ago, not because I’ve developed ADHD nor because I am aging, though the latter is true, but because my every day is a tsunami of noise, information, and stimulation. I can’t imagine who that kid was that could listen to Led Zeppelin and write essays for English class at the same time, because he is long gone. I need quiet, silence, to think.
We may not be able to afford a sensory deprivation tank, but we can turn it all off. Even a walk in the woods, leaves crunching, wind blowing, is a non-silent silence, if we can stop the talking talking, external and internal, and make room for the music of creation.
Whether you call it meditation or contemplative prayer, whether you sit in the Morgan Bay Zendo or here with Holbrook on a Wednesday night or head off to a monastery on a mountain, the simple fact is that silence creates space we need, space that the Christian hopes to be filled with the divine, with Spirit, with Christ. For even Jesus stepped away from the clamor and demands of life, from those seeking liberation, from those seeking healing. He went off alone to pray. St. Thomas Merton wrote that we should “Go into the desert not to escape other [people] but in order to find them in God.†And so it is when we seek peace and quiet, that we might hear the voice of God in the Word and in one another.
Silence is also critical in the humility required by our faith. It begins with what we can say about God, which is little, for every word about God places God in a box of human construction. We can pile up word upon word trying to explain God, and we do. The Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas has 3000 articles trying to systematically explain the divine and the working out of salvation in Creation. The truth is, sometimes the only proper words in the face of mystery are no words at all, but silence.
The Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation to which it gave birth were both distrustful of authority, and that times a hundred in the American experiment and the Great Awakenings. We rightly placed authority in the people, both as a nation and as a religious movement. But we have seen how easily the people can be misled, the bit in the mouth of scripture becomes the misinformation and lies of our current age. At a time when knowledge is expanding, when we are more inter-connected than ever, when we know that decisions we make at the polls are not abstract but cost real lives, it seems ironic that we have such antipathy for subject matter experts.
We have somehow convinced ourselves that everyone has to have an opinion on everything and it must be shared. The fictionalized Aaron Burr in the musical Hamilton advises the titular character to “Talk less, smile more,†and we are meant to reject this advice, for Burr is a schemer. In truth, maybe we should talk less and smile more. We waste the hours talking talking, as Dave Matthews sings. We might do better to listen listen, to choose silence.
Being engaged citizens and engaged Christians requires that we learn in order to make better decisions, and you must be silent to receive new information, must choose humility over hubris.
As I mentioned in last week’s sermon about healing, silence is sometimes the only appropriate response to suffering and grief, when words fail, when all we have to offer is presence.
Silence, then, can and should be a spiritual practice in our lives, individually and together. Like the word of Jesus in stormy seas, silence can slow the tempest, can give us respite. Our constant babble places us at the center of our own inner universe. Silence can help us restore right relationship with the divine and with the community by making room for God and for others.
Finally, silence can have tremendous power, particularly paired with non-violence. We each can recall instances where silent defiance made clear the corruption and brutality of the oppressor, from a woman on the bus to a man and a tank in Tienanmen Square, right up to the present day, when children sit in silent and defiant protest in a Senate office building, wrapped in emergency blankets, surrounded by parents and pastors.
We, who claim to follow Jesus, should know and live this example better than others, for that man stood silently as the self-righteous of his own faith and the Roman colonizers with their brutal force leveled false accusations against him, for nothing he said would ever satisfy them.
It was in the silence of a Sunday morning, when the Jewish sabbath had passed, that the women came to the tomb, when love’s victory was made known and changed the world forever.
Silence, chosen, to still our troubled, anxious, sin-sick souls, to make room for God and for one another, to remind ourselves that we are not God nor do we know everything. Silence that trusts
that God’s great work, the work of creation and renewal, is still unfolding…
that in a world where the volume is turned up to eleven and everything is loud, God is still calling.
Amen.