Today's Daily Lesson comes from James chapter 3 verses 7 through 12
7 For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, 8 but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. 9 With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. 10 From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers,these things ought not to be so. 11 Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and salt water? 12 Can a fig tree, my brothers, bear olives, or a grapevine produce figs? Neither can a salt pond yield fresh water.
With the tongue we both bless and curse; and in the South we do both in one fell swoop. We say: "Susie Q, God bless her, what a ditz." A variant of this is: "Susie Q, God love her, what a ditz." We bless and pray for Susie and then dish on her. And if we're real sophisticated it comes out like this. "You know Susie Q, God bless her, but she can be a ditz. We really need to pray for her and I need to tell you why we do . . ." That's gossip masquerading as a prayer concern.
As our lesson says today: "These things ought not to be so."
The lesson also says no human being can tame the tongue, but I heard of a group that tried. Before it was shut down by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer formed a small, "underground" communal seminary in a place called Finkenwalde. One of the rules at Finkenwalde was nobody could talk about anybody else without the presence of the other person being in the room. After WWII, Bonhoeffer's former students wrote about that time in seminary and admitted that the rule was absolutely impossible to keep; however, they said just trying to keep the rule totally reshaped the character of the Finkenwalde community.
I think I'm going to try to keep that rule today.
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