Tongues starting fires

 

"How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! 

And the tongue is a fire.”

 

    I can’t remember when an appointed lesson mirrored so clearly current events in real time. If you were in church last Sunday, you heard the words quoted above. Eugene Peterson’s contemporary biblical rendering in “The Message” continues the warning from the Letter of James: It only takes a spark, remember, to set off a forest fire. A careless or wrongly placed word out of your mouth can do that. By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation…”

     Yesterday, an LA Times article titled “The specter of violence returns” included this quote from Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis: “It is our job to be wet ground, so that when a spark of political violence falls, it stops right there and it doesn’t initiate a conflagration. It’s also our job---the vast majority who reject violence---to speak up about that.”

     Politicians of all stripes and parties, speaking from platforms large and small, are guilty of not taming their tongues. But I would argue a current politician is the leader of the pack by far. He has been poisoning our nation’s bloodstream with his words from the moment he came down that escalator, to his remarks about household pets on the debate stage last Tuesday. Now, he and his running mate, are inferring his political opponents are the real enemies and threats, and are the reason for the recent assassination attempts. Trump cannot tame his tongue. He speaks without any sense of responsibility or remorse.  

    Two final quotes. JD Vance, who essentially admitted he stoked a fire by reposting tweets and memes, said he wanted to “create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of American people” and that alleged problems in Springfield were not being discussed until he and Trump “started talking about cat memes.”

     To which Mayor Rob Rue politely responded, “It would be helpful if they understood the weight of their words and how they can harm a community like ours”.

     Sadly, the former president and his running mate know exactly the weight of their words. They don’t care about the harm they may do. They just believe those words will help their chances to win.

We the people, we the jury, will have to decide that on November 5^th.

Lord, have mercy upon us!

John