The Compassion Muscle

James 3:1-12

Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits.

How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh.

This is one of those rare cases where there were so many relevant, modern-day parallels we can use teach this scripture passage that I got overwhelmed and struggled to figure out which direction to go in. We have James warning us that the word is mightier than the sword, essentially. We have James telling us that the smallest mistake in our teaching can be ruinous—he uses metaphors that are shockingly easy for us to understand, not the usual archaic sayings that require a lot of research and explanation—a mistake or a lie from a teacher is like a tiny spark that starts a forest fire; he explains that the tongue is something small in physical size, but capable of great and dangerous power—like a bridle, a small tool that can order a giant horse to move as we please; or the rudder of a ship, a small part of the ship that allows us to steer and navigate powerful seas.

I mean, if you’ve been anywhere around the internet these past couple weeks, or paying even the littlest bit of attention the news, you’ve probably seen lots of hand-wringing and insane headlines about immigrants eating household pets in Ohio—a wildly racist claim that’s been turned into memes and that’s made international news—because a rumor got out of control, and then some folks who James would say probably should not call themselves teachers continued to spread that lie, some knowing it was a lie, some genuinely thought they were spreading truthful information. We can go back in time, before internet memes to the now debunked theory that vaccines cause autism—a single paper by a British doctor who has long since lost his medical license has caused thousands to believe a lie and put lives at risk. And then there are simple misunderstandings. Chris and I have gotten in arguments before because we’ve misread the other’s tone or one of us has misheard the other when we’re trying to communicate across rooms while wrestling a toddler during a diaper change. There are just so. many. instances that come to mind relating to the power of words, the potential danger of words. 

At Bible Study on Monday, (which was great, by the way, here’s my plug for trying Bible Study out), Al made the excellent observation that this passage is all about how the tongue cannot be tamed, how it’s a perpetual blessing and a curse; it’s all very doom and gloom metaphors about how the words are weapons—so Al asked… so what do we do? If we can’t possibly open our mouths without cursing our siblings and doing harm, what do we do? I mean, great question, and it’s one we’ll… kind of… answer next week. It seems like this week James is just telling us to shut up. Not a super uplifting message, not an especially productive one!

But sometimes, there is wisdom in the silence. Sometimes it is far more important to listen than it is to talk. We only learn through deep listening to people we trust, and we only get to that point of trust by connecting genuinely with others; and also, when it comes to discerning regarding our own lived experiences and thinking through them so we project our own issues onto others.

I spoke just a couple weeks ago about the fact that I’m an internal processor, sometimes to a fault. When I’m asked a question with any weight to it, I often need a minute to really think about my answer, what its ramification will be, if I need any follow up questions before I do give a final answer—church, my mind can be an exhausting place sometimes. But I’m just hyper aware, especially when I am wearing my pastor hat, the strength my words can have. It is so deeply important for anyone, but especially those in positions of authority, to stop to think about the true power of those words—will they bring hope, or will they drive people to despair? Will they uplift folks encourage confidence, or will they create more insecurity? Will it comes across as tough love or will they just hurt feelings?

So maybe to figure out the lesson James is trying to convey to us here, we have to go backwards—two weeks ago we read a chunk of the first chapter of James. And in that chapter, in verse 19, he says, “You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen and slow to speak…” James doesn’t want us to just stay silent for fear of making a little mistake that would spark a conflagration. James wants us to listen. James wants us to understand what we’re saying before we speak. James wants us to take people’s feelings and history into account. He wants us to take our own feelings and experiences into account so we’re not projecting onto anyone else. He wants us to take the circumstances and climate of this world into account. He wants us to research and to think and discern before speaking.

Thinking before speaking is always something that’s easier said than done. When tensions are high or our emotions get the better of us, we might say things off the cuff we regret. We might type out the angry text message and press ‘send’ without thinking about what that person on the other end might read. And things just seem to get harder and harder and harder. Because now we have artificial intelligence to contend with. I remember just a couple years ago when AI art started becoming a thing, you would see these strange pictures online—people with extra thumbs, melty faces, just kind of odd stuff that was clearly computer generated. But technology just evolves so fast now, too fast, and now the most tech savvy among us can’t tell AI from real life. Chris, who as most of you know, teaches in the first-year writing program at Dartmouth, has to go meetings and workshops all the time about AI, but it’s gotten to the point now where it's almost impossible to detect. So when we read something on the internet, even when we see a photo with our own eyes, seeing is no longer necessarily believing. It’s so hard to tell what is AI and what is real now. And so, when we think of being slow to speak and quick to listen, now, when it comes to information we read and see, (and then proliferate) we need to be slow to act, slow to reshare, slow to freak out; and quick to discern, to look at sources, to think about the context.

A couple weeks ago, the science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote an incredible essay for the New Yorker entitled “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art.” As a writer himself, he mostly talks about in regards to writing, but he takes all art into account. He writes about how real writing, real art takes specific choices, feelings, experiences; and it takes effort. “Effort during the writing process,” he writes, “doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it.”

I think, Church, the same goes for how we interact and communicate with one another and with the world around us, especially in this brave new AI dystopia we’re living in—it takes effort, real human effort and compassion—to understand each other. It takes real effort to connect and learn and to teach, to tell truth from lies. And while this world is still broken, putting that effort in won’t always result in some kind of perfect relationship; there will still be people with whom we have fundamental disagreements, and even in relationships with those we love, there will still be misunderstandings. But—those worthwhile connections and relationships can’t be made without that real human effort of listening, and without that real God-given gift of grace.

Ted Chiang compares using programs like ChatGPT to write to “bringing a forklift into the weight room.” Without putting in the effort to really listen for the truth and listen for connection, we don’t work that compassion muscle. And we lose it. We lose the ability to empathize and connect.

This past week my friend sent me a link to a new app called SocialAI. We both scoured the internet to see if this was a joke or not, and it does, indeed, seem to be real. SocialAI is an app that allows you to “be the main character.” You make an account and post to infinite AI followers who will feed you answers to your queries with self-serving affirmations and AI wisdom. It’s a way to create a true echo chamber… just you and the AI followers telling you exactly what you want to hear. Now of course this is an extreme example, but the fact that it’s real at all is terrifying. Are we so afraid of working out our compassion muscle that we’re retreating that far into isolation? Are we so afraid of learning something new about the world that we’re only content to connect with bots? Are we so intent on our own personal truths and so against being quick to listen and slow to speak that we won’t even try to hear other human beings out?

I think the lesson we can take from James today is that being a true follower of Jesus in this world, being a good Christian, being a good person, takes effort. It takes effort to “tame the tongue,” to think before speaking. It takes effort that we often don’t want to expend. Maybe we don’t want to expend that effort because we’re just so angry at the world, we refuse to listen and learn, and think before yelling, or posting; maybe we don’t want to expend that effort because… we don’t have to! There are too many things that make it easy to just sit back and let unfeeling machines to the work for us! Or maybe we don’t want to spend the effort because the world that we live in now is one that doesn’t foster connection or togetherness. It promotes selfishness and division above selflessness and understanding. It seems that we’re more often rewarded in this world when we curse rather than bless.

In his essay, Ted Chiang references a computer scientist, Francois Chollet, who makes a distinction between skill and intelligence: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills.”[i] So this means an AI program can be very skillful, more skillful than some humans at certain tasks, perhaps. But it takes humans to design it to perform that skill, so it is therefore not intelligent, since it can’t acquire new skills efficiently, or at this point, at all really. Now, remember two weeks ago, I contradicted myself. I talked about how in the past I’ve talked about how since Jesus was perfect, we can’t possibly become that, so we can take some pressure off ourselves, and do, in the words of Rev. Peter Gomes, not what Jesus would do, but what Jesus would have us do—but now, reading James, I’m starting to rethink that a little. Maybe Jesus would have a strive to perfection. “Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle,” James says. Now it’s important to make note here, that James includes himself as one who does make mistakes, and he believes he will be divinely judged for those mistakes, and harshly at that, due to his position of authority. All this to say… we are humans, made in God’s image. We are real, thinking human beings and we are intelligent. So maybe we should be striving towards that perfection. We should be striving to speaking only truths, to making no mistakes in speaking. We get to that seemingly impossible perfection with the humble knowledge that we will make mistakes along the way—but we have to push through those mistakes and right them. And to do that we have to put in the effort, the real effort to truly listen to one another and understand each other. Just as a fig tree won’t yield olives, or salt water yield fresh, an isolated, stubborn people will not yield compassion or love for their siblings.

So Church, let’s think before we act and speak. Write that angry text, but don’t hit send. When we read that article online that seems too outrageous to possibly be true, check the sources and see if actually is before you click that share button. We can stop the spread of anger, hate, and lies together—by quieting ourselves and putting in the effort to understand and connect. Once we all truly and wholly understand and love one another, as God loves us, we have attained perfection. Amen.

[i] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art