Grace Presbyterian Church, Montclair, New Jersey

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Pastor's Pulse

by Paul Leggett, Pastor

Words from the Heart?

February 2007

“… and do not make room for the devil” – Ephesians 4:27

This past week I was attending a meeting of the Montclair Clergy Association during which one of the African-American pastors shared a disturbing story. Prior to his coming to Montclair, in a city and state that will remain nameless, he and his family had a disturbing experience involving their teenage son. The son was playing on one of the school sports teams.  In a moment of frustration the coach referred to the son in a negative racial manner. The pastor and his wife subsequently met with the principal and the coach. The coach was sobbing, begging forgiveness and saying that he did not know where the racial expression had came from.  It did not reflect his own beliefs and understanding.

The pastor went on to say to the rest of us that this demonstrates that racism is not a thing of the past in American society.  We may no longer live with the apartheid structure that existed before the modern civil rights movement.  Yet the coach’s comments hadn’t come out of nowhere.  The coach had maintained that this is not what he really thought.  This incident reminded those of us at the Clergy meeting of the recent outburst of Michael Richards who played Kramer on the Seinfeld show.  In a now notorious moment Richards had addressed two African-Americans heckling him in virulent, racist terms.  Like the coach, Richards later maintained that his words did not express his actual beliefs.  A similar situation had occurred earlier with Mel Gibson who in a drunken tirade used anti-Semitic terms repeatedly.  In all these cases the subjects maintained that in a moment of duress they had used expressions that did not reflect their true thinking.

It is timely to mention these examples during Black History month when we need to be especially conscious of the racism in our history.  Yet we can all recognize such examples as going well beyond the racial dimension.  Haven’t we all said things we regretted?  Haven’t we all apologized to family and friends for words that have wounded them?  Don’t we want to say in such circumstances, “I didn’t mean it,” or “That’s not what I really think.”  There’s a familiar cliché that states, “if you tip over a glass of Coca-Cola, milk doesn’t spill out.”  It’s only what’s inside that will come out.  When we use cruel and harmful language it can only be that we are expressing cruel and harmful thoughts.  We want to say that such language doesn’t really express us, who we really are and what we really think.  Such excuses sound all too hollow.  James says that the tongue itself is “set on fire by hell” (James 3:6).  Jesus says,

“But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.  For out of the heart comes evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.” – Matthew 15:18-19.

We all have a major problem with our heart.  This applies to long standing Christians as well as to non-believers.  Examples of people who have used their tongue as a “fire by hell” should drive us all to our knees and to deep humility.  James calls us to seek the wisdom that is from above (James 3:17).  We can all say in the words of the apostle Paul, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19).  We need to hold each other accountable.  More than this we must also, in the words of James, not grumble against one another but be patient with each other as the Lord is patient with us (James 5:9-10; II Peter 3:14-15).