On this Bank Holiday weekend we come to the end of our summer series on some of the basics of the Christian faith. We’ve touched on praying, paying, staying and straying, and if you missed any of these themes you can read the sermons on the parish website, which is gradually being updated thanks to the efforts of our new administrator Jack.

Today we conclude by moving on, at last, from the sixth chapter of John’s gospel, which has been read in slow motion over the past five weeks. We turn back to our gospel for this year, Mark. It is because Mark is such a short gospel that we have had a big dose of John in the middle of the year. But today we rejoin Mark where we left him in the middle of July, and as so often in this gospel, we find Jesus in the middle of a disagreement with the religious leaders of his day.

The subject under discussion is handwashing – that hits home, because at the moment you may have noticed that we are rather obsessed with handwashing at St Mary’s! Following instructions on how to behave during the swine flu pandemic, we have substituted a good antiseptic scrub for the ritual ablutions as the president prepares to offer the eucharistic prayer.

But of course the discussion Jesus was having with the Pharisees was not about avoiding viruses but rather about adhering to the Law, with its rules concerning ritual purity. Meat must not mix with milk, leaven must not be consumed during Passover, prohibitions on eating with Gentiles must be observed, and so on.

This is one of those bits of the Bible that is dangerous for children to read – who is going to wash their hands before dinner if Jesus says it is all right not to? Jesus was incarnate as a fully human person, whose store of scientific facts would include only what was known to first-century Jews, and so of course he was not concerned about microbes. The exterior defilement that so worried the Pharisees was of minuscule importance to Jesus compared to the rottenness that can come from within. Washing our hands does not purify our hearts.

So today we are heeding his warning about what comes from the inside – what do our words and our actions say about us? How does our speaking matter?

We learn very early in life that what we say is considered important. Very small children get used to hearing, “What’s the magic word?” when they forget to say “Please” or “Thank you.” Slightly bigger children find out how telling a fib can provoke a very angry reaction from their parents. And as they get older still, they find that they can cause quite a stir by using crude language picked up from their friends. There is a lot to learn: be polite, tell the truth, remember what language is appropriate in what situation.

But there is a lesson that often isn’t very well taught, and that’s because we grownups haven’t always learned it ourselves. It’s the temptation that Orthodox Jews call “loshen hora”, translated as “evil tongue”. It doesn’t mean lying or slandering or blaspheming, all of which are covered by the Ten Commandments. Rather it means saying something that is true but harmful. Essentially it is a definition of gossip.

Now sometimes we do have to say something that is true but unkind in order to achieve a good purpose. Wrongdoing has to be exposed and the wellbeing of others must be safeguarded. But we all know when we have gone beyond that requirement and started to indulge in the guilty pleasure of telling an unflattering story about someone just for the malicious fun of it. Or when we inappropriately share personal information about someone, not out of malice but just because we can’t keep a secret.

Sometimes we just have to do the hardest thing and keep our stories to ourselves. You’ll remember that in the classic movie Bambi, Thumper is made to repeat to his mother Mrs Rabbit the family rule: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

The truth is, we say most about our faith in the ordinary way that we talk about one another and act towards one another. It is probably not very often that we are asked to give an account of our faith or to engage in a conversation about God, though such opportunities can be precious.

But every day we have the opportunity to speak and act kindly and avoid gossip. People who know us as professing Christians will watch and listen carefully, so it’s quite a responsibility! And of course we will fail, time and again. We are still works in progress, and we need to repent, get up and start again on a daily basis.

It helps to have some good models. Those of you who were here last week will have heard me speaking about the Taize community in France, where the emphasis is on mutual trust and reconciliation. The effort is constant to find common ground and to listen and learn from one another, even those who would not naturally be our associates, and particularly those who are young. And space is made for being silent together, which is an amazing and unusual opportunity in our world. When we sit in silence, or quietly singing and praying, together before God, our inner noise slows down and we can attend to what is important.

It also helps to remember what every parent eventually learns, that people respond well to positive reinforcements but react defensively to negative ones. Finding something nice to say, as Thumper reminds us, is fine; but if we can’t say something nice, it’s better to be quiet unless we are very sure of our reasons for speaking.

Words do hurt, but they can also heal. If what comes out of our mouths can defile us, it is also true that what we say can be helpful to others and also to ourselves. By practising kindness and encouragement we actually become better natured people, and the communities we belong to become places of healing. The letter of James that we heard today reminds us to be doers of the word and to be quick to listen, slow to speak. We build each other up chiefly by giving one another our full and loving attention.

It is very difficult to do this in a crowded church on a busy Sunday morning, but even in this situation we can perhaps try to listen carefully to someone we don’t usually speak to. Before sharing our news with old friends, we can seek out someone we don’t know and ask them something about themselves. If each of us did this on a regular basis, no newcomer would ever be left on the sidelines, and no one who is feeling down in the dumps would be accidentally overlooked.

We can also offer to pray for, or even better with, anyone who has a pressing need. That is the best kind of speech of all, because when we pray we are joining in Jesus’ conversation with his Father, and there is no better model that that. In fact the act of praying invites us to be silent and let the Holy Spirit draw us into that loving conversation, while all we need to do is hold the other person in our heart and mind. In the silence of our heart, we often hear what God wants to say to us about what we should do. That was what we experienced at Taize – prayer does not need a lot of words. It is more a matter of letting God pray in us.

It is paradoxical to speak so long about not talking too much. So I will finish with a prayer that was written by George Briggs, a canon of Worcester Cathedral half a century ago:

“Set a watch, o Lord, upon my tongue:
that I may never speak the cruel word, which is untrue;
or,being true, is not the whole truth;
orbeing wholly true, is merciless;
for the love of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”