Who Is Still Carrying Wood

“For lack of wood the fire goes out, and where there is no whisperer, quarreling ceases.” (Proverbs 26:20, ESV)

I suspect all of us have felt this. Something happens. Within a few hours the same people are angry about the same thing in nearly the same words, and you can guess who will say what before they say it. A week later the subject changes and the rhythm does not. Six weeks after that the first subject comes back around, and we do it again.

To be fair, Facebook told me a brother was in the ICU when nobody there had my number. It has carried real news of real suffering to people who would have never heard of it otherwise, and some of them have gone and done something about it. That is a good gift, and I do not believe we should pretend otherwise.

But the same wiring that carries the news also sets the tempo. And the tempo is the problem.

Personally, I have been part of the problem. I have added heat. I have typed a reply at eleven at night that I would not have said at eleven in the morning with the man standing in front of me. I have felt the small satisfaction of a sentence landing, and I have called that satisfaction conviction. It was not conviction. It was the pleasure of winning in front of an audience, and I dressed it up in the language of standing for truth.

James says it plainly. “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1.19). Then the reason. “For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1.20). Behind “produce” is katergazomai, to work a thing all the way through to a finished product, and that is the whole weight of it. Anger runs that machine. Nothing comes off the line. You can be furious about injustice for six years and produce no righteousness at all. Notice the order James gives. Hearing first. Speaking after that. Anger last and slowest of the three. Our platforms run the list backward and call it engagement.

Now let me widen it, because this is not a preacher’s problem with a preacher’s solution.

Every one of us with a phone is a publisher now. That is new. For most of human history, one person’s sharpest opinion reached the four people at the table and then died there. Yours reaches three hundred people, and it does not die. It sits in a feed, and it is read by people you were not picturing when you wrote it. That is the part we keep forgetting. We write to the one person we are arguing with, and we are read by everybody else.

I want us to think about who else is in the room.

Think about a woman in her eighties. Her husband has been gone four years. Two of her children live out of state and call on Sundays. The tablet leans against the sugar bowl on the kitchen table, and it is on from about six in the morning until she goes to bed. What she takes in through that screen is not a slice of her social life. On most days it is the majority of it. Every alarming post lands in a quiet house with nobody there to say “well, that is probably overstated.” She has no counterweight. So the fear compounds, and the resentment compounds, and by Tuesday she is afraid of a country she has lived in for eighty-three years.

This is not because she is weak. She is not weak. She buried a husband and raised four children and worked thirty years standing up. It is because her circumstances have made one channel do the work that a whole life used to do. Isolation does not make a person gullible. It removes the friction that used to slow things down. The same is true of the man out of work at thirty-four who scrolls at two in the afternoon because there is nothing else to do with the afternoon, and of the teenager who has moved schools twice and has more contacts than friends.

And then there is what it does to the people right in front of us.

You have known a man for thirty years. He plowed out your driveway the winter your back went out. His wife brought food when your mother died. Then a sign goes up in his yard, or a post shows up in your feed, and thirty years quietly reorganizes itself around one fact about him. He is not the man with the tractor anymore. He is a category with a face on it.

This is exactly the move the lawyer makes in Luke 10. He asks who his neighbor is, and Luke tells us why he asked. He was “desiring to justify himself” (Luke 10.29). He wants a definition, because a definition has an edge, and an edge has an outside. Jesus refuses to give him one. He tells a story about a man on a road, and then he hands the question back inside out. “Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?”(Luke 10.36). Not who qualifies. Who drew near. The Samaritan is not sorting. He is stopping.

N. T. Wright has argued that this is precisely where the early communities were tested. Could a Jewish believer sit down and eat at the same table with a Gentile believer who had not been circumcised? Wright says the heart of the gospel was at stake in that question. Not a matter of manners. A table. That was the visible argument then and it is the visible argument now. And it is very hard to eat with a man you have already filed.

Paul gives the standard for our speech, and it is not the standard most of us are using. “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear”(Ephesians 4.29). The word behind “corrupting” is sapros, which BDAG puts with rotten fish and spoiled fruit, and there is the payload. The question is not whether what I posted is sharp. The question is whether it goes bad in the hands of the man who takes it. Notice the standard Paul sets. Not accuracy. Grace to those who hear.

So give the benefit of the doubt. Assume the best first. I know how hard that is, and the difficulty is not imaginary. It is hard to read a thing on a screen and get the full sense of what the man meant by it. Solomon saw the trouble from the other side. “The vexation of a fool is known at once” (Proverbs 12.16). Assuming the best takes time. Anger does not need any. That is why the speed is not a small thing.

So what do we do?

Not withdraw. That is the easy answer and it is the wrong one. The command is stranger than that. Paul tells us “to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs” (1 Thessalonians 4.11). Behind “aspire” is philotimeisthai, to love honor, to make a thing your ambition, and Paul aims that ambition at quiet. Read it slowly. Be ambitious about being still. Milligan took Paul to be describing an honourable independence, a life that attends to its own work and does not meddle in everyone else’s. This is not passivity. Paul is asking us to spend real effort on a quiet that most of us have never once pursued on purpose.

Underneath that is the older instruction. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life”(Proverbs 4.23). The verb is natsar, the word BDB gives for a sentry watching over a city, and that is what the proverb is asking. Not tidy your heart. Post a guard on it. Most of us have never once considered that the feed we scroll for two hours walks past the gate unchallenged.

Then ask the small questions before you post. Am I adding light here, or am I adding heat? Will this help anyone see another person more truthfully than they did before? Will this be worth reading in a year, or is it only worth reading today? Would I say this, in this tone, in a room with my neighbors and my grandchildren in it?

Solomon knew how the fire behaves. “For lack of wood the fire goes out” (Proverbs 26.20). We keep asking who started the fire. The proverb asks who is still carrying wood.

Matthew, reaching for a way to say what the Messiah was like, quotes Isaiah. “He will not quarrel or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets” (Matthew 12.19). And then this. “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench” (Matthew 12.20). The Christ we follow was not loud in public and was not careless with the fragile. He had every argument and won none of them by volume. If we belong to him, that is what our presence in a room should look like, including this room. He is enough for the world we are frightened of. That is why we can be gentle with the people we are tempted to shout down.

~PW 🌮🛶

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• Bauer, Walter. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Revised and edited by Frederick William Danker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. S.v. “κατεργάζομαι,” “σαπρός,” and “φιλοτιμέομαι.”
• Brown, Francis, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. S.v. “נָצַר.”
• Milligan, George. St. Paul’s Epistles to the Thessalonians: The Greek Text with Introduction and Notes. London: Macmillan, 1908.
• Wright, N. T. “Communion and Koinonia: Pauline Reflections on Tolerance and Boundaries.” Paper presented at the Future of Anglicanism Conference, Oxford, 2002. https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/communion-and-koinonia-pauline-reflections-on-tolerance-and-boundaries/.