Some would argue that freedom of speech should be absolute. In the sphere of law, I tend to agree. Speech short of inciting violence or endangering people through falsehood should not be prosecuted in the courts.
Nevertheless, there are things I should not say. I shouldn’t share the numbers and passwords that access my bank account. I shouldn’t share my anger with someone unless I’ve made an earnest attempt to resolve it with them first, especially if I value the relationship. Basically, if I can anticipate consequences to my words that I don’t wish to suffer, those are good things to keep silent.
Then there are the ideas that aren’t worth sharing.
There are plenty of them. They range from the personal (“I am always right”) to the social (“My race is better than other races”). Such ideas are simply false in a world that doesn’t need any more lies. When these words become actions, people suffer. Sometimes they die.
I don’t think the people who believe such things should be silenced. But they shouldn’t be encouraged. They shouldn’t be rewarded. They should be opposed. Their ideas should be rejected. Their ideals should be repudiated.
There are things people shouldn’t say because they are harmful lies. There are things that just aren’t worth listening to.
Jesus promised his disciples that the Holy Spirit would lead them into all truth. May we be wise enough to follow!
Here’s a transcript:
As we come to Trinity Sunday, I’m thinking about the sixteenth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 16:12-15), yet another portion of Jesus’ “Farewell Address to his Disciples.” In this section, Jesus promised them the gift of the Holy Spirit once again.
This time Jesus described it as the Spirit of Truth that would lead them into all truth. I hate to say it, but in the twenty-first century we have not valued all truth, have we? We live surrounded by half-truths. We live surrounded by outright deceptions.
Many of them take place in our entertainment. I’m not talking about, you know, fictional stories: I’m talking about the advertising that accompanies them. Their claims to make our lives better are, at best, exaggerated. At worst, they’re outright falsehoods. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve purchased over the years that simply have not lived up to the claims. I can’t tell you how many things I’ve purchased over the years that I’ve come to regret, for the waste of my time and effort and, yes, money, trying to make them work in the way they were claimed to work.
Sadly, we in the United states have come to believe that the leaders we elect lie to us and do so routinely. Sometimes we believe it’s only the opponents of our selected political party that lie to us, but in general we tend to say something like, “Well, politicians will lie.”
Jesus told his disciples that that was not an acceptable state of affairs. Jesus said that the wisdom of God, the work of the Holy Spirit, was the work of truth, is the work of truth. You and I do not need to accept lies. We need to insist upon truth. It is what we are due. It is what the Holy Spirit has come to bring us, or to lead us to.
So as you watch the advertisements, as you listen to the leaders, insist upon truth. And if you don’t get it, insist further upon truth. And if you still don’t get it, insist further upon truth.
It is, truth is, what the Holy Spirit will lead us to if we follow the Spirit’s guidance and take our steps along the way.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
The single most efficient communications system I have ever encountered in my life is known as “The Coconut Wireless.” And I’m afraid, contrary to the hopes of my colleagues in the Hawai’i Conference who edit and manage the Conference’s electronic newsletter of that title, that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the original Coconut Wireless that gets good news and bad news from friend to friend and family member to family member in less time than it took for the original event.
If only the original Coconut Wireless had editors as good as those for the Hawai’i Conference’s Coconut Wireless. I’m afraid that the news we distribute so effectively around Hilo, Hawai’i Island, and far beyond, is… inconsistently accurate. And inconsistently well-meaning. And inconsistently careful about telling other people’s stories.
I may think the Coconut Wireless is more efficient than similar “unofficial” communication systems I’ve encountered in my life, but it definitely shares those inconsistences with the other “rumor mills” I’ve known. I’ve been told that family members were dying by other family members – and yes, they were pretty sick, but not dying. I’ve been told that people were upset with me or that they were pleased with me, and in conversations with those people later, found out that neither was true. I’ve lost count of the recommendations people made for people who weren’t interested in what they were being recommended for.
And I’m still aching about the reassurances I have given that I simply didn’t know enough to give. “It will be all right,” is what I said and what I wanted, but it wasn’t what I knew, and sometimes… it wasn’t all right.
“…No one can tame the tongue,” wrote James, “a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”
Sometimes our Coconut Wireless goes that far, doesn’t it?
Margaret Aymer writes at Working Preacher, “What does it mean to think of one’s tongue as that which controls one’s whole being? Or perhaps, in today’s vernacular, what does it mean to think of one’s entire being as controlled by what we post on social media?”
To be honest, we don’t need social media to spread information (and misinformation) efficiently, but Dr. Aymer’s question is on point. We are accustomed to thinking that our actions must match our words. Last week we sang it, in fact, with these words from “Christian, Rise and Act Your Creed”: “Let your prayer be in your deed.” James said similar things earlier in the letter. We read one of them last week.
“If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily foodand one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,’ and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?” (James 2:15-16) Well, not much. No wonder James went on to say that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”
He wasn’t just interested in matching word to deed, however. He had observed the way that our words lead our deeds. It’s like the bridle of a horse, he wrote. It’s like the rudder of a ship. It’s like a flame.
It’s rather clever writing, actually. Did you notice that all of them have something to do with tongues? The bit goes into the horse’s mouth, over the tongue. The rudder of a ship is tongue shaped. And we talk about… tongues of fire.
Dr. Aymer continues, “[James] argues, the tongue has the capability of destroying one’s religious practice and that of one’s community. Here, James invites meditation on destructive ‘speech,’ more broadly defined. One might, for instance, think critically about racist speech, vitriol against immigrants, or the practice of ‘trolling’ on social media.”
If that sounds like Dr. Aymer had the current political climate in mind, she wrote those words in 2018. When, it must be said, the political climate wasn’t that much different.
When it comes to our Coconut Wireless, it is indeed difficult to bridle our tongues. Juicy news is just too good not to share, right? Even if we don’t have confirmation that it’s true. Even if it might hurt someone. Even if it’s someone else’s story to tell, not ours. James wanted us to use our faith to guide what we say. Too often, we say it, and then our tongues become the guide for what happens after that.
Gossip, however, is not the worst example of the unbridled tongue. The Coconut Wireless carries care and compassion, too. It’s how we find out that someone needs help, and it’s how we start to organize support for them. No, it’s when the tongue dips into the evils within the human spirit and casts them out into the world: that’s when the tongue becomes “a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”
It’s been twenty-three years since that terrible September 11th when so many people died. Do you remember the ways in which tongues wagged? Do you remember the hateful things said about Afghans, about Arabs, about all Muslims? I remember some efforts by national leaders to restrain such things, but they weren’t enough. In 2011 the Justice Department reviewed anti-Muslim hate crimes from 1998 to 2010. In 2000 there were less than 50 reported incidents. In 2001 there were nearly 500. In 2002 they fell to about 160 – but they continued to be between 100 and 170 right up to 2010.
Hateful words led to hate crimes.
This past week a hateful – and baseless – accusation against immigrants in an Ohio community received a lot of amplification. Hateful words on a national stage led to bomb threats that closed elementary schools in Springfield, Ohio, for two days this week. The people amplifying these racist lies have not just refused to recant them, they have repeated them.
Dan Clendenin writes at JourneyWithJesus.net, “What we say can reveal more about us than about the recipient of our speech. The scary part about toxic talk is that it reveals the character of our inner identity. ‘Out of the overflow of the heart,’ said Jesus, ‘the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. But I tell you that men will have to give account on the day of judgment for every careless word they have spoken. For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned’ (Matthew 12:34–37).”
Well. I suppose I should be grateful for some revelatory unbridled tongues. I’m afraid I’m not, though.
“Bridling the tongue is not for the faint of heart,” writes Casey Thornburgh Sigmon at Working Preacher. “It takes courage and a strong heart to listen in order to hear another, to tune into the Spirit’s whispers through them and in the space between people, rather than to listen only for a gap to insert yourself in an unbridled fashion.
“Our American society hasn’t the faintest idea how to listen. So much of American Christianity is a shouting match. Foolishness abides. Fires are set, and what is the cost?”
We know the cost. We do not need to pay it.
James offered no easy guidance to bridling the tongue. He simply said, “Do it.” So here are a few suggestions of my own.
First, if you don’t know it’s true, don’t say it. I’m not talking about asking questions for learning. If you don’t know something, by all means ask. But if the sentence begins, “I heard that…” make sure that the person you’re quoting had the ability to know what they told you. If they didn’t, check with someone who does. If you don’t know it’s true, don’t say it.
Second, ask yourself whose story this is to tell. Who is concerned in it, and who is affected by it? If the story is about you, it’s yours. You can tell it or not as you need or as you please. But if the story is about someone else, did they give permission to share it? What impact might it have upon them if it goes farther than you?
Impact: that’s the third thing. Will what you say tend to help or to harm? Will it organize support or coalesce into shame? Will your jokes be “laugh with” or “laugh at?” Will other people be further affected, particularly by speech that can be heard as prejudiced?
Here’s James’ advice: “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.”
That works, too.
I’m still impressed with the efficiency of our Coconut Wireless. It’s so quick. It’s so effective. It makes things happen.
By what we say, may our Coconut Wireless also be truthful, sensitive to others’ stories, and focused on compassion.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching, so the text will not precisely match the recorded sermon.
Jesus raised this prayer to God at the end of the Last Supper, after a long address to his gathered followers. He’d called them his friends. He’d warned them of his impending separation from them. He’d told them to love one another. He’d promised them the comfort and support of the Holy Spirit.
Then he prayed for them. Debie Thomas, writing at JourneyWithJesus.net, calls the prayer “long, rambling, and rather hard to follow. And though the disciples are meant to overhear the words, Jesus’s tone has an urgency and passion to it that is achingly private. Jesus isn’t engaging in a teaching moment with this Lord’s Prayer; he’s rending his heart.”
Most of the Gospel writers didn’t spend much time with emotion, except for confusion, I suppose. John, in contrast, lingered with Jesus in his pain and sorrow, and with the disciples in their fear and anguish. Beyond that, however, John lingered with Jesus’ deep care for his friends, the love that is emotional. As David Lose writes at DavidLose.net, “Prayer is love. Taking the time to name the hopes, joys, concerns, fears, and thanksgiving of someone you know and bring all of that into the presence of God through prayer is an act of love, plain and simple. It expresses your care, your concern, and your compassion for the one(s) for whom you are praying. And it expresses your trust that they are as important to God as they are to you. Prayer is love. It’s that simple.”
That equivalence might be simple – and I do think Dr. Lose is right to equate prayer and love, and certainly in this passage – but neither prayer nor love are simple in themselves, and they aren’t simple in this passage, either. Jesus said his disciples came from the world, but that they did not belong to the world, and that the world hated them. Despite the world’s hatred, he didn’t ask God to remove them from the world, but to protect them in the world – but such protection had to have its limits. Jesus asked God to sanctify them in the word, in the truth, but he knew and the disciples knew and we know that life in the world as it is makes truth a difficult thing to discern, to understand, and to maintain. Like the ‘amakihi, we come to the ohi’a flower ignorant of its flavor. Like the ‘amakihi, we can be misled by others’ malice, and persuaded not to taste what is good. Like the ‘amakihi, we can even find ourselves feeling sorry for those who know what is good and pursue it when we, in our ignorance and in our acceptance of others’ mistruths, observe without understanding.
We live in the world, but as followers of Jesus we are also not people of the world. We live amidst ignorance, our own and that of others, while we are people of the truth. We live subject to lies and fraud even as we struggle to bear witness to the truth.
In the world; in the truth. It’s a strange place to be, a strange way to live, a strange dance to dance.
Susan Hedahl writes at Working Preacher, “From the perspective of the biblical text, the world signifies the origin of the disciples. They did not come from outside of society but from inside of it, from the everyday people. However, in belonging to Jesus, the disciples have been separated from the world. Still, they must continue to do ministry in it (cf. John 17:18).
“But what exactly is ‘the world?’ It should not be defined to mean a place antithetical to the goodness of creation. Rather, it is the persons and forces opposed or indifferent to the things of God embodied in Jesus.”
The created order, in and of itself, is not the problem. Genesis asserts that God created, and what God created was and is good. That means that ignorance, in and of itself, is also not a problem, or at least it’s not an intractable one. The ‘amakihi didn’t know that ohi’a was good. All he had to do was try it to find out whether it was or not. Because he didn’t make that test, he remained ignorant. But if he had made that test, if he’d followed the guidance of his nose (I would guess that ohi’a flowers smell pretty good to an ‘amakihi), or the example of the other birds feeding on the lehua, he would have learned something and been glad to know it.
Learning can be a wonderful thing.
Lies, on the other hand, are not.
As Melissa Bane Sevier writes in her blog, “When lies are passed off as truth, when sexual misconduct and gun violence garner a shrug, when the ones Jesus loved the most are refused adequate access to healthcare, when those fleeing terror and tyranny are denied refuge, when the environment is sacrificed for greed, and when all these things are defended by religion, then our concepts of κόσμως collide.”
“Kosmos” is the Greek word John used and which has been translated as “world.”
My purpose today is not to encourage you to tell the truth. I am in favor of it, to be clear. Tell the truth. It’s a Good Thing.
My purpose today is to encourage you to discern the truth, and to maintain the truth, and to cling to the truth amidst all the efforts other make, have made, and will make to shake you from it or pull you away from it. We people of the truth are surrounded by people who will mislead or misinform or encourage us to misinterpret – and yes, people who will tell out and out lies in order to defraud or defame.
Test the things you hear, or read, or see, friends. Compare one assertion to another. Is this new thing you’ve heard consistent with other things you know? Is it supported by facts? Is there a larger or smaller number of people who believe it?
Majority belief is not a guarantee of truthfulness, not even close. In the world of science, it took a long time to verify some of the things Albert Einstein proposed in physics – and Einstein himself objected to developments in physics that have since been experimentally affirmed. Look at Christian accounts of the news of Jesus’ resurrection. For a period of time on Easter morning, Mary Magdalene may have been the only person who knew the truth, that he had risen – and nobody else believed her.
Still: check to see what others know or believe.
Could somebody know what they claim to know? That’s a harder question in these days of free-floating information, but a lot of the claims people make on the Internet make me wonder: Who could know this? If someone claims to know what somebody else is thinking, but they’ve quoted no speeches or public statements, if they’ve had no direct experience with the person, if there’s no writing or correspondence to quote, well. How do they know what they say they know?
Employ the old Roman question, “Cui bono?” “Who benefits?” Attributed to a Roman judge named Lucius Cassius, “Who benefits?” helps us to decide the likelihood of someone attempting to mislead. Somebody saying something that doesn’t benefit them is more likely to be telling the truth, or at least the truth as they understand it. Somebody saying something that does benefit them – particularly if it’s something that’s contradicted by other sources – well, they’re more likely to be lying.
A corollary, of course, is to know the history of someone and their habits of truth-telling. One of the well-known stories attributed to the Greek storyteller Aesop is that of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” In the tale, a shepherd would get lonely, holler that there was a wolf, and the villagers would come up and he’d have company. Eventually they recognized his habit of lying, so they stopped coming – and, of course, that’s when the wolf came.
Somebody with a habit of lying might be telling the truth. But you’d better approach those assertions with a good amount of skepticism and a lot of tests.
And pray.
I’m not urging prayer so much as a search for definitive answers. Personally, I’ve managed to deceive myself in prayer more than once, convinced that God was telling me something that, in the end, I had to admit came from my own voice. That first group of Christians used casting lots to make room for God to influence the selection of a twelfth apostle, but I note that they’d already done their work to make sure God chose between two solid candidates.
I urge prayer to settle your soul in the pursuit of truth with the One who has called you to Truth. I urge prayer to affirm your commitment, and to calm the emotions that can distract you. I urge prayer because, first and last, the search for truth is a sacred task, a holy occupation, a prayerful endeavor. I urge prayer to that God may hold you gently and guide you firmly.
We live with ignorance. We live with lies. We live firmly in the world.
We also live as seekers of the truth. Seek, my friends. Seek: and find.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while he preaches. Sometimes they’re improvements, but they’re always differences.
In Jesus’ prayer after the Last Supper, he acknowledged one of the greatest challenges faced by his followers: living as people of truth in a world of ignorance and lies.
Here’s a transcript:
I’m thinking about the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel (John 17:6-19), the prayer with which Jesus concluded his Farewell Address to his disciples at the Last Supper. In the prayer, Jesus acknowledged that with his departure his disciples would be vulnerable to the strains, the trials, and yes, the evils of the world. Jesus asked God to protect them as he had been protecting them throughout the last three years of his ministry.
Jesus drew a stark distinction between the world on the one hand and the word — the word of God — on the other. The word, said Jesus, is truth: the truth that had been given to him by God; the truth that he, Jesus, had passed on to his followers.
It is no great strain to realize that the world has a problem with truth. Partially this is because of simple ignorance. There is an enormous number of things that we do not know about the world, about the universe, about one another, about Jesus, about God. Ignorance is simply a part of existence, one that we can, at least to some degree, make changes in. We learn new things from the day that we are born right up until the day that we move on to the next life. We learn, and our ignorance declines.
It is also true, however, that within this world of ours there are people who tell falsehoods, and not just in ignorance. People invent things, not for entertainment or for instruction: they invent things for their own interest, in order to deprive other people of things, resources. We are surrounded by lies.
Again, this is no great surprise. Jesus said in that prayer that we, his followers, are people of the word, people of the truth, but we people of the word live in the world and though Jesus said we are not of the world we are still within it. We still experience it. We still struggle with it.
And with the world’s uneasy relationship with the truth, we are called to learn to deal with that reality of ignorance and to get closer and closer to a full knowledge with each passing day. That’s not easy. We are also challenged to discern between truth and falsehood, between what is real and what is lies, and that is a great strain upon us.
Jesus promised to be with us. Jesus asked for God’s presence with us as we live with this reality, this reality that we are committed to truth and yet surrounded by falsehood, this reality that we are committed to knowledge and yet beset by ignorance.
Do the best you can, my friends, to learn, to grow, to discern between the falsehoods and the truths of life.
That’s what I’m thinking. I’m curious to hear what you’re thinking. Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you.
