Proper 14

It’s a simple but reliable principle of human life: how people talk reveals a lot about who they are.

I grew up in New Jersey and could easily tell the difference between a Jersey boy and a New Yorker from across the Hudson simply by the accent.  Later, the U.S Army sent me to Oklahoma, where I experienced a strange, new way of speaking: the Southwestern drawl.  Then, while at seminary in Virginia, I heard the soft, lovely lilt of a Tidewater accent.  After that, it was off to Western New York, where the accent was a unique, quasi-Midwestern one.  For instance, the word ‘water’ was pronounced ‘wadder.’ And now, living in Florida, it’s a smorgasbord, from a Southern accent for those who have been here for generations to the accents of all the immigrants who have come here from other parts of the country.  Sometimes it’s hard to decipher some of these.

Language has divided Christians, too. Among the earliest followers of Jesus, strife emerged between Greek-speaking Jews who complained that the Aramaic-speakers overlooked their widows in the distribution of food (Acts 6). A thousand years later, the Latin-speaking, Catholic west and the (mainly) Greek-speaking, Orthodox east divided in the Schism of 1054. During the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church banned translations of the Bible into the everyday vernacular of the common laity.

The way we talk can reveal something about how committed we are to being Christian. But it has nothing to do with accent, or vocabulary or grammar. It has everything to do with how we use this God-given gift of speech.

Do our words hurt, or do they heal? Do they work in service to truth or contribute to falsehood? Do our words build up, or do they tear down?

Such are the concerns we read about in today’s Epistle. Ephesians, chapters 4 and 5, is a collection of miscellaneous ethical advice and many of these instructions can help us understand how Christians should talk to one another … and to others.

“Putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another” (4:25).

That one sounds like a no-brainer. Christians are supposed to speak the truth. Everybody knows that! We like to imagine ourselves as fundamentally trustworthy people.

But not so fast. Sometimes we’re led to ask the question Pontius Pilate famously asked: “What is truth?”

What about the infamous “little white lies” we tell, intended to not hurt another person’s feelings? What about when the dental hygienist asks whether we really do floss every day?

Telling the truth isn’t always so straightforward and simple, is it?

Can any of us ever aspire to perfect truthfulness? It’s part and parcel of our sinful nature to bend the truth from time to time. Fortunately, those little ethical alarms keep going off, so we can hear them and keep that goal of truthfulness ever before us.

Here’s something else Ephesians 4 says about how to talk like a Christian: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.”

The reason that statement sounds so strange is that most of us have been taught that anger is always un–Christian and ought to be avoided. Many of us have been taught that the most important characteristic of a Christian is to be nice — to not make waves, to smile a lot, to be soft-spoken.

Think of Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. Half the power tools in Homer’s garage belong to Ned. Homer borrowed most of them a long time ago, but never returned them. Nor does he have any intention of returning them. He has even scratched out Ned’s name on some tools and written his own. But still, Homer keeps walking up to the fence and asking Ned if he can borrow his latest gadget.

And what does Ned unfailingly say in reply?  “Okely dokely, neighborino!”

Ned is portrayed on The Simpsons as reading his Bible all the time, but he very possibly overlooked Ephesians 4:26.

“Be angry but do not sin.”

 The Bible does consider it normal for Christians to get angry. Nowhere, in all the many ethical instructions Jesus gives to his disciples, will you find the command to be “nice” — in the way Ned Flanders is unfailingly nice. It’s a distortion of the New Testament to equate all anger with sin.

Even Jesus himself got angry.

The best example might be Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. He strides through the temple courtyard, overturning the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sell sacrificial doves. In Mark’s version of the story, Jesus shouts, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17).

In John’s version of the story, Jesus is cracking a whip made of cords. Nothing especially nice about that!

The difference in both these cases — compared to the situations in which we typically feel our anger boiling over — lies in the reasons for the anger. Most of the time, when we find ourselves raising our voices and getting red in the face, it’s because we feel personally injured or abused in some way. Somebody just squeezed into the parking place ahead of us. A co-worker just fired off a flaming e-mail. The person ahead of us in the express line has 21 items in the cart. We feel injured, so we respond by getting angry.

Whenever the Bible speaks approvingly of anger, the object of the anger is not our own precious sense of injury, but rather injury or injustice inflicted on another person. When Jesus gets mad at the Pharisees, it’s because that poor man with the withered hand may not get healed. When he swings that whip of cords in the temple courtyard, it’s on behalf of all the devout pilgrims who are getting swindled by a corrupt system.

The letter to the Ephesians moves on to supply some practical advice on how to manage anger, righteous or otherwise. “Do not let the sun go down on your anger” (4:26). Don’t hang on to it obsessively. That’s good advice for a marriage, as well as for a social reform movement.

Those who live their lives driven by anger eventually pay a bitter personal price, as Frederick Buechner points out in this oft-quoted passage from his book, Wishful Thinking:

“Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.” [Harper & Row, 1973, 2.]

If we don’t let the sun go down on our anger — if we make sure there are intervals of rest and peace, even in the midst of a protracted campaign for social justice — we’ll find we do have the staying power to stick with the cause for the long term.

            Ephesians 4 says something else about how to speak like a Christian: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up …” (v. 29).

Paul’s advice is to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you” (4:32). Now that’s the sort of talk Christians should truly engage in! Positive, upbuilding words are a counterweight to anger, slander, and all the rest. It’s the “Thou shalt” to balance off the “Thou shalt nots” of the previous verses. Kindness, compassion, forgiveness: these are the building blocks of good Christian conversation.

Now this is not weakness. It’s not cloying niceness. It’s not being a doormat. Rather, filling our mouths with positive, affirming talk is a strong and grateful response to the forgiveness and grace we have ourselves received from Jesus Christ.

They say talk is cheap. But not this kind. Encouraging, caring discourse is a savored commodity regardless of your accent. It’s the type of speech Christ calls us to utter. It’s how to talk like a Christian.