Grace and Peace to you from God, our father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
St. Francis of Assisi once told a story about a woman who came to her priest for confession. She had repeated gossip about a neighbor – the mean spirited kind, the kind that tears a person down and reduces and humiliates them in the public’s estimation. The priest went to his pillow and got out a handful of feathers. He counted out 100. He said, “Go and place these feathers on the doorstep of the persons you repeated your gossip to. Then come back a day later and retrieve all one hundred. She looked at him with wonder. “They will have blown this way and that; I will never be able to collect them all”. “So, it is with gossip, my sister, once released it take on a life of its own”.
We’ve been reading these past few weeks from St. James. If you are ever feeling bad and want to feel worse, pick up St. James and read him. He zeros in on the weakest aspects of the human condition and then like a moral pile driver; he pounds and pounds his point home. He casts a wide net and brings all of us in. We have met the gossip, and he or she is us.
Gossip is private information that is always damaging to someone. Gossip is about someone else’s moral failure, a weakness in some way. It is always stuff that, if the shoe were on the other foot, we would hate to have that information being circulated about us. We too would feel ashamed, diminished. The basic Biblical “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” mandate applies here to us all. We know repeating gossip is wrong, yet we all do it.
St. James suggests there is evil in us. He says “Just think how large a forest can be set on fire by a tiny flame. And the tongue is like a fire. It is a world of wrong, occupying its place in our bodies and speaking evil through one whole being. It sets on fire the entire course of our existence with the fire that comes to it from hell itself”.
Our motives for gossiping are many. If the object of our gossip is above us socially or economically and we envy them, we rejoice in their being cut down to size. If we feign shock at what this “other” did, we can take pride in the fact that “we would never stoop so low”. Their moral failure makes our being able to walk the straight and narrow path all that much more of our achievement. Yet, if the truth were told, how often have we ourselves not been tempted to do the very thing they did. Jesus said to the great crowd gathered on the Mount, “If any of you has looked lustfully at another women, you have already committed adultery in your heart”. His point was that our human nature gives rise to all kinds of selfish, anti-social, egocentric desires and impulses. Being human means that we will covet, we will grow angry and seek vengeance. We have to fight these compulsions and urges all the time, and recognizing that they are there in us as well as in other, keeps us from becoming judgmental and morally superior, so that we can have compassion on a fellow sister or brother who falls down and transgresses.
The word “gossip” actually comes from God’s siblings – God’s brothers and sisters. It implies an intimacy. Who hurts us more by gossiping about us? We fully expect our enemies to rejoice in our failure and blab them all over town, but it is when our friends betray us, those who are close to us, that we find circulating dirt about us that we are the most hurt. It is part of our social sickness that only God can cure us of. The German language even has a word for it “shadenfreude”. It means taking pleasure in a laughing about other people’s pain.
Sometimes there is a more benign motive behind our gossip. We want to process the failings of the other, so as to shore up the breach in our collective moral dike that has sprung a leak. When then President Clinton had his “moral meltdown” the whole nation expressed its shock, horror and outrage. He was leader of the nation, entrusted with guiding and leading the nation. His failure cast a negative reflection on us as a whole people. His sin become the topic of dinner table conversation and parents, by their grief and shock, showed their children that this kind of behavior weakens the whole society.
When something similar happened to Dr Martin Luther King it served as an example to a whole generation of young pastors. His slip said, “Don’t get so overworked, and so over extended that you become vulnerable to temptation”. You need to live a life in balance. You are not a demi-god, you are human. Humans need to rest and turn from work. As folks processed his failure they learned from his mistake. Gossip about him truly became educational to the community.
Yet, St. James reminds us, we are to look into our hearts as we hear gossip – the talk about others moral failures. We need to ask ourselves these questions: Would I want this information about me being disclosed to other people? Does it tear down or does it build up? Would I want the person I am talking about to know I passed on this kind of talk about them?. Could I look them in the eye? Could I share the “peace of the Lord” at Sunday morning’s liturgy before taking the sacrament of Holy Communion and being the body of Christ?
Almost always, of course, the answers to both questions would be NO. so, when you hear gossip, change the subject as quickly as you can to let your informant know you are uncomfortable. You don’t have to get all judgmental – simply take the high ground and do not participate.
There is a major commandment to cover this territory in God’s big 10. In the Small Catechism Luther writes, You shall not bear false witness about your neighbor. What does this mean? “We are to fear and love God, so that we do not tell lies about our neighbors, betray or slander them, or destroy their reputations. Instead we are to come to their defense, speak well of them and interpret their behavior in the kindest way”.
Jesus sees us as so loveable he gives up his life for ours to redeem us from sin. Our neighbor is beheld in the same light of love. Who are we to trash the one for whom Christ died?
Be careful little tongue what you say. O, be careful little tongue what you say. For the Father up above, is looking down with love, kindness, mercy, compassion and understanding on you and your neighbor – so love your neighbor as yourself.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Pastor John