Who Do You Talk Like – A Sailor or a Saint?

Who Do You Talk Like – A Sailor or a Saint? Ephesians 4:25-5:2 Speech – our talk – it gives us away. We express our views and opinions, on a myriad of issues from politics to religion to everyday common-sense matters. We express our attitudes, our train of thought, our emotions, even though we may not have verbalized or expressed them yet. We are an open book that people read all the time, and what we say and do or don’t say or don’t do defines us. So who do you talk like – a sailor or a saint? I hasten to offer my apologies to all sailors who have gotten the reputation for being foul-mouthed. That character probably has a history back to pirate days. I just needed a catchy title… Back to speech and talk which may give us away as a foolish person or a wise sage. My brother Les in his younger day preached a little around the Hornbrook charge. He was pretty good. One thing he picked up along the way that he shared with me was, “The more you think you know, the more you know how much you don’t know.” Now, how many times did I refer to knowing or not knowing something? …Three “knows” and one “think,” yet that was a “wise” statement and a humble one too. Today we are going to talk about talk and what Paul has to say with what comes out of our mouth or, more expressly, our heart. It is said that talk is cheap. But the kind of talk Christ calls us to utter ― kind, compassionate, caring discourse ― may be the rarest of commodities and yet, the building block of true Christian conversation. It’s a simple but reliable principle of human life: how people talk reveals a lot about who they are. Imagine a person comes up to you and says this: (in an English accent) “I was out driving the other day when I had a punctured tyre (tiare). I pulled off to the verge and opened the boot. There was no spare. So, I opened the bonnet. Fortunately, a lorry (lori) driver saw the raised bonnet and stopped to help me out.” Anyone who follows that has likely spent some time in the British Isles. Winston Churchill once said the English and Americans are “two great peoples divided by a common language,” and this is a case in point. Want an American translation? “I was out driving the other day when I had a flat tire. I pulled off to the shoulder and opened the trunk. There was no spare. So I opened the hood. Fortunately, a truck driver saw the raised hood and stopped to help me out.” 2 The way we talk can also reveal something about how committed we are to being Christian. 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? Are they blathering, or are they wise? Do they work in service to truth or falsehood? Do our words build up, or do they tear down? I’ve got a couple good stories about miscommunication and misinterpretation, with consequences. A long-time Presbyterian mission worker, Lois Kroehler, who spent most of her life aiding the Cuban church, once told of a visit she and American civilrights activist Jesse Jackson paid to Cuban President Fidel Castro. Through a government translator, Jackson prayed that the “Balm of Gilead” might be provided for Cuba. The translator thought he’d heard that God might deliver a bomb to the island nation. Castro, Kroehler reported, nearly swallowed his cigar. Even more seriously and consequentially was an episode near the end of WWII. One wrongly translated word contributed to the atomic conclusion of World War II. In July 1945, many influential Japanese, including the emperor, were prepared to consider the terms of the Potsdam ultimatum to surrender or face utter annihilation. Before responding, the Japanese cabinet felt that they needed more time, so they announced that their policy was mo-ku-sat’-su, meaning (1) to refrain from comment, or (2) to ignore. Unfortunately, the foreign press translated the policy as “ignore” rather than “refrain” as intended. It was impossible for the Japanese to correct the wrong interpretation. Hostilities intensified. The hope for settlement was lost. Within weeks, the world saw the flames of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Russian invasion of Manchuria, and the division of Korea into north and south – all because one word was misrepresented by the press. “Put away falsehood; let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” 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 all the “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 twice a day? What about the expenses we deduct on our tax returns? Telling the truth isn’t always so straightforward and simple, is it? I remember a counselor once told the story about a woman who comes to your door late into the night. She’s battered and bruised, crying and terrified - and a neighbor. She says her husband had been drinking and 3 they got into an argument; and he started to beat her up but she got away and ran to your house, now pleading for you to help. You take her in and calm her spirit and attend to her bruises. A couple minutes later, someone is banging on the door hollering he wants to come in. You have your wife take the woman to the kitchen to hide her and protect her. You open the door and there is her husband. He wants to see his (so and so) wife, saying he’s going to kill her. After calling her every name in the book and threatening you, he asks if you have seen her. What do you say? “Sure, she’s just in the kitchen, come this way” or “I see that you’re a little upset, can we talk about this for a minute?” or do you lie through your teeth and say, “I haven’t seen her, sorry, now you have to go.” What would you say? My counselor, a devout Christian man, said he’d lie through his teeth to protect the woman and deal with the husband later. Speaking the truth is one of the most important ways to talk like a Christian. The only problem is, life throws us some really bad curves sometimes and we have to weigh the ethics of the moment for possibly a more loving way forward. It’s not always easy. We probably fail to tell the truth almost every day, usually to protect someone or cover for ourselves, but we should aspire to be the best we can be in all ways at all times. 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. Maybe the best we can hope for in this life is that those ethical alarms keep going off, so we can hear them and keep that goal of truthfulness and lovingness and grace and mercy and forgiveness ever before us. Here’s something else chapter 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.” Wow! You thought the last moment was serious. That verse makes you sit up and take notice. “Be angry but do not sin, make no room for the devil.” The reason that statement sounds so strange is that most of us have been taught that anger is always unChristian 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. Question: Is the Bible really telling us to be a doormat? “Be angry but do not sin.” You might almost think the Bible considers it normal for Christians to get angry! Here’s a little secret. 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” to be a pushover. It’s a distortion of the New Testament to equate all anger with sin. Even Jesus Himself got angry, for a 4 righteous cause. There are more than a few Bible passages where He does. Jesus gets angry at the Pharisees more than once. Why? Mark says, “He looked around at them with anger; He was grieved at their hardness of heart.” And why? Because the Pharisees have been objecting to Jesus’ plan to heal a man’s withered hand on the Sabbath. An even better-known example is 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. Jesus cries out, “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.” Them’s fightin’ words. The difference in both of 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 was offensive, so you thought. The person ahead of us in the grocery line has 16 items in the cart when they are only suppose to have 10 or less. We can feel injured for so many insignificant things and 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 needs a good hand, and He can provide it and in turn he can provide for himself. That’s a win - win. When He turns over the tables and even swings that whip of cords in the temple courtyard, it’s on behalf of all the poor, devout pilgrims who are getting swindled by a corrupt system. A Christian could be forgiven for swinging a whip of cords in response to situations like these or for helping a battered woman. 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.” Don’t hang on to it obsessively. Those who live their lives driven by anger eventually pay a bitter personal price as a bitter, angry person. If we don’t let the sun go down on our anger, if we make sure there are intervals of rest and peace, we’ll find we can resolve most any problem. Ephesians says something else about how to talk like a Christian: “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up …” The translation “evil,” as in “evil talk,” is actually a 5 cleaned-up version. The word literally means something like “putrid,” as in rotting fish. What sort of talk is worthy of that sort of description? You may think that this passage must be about profanity or obscenity, but it has something very different in mind. It says, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice …” It’s quite a list. Some people go to their graves feeling bitter for something or toward someone who “done them wrong.” Bitter talk, when it continues, can cause terrible emotional harm to the speaker, not to mention misery for everyone who has to listen to their complaints. Then comes the word “wranglings.” It really means “shoutings” or “raucous outbursts.” Not pretty – cut it out, Paul says. Next comes the word “slander.” The Greek is blasphemia, which you may recognize as our word “blasphemy.” Usually, we think of blasphemy as taking the Lord’s name in vain, but in the original Greek it means slanderous, gossipy remarks of any kind. Another Greek word for “slanderer” is the word diabolos, which you may recognize as the root of “diabolical” (meaning “devilish”). As in “do not make room for the devil.” Literally, it’s “do not make room for the slanderer.” You may have heard Satan, or the devil, referred to as “the father of lies,” and that’s exactly what this word means. To slander another person is to serve a diabolical purpose. We have whole new dimensions for doing this today through social media. The speed with which a slanderous remark can make the rounds these days is breathtaking. The final word on the list is “malice,” or hateful feelings. We know what damage such feelings can do to people. Malice can kill. So what are we to do? “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” Now that’s the sort of talk Christians should truly engage in! Positive, up-building talk is a counterweight to the anger, slander and all the rest. It’s the “Thou shalt” to balance off the “Thou shalt nots” of the previous verses. Kindness, tenderheartedness (literally, compassion), forgiveness: such are the building blocks of true Christian conversation and character. This is not weakness. 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 of talk. Kind, compassionate, caring discourse is the rarest of commodities amidst the sound and fury of soul-destroying hate speech all around us. It’s the type of speech Christ calls us to utter. It’s how to talk like a Christian.