Shouldn’t I Say Something?
Proverbs 27:5-6, Colossians 3:1-17
The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights 06/21/15
Pastor Dave Carver
Perhaps you were here last week, and you heard me
preach against publicly shaming other people for what you
perceive to be moral failures on their part. I said that we
were called to imitate Jesus, who resisted the invitations he
constantly received to pile on and point fingers at those who
had fallen.
That sermon made sense, at least to some of you. I
know that because a few of you said things like, “Thanks for
the reminder, Dave,” or “I need to go home and think about
my own dirty laundry before I go looking through someone
else’s…” I am glad for such feedback.
However, the message was incomplete.
Sometimes, you have to say something.
Sometimes, you see someone engaged in a
behavior, a relationship, that is just wrong.
Perhaps it is causing harm or pain to someone
else. Maybe it’s self-destructive. At any rate, I
don’t want anyone to think, “But wait – did Pastor Dave say
we weren’t supposed to say anything?
No, that’s not what I said – or at least, not what I meant
to say. As our reading from Proverbs implies, sometimes
friendship requires difficult conversation. Sometimes, the
best thing you can do is to stop pretending that everything is
ok and to go ahead and name what is wrong and bring it into
the light.
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How do we do that? There are many models in
scripture; I’d like to look at Colossians 3 as one guide for
having difficult conversations.
The first thing that we want to consider is the fact that
this part of the Bible is attributed to the Apostle Paul – a man
who by all accounts had an incredible track record for
irritating other people. He was accused of being a hot-head
with a quick temper. I might suggest that at least some of
what is written here in Colossians 3 is written after some
serious self-reflection.
When it’s time to say something, Paul writes, we need
to start by remembering who and where we are. We belong
to Christ. We are located with him, or in him. Our primary
identity, says Paul, is that of “Christian.” He reminds us to
live into our baptisms each and every moment.
OK, that sounds good, but how do we do that? Well,
we clean house. We put to death the things that are not
right within us. We get rid of pride, lies, anger, and greed.
We need to do some serious self-reflection: if I feel
compelled to talk with you about something that you are
doing, it had best not be because I am envious of you. For
instance, if I am secretly jealous of how much money you
have, I’m probably not the person who ought to sit down and
talk with you about the importance of tithing. Someone
else’s attempt to engage you in conversation about the way
that you treat your wife ought not to be related to the ways
that that person is feeling intensely lonely. Do you see: if the
only reason I want to talk with you about some supposed
“sin” in your life is because I’m jealous of you for it, or
because I need to feel superior to you because of it – then
I’m no friend of yours.
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I can only approach you in the humility that is born of
knowing that I, like you, am a forgiven sinner. I have died to
any notion of my own moral superiority. I can only approach
you as one who has stripped away all pretense.
But Paul goes on to say that I dare not approach you
naked (a bit of advice for which we can all be grateful this
morning). No, he says, after I allow all of my own delusions
and self-righteousness and self-importance to be stripped
away; after I own all of my own baggage, then I am free to
put on what Christ gives to me: I can be clothed in
compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.
I’d like to say just a few words about one of those
words, “compassion”. It’s a compound word that comes
from two roots: pata, meaning “to suffer”, and cum, meaning
“with”. We approach each other in compassion.
I think what that means is that unless you have
received a specific call from God to be a prophet sent to
publicly unmask someone else’s sin, then that’s not your job.
The normative thing is for you and I to suffer with those who
struggle, not to point out all the places where they are
screwed up. Instead, I look to you and I think, “Wow, that
must hurt to carry that kind of load… I wonder what has
happened to bring you to the point where this was the best
choice you could make…
Is your friend in a broken sexual relationship, or hiding
in a web of lies, or somehow being engulfed by the
darkness? If so, you do not have the right to saunter into
that person’s life and turn on the big old Truth Light, point
your fingers, and say, “You’re welcome” just before you walk
out of the room.
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No, you are called to have compassion – to suffer with
that person. To look for the pain in her life and to enter into
the pain. When you’ve done that, then you can speak the
truth in love.
When you’ve come to that person in a profound
awareness not only of your deep sinfulness but this other
person’s ambiguity, confusion, or pain, then you are
prepared to love like Christ and to forgive like Christ.
And when we’ve gotten that far, then, according to
verse 16, we can teach and admonish one another in all
wisdom. In fact, Paul says, you probably don’t have the right
to address a brother or sister’s brokenness unless you are
able to sing together.
And, for the record, I know what this sounds like. This
sounds like old Pastor Dave is about to get all “Kum ba Yah”
on you. This sounds corny. It sounds fake.
I get it. And if you see a child being harmed, or
someone being attacked, or some grave danger, then you
need to step in and stop that from happening. Sometimes,
there’s no time for singing.
But can we, who bear the name of the body of Christ,
seek to love each other enough to be friends? Can we care
enough more about each other than we care about being
right, or about winning the argument?
This morning, we are going to commission the Cross
Trainers ministry staff. Let me direct a few words to them by
way of example.
You guys know that you are about to embark on a full
summer program. There will be a number of long, hot days
ahead. If you do not know this now, you will by this time
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next week: sinfulness is not limited to specific age
categories. These little angels who will fill our building
tomorrow? They can be tough. They can be mean. They
can be terribly obnoxious.
And whenever it strikes you just how tough, mean, and
obnoxious they can be, your first temptation will be to show
them how tough, mean and obnoxious you can be. You’ll
say to yourself, “OK, self, it’s time to show them who’s boss.”
You will want to take charge. You will want to unleash the
power of your voice, your intellect, your presence on them.
You will want to lay down the law.
But I’m here to ask you to work a little harder when that
happens, and don’t worry so much about laying down the
law as about laying down the love.
Your goal this summer is not to run a precision camp
populated only by impeccably behaved children who will sit
quietly in classrooms because they are afraid of you.
Your goal is to help some beautiful and flawed little
children learn something about what it means to fall in love
with Jesus. The only real hope that any of these kids have
of surviving some of the horrors through which our world has
already put them is if they get a glimpse of Jesus.
Some of the kids you’ll meet have an amazingly great
grasp on that already. But a lot of them? They’ve never
seen Jesus. They’ve never begun to even imagine someone
like Jesus… But they’ll see you.
So right now, this morning, in the quietness of this
room… Right now, before those kids irritate you, or offend
you, or disappoint you in some way – I want to ask you to
decide to love them. Love them anyway. Love those kids.
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Love that neighbor. Approach them as God in Christ has
approached you.
It’s been said that people care what you know when
they know that you care. Brennan Manning once said, “How
I treat a brother or sister from day to day, how I react to the
sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions
from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their
normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication
of my reverence for life than the antiabortion sticker on the
bumper of my car.”
Don’t bumper-sticker people. Love them.
Some day – hopefully, a long time from now – you’ll be
invited to come into a room and look at a few photos of me.
Then you’ll take me out to a field somewhere and throw dirt
in my face and come back to this building and eat cheesy
potatoes and talk about how it’s too bad that I had to die like
that.
And if I did it right, then there will be at least a couple
people here who will come sort of grudgingly. If you get
them talking, they might say something like, “You know, I
didn’t agree with that guy. In fact, I thought he was a real
knucklehead some times. But you know what? I think that
he loved me.”
If the person you seek to correct is sure that you love
them as Christ has loved you, then you have a chance to be
heard as you come alongside them. If people are convinced
that you love them, we might just have less screaming and
more singing. Singing! Thanks be to God for that. Amen.
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