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Taming the Tongue
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis August 28, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Kings 21:1-20a James 3:1-18
The ninth commandment is before us this morning, the commandment that frees our tongues for telling the truth about our neighbor. We would, of course, tell the truth but for the fact that Pilate’s question-so succinctly asked while staring truth in the face-is also our own: “What is truth?” “Lies bind the fabric of every human life,” begins Paul Griffiths in his very provocative book entitled Lying: The Augustinian Theology of Duplicity. “We lie to our lovers when we whisper sweet nothings;…we lie to our children when we browbeat them with the image of our imagined rectitude;…we lie to our confessors when, kneeling in the attitude of contrition, we imagine what they’d like to hear in order to think us true athletes of the spirit….We are imaginatively masked,” he says, “adorned with the lie….” These lies, though, are all about us. As regards our neighbor, what spouse when asked outside the dressing room door in a department store, “Does this make me look fat?” has not said with the tongue, “No, of course not!” while thinking in the heart, “Oh honey!” Or what child, when asked by the teacher if a parent drinks too much, to use Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s example, has not denied the charge with the tongue, knowing full well that the teacher has stumbled upon the truth we have buried in our heart? Or what colleague, when asked by a fellow worker about her faux pas in a meeting, has not assured her with the tongue that no one noticed when, in fact, her misstep was the talk of the women’s room? “A truthful statement can be a cruel hurt to a fellow human being,” writes Walter Harrelson addressing our trivial construal of this command. “We all know people who are immensely proud of their veracity, their refusal to shade the truth in order to avoid hurting other people. Important as it is to cultivate the practice of speaking the unvarnished truth” of and to another, he contends, “it is self-indulgent and supercilious to speak the truth, no matter what harm ensues, merely to protect one’s own reputation for veracity.” Augustine, on the other hand and according to Griffiths, stood just the opposite moral ground. For him, verbal veracity was required by God without exception, encompassing everything from the seemingly trivial childhood prank of stealing pears off a neighbor’s tree and lying about it to the most consequential crossroads where life and death are at stake in human speech. “Should I lie to save the life of my child?” Augustine would counsel, “No.” We recoil. “Should I lie to prevent war, encourage peace, soothe the weary and discouraged, instruct the foolish, liberate the innocent from torture? No.” Intentionally duplicitous speech is prohibited by God’s command according to Augustine, and the double heart—the “mismatch between what is in your heart (what you take to be true) and what is on your tongue (what you say to be true)”—is without excuse. Who can stand? Where between the white lie and the duplicitous heart do we locate the truth required of believers in Jesus Christ and members of his church? Enter the Ninth Commandment, a commandment that, over the span of generations in the Old Testament, was addressed to three very specific settings: the courtroom, the sanctuary and the public square. First we enter the courtroom where, in the agrarian life of ancient Israel, elders or judges or the heads of households from the covenant community assembled to hear cases brought by individuals or families over such matters as property, business transactions, and personal injury. The speech of those subpoenaed and placed on the witness stand, as well as the speech of those robed and sitting in judgment over the neighbor, was not to be false. It is in this first setting that we recognize the origin of our own judicial system and acknowledge the foundational role of the Ninth Commandment in the doing of justice today. “Freedom of choice depends upon knowledge of the case at hand, which lies take away. Integrity depends upon speaking from one’s own perspective, which lies remove. When lies are habitual and the words of every day discourse unreliable, we plunge into doubt and suspicion,” says Christian ethicist Charles Swezey. Whether posted illegally on public property or written indelibly upon the human heart, the order of our common life rests on this command! Yet according to Walter Harrelson, the commandment also encompasses the setting of the sanctuary, where members of the community who had suffered sickness or misfortune were brought before God to answer for their presumed sin. From this setting comes the psalmist’s complaint against those who are out to get him when he is down; there issues as well, from the sanctuary, that theologically abhorrent question, to wit: “What did I do to deserve this?” Believing sickness to follow upon sin as punishment, “it was possible for pious and well-meaning [Israelites] to accuse the sick one of having done some misdeed.” Here gossip, the “sniffing out of another’s sin”, was easily misrepresented in the community as evidence of wrong-doing. The accused soul then had to present himself or herself in the holy place and wait upon God who, through the voice of the priest, would separate the truth from the lie. Job is the quintessential case in point! We have little imagination for this second setting, though the sanctuaries of our own denomination may soon be mired in charges and counter-charges concerning members judged by some to be morally too weak or sick from sin to lead. The “Peace, Unity and Purity Task Force” has just issued its report—you can go on line and read it. The report counsels the church to maintain the current prohibition placed on the ordination of gay and lesbian members to any office in the church. But it also carefully counsels the church to make room for congregations who in good conscience must dissent from this “non-essential” tenet of faith before a candidate they believe to have been called by God to lead without regard to sexual orientation. For the pious and well-meaning who court no exceptions to the rule, the sanctuary may once again become the arena for accusers to assemble and God’s judgment, in the voice of a priest or two, to be spoken. Then there is a third setting within the history of Israel, a setting revealed in the speech of the prophets. “The requirement of [the commandment] is matured by the prophets,” says Walter Brueggemann, “by enlarging its scope to include royal reality with its penchant for distorted public policy….” Here Jezebel is the biblical case in point and the speech of Elijah against her royal lying about Naboth brings the commandment to bear in the public square. In opposition to the voices of power that “present a false reality, with failed fact disguised as workable fantasy” the prophetic voice declares that “such fantasy will bring devastation upon a deceived community.” This third setting is, of course, painfully recognizable to a nation at war with its fears. Failed fact disguised as workable fantasy is bringing devastation upon a divided and deceived community more and more, day by day. Yet for the most part the practitioners of civil religion who have been at the ready to demand the commandments be posted in courthouses and who are eager to speak for God in the sanctuary where moral judgment might be pronounced by the pious and well-meaning against the sinner, are the same believers who contend the Ninth Commandment has nothing to recommend to the principalities and powers. In fact says Brueggemann, “The church in its accommodating timidity has characteristically wanted to keep the commandments of Sinai in modest zones of moralizing. [Hence the] dominant ‘word-making’ and ‘world-making’…pseudo-versions of reality… regularly the work of the strong against the weak, the haves against the have-nots”, go un-judged of a Sunday morning! Only when members of the party in power, usually playing opposite the pulpit on “Meet the Press”, call their own house—the White one—to account for its false witness, only then does the church think this commandment may have something to do with the common life outside the modest zones of moralizing, something to do with the death-dealing lies told by power in the public square. Until then, our silence bears false witness-as surely as Pilate’s washed hands have-to the truth that alone has the power to set people free: the power of God made perfect in weakness! So where, I ask again, between the white lie and the duplicitous heart do we locate the truth that is required of believers in Jesus Christ and members of his church? What, in other words and finally, has the Ninth Commandment to do with the New Testament? Has the prohibition against our false witness to do with Him who came to bear witness to the truth that sets us free? Simply put, Jesus Christ is now the neighbor in question in the Ninth Commandment! Against him, and through him against the least of these, you and I are not to bear false witness. We do, of course, and in his light our every stab at telling the truth—our rules decreed or set of values espoused or ethical systems laid out or verbal veracity accomplished-can only be a lie. A lie these little systems are of ours because at his birth, grace and truth entered gravity not in the form of a proposition or a disembodied rule, but in the messy, contextual flesh of a human life. Since truth has come to us by way of love incarnate, the point of God’s command morally is not to the end that we “pull up our socks, clean up our act, and just stop lying.” If human effort alone were the redeeming element in relation to God’s command, the human will mysteriously would have acquired a power it has not possessed since the fall! Rather because God’s Word was made flesh, we are those who may listen through Jesus Christ for the speech that does not lie, for the stories told in the syntax of grace, for the voice of our God whose Son alone has come to reveal what a human life lived between the white lie and the heart’s duplicity looks like: it looks like truth-sharp as a two-edged sword-spoken in love. Truth spoken in love! Hear me: neither the false love which scorns the truth nor the false zeal for truth which destroys love will do [Pascal]; not the devil’s truth, said Bonhoeffer, that judges out of envy and hatred but God’s truth that judges created things out of love. The truth can be told—our witness can only be borne—in love. Christ’s church, then, is the community charged to speak the truth in love. This is not easy when the ones we love are captive to lies or sin or sickness; when the nation we love is enslaved by fear and divided; when the community we love has been kept from the life God intends by the life it has chosen to hoard. Yet the Ninth Commandment invites us together to be a covenant community of grace whose practices reorder human loves and turn our lives from our selves, our money, our name, our need, our desire, our will to the God who “ceaselessly batters our hearts with the gift of himself.” So may our tongues be tamed by grace alone until our lives confess him and our songs adore him and our hearts double back upon the love that frees our speech for the truth made flesh in Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God! |