29 Don’t let any foul words come out of your mouth. Only say what is helpful when it is needed for building up the community so that it benefits those who hear what you say. 30 Don’t make the Holy Spirit of God unhappy—you were sealed by him for the day of redemption. 31 Put aside all bitterness, losing your temper, anger, shouting, and slander, along with every other evil. 32 Be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other, in the same way God forgave you in Christ.
Therefore, imitate God like dearly loved children. 2 Live your life with love, following the example of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. He was a sacrificial offering that smelled sweet to God.
Today we are wrapping up a series
of messages we’ve been in for several weeks, called “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
Grace.” Just as a hitchhiker is
dependent on the generosity of someone else to make a journey, so too are we
spiritual hitchhikers, dependent on God’s generosity for our spiritual
journey. Over and over, the thing that
God gives us is grace.
Over the last several weeks, we
have talked about practical, proven ways that we experience God’s grace - where
God’s love and God’s presence are made tangibly real in our lives. The image
I’ve asked all of us to keep in our minds is of God driving around in a great
big bus just overflowing with grace, making periodic stops along the way where
we can get on the bus and make the journey with God. The stops are places where we receive grace
from God, so long as we do two things, the first is to----show up, and the
second is to----have an open and willing heart.
So far we have made stops at
Communion, Baptism, healing, prayer, and worship. Today, we make one final stop, and even
though we’re looking at this one last, it might be the most important one of
all. Today we talk about how we
experience God’s grace through holy conversation. May we
pray.
Holy Conversation Applies to Everyone
Question for you this morning - if you never
speak to, listen to, or otherwise interact with other people, would you please
raise your hand? Raise it high and leave
it up, if you would! If your hand is
raised, you are free to check out right now, because today’s message is only
applicable to those who do speak to,
listen to, and otherwise interact with other people.
Today we’re looking at how we
experience God’s grace through holy conversation. It sounds like something Robin might have
exclaimed - “Holy Conversation, Batman!”
Or, perhaps it sounds like conversation between two nuns, maybe it
sounds like the content of conversation taking place in or about church, or
maybe some special way of speaking where we say “Thee” and “Thou” all the
time. Yet, holy conversation is less
about the content of our conversation and more about the spirit in which we
converse, and we are called to practice it every time we open our mouths.
Today’s Scripture reading couldn’t
be clearer in this regard. Verse 29 -
“Don’t let any foul words come out of your mouth. “Only say what is helpful when it is needed
for building up the community so that it benefits those who hear what you
say.” If ever there was a blueprint for
holy conversation, for the type of speaking and interacting that gives grace,
this text is it.
Stinky Words
When the Scripture tells us not to
let “foul words” come out of our mouths, perhaps we think of those four-letter
words, those naughty words - words we didn’t even know existed, much less knew
were bad - until we were told not to say them.
Yet, this reference to “foul words” is more like what happens when you
go on vacation and your fridge breaks down while you’re gone and everything in
it spoils, and you walk back into the house and the only word to describe the
odor is “foul.” “Don’t let any foul
words come out of your mouth” - in other words, don’t say things that stink up
the place.
Easier said than done - especially
less than two months before a national election. We are a divided and polarized people. Have you seen the image: “I desperately need
a ‘hide political posts’ button on Facebook so I can still like my friends
after the election is over”? It is fine
to have disagreements and genuine difference of opinion - that’s just part of
life and being connected to other people - we need to remember that just
because we disagree doesn’t mean we have to be disagreeable.
Our civilization lacks basic
civility, filled with labels that we use as weapons to demonize people who are
different from ourselves: conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat,
fundamentalist or radical. These labels
allow us to marginalize people as “out,” rather than “in,” as “against us”
rather than “with us” - and then we hear the Scripture - “Don’t let any foul
words come out of your mouth [Don’t say things that stink up the place]. Only say what is needed for building up the
community so that it benefits those who hear what you say.”
What we say can give grace or give
grief, our words can build up, or they can tear down. Foul words - those that stink up the place -
are those that grieve others, that tear them down, that destroy others, that
pridefully exalt ourselves and belittle others; such speech has no place in the
life of a Christian. The text makes it
even clearer in verse 31: “Put aside all bitterness, losing your temper, anger,
shouting, and slander, along with every other evil.”
None of us has any control over
what other people say, but each of us is responsible for our own words. When I was a kid in Sunday School, Mrs.
Jasper hung a sign in our room that said, “Before you speak, ask yourself: Is
it kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?” If the answer to any of those was “no,” the
most appropriate thing to do with whatever you were thinking was to keep it to
yourself. Don’t say things that stink up
the place.
Dorothy Neville says, “The real
art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but
to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” My wife always has the perfect comeback an
hour too late. I have the opposite
problem - a snappy retort is sometimes past my lips before my brain can say
“WAAAAIT!” and in the end, neither is particularly desirable. It’s not only saying the right thing at the
right place, it’s leaving unsaid the wrong thing when tempted (bitterness,
losing your temper, anger, shouting, and slander).
Rubber and
Glue
What we say is a major reflection on who we are. When someone said something bad about us or
insulted us when we were kids, what did we say - “I am rubber and you are
glue. What you say bounces off of me and
sticks to you.” It’s just something we
used to deflect whatever they said, but there’s a lot of truth in this
playground comeback line. What we say,
particularly what we say about others, reflects more on us than it does on the
person we’re speaking about. Just as the
odor of spoiled food indicates a broken refrigerator, so too does the odor of
foul words - words that tear down rather than build up - indicate a broken
person.
Who we are on the inside will make itself known in the
words that come out of our mouths. The
question I would like each of us to consider this morning is this: what do our
words smell like? When we open our
mouths to speak, are our words foul or sweet?
Do our words build up, are they helpful, do they benefit those who hear
them, do they give grace - or do our words tear down, are they hurtful, do they
grieve those who hear them? When we open
our mouths to speak, what smell are we making?
Putting it Into Practice
I have prepared some cards for
each of you to take with you today. They
say, “Guidelines for Holy Conferencing,” and when they are practiced, can help
us sweeten our conversation with God’s love, that our words might give grace to
all who hear them. I’d like everyone
here to take one of these cards home, and put it in a place where you will see
it every day, and every time you go to speak, think about these guidelines and
how they can shape your conversation. I
guarantee that if you follow them for everything you say, those around you will
find grace in you and your words.
“Don’t let any foul words come out
of your mouth” - don’t let them come out of your email, either, or your
Facebook feed, or your phone line. Don’t
let them be exchanged in the parking lot before church or after the meeting, in
your yard, at your party, at home, at work, at school, or wherever else you
find yourself this week. Why? Because you’re better than that. That’s not who you are - you and I are
members of the body of Christ, and as such we are called - commanded, even - to
make sure that our words never tear down but always build up, that our words
are never giving people grief but always giving them grace - and to the extent
that grace is experienced through what we say, then our conversation is holy.
Paul spells it out even further in
verses 32 and following: “Be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other,
in the same way God forgave you in Christ.
Therefore, imitate God like dearly loved children. Live your life with love, following the
example of Christ, who loved us and gave himself for us. He was a sacrificial offering that smelled
sweet to God” (Ephesians 4:32-5:2). The
cure for words that stink up the place is the self-sacrificing agape love of God in Christ, a love
lavished upon us not because we deserve it, but simply because that’s who God
is and that’s what God chooses to do.
Holy conversation is a means of grace because its source is grace. We call it holy conversation because through
our words, people can see beyond us and glimpse the holiness of God, the love
of Christ, and the breath of the Spirit that shapes and forms our words so they
give grace.
The Answer is Always Grace
And when it all comes down to it,
for followers of Jesus, those who are trying to imitate God and follow the
example of Christ, it really is all about grace - receiving God’s grace, using
God’s grace, giving God’s grace to others.
Our theology, our practices, our understanding, our relationships, our
way of being followers of Jesus in the world - all of that is rooted in our
experience of God’s grace.
Every message in this series -
every stop along the route of our grace bus - is a means of grace. These are basic practices given by God to the
church in order to lead people to Christ and keep them connected with him. The means of grace are foundational gifts
from God intended to be practiced frequently in order to help us be the best we
can be.
From now on for the rest of your
lives, my hope is that every time you have an opportunity to practice these
means of grace, you do. I hope some
lightbulb goes off in your head around these things that makes you say,
“Grace! I need grace! I want
grace, and I know where to go to get it.”
I hope you remember that all of these are places you can go get some
grace - in the frequent celebration of Communion, in frequently remembering the
covenant made at our Baptism, in seeking healing, in prayer that involves as
much listening as speaking, and in joining together with others in the public
worship of God - that you will seek out these opportunities frequently, and
find God’s grace made real in your life because of it. If you do, then this whole series of messages
will have been worth it.
For today, may you fulfill the
Scripture, to “be kind, compassionate, and forgiving to each other, in the same
way God forgave you in Christ” (Ephesians 4:32). May the fragrance of the words you say and
the spirit in which you say them be sweet.
May what you speak build up and give grace. May all your conversation be holy.
No comments:
Post a Comment