"Word-Inflation"--October 7, 2019

Word-Inflation—October 7, 2019

“Entirely out of place is obscene, silly, and vulgar talk; but instead, let there be thanksgiving.” [Ephesians 5:4]
Do you know why economists care about inflation?  Or why the talking heads of the Federal Reserve are nervous about dropping interest rates too low too fast?

Because if we carelessly flood the market with more and more paper money (none of which is backed by some kind of shiny metal, like gold, any longer), eventually ALL of our money loses value, not just the newly printed bills. When you start throwing around more and more currency, eventually each dollar loses a little of its value, a little of its buying power, because there are more to go around. It's not a fear of worthless counterfeit money going into circulation--it's a fear that even legally-issued currency will lose its worth altogether. In worst case scenarios you get the scenes from the Great Depression in Europe, where people with wheelbarrows full of paper money were in line at the grocery story just to buy staples like bread. Eventually, if we are not careful with these little green pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, they won’t be worth the paper they are printed on.

Well, words are an awful lot like paper money in that respect. “Talk is cheap,” they say, but that’s really a question of inflation. Our words, like paper money, have the value we give to them. Or rather, my word only has as much power to it as you have the willingness to trust it. If you are known to be a person of your word, who says a thing and does it, who doesn’t make promises you don’t intend to keep, and who lives up to a commitment once it is made, who values the truth, and who doesn't go around making things up willy-nilly to suit your interests, you probably don’t need to say much to convince people of your reliability other than simply, “I promise.” But, on the other hand, if you are known as someone who plays fast and loose with the truth, as a smooth-talker, a con-artist, a phony, a schmoozer, or as a (well, how to say this delicately) just plain B.S.-er, your words have begun to lose some of their heft.

Even if you aren’t known so much as a liar but as someone who hedges, a spin-doctor who holds back the truth, or just as someone who sugar-coats everything to make it sound nice and happy, your words start to weaken. Or if you’re the one who is always good for a laugh, and always willing to shoot the breeze or tell a tall-tale for some guffaws over a drink, you may be the life of the party…but your words don’t “count” as much, one by one, as someone who can command your attention simply with the words, “I promise.” Our words can become empty talk, not worth the air they are spoken with.

And maybe most frightening of all are those voices that don't even care anymore whether what they are saying is true or not--only whether it puts their side in a better light.  The voices that no longer care about truth or falsity, about goodness or rottenness--in other words, the amoral voices--those are the ones that should keep you awake at night.  They have the power, if we grant it to them by letting them inflate the economy of language with their nonsense, to make all of our communication meaningless. In other words, it is quite possible to so water down the words we use that, like hyper-inflated paper money, you can’t do anything with your words anymore, no matter how many wheelbarrows full of them you offer, how loud you shout them, or how frequently you tweet them.

This, really, is the issue with what Paul calls, “obscene, silly, and vulgar talk.” It’s not that Paul is so tightly wound that he can’t appreciate a good joke. And it’s surely not that Paul couldn’t enjoy a good conversation over a glass of something (he advises Timothy at one point to take some wine for his stomach, after all!). It’s not even that Paul was so prissy and prim that he never dared to work blue himself, either (Paul himself makes some crude jokes to make a theological point in the original Greek of Galatians 5:12 and Philippians 3:8, among other places). But the critical difference for Paul, you could say, was that he knew what he was doing when he did it, and he never emptied his words of their power.

Paul knows that when we are careless with our words—not even untruthful, but just simply careless—we make all of our words “count” less, even the ones that really are true. Like the boy who cries wolf, when everybody knows you as a pompous blowhard who toots your own horn, or as a sniveling sycophant who just tells people what they want to hear, or as a crude windbag who doesn’t care about the coarseness of their demeanor, people just stop listening to you. Even if you ever actually tell the God’s-honest-truth.

That matters to Christians because, in a lot of ways, all we have are these ordinary things called words. All we have to bring the Good News into other people’s lives are the stories we tell of how God has been involved in our lives, and the stories we tell of what God has done in Jesus. All we have to show our own trustworthiness are our words, which are then either backed up by our actions or undercut by them. All we have to reach someone else—some stranger whose heart is heavy and needs your words of welcome and love, some friend who needs to hear your word of forgiveness that tells them “we are okay again,” some child who needs comfort and assurance that you will not leave them—all we have in those moments are our words. And how much weight and worth those words have will depend on how well and wisely we have expended our words up to that point—that is, how much we have inflated our language with empty talk. Like the character says in V for Vendetta, “Our integrity sells for so little, but really it is all we have.” Paul doesn’t want us to lose the power of our words, because there will come a time when words are all you have to use.

So again, rather than just being the blushing caricature who can’t take a joke that the world sometimes makes Christians out to be, Paul calls us to guard what we say because there will come a time when we need our words to be strong and our promises to be trust-able. We need people to know that our words are true and that we don't just repeat whatever some blowhard says because he said it loudly. That can’t happen if you and I waste our breath yammering with lame bawdy jokes, gossip and pot-stirring, groundless insults, fact-free accusations, or empty commitments we didn’t really mean.

Pay attention to your words today, and to what they are worth. There will come a moment when you need words to be strong to bear the weight of something vital—something like love, something like hope, something like grace.

Good Lord, let our words be strong when you need them to be. Let us take care of our words in the mean time.