Being the Alternative

 

Being the Alternative--August 18, 2020

"Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone." [Colossians 4:5-6]

It's about more than mere niceness.  It's about the power in our words either to bring others to life... or to make us all a little more dead inside.

Please don't hear these words from the letter to the Colossians as just a lecture about having manners and being polite.  It's not about etiquette--it's about being people who resist the temptation to use words as weapons, and instead to use them as instruments of healing... as vehicles for grace.

Look, I know it is so easy to believe that talk is so cheap these days as to be worthless. We live in a time when the headline-makers just blurt things out that then have to be walked back, spun by handlers, qualified, or denied.  We live in a time when it is easier to just keep yelling, meme-sharing or tweeting terrible things about people you don't like than it is to have an honest conversation.  And for sure these are days when it's supremely tempting to use words as weapons to attack, smoke screens to distract, or walls to divide us, rather than to use them as bridges to connect us.

Ok, that may sound naive.  I know that the solution to the many ways we are fragmented and fractured these days is not simply to talk it all out over a cup of coffee one afternoon, and then all our disagreements will evaporate.  I know, too, that it is possible in this day and age to become so certain of your "rightness" that all the talk, all the facts, and all the data-driven insight in the world won't persuade you to listen anew.  At some point we just harden ourselves from having to think critically, listen open-mindedly, or reflect honestly, and we dig our heels in against anybody who says anything that even remotely challenges the self-reinforcing sense of "rightness" we build around ourselves.  I know all of that happens, and I fight it every day in myself, too--so I know that talking isn't magical.  

But I also know it was just as fractured, just as hostile, and just as closed-minded to live in the Roman Empire in the first century... and the first followers of Jesus knew it was an uphill battle to get their neighbors to listen to them when so many of them were trying to run the Christians out of town and brand them as troublemakers.  And yet those first generations of Christians didn't give up on the power of their words.  And they did not desert their calling to resist the hostility of the world by refusing to resort to that hostility themselves.  They answered the rottenness of their persecutors, not with insults and name-calling or by spreading unfounded rumors and conspiracy theories about them around town, but by choosing to use their conduct to communicate grace.  They refused to weaponize their words--they didn't spread misinformation about the ones who threw them in jail, they didn't demean the people who were hostile toward them, and neither did they let hatred come out of their mouths or from their pens.  And by doing that, they offered an alternative.

Maybe that's the key.  When we commit to using words as bridges rather than walls, and when we listen in order to earn the right to be heard, we offer an alternative to the childish name-calling and demeaning lies that spread everywhere else.  We can be a resistance to the tidal wave of rottenness that sometimes feels like it is overwhelming.  Each of us, by our choices to use words honorably, gracefully, truthfully, and vulnerably, can be a part of turning that tide back.  Every choice you and I make to listen first changes the conversation with others.  Every time we treat others with respect in our words, even when it is not shown back to us, helps to make another world possible.  Every time we defuse the temptation to resort to name-calling or prejudice and instead engage people with decency and compassion, it reveals the contrast with those whose are morally and emotionally bankrupt.  We can offer the alternative that this vitriolic time needs--not simply an alternative of Side B yelling at Side A instead of Side A yelling at Side B, but an alternative to the assumption that everything is a battle with sides to vanquish.  Maybe we don't have to accept the premise that my goal is to demolish those who disagree with me or disrespect me, rather than to persuade and get them to consider a new possibility.  Maybe, in fact, in the end, I will learn and grow, too, and will change some of how I think, as well as changing someone else's mind.  But the ways we speak to others, even when we strongly disagree, is part of the way we make things change--part of the way we make things better.

Just think about it for a moment: what if you were the one who all your coworkers knew as someone who wouldn't allow trashy insults to be thrown around?  How might that change your workplace?  What if you were known in your family as the person who didn't laugh along when someone else told a racist joke?  What if your "friends" on social media knew you weren't going to share the misinformation, the name-calling, or the just plain crude things they posted?  Maybe these are little things, and maybe sometimes it will feel futile to keep resisting the meanness and bitterness that is out there.  But we will keep at it, because we dare to believe that's part of how Christ can be seen and heard in us.

Like I say, this is about so much more than just remembering our manners--it is about offering to people around us an alternative to the trash-heap of a shouting-match we all seem to be stuck suffering through.  We can be the alternative.  Your words today can be resistance to the rottenness.  Your listening ears can be what builds a bridge rather than another damned wall.

Lord God, as you took Moses' rough speech and made him to stand before Pharaoh with power and grace, take our words and our hearts so that we may be winsome, truth-seeking, and grace-filled as well.