Breaking the Outrage Cycle--July 3, 2023

Breaking the Outrage Cycle--July 3, 2023

"Love bears all things..." [1 Corinthians 13:7a]

Would you do a deep dive with me into this short sentence?  It's funny--this snippet from Paul's lengthy description of Christ-like love that we've been looking at all year is only four words long in English (and only two in Paul's original Greek), but there are a lot of ways to miss the point Paul is making.  As a kid I remember getting hung up on the word "bears" and immediately picturing either the stuffed teddy bear I had in childhood or the grizzly creatures that lurked in the woods--I actually thought the Bible was telling us to "love bears," like the brown furry creatures with claws.  But this verse isn't about furry hibernating mammals--the idea is of "bearing" like carrying or enduring or "putting up with" or "not making a fuss over."

But even once we get past the confusion of English homonyms and the various meanings of the word "bears," there's still plenty we need to get clear.  For one thing, our English translation "all things" is really a bit wooden--the Greek has the sense of working like an adverb, "always."  So rather than saying "Love puts up with everything," as if to suggest someone whose spouse was abusing them or beating them should just stay put and take it (which some preachers have taught, thinking they were "just being biblical,"), the gist of Paul's original phrasing is more like, "Love keeps on keeping on," or "Love consistently accepts the other, without making a big deal about it."  Even the word we translate as "bears" has a richer sense of "putting a cover on"--it's actually related to the Greek word stegos for "roof" or "covering," and is actually familiar to dinosaur lovers who know about the armor plated "stegosaurus".  So the image Paul is using is something like "Rather than publicly shaming others for their failures or flaws, love is willing to set those aside without making a spectacle of it."  There is no public finger-pointing, and no "Woe-is-me; look-at-all-I-have-to-deal-with" martyr complex that turns the attention back on ourselves.  There is instead in love the willingness to know what can be kept discreet, maybe even what can be kept in confidence, or what we can just let go of.

Now, to be sure, I don't think Paul is advocating "cover-ups," as in the hiding of serious harm done to others in the name of saving a powerful person's reputation or keeping an institution out of legal trouble.  We need to be clear about that because we do live in a time when all sorts of abuse has been committed, and then often covered up, by people who insisted that the truth be covered up for the sake of preserving their own public image or the status of their organization or office.  In recent years we've lived through the scandals of abuse perpetrated by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Southern Baptist Church, and the way those were made worse by institutions trying to hush up the harm and silence victims.  Of course, every branch of organized religion has its share of leaders who abuse their power, and every time the leaders of the institution have to choose between transparency and truthfulness or hiding things that need to be brought out into the light.  And certainly secular institutions are no better--as someone who grew up in a world still rocked by the effects of the Watergate scandal and who came of age during the Clinton impeachment scandal, I've never known a time free from deep cynicism about the trustworthiness of elected leaders.  I can't imagine the apostle Paul insisting that genuine "love" would silence victims to protect the reputation of an institution, not even the church--Paul knows all too well that the church itself always entangled in the tendrils of sin and struggles to be truly free.

So we're not talking about a willingness to cover up abuse or harm. But I think it's more like the wisdom to overlook the rough edges each of us scrapes each other with, the graciousness to give others the benefit of the doubt, and the willingness not to make every perceived slight into a lawsuit or eternal melodrama. In a culture like ours where it seems everything is weaponized to stoke our outrage, and where everyone is ready to be triggered into lashing out at others, we need the ability to stop, to think, and to decide not to add more fuel to that fire.

Maybe that's as much as we can deal with at once on a day like today.  It can be draining--maybe downright exhausting--to reconsider what the word we've heard all our lives actually mean.  And maybe it starts with doing some difficult work looking inside ourselves--when someone causes some small harm or you are slighted or upset, it's worth pausing to ask, "How big a deal do I need to make this?"  Sometimes our initial gut response is to explode in anger or lash out in shaming the other person--but a little bit of a pause to catch our breath puts things in enough perspective to know that it would be better all around to let cooler heads prevail and to address the person calmly, one-on-one, rather than humiliating them in public or ranting about them on your social media.  Maybe that's where it starts, and maybe that's how we break the outrage cycles that tire us all out.

Let's start there today--and let's see how love releases us from the draining force of all that drama.

Lord Jesus, give us the wisdom in our love to know what not to make a big deal out of, so that we can preserve our relationships with others in healthy ways.