Readings: Act 8:5-8, 14-17; 1 Peter 3:15-18; John 14:15-21
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means
to speak the truth in love.
We hear a lot of people these days who are,
as they say, “speaking their truth,”
but it seems to me that there is
rather less speaking in love.
Perhaps I’ve just been spending
too much time on various social media,
where a firm conviction of one’s own correctness
is generally taken as license to savage the incorrect.
Don’t get me wrong.
When I see or hear someone spouting
what to me is clearly arrant nonsense
I too feel the urge to expose them to ridicule
or accuse them of (take your choice)
forgetting about some vulnerable group,
or not paying sufficient attention to the facts,
or being selfish or sub-Christian,
or a slave to popular opinion
or just a garden variety idiot.
Sometimes I even give in to those urges.
And I tell myself that I have no choice
because the truth matters.
Well, the truth does matter.
But so does love.
Because the truth matters we should,
as the first letter of Peter says,
“always be ready to give an explanation
to anyone who asks you
for a reason for your hope.”
We should live our lives in a way
that is so shaped by faith, hope, and love
that it provokes others to ask us
why we live in the way that we do.
We should live lives that are, frankly, unreasonable
unless God is who the Gospel says God is:
the eternal lover who raised Jesus from the dead
and who through the Spirit draws us into that new life.
But then, when it comes time to give our account,
we cannot let our words give the lie to our life.
If we cannot give a reason for our hope
without crushing the spirits
of those who may disagree with us,
then perhaps we are not the hopeful people
that we think we are.
Perhaps we do not really believe
that the truth matters,
because we do not trust
in the capacity of truth
to defeat falsehood by its own power.
We end up like Pontius Pilate
who contemptuously sneers
“what is truth?”
What is truth
without imperial power to enforce it?
What is truth
without armies of avenging angels?
What is truth
without verbal weapons
that can eviscerate its foes?
But the first letter of Peter speaks differently,
exhorting Christians to profess the truth
“with gentleness and reverence,
keeping your conscience clear.”
Christians should have a firm conviction
of the truth of their beliefs,
since these are convictions
upon which we stake our lives.
But conviction is not permission to forget
that those to whom we speak the truth
are just as beloved by God as we are,
and that we are called to love them
as God loves them
even if we are convinced
that they are being selfish
or sub-Christian,
or slaves to popular opinion
or just garden variety idiots.
Indeed, if we seek to love them
as God loves them
we might very well discover
that their reality and motivations
are a bit more complex than they first appear.
This does not mean
that we should never say things
that people find difficult to hear,
that might even make them angry,
but this is something quite different
from words that are demeaning and derogatory.
First Peter gives us no less an example
of the power of gentleness
than Jesus himself,
who “suffered for sins once,
the righteous for the sake of the unrighteous,
that he might lead you to God.”
It isn’t simply the fact
of Jesus’s suffering that saves us,
but how and why he suffered:
as a witness to the power of disarmed truth.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves
whether our unwillingness to surrender
the weapons of invective
is not in fact a fear that we might suffer
the same fate as Jesus,
is not in fact an unwillingness
to follow the way of the cross.
In John’s Gospel,
Jesus promises to send his followers
“another Advocate to be with you always,
the Spirit of truth.”
And Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians
that the fruits of that Spirit of truth
are love, joy, peace,
patience, kindness, generosity,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
These fruits should be key to our discernment
of whether it is through the Spirit of truth
that we speak and act
in witness to the hope that is in us,
or whether it is some other spirit
that moves us to speak.
The coronavirus pandemic,
while in some ways shutting down our lives,
has also opened up new horizons for us.
It has called forth
amazing acts of love and creativity
as well as some of our worst human instincts.
It has presented us with a choice.
Love or hatred?
Joy or anger?
Peace or strife?
Patience or impatience?
Kindness or cruelty?
Generosity or selfishness?
Faithfulness or despair?
Gentleness or brutality?
Self-control or giving free range
to whatever impulse moves us?
In the midst of this extraordinary time,
in this moment of choice,
God continues to pour out on us
the Spirit of Truth
and calls us to bear witness in the Spirit
to the hope that is in us.
May we witness truthfully in love
and may God have mercy on us all.
