During my youth and adolescence, my father was the president and primary fundraiser for a small Bible school that he had cofounded around the time I was born. I spent a bridge year there between graduating from high school when I had turned seventeen just two months before graduation and going away to college 2500 miles away from home. In addition to my father, the school had about a half dozen faculty, several of whom were pastors at local churches and did the teaching gig during the week.
My father had a great sense of humor; I recall that there was a lot of laughter whenever the faculty gathered for various reasons, frequently at my house. One time someone suggested that the Bible Institute of New England (BINE) needed to design a logo. My father suggested that the logo should have the letters BINE above a crocodile or alligator with wide open mouth showing its deadly teeth, along with the following text from Ephesians: “Speaking the truth in love.”
Laughter ensued, but the sort of uncomfortable laughter that recognizes an underlying truth. These models and exemplars of Christian leadership knew that in truth, Christians often eat their own. Perhaps many of those present had participated in such cannibalism themselves—within a few short years, several of them would turn on each other over doctrinal differences. The conversation I am describing took place close to six decades ago; if anything, the tendency of people of Christian faith to turn on each other at a moment’s notice had become far worse over the succeeding years. I wrote about this phenomenon last Thursday.
This is hardly an exclusively 20th/21st century phenomenon. Close to five centuries ago, as Catholics and Protestants fought with and killed each other in the name of their different versions of Christian belief, Michel de Montaigne wrote that “there is no hostility so extreme as that of the Christian. Our zeal works marvels when it seconds our inclination toward hatred, cruelty, ambition, greed, slander, and rebellion.” I don’t know why I continue to be surprised or shocked when I receive or hear of the latest vitriol from a professed Christian triggered by something that doesn’t fit into the religious straitjacket that they wear as a cloak of certainty; often that vitriol is closed with “God bless” or “I’m praying for you.” Don’t bother.
The New Testament lectionary reading for today is from Ephesians, beginning ten verses after Paul exhorts his readers to “speak the truth in love.”
Let no evil talk come out of your mouths but only what is good for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear.
And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption.
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice.
Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
I could pontificate on this, but Paul pretty much says it all. The next time I am tempted to respond in kind to a good Christian person labelling me as a heretic and/or condemning me to hell for something I wrote that they disagree with, I’ll try to remember this passage.
It’s good to remember that Paul wrote these words to the Jesus community at Ephesus not as a guide for how to engage with those outside of their community, but rather as a blueprint for how they should act toward and communicate with each other. This is a road map for how to be with those who share your faith commitment. As difficult as it may be to accept, the tent of faith is large enough to cover all sorts of people, even those with whom you disagree strongly and whom you would like to eject from the tent altogether. Remember that if the tent is large enough to include you, there are no boundaries to the sorts of people who are welcomed under the tent. Judging who is under the tent and who is not is far above our pay grade. Let’s speak the truth in love.
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