The Covenant on Our Hearts

 Jeremiah 36:1-8, 21-23, 27-31, Mark 4:26-34

               Today we continue our study of the book of Jeremiah.  To give the background of this passage, Jehoiakim was one of Josiah’s sons.  And while Josiah and Jeremiah were on the same page in terms of what God wanted and therefore how to lead the people, Jehoiakim, the King, did not agree with the prophet Jeremiah about how the country of Israel should be run.  Jeremiah was really clear about what God wanted: God wanted the lying the stop, God wanted justice for the poorest of the poor, God wanted kindness to the “least of these”.  But Jehoiakim was not listening and he resented everything that Jeremiah had to say about it.  He tried to arrest Jeremiah, unsuccessfully.  And then when Jeremiah continued to proclaim the message that the behavior of this king HAD to change, that he HAD to repent, that he had to stop the lying, the denying of the word of God as spoken through Jeremiah, Jeremiah said that if he did not change his behavior, his injustices, his acts of cruelty, that there would be consequences.  God was angry, and destruction would come if the behavior continued.  Jehoiakim’s reaction then was to destroy the words that Jeremiah had had Baruch write down.  His reaction was denial, was the ostrich putting its head in the sand, “If I just make these words go away, then the prophecy will end.”  His response was censorship.  But instead of succeeding in destroying the words, the words Jeremiah spoke on behalf of God moved from being conditional, “If you don’t stop this injustice and lying, you will be destroyed” to absolute, “You have gone past the point of no return and the consequences are coming.  You cannot turn back now.”  In addition, the words were expanded, including all that was said before and much, much more.  Unfortunately, the consequences for Jehoiakim’s actions extended beyond himself, too.  As a leader, his mis-steps were not only destroying himself, but would come down on all the people as well.  Jehoiakim’s reaction was not repentance, and it was not an offer to change.  He felt that if he just destroyed the words of God’s prophet, they would no longer have an affect.  But this is false.  We can deny the past all we want, but it still affects every single thing about the present.  Denying it, squashing it, trying to destroy the realities of what happened before, of our history, as ugly as it is, does not undo what has been done.  It does not change that past.  Instead, our denial of it cements the consequences that result from our past actions.  Rather than opening us up to change, to repentance, and therefore to healing and new life, both as individuals, but more importantly as communities, as countries, as nations, our denial of what has gone before simply ensures our doom, ensures we will not grow, ensures we will not change, ensures that we will continue to act with injustice and ensures that the consequences for those behaviors will take place.

               These are very hard words for us to hear.  VERY hard words for us to hear.  How many times have I heard people say, “I don’t like the God of the Old Testament because that God seems to very violent!”  But I want to be clear here.  This is not about punishment.  This is about consequences.  Our actions have consequences.  There isn’t any way to get around that.  There are consequences for our actions.  And, while it is especially hard to hear the words from Jeremiah today in which Jeremiah moves from the place of saying “you must repent” to, “there is no going back,”  there is truth that we must understand in which there comes a point when change is too late, when we cannot undo what we have done.  While I deeply believe that God is a God of second and third, fourth, fifth chances, at some point, there is no escaping the reality that the world has been built in such a way that there are consequences of our behaviors. 

            Many scientist are now saying, for example, that we have reached that point of no return in terms of the environment.  That we have crossed a line in terms of the rape and damage we have done to our world, to our environment.  The climate change that is a consequence of the destruction of our ozone, the build up of carbon in our atmosphere creating a greenhouse effect from which we cannot return.  As an article written in November on EcoWatch said it, “The only way to have prevented runaway climate change would have been to have stopped burning fossil fuels between 1960 and 1970, the model found, as USA TODAY reported. In order to stop temperatures and sea levels from rising now, we would have to remove at least 33 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year starting this one.” 

         The eight year drought that our damage has caused in the northern triangle: Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala is the single most cause of the influx of immigrants into this country.  The drought means the people can’t farm their own lands and they can’t feed their families.  This is driving folk here.  We are reaping the consequences of being the largest historic emitter of carbon. 

         UN did a study a few years back that said that there would be 100 million ecological refugees by 2100 in large part as a consequence of droughts in African pushing people towards Europe.  But more recently they have renewed the study taking into account the domino affects of conflict, war, and water scarcity.  The new estimate as a result is that  there will now be  two billion ecological refugees by year 2100.  Population closer to 10 billion by then.  That means 1/5 will be internally and externally displaced people.    Again, these are the consequences of choices we have made as nations.

      But we, too, like to deny truth, like to squish it in the hopes that it will just go away.  I think about the fact that Oklahoma has declared it will not include in its history the Tulsa riots, that others are proclaiming they will not change the history books to include the horrible things that we have done to African Americans, to Native peoples, to the Japanese and the Chinese in this country.  They will not include these historical facts.  Why?  It is just like Jehoiakim: if they don’t write it down they believe it can’t hurt them.  But burning the scrolls of life, the truths of our history does not change the central, scary and challenging message to “love your enemies”.  Instead, it cements our fate in horrible ways.  Perhaps if we had been honest about our history from the beginning we would not be experiencing the great racial strife that we face now.  But people fear the truth, they fear the stories and in doing so, they seal the fate of our country, of our people, of the world. 

               Howard Thurman in his book The Mood of Christmas wrote an essay called “The Great Incarnate Words” (P 111-118),

But the word would not be stilled:

               Let your motive be simple;

               Your words, yea, yea; naysay.

               Hypocrisy for self-defense—

               Is that the sinless sin?

               Does it degrade the soul at last

               And sweep the raft against the rocks?

               Deceive, and live for yet another day!

               Declare, and run the risk of sure destruction!

But why?

The Word knew:

               There is a point beyond which (humans) cannot go,

               Without yielding (their) right to try again.

               To play God false to save one’s skin,

               May jeopardize all there is that makes (humans, Human).

                              “What would a person give in exchange for (their) soul?”

               This is the great Decision!

               Even death becomes a little thing.

               To survive with inner cleanness;

To compromise where ground forsook can be retrieved;

               To stand unyielding when the moment comes;

This is the meaning of the Word!

 

Love. The word—LOVE.

Hate is the last great fortress of the weak.

The moving current of resentment flows through the channels

               of the heart,

When overarching wrong inflicts its bitter lash,

But this may pass.

                So then we come to the New Testament reading, the story of the mustard seed.  We know this story.  We here in CA also know mustard.  We know that we do nothing, not a thing, and every spring the mustard plants spring up all over the Bay Area with carpets of yellow.  They can’t be stopped, they can’t be controlled.  They are wild and they live on their own.  They grow tall and big and expansive and there is little to nothing that can be done to prevent it.  But this is a word of hope from God: mustard does not have to be planted, and mustard is not controlled.  So, too, is the word of God.  And so too, are the stories of truth. 

              Despite the attempts to block history, to confine history, to rewrite history, cell phones catching things like the murder of George Floyd can no longer be stopped.  People writing the history that is out there, in the underground sometimes, can no longer be stopped.  We think that we can control things in this way, but we can’t.  God’s work for truth, for justice, is unstoppable. 

               I think about the movie, “Two Weeks Notice”.  In the Movie, Sandra Bullock plays a character who has actively followed on “the way” as she understands it.  She has stood up for the oppressed, been a voice for the voiceless, fought against injustice at every level.  But there comes a moment at which she hits a place of despair.  She is done.  Her father is upset by her decision to no longer live a life of action.  And he confronts her saying, “we didn’t teach you to sit on the sidelines.”  She argues that what she does makes no difference.  To which he responds, “Then you change your tactics.  As long as people can change, the world can change.”  She says, “But what if people can’t change?” 

               The father in the movie I just quoted paused for a moment in consideration, “Let me put it this way.  I am eating a piece of cheesecake made entirely of soy.  I hate it.  But because of my health issues, I am doing it.”

               He didn’t like it.  But he did it, and that started with truth.  His change in behavior started with being unable to deny the truth about his health conditions, the truth about what he needed to do to stay well.  It did not stem from hiding from the realities of his situation.  It did not come about from burying his head, like an ostrich, in the sand.  He didn’t like it, but truth is powerful, it is unstoppable. 

               The word of God is like that.  It spreads despite what people try to do, despite what people try to hide, despite the lies.  It is like mustard that sprouts up regardless. 

               As the commentator David Jacobsen wrote, ““As I wrote these words, the court testimony of the sidewalk bystanders in the George Floyd killing seemed empty of hope. In their cell phone videos, you too can see them: the EMT, the youth, the martial arts expert, and the convenience store cashier lined up pleading with the white policeman kneeling on a Black man’s neck to stop and render assistance to George Floyd. As you watched their own videos, it seemed even to the bystanders themselves that all they could do from the sidewalk was to cry out and plead, but effect nothing.  One teenager on the sidewalk even testified in court how she apologizes over and over again to George Floyd at night. She asks herself whether she could have done more.  And why did her pleading or their yelling not suffice? Her haunting words make Jesus’ mysterious parable hard to hear. What about Mark’s seedy hope of an automatic Kingdom of God can survive her tearful testimony?  And then came the verdict on April 20. As many said, while justice did not come that day, accountability did. How did the lead prosecutor put it?: the bystanders were a “bouquet of humanity.” The very people who cried out from the sidewalk and made videos with smartphones were a surprise flowering of what it means to be human. The bystanders did not save George Floyd’s life, but they were a mysterious, living, testifying, bouquet of humanity. And in a moment, something of our view of Mark’s seed parable changes. What it offers now is a glimpse of change, a germination that flowers right there on a cracked sidewalk at 38th and Chicago.  Now that is mysterious and even a little revealing. Even so, there is one thing I now lay hold of. There may well be an arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice, but that modern view is for us both a promise and a goal. The famous quote from Parker and King and Obama uses the intransitive verb, “bend.” But there is no one who says that we can’t lay hold of that arc and in the name of the promise bend it a little bit ourselves with a little transitive joy. For we, thanks to Mark, are people who even now glimpse germinating seeds yielding bouquets of humanity: a surprising, sudden, fragile yield of the Kingdom’s mysterious grace and justice.” – Working Preacher, David Jacobsen.

               “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  The kingdom of God is a seed that grounds our hope that eventually things can change.  To remember that Mark’s gospel was written close to the time of the destruction of the temple in 70CE, that the context of that time was public chaos, control, confusion, oppression and pain.  And that it was in the midst of that that we hear the words of hope from today’s Gospel reading.  These are powerful stories of possibility.  And that possibility is in our midst as well.

               The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed: it is not planted, it is not sown.  And yet it takes off, it grows big and expansive and wild.  While we may hinder it for a while, we cannot stop it.  The word of Love, the word of hope, the word of healing and possibility: these are the words of God’s kingdom.  Yesterday, today and tomorrow.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Crying Wolf

       I think most of us do this at least occasionally. Most of us raise alarms about things that are minor, exaggerate problems that aren't really as big as we make them out to be, complain about things that really don't deserve that attention. There are exceptions: people who never exaggerate or make things bigger than they are, people who never overreact to situations, worrying that they will become something other than what is real. But most of us, especially when it comes to telling our own stories, do, at least on occasion, make them out to be bigger, more dangerous, more significant, more threatening, and more in need of help and support than is completely accurate.
        It's usually pretty easy to see this in other people.  And sometimes, as a result, this need to exaggerate can really backfire.  I have one person in my life whose exaggerations border on, and sometimes slip into, outright lies.  We all know this about her, we all see it.  As a result, very few people actually respond to her alarms of personal distress.  So, she ups the story even more the next time, trying to get the responses out of all of us that she is seeking: the care, the support, the concern, the expressions of love.  Instead of the care she wants, however, she is usually met with eye rolls, with attempts to "talk her down", and sometimes with even direct confrontations, "You know that isn't true.  Here is the real story."  I can't imagine that any of that feels good to her.  And yet she continues to weave these stories that bear no semblance to the truth in her quest for support, love and care.  She needs that, she needs it deeply enough that she manipulates the truth attempting to obtain it.  But this method is not working for her and she can't seem to get out of that rut of seeking it in this way.
        As I said, it is easy to see it in other people.
        Yet, this observation, this vision into how one person's exaggerations give her exactly the opposite of what she wants, this insight into the failure of the extended stories, does not seem to change or stop those around her from continuing to exaggerate from time to time as well.  I include myself in this.  I realize that while I can see that it is not helping this woman at all, that insight does not prevent me from occasionally exaggerating and seeking attention with a built-up story of my own.
          And that causes me to think.  Why is it so compelling that we seek attention in this way?  What is it that makes some people do this when others don't seem to have that same need?
         At the base, at the heart, this crying wolf is a call for attention.  It is a call for care and support and love.  At its root, the cry of "I've had it rough!" is one that includes, "Pay attention to me and tell me I'm loved!  See the pain I've felt, acknowledge it, and tell me that it is worth your care and your comfort!"  Most of us have insecurities, and one way to act that out is to cry for attention and care in this way.  Those who truly don't have a feeling of lack of love, those who feel they are loved enough, held enough, cared for enough, undoubtedly don't have the same impulse to gain attention and care by exaggerating stories.  Of course there are other ways people ask for this affirmation and attention too. Social media feeds this at some level by inviting people to share minute details from their day, by "counting" the number of friends one has, the number of likes one receives on posts, the number of comments made.  The whole "bridezilla" thing comes from a deep need for attention and care as well.
          Some people might say, "Well, this is the human condition: one of feeling lonely, alone, vulnerable, and needy for others to love us and care for us."  Maybe.  But I think it is absolutely true that it is the condition in white Western culture, where we value individuality to the point of forgetting our dependence on one another.  We live in our isolated boxes and we interact with the world only when we choose to do so, usually when we are feeling that need for connection.  But just as we don't really feel our thirst until our body is almost dehydrated, I'm not sure that we recognize our need for connection until we are drowning in our loneliness.  Additionally, we have so many rules about what is socially acceptable that it is hard to be genuine and therefore to connect with people who really see us, let alone who then can really love us for who we are.  Which brings me back to the exaggerations.
         When we exaggerate, when we tell stories that aren't true or even aren't completely true, when we "cry wolf" we will not receive care for what is real. We might succeed in capturing attention, but that attention is not for what we really have experienced.  At some level, I wonder if that doesn't add to the sense of loneliness and isolation.  We are receiving notice, but it isn't really for us, for what is real, for what we need.  It is like drinking salty or caffeinated drinks when we are thirsty: it only deepens the thirst.
         My commitment this year is to be authentic in all things.  To laugh more, cry more, reach out more, not with stories that are exaggerated, but with the honest, "I'm needing a friend right now.  Can you be with me" words.  But I have a secondary commitment as well.  And that is to try to hear underneath the exaggerated stories that come my way and to hear the cries for care and attention that they really are.  My commitment then is to try to offer that care more to those who would seek it in this way, not so much in response to the stories, but in response to their beings.  We all need care and love.  And I plan to give a little more to supporting those around me in special need.

Gossip

                                                     Proverbs 11:9-13

James 3:1-12

               I want to say that I don’t usually believe in focusing a sermon on a particular “sin” or error of behavior.  I don’t like this for many reasons, not the least of which is that I think we all must be extremely careful about looking at the specks in other people’s eyes without dealing with the logs in our own eyes.  Pastors are not exempt from this.  I was reminded recently story teller, Willie Claflin’s, twist on the Little Red Hen story.  His version begins the same as the one we all know:  the little red hen invites friends to help her in making loaves of bread from scratch: planting the wheat, harvesting the wheat, mixing the bread, baking the bread; but at every step of the way, all her friends find reasons why they can’t help: they are too busy, too sick, too involved with other things.  Then when the four loaves of bread are finally baked, she asks who will help her to eat them and everyone is suddenly available to share in the bread she has worked so hard to make.  But unlike in the traditional story, Willie Claflin goes on to say that at that point the little red hen gobbled down all four loaves of bread herself with the words, “then I will eat them myself!”  And the result is that she makes herself very ill eating all of that bread on her own.  The friends, it turns out, were just offering to try some of her bread to be polite.  They are not sad to have missed out on the bread at all.  They do have concerns over their sick friend, however, who has eaten herself into a coma.  Willie Claflin ends his story with this line, “and the moral of the story is, if you are doing something in order to teach someone else a lesson, it is likely that the one to receive the lesson will be yourself.” 

Given that, I find that the best sermons I’ve written are the ones I write to myself and that picking specific “flaws” or errors to confront in a sermon can be counterproductive.  Still, the lectionary passages for today all focus on the sin of gossiping.  And I think, honestly, that this is something we can all work on, including myself, so I beg your indulgence as we focus on gossip today. 

               When we look at scripture, there are many, many passages that tell us that God abhors gossip.  On one bible commentary web-site, I typed in the word “gossip” as a search and was rewarded with nine pages of biblical quotes that denounce gossip and lying. Some examples:

               Ephesians 4:29: let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths.

               Proverbs 6:16-19: There are six things that the Lord hates…(and then three of those six things include..): a lying tongue, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among siblings.

               James 1:26: If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue, but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.

               Psalm 101:5: Whoever slanders his neighbor secretly I will destroy.

               The list goes on and on and on. 

               It is clear: lying about other people, gossiping by saying untruths or spreading slander is anathema to God.  This is not surprising.  What perhaps, IS, surprising, is how hard it is to refrain from gossiping.  And how absolutely damaging it is to gossip.

               Almost ten years ago now I was invited to be part of a group of pastors who were experiencing crisis.  It was a small group that gathered together for a week to share experiences and to be gifted by the support of counselors, spiritual directors, and other helpers.  Within our group there was a clergy couple who shared a story about being the victims of truly malicious gossip.  The couple had just been let go, fired, from a church that had a history of firing their pastors after just a few years.  The process for booting the pastors at this church was always the same. This was a significant congregation in a very small town.  And there was a particular powerful individual who would decide when it was time for the pastor to go.  She was powerful and when she made that decision she always went about getting rid of the pastor in the same way: she would start spreading a rumor: something that was… well, it was a lie. She would take a kernel of something that resembled truth, but would twist and turn it into a falsehood and then spread it along.  She would start the gossip and it would morph, it would expand, it would take on a life of its own.  With each telling it would become more outrageous.  And it was always something that there was no ability to disprove, no way to confronting, no way to tear down.  Once these terrible rumors would take off, the story would be forever in the minds of the parishioners until the pastors were forced to resign.  Again, this was a pattern of behavior in this church.  But the originator of the story felt justified every time in her gossiping, first because it started with a grain of truth, and second, she deeply believed it was time for the pastor to go; and she told herself that the ends, of getting rid of the pastor, justified the means – the gossip that she began. We know that of course, this is false.  The couple that I met had been destroyed by these lies.  They had not just been forced to leave their church, but had been forced to move out of the area.  And still, with social media and the increasing small-ness and connectedness of the world, were being followed and haunted by these false lies, false stories.  Their kids had suffered bullying at school, one of the parents of this couple had suffered a complete break-down in health, a sense of safety and well-being for an entire extended family were destroyed, and all of them have left church, permanently, after seeing what churches can do to people through the simple use of gossip.

               The church also did not escape the damage of the gossip. Some people left the congregation, and the faith, entirely. But even those who stayed were damaged. Everyone knew the pattern.  And everyone knew who started the lies.  They also knew that if they went against the person who instigated the gossip, that they risked being the next to be torn down by this woman.  They all participated in the evil of the gossip because they knew to stand up against it meant they would become the next victims of it.  An entire community became entrenched in this evil behavior, and could not see their way out.

               I wish this story were unique, but it isn’t.  I know too many pastors who have gone through similar nightmares that all started because of gossip.  And as you know, this is not just limited to people in my profession.  It happens in our schools, it happens in all of our places of work. 

               Just this week I learned about this happening at a local school board situation.  Again, lies were put forth about someone who has been incredibly active but who was trying to become more involved in a position of greater authority. The lies were presented in a way that there was no forum for the person attacked to defend herself, to set the record straight or even to present a different opinion.  But those lies determined the decisions of the committee, to the huge detriment of the board who will miss out on the amazing energy and talents of the individual who was slandered.

We see this in our politics.  We’ve come to a place in our country where we no longer know what to believe, what is true.  We assume that those who disagree with us are lying or are misinformed by lies.  And those who disagree with us assume that the news that we read is false.  Slander, and the quick choice to lie when we are in a tough spot, when we are caught, when we are confronted with something we don’t want to admit, has muddied the waters so much, has become so rampant, that we just no longer know what to believe, who to believe.  It is separating us from our brothers and sisters within our own families, let alone within our communities, and in the larger world.

        While gossiping gives us something to discuss, while it may feel good to be on the “inside” of a story about someone else, while being able to separate the world into “us” and “them” may give us a sense of security and power in the world, there is a good reason why the Bible is so extremely hard on gossip.  It is evil.  It is harmful.  Any “gain” for one’s self made through the use of lying, gossiping and slander does not only harm the one we attack, it harms everyone touched by the gossip.        

           Frankly, our gossip reflects more on ourselves than on those about whom we are gossiping anyway.  And if we were actually aware of how true that is, we probably would refrain from gossip.  Some examples: someone I knew kept saying about other people, “that person is so power hungry.”  “That person is all about getting power.”  And finally, “it all comes down to power you know.”  And it was very clear that actually, it was all about power FOR HIM and that is why he was so focused on that being the case when it came to other people.  We see this regularly.  When someone repeatedly focuses on a particular “problem” with those around them, often that reflects back on who the speaker really is, where his or her focus lies, what really matters most to that person.

               I’ve shared with you that in one early episode of Joan of Arcadia, Joan was trying hard to get in with the “popular” crowd.  And the popular kids basically told her that if she wanted to be one of them, she needed to find out who her friend, Grace, “likes”.  In order to do this, Joan sidled up to Grace and talked to her about how much Joan herself had this crush on one of the other guys at school.  She didn’t really have a crush on the guy, didn’t even know who the guy is, he was just a name of someone that was supposedly popular.  Grace didn’t give anything away.  The next day, people were giving Joan a hard time for having a crush on the guy she mentioned to Grace.  Joan assumed Grace has been gossiping about her and went after Grace, telling her to stay out of her love life.  Grace responded, “I don’t care about your love life and haven’t talked to anybody!  However, it is clear that you have been talking about ME and trying to find out about MY love life so you can share it with your friends!  YOU are the one gossiping here.”  Grace understood that Joan’s accusation said more about Joan than about Grace.

             I'm certain we can all think of people we know who attack others through gossip, by accusing the other of being a gossip.  Most of us see through this, though it is clear that it is difficult for the one gossiping to see it in themself. 

               Some of the Biblical passages tell us to not even associate with those who lie and slander and gossip, and this too is for good reason.  As I mentioned in my first story, an entire community became caught in the web of slander and gossip that one individual perpetuated.  If those in the community had stepped away, or better, confronted it the first time it happened, it never would have grown to the repeating evil that it has become.  But now, in associating with the gossiper, the tangled webs of lies and gossip have become so entrenched that no one knows how to step out.

               It is not easy to step out or to confront someone who is gossiping or lying and tell them that they have it wrong.  But it is necessary.  I remember a situation I was in, in which someone was badmouthing me but made the mistake of doing it in an email to several other people.  I will always be extremely grateful to the person who responded to the email by INCLUDING me in that response and inviting my answer so that I could see the lies, could see the gossip, could see the slander and could address it directly.  The decision my friend made to include me in the email was not an easy one.  It could have ended his friendship with the originator of the email.  But he made that choice, which led to the truth telling, and eventually healing of all involved in the communications.

               There is another side to all of this.  I read an article a while ago that focused very specifically on the fact that women are discouraged from sharing with other women about predatorial men.  According to this article, women who share their experience of being victims are often accused of being gossips, and the social pressure to avoid being labelled as a gossip can prevent them from telling their stories.  Their silence, in turn, has prevented other women from knowing about unsafe men and has led to other women therefore being victims as well.  While I realize there is a gender bias here, this would apply to people of all genders and situations.  The author, Theo Wildcroft, wrote, “A teacher of mine once said that gossip had to be made a sin because it’s a social survival mechanism for the almost powerless. For good or evil, right or wrong, true or false, gossip is the glue that kept traditional communities together, an early warning system and in extremis, call for sanction. Of course it’s traditionally our sin, a woman’s sin.”  But what the author is confronting is a social stigma against the sharing (which becomes labelled “gossip”) of our feelings and experiences.  That is very different from what the bible is confronting when it talks about lies, slander and gossip.  The base difference is truth. What the bible is confronting is the passing on of lies. But there is another difference as well.  Discussing one’s experience is very different than talking about others with condemning words. “I felt x because this happened.  I experienced a because b took place.” These are important experiences to share.  “That person is a blankety blank” or “that person did x” when it is a lie, is not acceptable, has no real experience connected to it, is simply name calling, it is childish and it is wrong.

               The bottom line: God condemns gossiping, lying, slandering.  And that can be hard: hard to follow, hard to practice, hard to change within ourselves.  But it is essential, not only for others but for ourselves as well, that we strive to refrain from gossip, from slander, and from lying.  We are more centered and whole when we speak from our own experience rather speaking words that attack others. No ends justify a means of lying and condemning others with hateful, hurtful behavior that is damaging to our very souls.  It is hard to speak truth all the time, but it is a goal worth striving for, especially when the alternative choice is so harmful.  Gossip is not okay.  Lying is not okay.  AND, the more we speak truth, the easier it is to recognize it spoken by others too.  Thanks be to God.