Speaking the Truth in Love, and Doing It

Last month’s 76th triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church involved lots and lots of speaking. Most days, protesters stood outside the Anaheim Convention Center – a tag team of protesters: the man with the really loud voice; the man and the woman with big straw hats; the tired looking little man in a red cap. They yelled at bishops and deputies as we came and went. Their handmade signs spoke loudly, too, mostly about the Episcopal Church and human sexuality. One sign read, “Gene Robinson – Minister of Satan,” referring to the duly elected and openly gay bishop of New Hampshire; another, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing”; a third, my favorite, proclaimed us Episcopalians “Sin Addicted Atheists and Imposters.”

Inside the Convention Center, bishops, clergy, and lay folk like me got the chance to speak, often in one or two minute set pieces during legislative sessions strictly controlled by parliamentary procedures. Once, however, a deputy from an unhappy diocese back east teetering on the brink of leaving the Episcopal Church – mostly over issues of human sexuality – rushed out of the House of Deputies, striking her sandals together as she went, shaking the dust off her feet in protest. Ironically enough, that deputy seemed to think we were voting on removing references to “the blessed Virgin Mary” from some prayers, when, in fact, the committee report under consideration urged us to concur with the House of Bishops in restoring such traditional language alongside the new phrases “Mary of Nazareth” and “God-bearer” (Report #16 on Resolution A099).

Today’s lesson from Ephesians implores us to “speak the truth in love” (4:15). In its original context, this injunction aims at unity, community, and maturity: one body and one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God above, through, and in all (4-6); doing the truth, not merely speaking the truth, by “lead[ing] a life worthy of [our] calling” to be the body of Christ (1, 12); speaking the truth in love so that we might “grow up in every way” into “the full stature of Christ” (15, 13). But the Apostle’s words have frequently been taken to justify a certain kind of preaching about sin – always someone else’s sin – speaking to another person’s supposed untruth from a place of moral superiority, something like: “I’m going to tell you what’s true for you, now listen up!” In Anaheim, I heard such speaking not only in the protester’s “Sin Addicted…” sign, but also in the way the progressive majority – my side of most debates – sometimes patronized the remaining conservatives in our church. Speaking the truth? In love? What does that mean? What might it sound like in our personal lives and in the life of the church?

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Our first lesson this morning, from 2 Samuel, offers a model of speaking the truth in love. It continues the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah begun last Sunday. Remember? King David sees, lusts after, and has sex with Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, a foreigner, but one of David’s ablest soldiers. To conceal his adultery (and Bathsheba’s pregnancy), David tries to coax Uriah back from the battlefield to sleep with his wife. The foreigner refuses out of loyalty to Israelite vows of sexual abstinence during active military service. David then conspires to have Uriah abandoned by the Israelite army at the front of the battle to be killed by the enemy. Today’s reading picks up with David taking Bathsheba to be his own wife, after the obligatory period of mourning for Uriah (2 Samuel 11:26-27).

Nathan the prophet steps forward to speak God’s truth to King David’s political power and moral failure. But how indirectly he speaks. Nathan tells a story, a parable, and enlists David in an act of self-judgment (12:1-6). Two men lived in a certain city – a rich man who had everything he could possibly need or want and a poor man who possessed nothing but one beloved ewe lamb. When a traveler arrived, the rich man felt himself entitled to take the poor man’s lamb, slaughter it, and serve it to his guest, instead of reaching into his own abundant flocks. David becomes enraged at the behavior of the rich man, swearing he should be put to death and the poor man’s loss restored fourfold. Then and only then does Nathan the prophet speak to David the king directly, “You are the man!” (7) He goes on to describe the trouble that will arise for David from within his own house because of the king’s violation of the moral foundations of human community.

At first, although he gets caught up with Nathan’s story, David responds to the rich man exactly as he acted toward Uriah and Bathsheba – powerful, superior, entitled to judge and determine the lives of other people. At first, David hears Nathan speaking, but does not hear Nathan speaking to him, to David. When the king does finally listen himself and the story of his relations with Bathsheba and Uriah into Nathan’s story of the poor man and his lamb, David stops judging others and accepts responsibility for himself: “I have sinned against the Lord” (13). Having heard, really heard, Nathan’s parable, tradition tells us, David composed Psalm 51, the great Hebrew hymn of repentance which we chanted together this morning: “Have mercy on me, O God;…Wash me through and through from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me” (1-3).

David confirms the truth Nathan spoke by making it his story and doing something about it, which suggests we cannot fully know we have spoken the truth in love until we hear the response of the other person. So much for our moral superiority! And what a different understanding here of sin than the one Christians often espouse. By his own admission, the root of David’s sin lies in failing to show pity (2 Samuel 12”6). He simply did not consider Uriah or Bathsheba to possess the same dignity and importance he enjoyed. Rich, powerful David felt entitled to take as his own what little the dependent and poor have. David preyed on Bathsheba and Uriah’s vulnerabilities, what they loved the most, when they had the least control, and where they had the most to lose.

Lest we fail to hear our own stories in the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah, I offer a re-telling of Nathan’s parable.

“There were two men in a certain American city, one native born and fluent in English, with excellent health care coverage and easy access to the protections of the legal system; the other a recent immigrant with poor English, no health insurance for himself and his daughters and at the mercy of a daunting criminal justice system. In his prosperity, however unintentionally, the first man preyed on the vulnerabilities of the second man, took his ewe lamb and offered it to others like himself. You, Mark, are the man!” Other re-tellings of the same story might begin: “There were two women in a long-term, but dysfunctional, intimate relationship….” “There were two people, one able-bodied, the other in a wheelchair….” “There were human beings and animals (or plants or water or air) on a certain planet….” Each re-telling would end the same way: “You are the woman!” “You are the person!” “You are the human being!”

At its General Convention, The Episcopal Church was most unified when we told our own story honestly and non-defensively, when we spoke about issues we as a community could act upon. Not uniformity or complete agreement, but mature diversity within a common sense of mission. We came close to speaking the truth in love, I believe, when we simultaneously re-affirmed The Episcopal Church’s participation to the fullest extent possible in the many instruments and networks of the worldwide Anglican Communion and recognized that God has called and may continue to call gays and lesbians to any and all ordained ministries in this church (Resolution D025). We came close to speaking the truth in love, I believe, when we took the small, but momentous, step of collecting and developing theological and liturgical resources for the blessing of same sex unions and of devising an open process for conducting such work (Resolution C056). On the other hand, Episcopalians spoke past each other when the General Convention debated a whole series of public policy resolutions telling others what to do: President Obama, the Israelis and the Palestinians, even the Queen of England (for example, D039, B027, C059). While I agreed with the substance of many of those resolutions, I sensed the conservative diocese seated right next to us from progressive Olympia grow more and more disheartened and alienated by these highly political measures, measures that did not require us to do anything more than speak our purported moral superiority. I may speak my own story before others, but what they do with my story is part of their story and is theirs to speak.

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Before speaking the truth Jesus did the truth, according to this morning’s gospel; he enacted a living parable in the feeding of the 5,000 (John 6:22-35). And Jesus speaks words only because the crowd failed to hear Jesus speaking to them through his actions. The crowd ate their fill of the loaves and wanted more for themselves the next day. They missed the sign, missed the true bread come down from heaven to give life to the world. Instead of imitating and propagating Jesus’ ability to coax generous hospitality and abundant community from ordinary people, the crowd adopts a stance of superiority toward Jesus and judges him, demanding a sign, a miracle, that might convince them to believe. But the real miracle already stands right in front of them: God telling the story of God’s love for us all, God’s Word made flesh, God’s speaking made bread. To demand any other sign simply distances us from Jesus’ story, prolongs our easy, if eloquent, speaking about Jesus’ story and delays our enacting it in friendships, families, workplaces, churches, and governments.

Amid all the speaking at General Convention, we paused each day around noon for Eucharist, several thousand of us Episcopalians. We heard Jesus’ words about his body and blood in Spanish and French, as well as English. We employed all manner of liturgical resources – spoken and sung. Three times, Katherine our presiding bishop proclaimed God’s Word and blessed, broke, and gave us bread. For me, Wednesday July 15th’s “paperless” Eucharist spoke most powerfully. Although we abstained that day from all printed worship aids in order to consume fewer of the poor earth’s resources, the effect was to release the assembly in worship from the tyranny of reading the printed word and to enact our remembering and proclaiming of Christ with more wide open eyes and ears and hands. But that Wednesday, as at every General Convention Eucharist, we managed to eat of the loaves and miss the sign of bread from heaven. After gathering, several thousand of us, around many small tables set for eight people, hearing the spoken word, praying, and offering our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving at those intimate tables, when it came time to share bread and wine, Christ’s body and blood, we all stepped away from the tables with their seven other human faces, literally turned our backs on each other, and made our individual journeys to one of the many communion stations scattered around the outer reaches of the cavernous hall.

With that jarring image in mind, I offer a final retelling of Nathan’s parable, one that turns the original inside out just as surely as Jesus emptied and filled anew the manna his Hebrew ancestors ate in the wilderness.

“There was a community of people in a certain city, old and young, women and men, gay and straight, prosperous and indigent. They spoke the truth by doing the truth in love. They refused to prey on one another’s vulnerabilities, but, instead, worked to heal each other’s wounds. They discovered the real presence of the risen Christ in their gathering, their telling the story, their sharing the meal, and their sending into the world in mission. Through its very humanity, this community served as a sign of God’s love story for all human communities, all people. We are the community!”

May we become what we already are.

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