"What's the Good Word?"
Proverbs 13:2-3; 15:23; 16:13,24; 17:28; 18:21
A strong, self-reliant ranch owner who didn’t outwardly express his emotions, had to rush his wife to the hospital. She had a ruptured appendix. The operation was successful, but the woman’s condition deteriorated. Despite massive antibiotics and intensive care, she continued to lose strength. The doctors were puzzled because by all medical standards she should have been recovering.
The doctors were finally convinced of the reason for her not getting well. She wasn’t trying to get well. The surgeon, a family friend, went to her and talked to her about it. During the conversation he said to her, “I’d think you would want to be strong for John.”
She replied, weakly, “John is so strong, he doesn’t need anybody.”
When the surgeon told the husband what she had said, he immediately went into his wife’s room, took her hand and said, “You’ve got to get well!”
Without opening her eyes, she asked, “Why?”
He said, “Because I need you.”
The nurse, who happened to be in the room monitoring her vital signs, noticed an immediate change in her pulse and blood pressure. The wife opened her eyes, looked at her husband, and said, “John, that’s the first time you’ve ever said anything like that to me.”
Two days later she was home. The doctor, commenting on the case said it wasn’t the antibiotics, but the husband’s words that made the difference between life and death for her.
We too often underestimate the power of a good word. When a good word is spoken, isn’t it interesting how it stands out, like an oasis in the middle of the driest desert. Like the balm of healing upon the deepest of wounds. The opposite is also true: poorly chosen words can only make a dry life feel more barren, or a wound more deep and unhealable.
Joyce Landorf wrote about such words in her book, Irregular People:
There are the irregular parents who never attended any of their daughter’s swim meets while she was in competition. They were blind to the fact that she broke all the swimming records in her events her first year of high school.
Later, as a senior, she became the secretary of both her class and the student body; but at no time would either parent acknowledge her accomplishments.
She said, looking back, “I tried so hard to make my parents see that I was good.” Then, when she won the title of Homecoming Queen her senior year, she recalled thinking, “Now they’ll be proud of me!” But, again, out of blindness, her mother’s only caustic comment was, “I guess it pays to be cheap with the boys.”
Receiving no affirmation or approval from her parents wreaked havoc in this young girl’s heart. She eventually, years later, worked through this. But as a teenager, she couldn’t understand the blindness of her irregular parents and the pain of their words. (pg. 30)
Just as an underline, hear the words of the poem, “Twas Only a Word”:
‘Twas only a word, a careless word,
But it smote the heart of one who heard
Like a fierce, relentless blow;
The day seemed overcast with gloom,
The sweetest songs seemed out of tune;
The fires of hope burned low.
‘Twas only a word, a loving word,
But a weary, sorrowing heart was stirred,
And life took a brighter hue;
And Faith, triumphant, pruned her wing
Discouraged souls began to sing,
And hope revived anew.
Only a word, and yet what power
It holds to better or to mar
The lives of those who hear.
What power for good--for evil too!
Oh, may our words be good and true,
And spoken in God’s fear.
“The right word, at the right time--beautiful!” states the second half of Proverbs 15:23. Yet, sometimes the right word at the right time is no word at all. Especially when people are hurting. One of the hardest things is knowing what to say to someone who has just suffered a tragedy. We want to offer some kind of comfort so badly, and then end up saying something we wish we wouldn’t have. It’s like taking a big mouthful of really hot coffee; whatever you do next is wrong.
Maybe you read the book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People. It came out maybe 30 years ago. The author, Rabbi Harold Kushner was working through his feelings about his son’s death as a result of progeria, or rapid aging disease. One of the things he struggled with most was the harm done by well-meaning people who felt a compulsion to say something meaningful. But they ended up making him feel worse. He gave a couple of examples from his own experience, but one from a friends experience stands out in my memory.
Rabbi Kushner’s friends had had a child killed when the little boy ran out between two parked cars to chase a ball. A driver didn’t see the boy run out in the street, hit him, killing him instantly.
A neighbor came over to visit the family in the first days after the son’s death. The couple was struggling with how God was a part of this tragedy. The neighbor said, “Maybe God is trying to teach you a lesson that you need to keep a closer watch on your kids.” If someone would have said that to me, I would have been severely tempted to punch them in the mouth. Man or woman, it wouldn’t have mattered at that moment. (But that’s the anger sermon from last week.) Instead the mourning couple just quietly got up and asked their neighbor to leave.
As Christians, we feel we just have to say something to hurting people. We may think that we would be inadequate witnesses if we didn’t say something. But it’s often the case that wisdom is on the side of the exact opposite.
We can speak just as loudly and profoundly through our presence with hurting friends and family. And simply listening to them. It may be that what’s important is not what we say, but what they have to say. We need to learn from one of the greatest sufferers in the Bible, Job. He said to his so-called comforters:
O that you would be completely silent
And that it would become your wisdom! (Job 13:5)
A good word is, at times, a silent word.
A good word, like that oasis in the desert, can make astounding changes in peoples lives. When it’s the right moment to say something, good words are like a deep, healing massage that penetrates seemingly to the bones, bringing new life to a tired, weary, and dragging frame.
One day Pooh Bear is about to go for a walk in the Hundred Acre Wood. It’s about 11:30 in the morning. It’s a fine time to go calling--just before lunch. Pooh sets out across the stream, stepping on the stones. When he gets right in the middle of the stream, he sits down on a warm stone and thinks about which friend would be the best to call on. He said to himself, “I think I’ll go see Tigger.” No, he dismisses that. Then he says, “Owl!” Then, “No, Owl uses big words, hard-to-understand words.” At last he brightens up. “I know! I think I’ll go see Rabbit. I like Rabbit. Rabbit uses encouraging words like, ‘How’s about lunch?’ and ‘Help yourself to some more, Pooh!’ Yes, I think I’ll go see Rabbit.”
Or in a more serious vein there is the story of a 16 year old boy who was arrested for stealing a car. He was a previous offender. He was rebellious, and outwardly very hard. All attempts to get through to him had failed. In the trial, the prosecuting attorney was harsh and judgmental, attempting to break the boy down. The attorney pointed out to the jury and others that the boy was incorrigible, that he had caused trouble numerous times before, that he should be put behind bars to protect others.
The judge also had some harsh words for the boy, trying to break the boy’s spirit. When the judge was through, the boy startled everyone in the courtroom by saying to the judge, “I’m not afraid of you.”
There was another man in the courtroom. Mr. Weston ran a farm for delinquent boys. The judge turned to Mr. Weston and said, “I feel that this boy is hopeless and there’s no need sending him to your farm. We’ll have to send him to jail.” Mr. Weston got up and said, “Your honor, I don’t feel the boy is hopeless at all. I feel that beneath that rough, bluff exterior he is very frightened and confused. I happen to know that he has never had a father’s love, and has never had a chance to make anything of himself. I would like to give him that chance.”
The only sound in the courtroom was the sound of the boy breaking down and crying. As it turned out, at that moment, Mr. Weston’s statement, at that particular time in the boy’s life, was the turning point toward a new life. A full half-hour of harsh, judgmental condemnation had only driven the boy deeper into himself. One statement--non-judgmental, compassionate--had released within the boy the fresh waters of healing and hope.
Notice the adjectives in these proverbs that are used to describe a good word. Good words bring about:
the enjoyment of good
joy
delight
favor
love
sweetness, like honeycomb
healing
prudence
Who wouldn’t want to sit at this table of good words and enjoy this bill of fare they provide? Who wouldn’t want to hear, and see, and taste a good word that sinks deeply into parched souls and bring healing?
As the poem says:
Oh, that my tongue might so possess
The accent of His tenderness
That every word I breathe should bless.
For those who mourn, a word of cheer;
A word of hope for those who fear;
And love to all people, far or near.
Oh, that it might be said of me,
“Surely thy speech betrayeth thee
As a friend of Christ of Galilee!”
Monday, July 25, 2011
Monday, July 18, 2011
"Wide Nostrils and Long Noses"
"Wide Nostrils and Long Noses"
Assorted Proverbs
The coach of a Little League team called one of his players over to him and said he would like to explain some of the principles of sportsmanship. “We don’t believe in temper tantrums, screaming at the umpires, using bad language, or sulking when we lose. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The boy nodded, yes.
“All right, then,” said the coach. “Do you think you can explain it to your mother jumping around over there in the stands?”
Seth Grant of Hamilton, Ohio, was driving along in his car when it caught fire. He happened to have a six pack of pepsi in his car and used it to extinguish the blaze. Surprisingly, the car started up again, but two miles down the road it died, and he couldn’t get it started again. So infuriated at his car, he took out a rifle from the trunk and opened fire on his car. He was then arrested for using a firearm on a public road. Asked why he did it, Grant simply said, “I guess I just got mad.”
Thomas Jefferson is credited with first saying, “When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, count to a hundred.” Mark Twain changed that saying a bit when he said, “When angry, count to ten; when very angry, swear.”
Anger and how we handle it is one of those basic problems of being human. It’s been with us since the Garden of Eden. When Cain’s offering was given the thumbs down by God and brother Abel got the thumbs up for his offering, the story teller says that, “Cain lost his temper and went into a sulk.”
God’s reply to Cain was a warning about anger: “Why this tantrum? Why this sulking?...Sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it” (Genesis 4:5-7).
So anger first shows up with Cain. But what’s interesting to me about this story is that anger isn’t how it started. It started out as petty jealousy. The anger fueled the jealousy. It seems that anger isn’t something unto itself. Leo Madow, in his book, Anger, wrote, “Anger is energy. It cannot be destroyed. It has to be converted.”
I think he’s right. Anger is an energy, that, mixed with other negative qualities (like jealousy in Cain’s case) give force and power and a kind of self-substantiation to those negative qualities.
Here’s one way I was thinking about it. Think of a fire. If there was a fire in one of the rooms of your home, you can close the door, keep the oxygen supply to the fire low, so it stays contained. The fire--some negative human quality--may be burning in your life, but it’s somewhat contained and controlled if kept closed in. But anger is like oxygen. You open the door and let the oxygen in, and the blaze flares up suddenly and terrifyingly. Quickly, things get out of control. People get hurt. Things get destroyed.
Do you remember the shooting at the McDonald’s in San Diego a few years ago. A man opened fire inside the restaurant with an automatic gun in each hand. He killed everyone in the McDonald’s, over twenty people, men, women, and children. Finally a police marksman took down the shooter. Why did the man kill so many people in a seemingly random act of violence? When interviewed later, his wife and neighbors said, “He was always angry.” His wife said it probably went back to the time when his mother abandoned him as a child. Every sense of rejection became fed by the energy of anger until it exploded in fury. So it wasn’t just anger; it started with rejection. The rejection was fed by the energy of anger. Everything went bad when the two were mixed.
Many of the characters in the Bible showed anger for some reason or another, at some time in their lives. Anger seems to be part of the human fabric, and the Bible is not shy at describing angry humanity. Jonah shakes his fist at God because God is so gracious to the repentant people in Ninevah.
King Saul, the first King of Israel, was given to fits of temper. Young David was brought in to calm the king with some guitar music. Even so, the music wasn’t enough. Saul’s jealousy and paranoia, fueled by the energy of anger caused him to try and pin David to the wall with a spear.
Jacob blew up at Rachel because she couldn’t have children. His fear that he wouldn’t have a male heir, fueled by the oxygen of his anger, blew his rage out of control.
In the first chapter of the book of Esther, King Ahasuerus summoned Queen Vashti. She refused to come to him and dance for him and his drunken friends. He became afraid that her disobedience would set an example to all the other women about disrespect. Anger fueled his fear and sense of disrespect, so he had her thrown out of the palace to beg, and another queen was chosen to take her place.
But, there are other times when anger seems to be approved of in the Bible. Moses, who descends from the mountain with the Ten Commandments in hand, discovers Aaron and the people have built a golden calf and are worshipping it. He gets furious, and in his rage, breaks the 10 Commandment stones into pieces.
And speaking of pieces, probably one of the most striking--and certainly one of the most blood-chilling--examples of human anger in the Bible involved Samuel the prophet. Apparently, in the Lord’s service, Samuel had captured Agag, the King of the Amalekites. There, before the Lord and everyone, Samuel, in a fit of “holy” anger, chopped Agag to pieces.
Jesus, who gets upset when he sees the merchants turning the temple into religious marketplace, allows anger to fuel him as he throws everyone out of the temple. At another time he gets angry at people’s hardness and lack of grace when he healed a man with a withered hand (Mark 3:5).
So, there’s some tension in the Bible concerning the place and acceptability of anger. As we browse through the verses of wisdom read earlier from Proverbs, it doesn’t take us long to understand that anger, wrath, hasty words, and hot tempers are energies we need to keep under control or avoid.
A couple of these proverbs advise us to be slow in our anger. This is an interesting term in the Hebrew language and culture. For the ancient Hebrews, it was felt that the seat and controller of hot emotions, especially anger, was the nose or nostrils. When you picture someone getting angry, you think of someone’s nostrils wide and blaring. Thus, in Hebrew, to be angry, literally means to be of wide nostrils.
In cartoons, when one of the characters is angry, often smoke is picture coming out their nose or ears. For the Hebrew people, to be quick-tempered or angry literally meant to be short of nose, or wide-nostrilled. And the opposite, to be slow to anger meant literally to be long of nose. A modern day equivalent term might be, “short fuse” and “long fuse.”
Just look at the imagery that’s used to describe the difference between a short fused, short nosed, angry person, and a long fused, long-nosed, non-angry person. An angry person is described in these proverbs as people who stockpile stupidity, have temper-fire, fight, muscle their way through life, misuse political power, have a leak in the dam that would soon burst, have sharp tongues, and produce only heat.
On the opposite side, people not fueled by anger are described as deeply understanding, gentle in their response, keeping the peace, do things in moderation, have self-control, stop the leaks, say little, remain calm, hold their tongue, forgive and forget, and keep their cool.
These proverbs about controlling anger are so wise and so obvious. Yet they are apparently also so hard to follow because the intensity of the emotional fuel. These images help us picture the severity of when the fuel of anger gets the best of us. Like the image of anger as a small crack in the dam. If not taken care of, and kept in check, the whole dam breaks and there is a great catastrophe.
I’m guessing we all have some image of what we would be like if we allowed our anger to flow freely, or have someone else’s anger flow freely upon us.
There’s the story told of a traveler who got on a train in New York City. Immediately he went to the porter and said, “Look, I want to get off in Washington, D.C. Once I’m asleep, it’s very difficult for me to wake up. Here is five dollars. When I’m waking up, I have a short fuse; so, please, no matter what I say, don’t be offended. Just wake me up and put me off the train in Washington.”
Hours later, he awakened as the train pulled into the station at Richmond, Virginia, 100 miles past Washington. The man was furious. He found the porter and ripped him up one side and down the other for his incompetence. “What happened,” the conductor asked the porter. “I’ve never seen anyone that angry.”
To which the porter replied, “That’s nothing. You should have seen the fellow I put off at Washington.”
For some, anger seems to over-ride everything else. Nothing else matters. Anger has a way of taking over, and until it’s dealt with, all else takes a back seat. Work becomes less productive. Relationships are treated curtly and mechanically. Whatever has made us angry demands our undivided attention, and usually gets it.
Let’s take a look at several of these proverbs about anger, and combine what they teach with some psychological truths about why we get angry. Proverbs 15:1 states,
A gentle response defuses anger;
But a sharp tongue kindles a temper-fire.
One of the things that happens when we add the oxygen of anger to some fire in our lives, the fire explodes and others get burned. Anger seeks to pass your pain on to others. It’s the old “kick the dog” syndrome. You have a bad day at work; you come home, let anger have its way, and you yell at your spouse; he or she passes the pain of being yelled at on to the kids and punishes them; the kids let anger have its way, and they kick the dog. The dog bites the cat. The cat wonders, “What did I do?”
Some pain, some grievance, some injustice is done. The energy of anger is given some air, and all of a sudden you feel like you have to make someone pay. Only, the anger hides the fact that it’s your pain and emotional deficits you are making someone else pay for. Your anger only points out your own pain. Your own pain only points out your own emotional deficits. Anger brings all that to the surface, and you and everyone else around you gets a good look at it. Then, instead of dealing with that pain and deficit to become a better person, you only, through anger, attempt to pass it around.
Proverbs 17:14 is a similar kind of wise saying.
The start of a quarrel is like a leak in a dam;
so stop it before it bursts.
This proverb is the Cain and Abel story. A simple jealousy; what started out as a simple quarrel, was just a leak in the dam. How easy it would have been to repair the breach at that point. But anger was allowed to act as a jackhammer, and what was a little crack turned out to be a bursting dam.
What I think this proverb is saying is that anger can and should serve as a signal. Anger, like a leak, is a sign that some deeper threat needs attention. Erik Erikson, one of the world’s foremost psychologists, who studied how we human beings develop emotionally, spent some time studying anger. Particularly he tried to figure out how anger effects the other parts of our emotional development. What he discovered was that not learning to handle anger properly is caused by not knowing how to handle other important emotions, particularly kindness, empathy, and affection.
In other words, the writers of the proverbs knew something before Erikson knew it: that anger is a sign and signal that other, deeper matters need our attention. If you have an anger problem, the crack in the dam may be pointing to the areas of kindness, empathy and affection. Kindness has to do with how you treat others with respect and grace. Empathy has to do with understanding and connecting with the feelings of another person. Affection has to do with how you express love. If you are having trouble in one of those three areas, chances are good that you will also allow anger to fuel your inadequacies, poisoning your relationships. Anger doesn’t have to do with someone else; someone else is not making you angry. The anger is pointing to a crack in your dam. Take care of it, before the crack becomes a break and the break becomes a disaster. And one disaster doesn’t become one disaster after another.
Then there’s Proverbs 14:29,
Slowness to anger makes for deep understanding;
A quick-tempered person stockpiles stupidity.
A couple of the other proverbs have this theme, so it must be an important one. The theme has to do with the fact that anger just doesn’t affect the person or the immediate situation. Anger just seems to layer stupidity (stupid actions, stupid words) upon stupidity. For some reason it’s hard to learn from our anger. We have this sense of our noble self that everyone is supposed to be noticing and worshipping. You’d think the consequences of our anger would teach us humility. Instead, anger fuels this sense that you are entitled to receive instant respect from others, and they should bow to your angry superiority. Instead, that sense of entitlement only leads you into deeper levels of stupidity and embarrassment.
I used to read Parents Magazine when my kids were growing up. I figured I needed all the help I could get. There was an article in one issue in which parents wrote in their most humiliating moments.
One father wrote in about his moment. He was driving home from the office somewhat earlier than usual. He came to a stop light with one other car in front of him. A sign with large letters designated the car in front of him as a student driver.
The light changed green, but the drivers education car was slow in responding. It lurched forward a few feet, then stopped. Again it lurched, and again it stalled. The young woman driver appeared to be confused. The man in the car behind wanted that inept student to get out of the way. He became furious with each stall out, and two green lights come and gone. He laid on the horn. He flipped off the driver, and motioned furiously for her to get out of his way.
The instructor was calmly giving her instructions, as the man in the car behind finally passed the drivers ed. car, screaming with a red face through his open window as he went by. And as he went by, his eyes met the poor girls eyes, full of tears, as she was trying to pull aside and let him by. They were the eyes and face of his own daughter.
When you feel that kind of entitlement, that the world owes you something, that everyone needs to get out of your way because of your sense of self-importance, and you mix in the charged air of anger, look out; stupidity is on the way. The fire is about to explode on you. And so is pain and a total loss of respect, which is what you thought you were entitled to in the first place. Anger takes all that way.
There is so much I could say about anger. There is so much in the Proverbs about anger. And all of those proverbs highlight the fact that we humans are infectious. We are carriers of all kinds of emotions that can be flamed by long noses or wide nostrils.
The other truth of all these proverbs is that anger is a choice. We choose to be of wide nostrils or of long noses. We don’t have to get angry; we don’t have to open our mouths; we don’t have to display our stupidity; but we do. It’s a choice. We can choose to be understanding, peace keepers, moderate, self-controlled, leak fixers, calm, and cool. Or, we can choose...
Assorted Proverbs
The coach of a Little League team called one of his players over to him and said he would like to explain some of the principles of sportsmanship. “We don’t believe in temper tantrums, screaming at the umpires, using bad language, or sulking when we lose. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The boy nodded, yes.
“All right, then,” said the coach. “Do you think you can explain it to your mother jumping around over there in the stands?”
Seth Grant of Hamilton, Ohio, was driving along in his car when it caught fire. He happened to have a six pack of pepsi in his car and used it to extinguish the blaze. Surprisingly, the car started up again, but two miles down the road it died, and he couldn’t get it started again. So infuriated at his car, he took out a rifle from the trunk and opened fire on his car. He was then arrested for using a firearm on a public road. Asked why he did it, Grant simply said, “I guess I just got mad.”
Thomas Jefferson is credited with first saying, “When angry, count to ten before you speak; if very angry, count to a hundred.” Mark Twain changed that saying a bit when he said, “When angry, count to ten; when very angry, swear.”
Anger and how we handle it is one of those basic problems of being human. It’s been with us since the Garden of Eden. When Cain’s offering was given the thumbs down by God and brother Abel got the thumbs up for his offering, the story teller says that, “Cain lost his temper and went into a sulk.”
God’s reply to Cain was a warning about anger: “Why this tantrum? Why this sulking?...Sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it” (Genesis 4:5-7).
So anger first shows up with Cain. But what’s interesting to me about this story is that anger isn’t how it started. It started out as petty jealousy. The anger fueled the jealousy. It seems that anger isn’t something unto itself. Leo Madow, in his book, Anger, wrote, “Anger is energy. It cannot be destroyed. It has to be converted.”
I think he’s right. Anger is an energy, that, mixed with other negative qualities (like jealousy in Cain’s case) give force and power and a kind of self-substantiation to those negative qualities.
Here’s one way I was thinking about it. Think of a fire. If there was a fire in one of the rooms of your home, you can close the door, keep the oxygen supply to the fire low, so it stays contained. The fire--some negative human quality--may be burning in your life, but it’s somewhat contained and controlled if kept closed in. But anger is like oxygen. You open the door and let the oxygen in, and the blaze flares up suddenly and terrifyingly. Quickly, things get out of control. People get hurt. Things get destroyed.
Do you remember the shooting at the McDonald’s in San Diego a few years ago. A man opened fire inside the restaurant with an automatic gun in each hand. He killed everyone in the McDonald’s, over twenty people, men, women, and children. Finally a police marksman took down the shooter. Why did the man kill so many people in a seemingly random act of violence? When interviewed later, his wife and neighbors said, “He was always angry.” His wife said it probably went back to the time when his mother abandoned him as a child. Every sense of rejection became fed by the energy of anger until it exploded in fury. So it wasn’t just anger; it started with rejection. The rejection was fed by the energy of anger. Everything went bad when the two were mixed.
Many of the characters in the Bible showed anger for some reason or another, at some time in their lives. Anger seems to be part of the human fabric, and the Bible is not shy at describing angry humanity. Jonah shakes his fist at God because God is so gracious to the repentant people in Ninevah.
King Saul, the first King of Israel, was given to fits of temper. Young David was brought in to calm the king with some guitar music. Even so, the music wasn’t enough. Saul’s jealousy and paranoia, fueled by the energy of anger caused him to try and pin David to the wall with a spear.
Jacob blew up at Rachel because she couldn’t have children. His fear that he wouldn’t have a male heir, fueled by the oxygen of his anger, blew his rage out of control.
In the first chapter of the book of Esther, King Ahasuerus summoned Queen Vashti. She refused to come to him and dance for him and his drunken friends. He became afraid that her disobedience would set an example to all the other women about disrespect. Anger fueled his fear and sense of disrespect, so he had her thrown out of the palace to beg, and another queen was chosen to take her place.
But, there are other times when anger seems to be approved of in the Bible. Moses, who descends from the mountain with the Ten Commandments in hand, discovers Aaron and the people have built a golden calf and are worshipping it. He gets furious, and in his rage, breaks the 10 Commandment stones into pieces.
And speaking of pieces, probably one of the most striking--and certainly one of the most blood-chilling--examples of human anger in the Bible involved Samuel the prophet. Apparently, in the Lord’s service, Samuel had captured Agag, the King of the Amalekites. There, before the Lord and everyone, Samuel, in a fit of “holy” anger, chopped Agag to pieces.
Jesus, who gets upset when he sees the merchants turning the temple into religious marketplace, allows anger to fuel him as he throws everyone out of the temple. At another time he gets angry at people’s hardness and lack of grace when he healed a man with a withered hand (Mark 3:5).
So, there’s some tension in the Bible concerning the place and acceptability of anger. As we browse through the verses of wisdom read earlier from Proverbs, it doesn’t take us long to understand that anger, wrath, hasty words, and hot tempers are energies we need to keep under control or avoid.
A couple of these proverbs advise us to be slow in our anger. This is an interesting term in the Hebrew language and culture. For the ancient Hebrews, it was felt that the seat and controller of hot emotions, especially anger, was the nose or nostrils. When you picture someone getting angry, you think of someone’s nostrils wide and blaring. Thus, in Hebrew, to be angry, literally means to be of wide nostrils.
In cartoons, when one of the characters is angry, often smoke is picture coming out their nose or ears. For the Hebrew people, to be quick-tempered or angry literally meant to be short of nose, or wide-nostrilled. And the opposite, to be slow to anger meant literally to be long of nose. A modern day equivalent term might be, “short fuse” and “long fuse.”
Just look at the imagery that’s used to describe the difference between a short fused, short nosed, angry person, and a long fused, long-nosed, non-angry person. An angry person is described in these proverbs as people who stockpile stupidity, have temper-fire, fight, muscle their way through life, misuse political power, have a leak in the dam that would soon burst, have sharp tongues, and produce only heat.
On the opposite side, people not fueled by anger are described as deeply understanding, gentle in their response, keeping the peace, do things in moderation, have self-control, stop the leaks, say little, remain calm, hold their tongue, forgive and forget, and keep their cool.
These proverbs about controlling anger are so wise and so obvious. Yet they are apparently also so hard to follow because the intensity of the emotional fuel. These images help us picture the severity of when the fuel of anger gets the best of us. Like the image of anger as a small crack in the dam. If not taken care of, and kept in check, the whole dam breaks and there is a great catastrophe.
I’m guessing we all have some image of what we would be like if we allowed our anger to flow freely, or have someone else’s anger flow freely upon us.
There’s the story told of a traveler who got on a train in New York City. Immediately he went to the porter and said, “Look, I want to get off in Washington, D.C. Once I’m asleep, it’s very difficult for me to wake up. Here is five dollars. When I’m waking up, I have a short fuse; so, please, no matter what I say, don’t be offended. Just wake me up and put me off the train in Washington.”
Hours later, he awakened as the train pulled into the station at Richmond, Virginia, 100 miles past Washington. The man was furious. He found the porter and ripped him up one side and down the other for his incompetence. “What happened,” the conductor asked the porter. “I’ve never seen anyone that angry.”
To which the porter replied, “That’s nothing. You should have seen the fellow I put off at Washington.”
For some, anger seems to over-ride everything else. Nothing else matters. Anger has a way of taking over, and until it’s dealt with, all else takes a back seat. Work becomes less productive. Relationships are treated curtly and mechanically. Whatever has made us angry demands our undivided attention, and usually gets it.
Let’s take a look at several of these proverbs about anger, and combine what they teach with some psychological truths about why we get angry. Proverbs 15:1 states,
A gentle response defuses anger;
But a sharp tongue kindles a temper-fire.
One of the things that happens when we add the oxygen of anger to some fire in our lives, the fire explodes and others get burned. Anger seeks to pass your pain on to others. It’s the old “kick the dog” syndrome. You have a bad day at work; you come home, let anger have its way, and you yell at your spouse; he or she passes the pain of being yelled at on to the kids and punishes them; the kids let anger have its way, and they kick the dog. The dog bites the cat. The cat wonders, “What did I do?”
Some pain, some grievance, some injustice is done. The energy of anger is given some air, and all of a sudden you feel like you have to make someone pay. Only, the anger hides the fact that it’s your pain and emotional deficits you are making someone else pay for. Your anger only points out your own pain. Your own pain only points out your own emotional deficits. Anger brings all that to the surface, and you and everyone else around you gets a good look at it. Then, instead of dealing with that pain and deficit to become a better person, you only, through anger, attempt to pass it around.
Proverbs 17:14 is a similar kind of wise saying.
The start of a quarrel is like a leak in a dam;
so stop it before it bursts.
This proverb is the Cain and Abel story. A simple jealousy; what started out as a simple quarrel, was just a leak in the dam. How easy it would have been to repair the breach at that point. But anger was allowed to act as a jackhammer, and what was a little crack turned out to be a bursting dam.
What I think this proverb is saying is that anger can and should serve as a signal. Anger, like a leak, is a sign that some deeper threat needs attention. Erik Erikson, one of the world’s foremost psychologists, who studied how we human beings develop emotionally, spent some time studying anger. Particularly he tried to figure out how anger effects the other parts of our emotional development. What he discovered was that not learning to handle anger properly is caused by not knowing how to handle other important emotions, particularly kindness, empathy, and affection.
In other words, the writers of the proverbs knew something before Erikson knew it: that anger is a sign and signal that other, deeper matters need our attention. If you have an anger problem, the crack in the dam may be pointing to the areas of kindness, empathy and affection. Kindness has to do with how you treat others with respect and grace. Empathy has to do with understanding and connecting with the feelings of another person. Affection has to do with how you express love. If you are having trouble in one of those three areas, chances are good that you will also allow anger to fuel your inadequacies, poisoning your relationships. Anger doesn’t have to do with someone else; someone else is not making you angry. The anger is pointing to a crack in your dam. Take care of it, before the crack becomes a break and the break becomes a disaster. And one disaster doesn’t become one disaster after another.
Then there’s Proverbs 14:29,
Slowness to anger makes for deep understanding;
A quick-tempered person stockpiles stupidity.
A couple of the other proverbs have this theme, so it must be an important one. The theme has to do with the fact that anger just doesn’t affect the person or the immediate situation. Anger just seems to layer stupidity (stupid actions, stupid words) upon stupidity. For some reason it’s hard to learn from our anger. We have this sense of our noble self that everyone is supposed to be noticing and worshipping. You’d think the consequences of our anger would teach us humility. Instead, anger fuels this sense that you are entitled to receive instant respect from others, and they should bow to your angry superiority. Instead, that sense of entitlement only leads you into deeper levels of stupidity and embarrassment.
I used to read Parents Magazine when my kids were growing up. I figured I needed all the help I could get. There was an article in one issue in which parents wrote in their most humiliating moments.
One father wrote in about his moment. He was driving home from the office somewhat earlier than usual. He came to a stop light with one other car in front of him. A sign with large letters designated the car in front of him as a student driver.
The light changed green, but the drivers education car was slow in responding. It lurched forward a few feet, then stopped. Again it lurched, and again it stalled. The young woman driver appeared to be confused. The man in the car behind wanted that inept student to get out of the way. He became furious with each stall out, and two green lights come and gone. He laid on the horn. He flipped off the driver, and motioned furiously for her to get out of his way.
The instructor was calmly giving her instructions, as the man in the car behind finally passed the drivers ed. car, screaming with a red face through his open window as he went by. And as he went by, his eyes met the poor girls eyes, full of tears, as she was trying to pull aside and let him by. They were the eyes and face of his own daughter.
When you feel that kind of entitlement, that the world owes you something, that everyone needs to get out of your way because of your sense of self-importance, and you mix in the charged air of anger, look out; stupidity is on the way. The fire is about to explode on you. And so is pain and a total loss of respect, which is what you thought you were entitled to in the first place. Anger takes all that way.
There is so much I could say about anger. There is so much in the Proverbs about anger. And all of those proverbs highlight the fact that we humans are infectious. We are carriers of all kinds of emotions that can be flamed by long noses or wide nostrils.
The other truth of all these proverbs is that anger is a choice. We choose to be of wide nostrils or of long noses. We don’t have to get angry; we don’t have to open our mouths; we don’t have to display our stupidity; but we do. It’s a choice. We can choose to be understanding, peace keepers, moderate, self-controlled, leak fixers, calm, and cool. Or, we can choose...
Monday, July 11, 2011
"A Word to the (Un)Wise"
"A Word to the (Un)Wise"
Proverbs 13:20; 22:1
As I was thinking about this series of sermons we are embarking on for the rest of the summer, I thought about the phrase, “A word to the wise…” It doesn’t make sense. When we hear that phrase, it’s usually in the form of a warning to someone who’s about to choose something stupid. As in, “It may not be a smart thing to go on a fishing boat in the gulf of Mexico if there’s storm warnings being posted. Just a word to the wise.”
But, as I said, it isn’t a word to the wise. It’s a word to the unwise. Like the men who chose not to heed the storm warnings this past week, go out in a fishing boat in the gulf of Mexico. The boat was capsized in 40 foot swells, and most barely escaped with their lives. Seven are feared dead.
Somehow, there has to be a way to learn wisdom. Wisdom is different from intelligence. Some people are smart, but they aren’t wise. A person needs both in order to live well. To make good life choices. To see not just the events of life, but the meaning and relevance within those events.
Just about every culture has a collection of wisdom that it passes on to its young. Except maybe our own. In the Asian cultures there are the sayings of Confucius or of Lao Tzu. Such as, “Confucius say, A bird in the hand make it very hard to blow your nose.” In the Hebrew, Middle Eastern culture, there is the book of Proverbs. As I said last week, it is a collection of wisdom sayings that were passed from fathers to sons, and on down the line. Proverbs is a summary of the great lessons that life teaches about how to best get along with each other. Proverbs highlights the substance of what we need to emulate if we are to sustain ourselves positively for any length of time.
Where is the American culture’s depository of wisdom? There isn’t any, if you stop and think about it. But people are hungry for wisdom and common sense. There were some best selling books, several years ago, by the title of Life’s Little Instruction Book. The subtitle was, “511 suggestions, observations, and reminders on how to live a happy and rewarding life.” In those little books you could find sayings like:
Make it a habit to do nice things for people who’ll never find out.
Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.
Smile a lot. It costs nothing and is beyond price.
Then there came out a couple of books titled, God’s Little Instruction Book. They have wise sayings collected from a number of sources in the hopes of inspiring the reader to “live a happy and fulfilled life.” Some of them are:
The measure of a person’s character is not what they get from their ancestors, but what they leave their descendants.
He who wants to milk should not sit on a stool in the middle of the pasture expecting the cow to back up to him. (The person who said this certainly has no idea of what a modern dairy farm is like.)
Sorrow looks back. Worry looks around. Faith looks up.
God plus one is always a majority. (Except if you’re Harold Camping)
A shut mouth gathers no foot.
And, to add to those two repositories of American wisdom--those little instruction books--we cannot overlook the back bumper of people’s cars. Bumper stickers seem to be the only depository of wisdom in our culture. Like:
Politicians, like diapers, should be changed often. And for the same reason.
(on the back of a police car in Atlanta, GA) In God we trust--others we polygraph.
I don’t want buns of steel. I want buns of cinnamon.
Don’t believe everything you think.
Tithe if you love Jesus; any idiot can honk.
If bumper stickers and cutesy little gift books are the best we can do to pass on our collective wisdom, maybe we need to borrow from one of the other sources. My vote goes for the book of Proverbs. It’s better than driving around trying to find a word to the wise on the back of somebody’s car. Or going to the Chinese restaurant and opening a bunch of fortune cookies until you find a good one.
So I’m going to choose a couple of proverbs each Sunday to highlight. Again, I would highly recommend reading the book of Proverbs yourself over the coming weeks for your daily devotional. Read part of a chapter a day, and see which ones catch your attention. Spend some time in prayer over the ones that God makes jump out at you.
The first Proverb I’ll look at this morning is 22:1, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.” Or, as the Message has it, “A sterling reputation is better than striking it rich; a gracious spirit is better than money in the bank.”
When hearing a proverb like this, a follow-up question came to my mind: When does the choice between “great riches” and “a good name” come? We may think that the answer to that question is when we are young adults. That’s the point when we form our occupational identity and goals as individuals. As young adults, we make decisions that set the stage for later on in life when wealth and reputation becomes solidified. Or lost.
But the wiser answer is that these kinds of decisions come at many different times in our lives, in many different situations. Certainly as young adults. But also when we change jobs, when we get married, when we decide to have children, at mid-life, at retirement.
Everyone has a reputation. Everyone has either made a good name for themselves, or a bad name. Or a mix. In spite of what happens to us, or because of what happens to us, we all have some sort of reputation. When I was out in Leoti, in addition to working in a couple of churches, I also did some substitute teaching, and para educator work. I started out sitting at the teacher’s table at lunch time. But I got sick of hearing a few of the teachers rag on students. Often, I’d hear comments like, “Well, you know how Johnny’s father is. Always been that way; always will. Johnny’s the same way.” I thought, Poor Johnny. He’s got a father who has some kind of reputation and will never be able to live it down, apparently. And now Johnny’s being branded with the same hot iron. I couldn’t take listening to that, so I started eating with students at their tables.
A person’s reputation isn’t something gained overnight. It’s formed over a period of time. Often a long period of time. As we demonstrate such qualities as trustworthiness, caring, industriousness, commitment, etc. we build our reputation. We can also demonstrate the opposite of those qualities, and create another kind of name for ourselves.
General Robert E. Lee was approached after the close of the Civil War by a representative of a large insurance company. The man offered Lee the presidency of the company, at a salary of $50,000 dollars a year. That was a huge amount of money back then. General Lee was out of a job, and he needed to earn a living. But he stated, honestly, that he seriously doubted that his services were worth so much money.
“We aren’t interested in your services,” the insurance company board told General Lee. “We only want your name.”
“My name,” Lee said quietly but firmly, “is not for sale.
My hunch is that Robert E. Lee was able to say that, because a long time before, and in several points in his life before, he intentionally decided to keep his reputation pure and his integrity intact at any price.
What is disconcerting is that it only takes a fraction of the time to lose a reputation as it does to build it up. One compromise to the inner ogres, and all the bricks of integrity with which you have built your life vaporize to dust. In Shakespeare’s play Othello, there is the line, spoken by Cassio to the evil Iago:
Reputation, reputation, reputation!
Oh, I have lost my reputation!
I have lost the immortal part of myself,
and what remains is bestial.
Iago’s response is to say that reputation is just a quaint notion, when he says back to Cassio:
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition;
oft got without merit,
and lost without deserving.
I’m sure Cassio, as well as anyone else who has lost a piece of their good name and reputation would beg to differ with Iago. The wisdom of the book of Proverbs is to hold on to your good name with everything you’ve got.
The other proverb I want to highlight this morning may go along with the one about keeping a good name for yourself. It’s Proverbs 13:20:
Keep company with the wise
and you will become wise.
If you make friends with stupid people,
you will be ruined.
The Message translates that last phrase with:
...hang out with fools
and watch your life fall to pieces.
Another way to say this proverb is to affirm the truth, “You are who you are with.” It doesn’t matter how old you are on this account. The mix of you with your friends and associates determines a lot about who you are, and what your reputation will be.
Influence is undeniable. We are influenced by others. The kind of influence others have on us will depend on the kinds of people they are.
Much is at stake. The proverb states that depending on the kinds of people with whom we associate, we will either gain wisdom or we will fall into ruin. A person’s life could become destroyed simply by the choices made in terms of our associations, relationships and friendships. All that you are, all that you hope to be, can go down the sewer if you “make friends with stupid people.”
The province of Heraclea in ancient Greece was known for its honey. It seemed the honey found there was sweeter than any other honey. It also was told to bring a state of euphoria to those who ate it. But the euphoria was brought on by the fact that the bees gathered the honey-making nectar from the aconite or wolfsbane plants--plants that happen to be poisonous. The nectar of those plants is a cardiac and respiratory sedative. If a person ate enough of that honey their heart would stop.
The same could be true of certain of our friendships and associations. To eat of those relationships may seem sweet and bring us to a state of euphoria. But in reality we are being poisoned by the covering sweetness and our ruin is sure.
The thing is, nobody makes the choices for us as to who we associate with. It is up to us. Each of us chooses our own friendships and relationships. We, then, each of us, will reap the results of wise or poor choices in terms of our relationships.
I would add one additional thought here. The influence goes both ways. The proverb is not only a warning to look out for the kinds of people we gather around us, and who influence us. It is also a warning to us that we need to be mindful about what kind of influence we are affecting on others. This proverb forces us to look at and assess the kinds of influences we are having on those around us.
Each week I pick one of the Psalms and I concentrate on it, allowing it to guide my prayers. The Psalm I’ve been pondering over this past week was Psalm 67. I used a variation of it from a book called The Lyric Psalter. Here’s how it goes:
Let us declare that we are the people of God
And that the weight of seeing is among us.
The nations will be sane, using our thoughts,
And our words shall penetrate beyond our guns.
We live upon the edge near the lordly lands,
And the world shall eat the harvest of our minds.
The Psalm has served, for me, to be a serious call to attention. We are the people of God. That is a large part of our reputation. Christian is our name. And by that name we are, by our faith and identity in God, the only sane voices in this crazy world. The world has for too long been feasting on the harvest of the honey of Heraclea. People are falling into ruin on our right and on our left. It’s time to become influencers rather than just the influenced. It is time that the world eat of the harvest of our Godly minds and lives.
A young woman was working as a night nurse in a hospital in New York City when they had that black out a number of years ago. When she left the hospital at 1:30 a.m., the ordinarily well-lighted street was in total darkness. Suddenly, a flashlight appeared in an upper-story window of an apartment near the hospital. It shined down on her as she walked along the sidewalk. As she was walking just out of reach of it’s friendly beam, another flashlight came on several windows over. The lights from above continued appearing until she reached her apartment a few blocks away.
As you think about that story and this proverb, ponder how you are shining a light for others. And whether the others in your life are leaving you in the dark, and aren’t the kind of people who would shine a light for you in your darkness.
“A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.”
Keep company with the wise and you will become wise. If you make friends with stupid people, you will be ruined.
Proverbs 13:20; 22:1
As I was thinking about this series of sermons we are embarking on for the rest of the summer, I thought about the phrase, “A word to the wise…” It doesn’t make sense. When we hear that phrase, it’s usually in the form of a warning to someone who’s about to choose something stupid. As in, “It may not be a smart thing to go on a fishing boat in the gulf of Mexico if there’s storm warnings being posted. Just a word to the wise.”
But, as I said, it isn’t a word to the wise. It’s a word to the unwise. Like the men who chose not to heed the storm warnings this past week, go out in a fishing boat in the gulf of Mexico. The boat was capsized in 40 foot swells, and most barely escaped with their lives. Seven are feared dead.
Somehow, there has to be a way to learn wisdom. Wisdom is different from intelligence. Some people are smart, but they aren’t wise. A person needs both in order to live well. To make good life choices. To see not just the events of life, but the meaning and relevance within those events.
Just about every culture has a collection of wisdom that it passes on to its young. Except maybe our own. In the Asian cultures there are the sayings of Confucius or of Lao Tzu. Such as, “Confucius say, A bird in the hand make it very hard to blow your nose.” In the Hebrew, Middle Eastern culture, there is the book of Proverbs. As I said last week, it is a collection of wisdom sayings that were passed from fathers to sons, and on down the line. Proverbs is a summary of the great lessons that life teaches about how to best get along with each other. Proverbs highlights the substance of what we need to emulate if we are to sustain ourselves positively for any length of time.
Where is the American culture’s depository of wisdom? There isn’t any, if you stop and think about it. But people are hungry for wisdom and common sense. There were some best selling books, several years ago, by the title of Life’s Little Instruction Book. The subtitle was, “511 suggestions, observations, and reminders on how to live a happy and rewarding life.” In those little books you could find sayings like:
Make it a habit to do nice things for people who’ll never find out.
Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.
Smile a lot. It costs nothing and is beyond price.
Then there came out a couple of books titled, God’s Little Instruction Book. They have wise sayings collected from a number of sources in the hopes of inspiring the reader to “live a happy and fulfilled life.” Some of them are:
The measure of a person’s character is not what they get from their ancestors, but what they leave their descendants.
He who wants to milk should not sit on a stool in the middle of the pasture expecting the cow to back up to him. (The person who said this certainly has no idea of what a modern dairy farm is like.)
Sorrow looks back. Worry looks around. Faith looks up.
God plus one is always a majority. (Except if you’re Harold Camping)
A shut mouth gathers no foot.
And, to add to those two repositories of American wisdom--those little instruction books--we cannot overlook the back bumper of people’s cars. Bumper stickers seem to be the only depository of wisdom in our culture. Like:
Politicians, like diapers, should be changed often. And for the same reason.
(on the back of a police car in Atlanta, GA) In God we trust--others we polygraph.
I don’t want buns of steel. I want buns of cinnamon.
Don’t believe everything you think.
Tithe if you love Jesus; any idiot can honk.
If bumper stickers and cutesy little gift books are the best we can do to pass on our collective wisdom, maybe we need to borrow from one of the other sources. My vote goes for the book of Proverbs. It’s better than driving around trying to find a word to the wise on the back of somebody’s car. Or going to the Chinese restaurant and opening a bunch of fortune cookies until you find a good one.
So I’m going to choose a couple of proverbs each Sunday to highlight. Again, I would highly recommend reading the book of Proverbs yourself over the coming weeks for your daily devotional. Read part of a chapter a day, and see which ones catch your attention. Spend some time in prayer over the ones that God makes jump out at you.
The first Proverb I’ll look at this morning is 22:1, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.” Or, as the Message has it, “A sterling reputation is better than striking it rich; a gracious spirit is better than money in the bank.”
When hearing a proverb like this, a follow-up question came to my mind: When does the choice between “great riches” and “a good name” come? We may think that the answer to that question is when we are young adults. That’s the point when we form our occupational identity and goals as individuals. As young adults, we make decisions that set the stage for later on in life when wealth and reputation becomes solidified. Or lost.
But the wiser answer is that these kinds of decisions come at many different times in our lives, in many different situations. Certainly as young adults. But also when we change jobs, when we get married, when we decide to have children, at mid-life, at retirement.
Everyone has a reputation. Everyone has either made a good name for themselves, or a bad name. Or a mix. In spite of what happens to us, or because of what happens to us, we all have some sort of reputation. When I was out in Leoti, in addition to working in a couple of churches, I also did some substitute teaching, and para educator work. I started out sitting at the teacher’s table at lunch time. But I got sick of hearing a few of the teachers rag on students. Often, I’d hear comments like, “Well, you know how Johnny’s father is. Always been that way; always will. Johnny’s the same way.” I thought, Poor Johnny. He’s got a father who has some kind of reputation and will never be able to live it down, apparently. And now Johnny’s being branded with the same hot iron. I couldn’t take listening to that, so I started eating with students at their tables.
A person’s reputation isn’t something gained overnight. It’s formed over a period of time. Often a long period of time. As we demonstrate such qualities as trustworthiness, caring, industriousness, commitment, etc. we build our reputation. We can also demonstrate the opposite of those qualities, and create another kind of name for ourselves.
General Robert E. Lee was approached after the close of the Civil War by a representative of a large insurance company. The man offered Lee the presidency of the company, at a salary of $50,000 dollars a year. That was a huge amount of money back then. General Lee was out of a job, and he needed to earn a living. But he stated, honestly, that he seriously doubted that his services were worth so much money.
“We aren’t interested in your services,” the insurance company board told General Lee. “We only want your name.”
“My name,” Lee said quietly but firmly, “is not for sale.
My hunch is that Robert E. Lee was able to say that, because a long time before, and in several points in his life before, he intentionally decided to keep his reputation pure and his integrity intact at any price.
What is disconcerting is that it only takes a fraction of the time to lose a reputation as it does to build it up. One compromise to the inner ogres, and all the bricks of integrity with which you have built your life vaporize to dust. In Shakespeare’s play Othello, there is the line, spoken by Cassio to the evil Iago:
Reputation, reputation, reputation!
Oh, I have lost my reputation!
I have lost the immortal part of myself,
and what remains is bestial.
Iago’s response is to say that reputation is just a quaint notion, when he says back to Cassio:
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition;
oft got without merit,
and lost without deserving.
I’m sure Cassio, as well as anyone else who has lost a piece of their good name and reputation would beg to differ with Iago. The wisdom of the book of Proverbs is to hold on to your good name with everything you’ve got.
The other proverb I want to highlight this morning may go along with the one about keeping a good name for yourself. It’s Proverbs 13:20:
Keep company with the wise
and you will become wise.
If you make friends with stupid people,
you will be ruined.
The Message translates that last phrase with:
...hang out with fools
and watch your life fall to pieces.
Another way to say this proverb is to affirm the truth, “You are who you are with.” It doesn’t matter how old you are on this account. The mix of you with your friends and associates determines a lot about who you are, and what your reputation will be.
Influence is undeniable. We are influenced by others. The kind of influence others have on us will depend on the kinds of people they are.
Much is at stake. The proverb states that depending on the kinds of people with whom we associate, we will either gain wisdom or we will fall into ruin. A person’s life could become destroyed simply by the choices made in terms of our associations, relationships and friendships. All that you are, all that you hope to be, can go down the sewer if you “make friends with stupid people.”
The province of Heraclea in ancient Greece was known for its honey. It seemed the honey found there was sweeter than any other honey. It also was told to bring a state of euphoria to those who ate it. But the euphoria was brought on by the fact that the bees gathered the honey-making nectar from the aconite or wolfsbane plants--plants that happen to be poisonous. The nectar of those plants is a cardiac and respiratory sedative. If a person ate enough of that honey their heart would stop.
The same could be true of certain of our friendships and associations. To eat of those relationships may seem sweet and bring us to a state of euphoria. But in reality we are being poisoned by the covering sweetness and our ruin is sure.
The thing is, nobody makes the choices for us as to who we associate with. It is up to us. Each of us chooses our own friendships and relationships. We, then, each of us, will reap the results of wise or poor choices in terms of our relationships.
I would add one additional thought here. The influence goes both ways. The proverb is not only a warning to look out for the kinds of people we gather around us, and who influence us. It is also a warning to us that we need to be mindful about what kind of influence we are affecting on others. This proverb forces us to look at and assess the kinds of influences we are having on those around us.
Each week I pick one of the Psalms and I concentrate on it, allowing it to guide my prayers. The Psalm I’ve been pondering over this past week was Psalm 67. I used a variation of it from a book called The Lyric Psalter. Here’s how it goes:
Let us declare that we are the people of God
And that the weight of seeing is among us.
The nations will be sane, using our thoughts,
And our words shall penetrate beyond our guns.
We live upon the edge near the lordly lands,
And the world shall eat the harvest of our minds.
The Psalm has served, for me, to be a serious call to attention. We are the people of God. That is a large part of our reputation. Christian is our name. And by that name we are, by our faith and identity in God, the only sane voices in this crazy world. The world has for too long been feasting on the harvest of the honey of Heraclea. People are falling into ruin on our right and on our left. It’s time to become influencers rather than just the influenced. It is time that the world eat of the harvest of our Godly minds and lives.
A young woman was working as a night nurse in a hospital in New York City when they had that black out a number of years ago. When she left the hospital at 1:30 a.m., the ordinarily well-lighted street was in total darkness. Suddenly, a flashlight appeared in an upper-story window of an apartment near the hospital. It shined down on her as she walked along the sidewalk. As she was walking just out of reach of it’s friendly beam, another flashlight came on several windows over. The lights from above continued appearing until she reached her apartment a few blocks away.
As you think about that story and this proverb, ponder how you are shining a light for others. And whether the others in your life are leaving you in the dark, and aren’t the kind of people who would shine a light for you in your darkness.
“A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.”
Keep company with the wise and you will become wise. If you make friends with stupid people, you will be ruined.
Monday, July 4, 2011
"Of Blagojevich and Anthony"
"Of Blagojevich and Anthony"
Proverbs 2:5-12
I’ve been following the news more closely, lately, since we started our Sunday School class based around current events. I find myself trying to guess which news story is going to be highlighted for discussion for the coming Sunday.
The two stories that caught my interest early in the week had to do with the conviction of Rod Blagojevich selling Barrack Obama’s old senate seat to the highest bidder as well as lying to federal investigators. And, of course, the whole Caley Anthony story, the two year old allegedly murdered by her mother, Casey Anthony. Both stories have at their heart huge questions of personal integrity. There have been so many lies and counter lies, denial, deflections and dysfunction, I’m pretty much sick of it all.
Juxtapose all that with the celebration of our independence as a nation on the 4th of July, and the huge amounts of integrity it took on so many people’s part, to gain and maintain our freedom. We have moved, at the beginnings of our national history, from a position of personal and national integrity, to a place where personal and national integrity are severely damaged. From our legal system, to our economic system, to our political system, to our morality, and on and on, we have gone terribly astray.
Our country is infected with systemic problems, for sure. But all systems are run by people. I’ve always said, if it wasn’t for people it would be a pretty good world. So if the systems in our country are going to change, people have to change. In any kind of large scale, systemic change, there needs to be a number of strong individuals, with a large amount of personal integrity, to make that kind of change happen.
So, this morning, I’m launching us out into a series of sermons based on the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs was a teaching tool. It is a collection of wisdom that was passed down from father to sons. Proverbs isn’t about facts and figures about life. It’s not about statistics. It’s a book about how to live well. How to be a person of integrity. A country can’t be great, unless it’s people are great. A country can’t be a place of integrity, if it’s people have no integrity. Change, if it is to happen, must start with personal integrity, passed down from adults to children. That’s why we’ll spend a good amount of time, the rest of the summer, looking at the book of Proverbs in order to bolster our own, and our children’s, and hopefully our country’s integrity.
The assumption behind these proverbs about personal integrity is that it doesn’t come naturally. We aren’t born as people of integrity. We have to live into becoming people with a strong moral fibre. It takes effort and resolve to live a life of integrity.
Integrity, according to these verses in proverbs read a moment ago, has a lot of facets to it: common sense, justice, honesty, fairness, sound judgement, protecting yourself from evil ways, refusing to lie. So, mainly, with all these different facets, integrity has to do with being a certain kind of person. Being a person of integrity means we know who and what we are. And that we are willing to continue to work at our personal integrity no matter what the cost may be to us.
Looking at it another way, creating integrity is a way of writing your personal story. We all live by a personal story. Dan McAdams has a great book titled, The Stories We Live By. The subtitle of the book is, Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.
At the start of the book he tells the story of Margaret. Margaret drove over 2000 miles across the country with her teenaged daughter. She drove all that way to break into an abandoned chapel at a Catholic Church so she could, in her words, “rip the place apart.” The mother and daughter scaled the cyclone fence surrounding the former Catholic boarding school for girls. Twenty-five years had passed since Margaret left the school.
Margaret marched behind the altar. She kicked its walls in and punched the pulpit. She knocked over particular pews. She flipped off the icon paintings on the wall. With her car keys she carved, “I hate nuns,” and “They beat children,” in the chapel’s big wooden doors.
Then she stopped. She calmly turned to her daughter and said, “We can leave now.” She had accomplished a mission of extraordinary significance. What may appear to others as an act of petty vandalism was for her a sacred ritual of facing her tragic story that started at that school and church. One can only imagine what happened to her there. Her personal theme had been, “my wasted life.” But now she would not let that theme determine or deter her growing sense of personal integrity.
What is a story? What does it take to make a story? There’s a simple formula. First, you need a character for your story. Second, you need a setting for your character. Then, thirdly, when you add a certain amount of dramatic conflict, what you get is the fourth element of the story, the theme or the myth of that story. The myth of our personal stories has to do with how we put together, and find meaning around life’s ultimate questions. How your character, imbedded in particular settings, dealing with dramatic conflict, will determine the depth and quality of your integrity.
Margaret had to return to her setting, the old Catholic school and chapel, where she suffered dramatic abuse of some kind. In an equally dramatic way, she had to purge herself of that setting in order to change the meanings she had allowed to shape her life. She was ready to find a new integrity of person, in a new setting, which would create new meaning for her life.
There are some parts of this formula we can’t control. Like setting. We are all born into a particular setting that included parents, siblings and extended family. We had no choice in that. Or the schools we went to, where we went to church (or didn’t go to church), our genetics, etc. This is all the “raw material” we were given as we came into the world. We can’t do anything to change all that.
Also, some of the dramatic conflict in our lives was way beyond our control. For example, if you had an alcoholic, disruptive parent. Or your parents got divorced. Or if there was physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. A life changing accident. A disease. All of that, that any of us experienced, and may still experience, was out of our control.
But the character, who we are, that person in the story, we do have control over. The building of our own personal integrity, either because of or in spite of the unchangeable factors, we do have a say in, and can influence.
Our personal integrity, the meanings and myths of our personal stories are determined NOT by the setting of our stories. NOT by the conflict in our stories. Our personal integrity is determined by who we choose to be within those settings, and during our times when we must face conflict.
We may need to forgive those settings and conflicts we can’t understand or accept. Especially in the parts of the story that we couldn’t control. That’s part of our choice for integrity. Forgiving our past for what it was, especially when it was beyond our control.
But some of the dramatic conflict in our stories has to do with our own selves. Because we are all a mix as human beings, our selves contain inner ogres which we must face, and with which we must deal. We can’t become people of integrity, or a nation of integrity, unless we deal with these parts of ourselves we may not like very much.
Our inner ogres might answer to names like mean, cheap, hypocritical, self-righteous, lustful, prudish, vulgar, stingy, two-faced, insensitive, self-centered, passive aggressive. And so on.
As I said, we are a mix as human beings. The good news is our ogres are not the sum total of who we are. We have a lot of good traits in us that help bolster our sense of personal integrity.
But the warning is that our inner ogres are our potential selves. Potentially, the inner ogres can detract from our good traits and ultimately destroy our integrity. If we allow them enough growing room.
They are our unexpressed selves. Remember in Mad Magazine (if you are bold enough to profess that you once read that magazine, as I am now) there was that one cartoon titled, “Shadow vs. Shadow.” It showed a character in all white doing something. But the character’s dark shadow on the wall was doing what the white character really wanted to be doing. That’s the inner potential, the unexpressed ogre in us. It only has as much power as we give it expression. Not giving the inner ogres their expression is a large part of building our integrity as persons.
When you look at the list of qualities that define integrity in this part of the second chapter of Proverbs, they mostly have to do with ogre control: common sense, honesty, fairness, sound judgement, keeping yourself from lies and scheming. That’s all ogre control.
What happens if your ogre control, described for us here in Proverbs 2, breaks down? What happens if we end up with a bad chapter in the story of our lives? You may be fortunate that, in your life story, you only have a bad sentence or paragraph here or there. Some minor mishap--hardly a blip in the telling of your story, and the maintenance of your personal integrity.
Others may have a bad chapter. A major piece that isn’t pretty. A time we wish could be edited out. But no. It’s there. How that bad chapter fits into your story, and more importantly, how you flow out of it, will build or destroy your integrity. How we deal with our bad chapters has a lot to do with building and rebuilding personal integrity.
Let’s look at a couple of examples from literature. First, from Shakespeare: Oedipus. Oedipus, the son of a king and queen, was taken from his home soon after he was born. When he was a young man, he went on a journey. He met up with a stranger, they got into a conflict; they drew swords, and Oedipus killed the stranger. Oedipus didn’t know at the time, that the person he killed was his real father.
Oedipus came, in his journey, to Thebes. He ended up helping the city get through a crisis. The grateful people hailed him as king. He married the queen, not knowing it was his own mother, the widow of the king he had killed earlier in his journey.
Later, Oedipus finds out the truth of the tragic wrongs he had done, even though they were done out of ignorance. On discovering the truth, he cried out:
Darkness!
Horror of darkness, enfolding
memory of evil deeds I have done!
Why should I see?
Oedipus went into his chambers and tore out his eyeballs with his own fingers. He spent the rest of his life wandering in blind and overpowering guilt. He took responsibility for his actions but could never forgive himself, dying in misery. His bad chapter became his last chapter.
The other example is the character Raskolnikov, in the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In this book, Raskolnikov murders a wretch of a woman in cold blood, simply because he could. There was no ignorance in his murderous act, as there was with Oedipus. Raskolnikov simply did it without guilt.
But later in the book he falls in love with Sonia. Out of his love for her he confesses his crime to the police, but still tried to make excuses for his behavior. He blamed it on fate. But once in prison he came face to face with his inner ogres. When Sonia came to visit him, at one point in the story, he fell at her feet, and found the courage to admit his darkness. He found the only remedy for such a dark, bad chapter: forgiveness from others and himself. Only then was Raskolnikov able to move on with his life as a person of integrity, and begin a new chapter.
These two characters, Oedipus and Raskolnikov are examples of what we can do with the bad chapters in our lives. We can let the guilt of them overwhelm us and destroy us. And so can dishonest denial. Only honesty answered by God’s grace can free us, and restore our integrity. Then we can start writing a new chapter.
Personal integrity is an ongoing challenge. A daily challenge. Reading through the book of Proverbs will be a guide for the ethical and moral situations we face that challenge our integrity. And people throughout church history have given us guidance about how to maintain our integrity before God. One of those is Ignatius of Loyola.
(The Examen)
Proverbs 2:5-12
I’ve been following the news more closely, lately, since we started our Sunday School class based around current events. I find myself trying to guess which news story is going to be highlighted for discussion for the coming Sunday.
The two stories that caught my interest early in the week had to do with the conviction of Rod Blagojevich selling Barrack Obama’s old senate seat to the highest bidder as well as lying to federal investigators. And, of course, the whole Caley Anthony story, the two year old allegedly murdered by her mother, Casey Anthony. Both stories have at their heart huge questions of personal integrity. There have been so many lies and counter lies, denial, deflections and dysfunction, I’m pretty much sick of it all.
Juxtapose all that with the celebration of our independence as a nation on the 4th of July, and the huge amounts of integrity it took on so many people’s part, to gain and maintain our freedom. We have moved, at the beginnings of our national history, from a position of personal and national integrity, to a place where personal and national integrity are severely damaged. From our legal system, to our economic system, to our political system, to our morality, and on and on, we have gone terribly astray.
Our country is infected with systemic problems, for sure. But all systems are run by people. I’ve always said, if it wasn’t for people it would be a pretty good world. So if the systems in our country are going to change, people have to change. In any kind of large scale, systemic change, there needs to be a number of strong individuals, with a large amount of personal integrity, to make that kind of change happen.
So, this morning, I’m launching us out into a series of sermons based on the book of Proverbs. The book of Proverbs was a teaching tool. It is a collection of wisdom that was passed down from father to sons. Proverbs isn’t about facts and figures about life. It’s not about statistics. It’s a book about how to live well. How to be a person of integrity. A country can’t be great, unless it’s people are great. A country can’t be a place of integrity, if it’s people have no integrity. Change, if it is to happen, must start with personal integrity, passed down from adults to children. That’s why we’ll spend a good amount of time, the rest of the summer, looking at the book of Proverbs in order to bolster our own, and our children’s, and hopefully our country’s integrity.
The assumption behind these proverbs about personal integrity is that it doesn’t come naturally. We aren’t born as people of integrity. We have to live into becoming people with a strong moral fibre. It takes effort and resolve to live a life of integrity.
Integrity, according to these verses in proverbs read a moment ago, has a lot of facets to it: common sense, justice, honesty, fairness, sound judgement, protecting yourself from evil ways, refusing to lie. So, mainly, with all these different facets, integrity has to do with being a certain kind of person. Being a person of integrity means we know who and what we are. And that we are willing to continue to work at our personal integrity no matter what the cost may be to us.
Looking at it another way, creating integrity is a way of writing your personal story. We all live by a personal story. Dan McAdams has a great book titled, The Stories We Live By. The subtitle of the book is, Personal Myths and the Making of the Self.
At the start of the book he tells the story of Margaret. Margaret drove over 2000 miles across the country with her teenaged daughter. She drove all that way to break into an abandoned chapel at a Catholic Church so she could, in her words, “rip the place apart.” The mother and daughter scaled the cyclone fence surrounding the former Catholic boarding school for girls. Twenty-five years had passed since Margaret left the school.
Margaret marched behind the altar. She kicked its walls in and punched the pulpit. She knocked over particular pews. She flipped off the icon paintings on the wall. With her car keys she carved, “I hate nuns,” and “They beat children,” in the chapel’s big wooden doors.
Then she stopped. She calmly turned to her daughter and said, “We can leave now.” She had accomplished a mission of extraordinary significance. What may appear to others as an act of petty vandalism was for her a sacred ritual of facing her tragic story that started at that school and church. One can only imagine what happened to her there. Her personal theme had been, “my wasted life.” But now she would not let that theme determine or deter her growing sense of personal integrity.
What is a story? What does it take to make a story? There’s a simple formula. First, you need a character for your story. Second, you need a setting for your character. Then, thirdly, when you add a certain amount of dramatic conflict, what you get is the fourth element of the story, the theme or the myth of that story. The myth of our personal stories has to do with how we put together, and find meaning around life’s ultimate questions. How your character, imbedded in particular settings, dealing with dramatic conflict, will determine the depth and quality of your integrity.
Margaret had to return to her setting, the old Catholic school and chapel, where she suffered dramatic abuse of some kind. In an equally dramatic way, she had to purge herself of that setting in order to change the meanings she had allowed to shape her life. She was ready to find a new integrity of person, in a new setting, which would create new meaning for her life.
There are some parts of this formula we can’t control. Like setting. We are all born into a particular setting that included parents, siblings and extended family. We had no choice in that. Or the schools we went to, where we went to church (or didn’t go to church), our genetics, etc. This is all the “raw material” we were given as we came into the world. We can’t do anything to change all that.
Also, some of the dramatic conflict in our lives was way beyond our control. For example, if you had an alcoholic, disruptive parent. Or your parents got divorced. Or if there was physical, sexual, or emotional abuse. A life changing accident. A disease. All of that, that any of us experienced, and may still experience, was out of our control.
But the character, who we are, that person in the story, we do have control over. The building of our own personal integrity, either because of or in spite of the unchangeable factors, we do have a say in, and can influence.
Our personal integrity, the meanings and myths of our personal stories are determined NOT by the setting of our stories. NOT by the conflict in our stories. Our personal integrity is determined by who we choose to be within those settings, and during our times when we must face conflict.
We may need to forgive those settings and conflicts we can’t understand or accept. Especially in the parts of the story that we couldn’t control. That’s part of our choice for integrity. Forgiving our past for what it was, especially when it was beyond our control.
But some of the dramatic conflict in our stories has to do with our own selves. Because we are all a mix as human beings, our selves contain inner ogres which we must face, and with which we must deal. We can’t become people of integrity, or a nation of integrity, unless we deal with these parts of ourselves we may not like very much.
Our inner ogres might answer to names like mean, cheap, hypocritical, self-righteous, lustful, prudish, vulgar, stingy, two-faced, insensitive, self-centered, passive aggressive. And so on.
As I said, we are a mix as human beings. The good news is our ogres are not the sum total of who we are. We have a lot of good traits in us that help bolster our sense of personal integrity.
But the warning is that our inner ogres are our potential selves. Potentially, the inner ogres can detract from our good traits and ultimately destroy our integrity. If we allow them enough growing room.
They are our unexpressed selves. Remember in Mad Magazine (if you are bold enough to profess that you once read that magazine, as I am now) there was that one cartoon titled, “Shadow vs. Shadow.” It showed a character in all white doing something. But the character’s dark shadow on the wall was doing what the white character really wanted to be doing. That’s the inner potential, the unexpressed ogre in us. It only has as much power as we give it expression. Not giving the inner ogres their expression is a large part of building our integrity as persons.
When you look at the list of qualities that define integrity in this part of the second chapter of Proverbs, they mostly have to do with ogre control: common sense, honesty, fairness, sound judgement, keeping yourself from lies and scheming. That’s all ogre control.
What happens if your ogre control, described for us here in Proverbs 2, breaks down? What happens if we end up with a bad chapter in the story of our lives? You may be fortunate that, in your life story, you only have a bad sentence or paragraph here or there. Some minor mishap--hardly a blip in the telling of your story, and the maintenance of your personal integrity.
Others may have a bad chapter. A major piece that isn’t pretty. A time we wish could be edited out. But no. It’s there. How that bad chapter fits into your story, and more importantly, how you flow out of it, will build or destroy your integrity. How we deal with our bad chapters has a lot to do with building and rebuilding personal integrity.
Let’s look at a couple of examples from literature. First, from Shakespeare: Oedipus. Oedipus, the son of a king and queen, was taken from his home soon after he was born. When he was a young man, he went on a journey. He met up with a stranger, they got into a conflict; they drew swords, and Oedipus killed the stranger. Oedipus didn’t know at the time, that the person he killed was his real father.
Oedipus came, in his journey, to Thebes. He ended up helping the city get through a crisis. The grateful people hailed him as king. He married the queen, not knowing it was his own mother, the widow of the king he had killed earlier in his journey.
Later, Oedipus finds out the truth of the tragic wrongs he had done, even though they were done out of ignorance. On discovering the truth, he cried out:
Darkness!
Horror of darkness, enfolding
memory of evil deeds I have done!
Why should I see?
Oedipus went into his chambers and tore out his eyeballs with his own fingers. He spent the rest of his life wandering in blind and overpowering guilt. He took responsibility for his actions but could never forgive himself, dying in misery. His bad chapter became his last chapter.
The other example is the character Raskolnikov, in the book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In this book, Raskolnikov murders a wretch of a woman in cold blood, simply because he could. There was no ignorance in his murderous act, as there was with Oedipus. Raskolnikov simply did it without guilt.
But later in the book he falls in love with Sonia. Out of his love for her he confesses his crime to the police, but still tried to make excuses for his behavior. He blamed it on fate. But once in prison he came face to face with his inner ogres. When Sonia came to visit him, at one point in the story, he fell at her feet, and found the courage to admit his darkness. He found the only remedy for such a dark, bad chapter: forgiveness from others and himself. Only then was Raskolnikov able to move on with his life as a person of integrity, and begin a new chapter.
These two characters, Oedipus and Raskolnikov are examples of what we can do with the bad chapters in our lives. We can let the guilt of them overwhelm us and destroy us. And so can dishonest denial. Only honesty answered by God’s grace can free us, and restore our integrity. Then we can start writing a new chapter.
Personal integrity is an ongoing challenge. A daily challenge. Reading through the book of Proverbs will be a guide for the ethical and moral situations we face that challenge our integrity. And people throughout church history have given us guidance about how to maintain our integrity before God. One of those is Ignatius of Loyola.
(The Examen)
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