Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
My Big Loud Mouth Part 4: John 8
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Choose your words in ways designed always to open up the possibility for connection, even in the hardest of moments. Trusting that the shortcut to no and the path of least resistance is also the path of least discovery and beauty. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Hey, well, welcome to church. My name continues to be Jeremy, and once again, we continue to be thankful that you take space out of your week to worship with us here online. We're in the midst of a series called My Big Loud Mouth. We're actually going to wrap this one up today.
Speaker 1:But in this series, we have been talking together about all the things we wish we didn't say. And so far, we've covered things like everything happens for a reason. Those moments when we don't know what to say and we want to be comforting, but we end up compressing the complexity of someone else's story. We've talked about when we have said, I hate you. Those moments where our emotions or frustrations got the best of us and maybe we lashed out.
Speaker 1:We've talked about when we overshare a bit of our story. Maybe we have told a delicate part of our story in the wrong setting. That maybe we shared a vulnerable part of our story with the wrong person, but we found ourselves wishing we could take it back. And I know as someone who is generally quite hesitant to put myself out there in vulnerable ways, I really resonate with that. And I think for me, is one of the most important pieces from our conversation last week: this idea that oversharing is often not the result of being too open.
Speaker 1:It's actually the consequence of being too closed off. Because our empathy is in part our ability to read the room, to respond with vulnerability to vulnerability, but we often talk about this in terms of how we bring ourselves care fully, meaning full of care, to someone else. But empathy can also be the way we bring ourselves to others. How we have the emotional intelligence to see someone, to understand their emotional capacity in this moment, and then to choose the appropriate moments, the settings and the relationships to open ourselves to them. Because we need that kind of openness.
Speaker 1:We need vulnerability. The less effort and care we put into pursuing it, the irony is the more we find ourselves building up that need inside, and then all of it coming out the ways we least expect. What happens is we end up trading vulnerability for attention. And so the pursuit of healthy, safe spaces to be vulnerable is actually what saves us from oversharing where it's inappropriate. Now, today we have one more conversation in this series, and it is all about gossip.
Speaker 1:So let's pray, and then we'll jump in today. God of all grace, who comes to us with open arms, ready to embrace us fully. All of our stories, all of our words, all of the things that we need to say and express and get off our chest. You are there and you are welcoming. Your spirit is present to us, welcoming us to share whatever it is that we need to in that safe space.
Speaker 1:Then pointing us back towards each other in the healthy relationships where you are present, building us, repairing us, healing us again. God, as we speak about our words, our gossip, the ways that we speak about each other, both in positive and negative ways, Would everything that we do expand the story to include more and more of us? Would our words never be used to close down the boundaries, to exclude others, to push them farther away, but only ever to welcome them the way that you welcome us. May your spirit be the guide that shapes our words about and toward each other. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen. Okay. Today we are talking about gossip. But first, some statistics, because that's always a fun way to start any conversation. Psychologists estimate that approximately two thirds of our conversational diet is gossip.
Speaker 1:Another way to tackle that would be to say that the average person spends about fifty two minutes a day gossiping, or three sixty four minutes a week in gossip, or three fifteen hours a year in gossip. That's not all bad, because in terminating these numbers psychologists do not place a value judgment on the perceived positive or negative impact of said gossip. In fact, for these studies, gossip is defined as face to face evaluative speech about an absent subject. And in fact, studies seem to show that about 16% of our gossip could be determined negative, about 9% positive, and the remaining 75% of our gossip conversation, which remember, entails about 66% of all of our conversations in total, are actually neutral. And what this means is that we like talking about each other.
Speaker 1:We like saying mean things about each other, we like saying nice things about each other, but more than anything, we simply like saying things about each other. Which should not be all that surprising considering everything that we have already talked about in this series. Humans are, by our nature, social creatures with big loud mouths that like to say big loud things. By the way, my wife hates how loud I talk. Just in our house, we'll be having a conversation and she'll be like, Why are you speaking so loudly?
Speaker 1:There's no one here to listen to you. It's just me. And I say, You never know. Although actually what really drives her nuts is when we used to go out for dinner. Remember that?
Speaker 1:She will always say, Stop talking so loud. I am the only one who needs to hear you. And I'm like, Yeah, maybe, but also maybe not. Anyway, Mark Leary, a professor of social psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, says this: That gossip is a fundamental human instinct because our lives are deeply rooted in groups. We not only live in groups, but we also depend on the people in our groups to survive.
Speaker 1:And so in light of that, we need to have as much information as possible about the people around us in order to know what various other people are like: who can and who can't be trusted, who breaks the group's rules, who is friends with who and what other people's personalities and viewpoints are, and so on. His point here is that gossiping, in the very broad sense of having conversations about each other, this is how we crowdsource our connections. We don't have the time to interview everyone. We don't have the capacity to monitor each other for reliability. So gossiping is the mechanism by which we build a collective database about each other.
Speaker 1:It's how we know who is us, and it's how we know who is them. And it's that second one who is them that we are usually talking about when we talk about gossip. Because generally it is the negative, accusatory, distancing conversations that tend to stick with us. And so even though only about 16% of our gossip tends to be negative, that can be so sticky, so destructive that it tends to dominate our imagination. So I want to talk today about us and them, positive gossip, from about toward to, and how to think about the distance between us.
Speaker 1:But Henri Tajfel was an experimental social psychologist that grew up in Poland after the First World War. He studied chemistry in France, he enlisted during the war and was taken prisoner by the Germans. And as a person of Jewish descent, he was sent to a series of concentration camps. But in the end, he survived the war and was profoundly shaped by it. He just couldn't shake this question of how people could act this way.
Speaker 1:And so after the war, he shifted his focus to the study of psychology, actually the psychology of prejudice and intergroup relations. The prevailing theory of the day was that violent, warlike behavior was the result of deep seated differences that were seized upon by aggressive leaders who could exploit that in us. Tajfel's experience of the war led him to believe that the actual differences between people Jewish people and German people and Polish people and French people were largely arbitrary and not all that meaningful at all. And so he started devising experiments to understand why we choose our groups. And what he found is that our groups are largely little more than the labels we apply to ourselves.
Speaker 1:In one experiment, he had people come into a room and they were handed a piece of paper with a bunch of dots on it. And then they were asked to estimate the number of dots on the page. After that, irrespective of their answer, they were put into a group, either overestimators or underestimators. Now remember, again, this had nothing to do with their answers at all. This was strictly a coin flip assigned before they even walked into the room.
Speaker 1:Then, before they left, he would ask them if they would help with another experiment. He would tell them that previous subjects had been sequestered in their groups and there was a payout for those who had participated, but they needed to know how to distribute that payout fairly. And even though the participant wasn't set to receive any of the compensation for themselves, they inevitably assigned more money to whatever group they had been randomly assigned to. In fact, even when people were given the option of assigning an equal value to both groups, they would generally prefer alternative values that biased their own group. So, for example, if they could give $5 to everyone, or if they could give $4 to the people in their group and $3 to the people in the other group, even though it meant that their group would get less, they still chose to penalize the others by going for this four-three split.
Speaker 1:And what Tajfel determined, after a series of these types of experiments that have been repeated over and over again since then, is that our concept of who is us is largely determined by what someone tells us, and not actually by some deep seated, meaningful distinction about us. Although, once we've accepted that label, our thoughts and our actions, our choices and our paradigms begin to kick in in order to reinforce those labels. We call this the minimal group paradigm, this idea that human beings will form groups around just about anything, and even if those groups are initially meaningless, we make them mean everything oftentimes through our words. And so I want to look at three examples in the New Testament of how we can use our words to shape our groups. First, an example of how we can expand the group through gossip, acknowledging that speaking about each other is a normative social function.
Speaker 1:Second, an example of how we deepen the group through face to face engagement, that need that we have to move from speaking about to speaking to. And then finally, an example of how we can resist the temptation to close down the group and begin to exclude others through our gossip. So, first, let's look at an example of how news spread in Jesus' world. Mark is notorious among the Gospels for sort of jumping right into the story. And already in chapter one, Jesus has been traveling around teaching and healing people.
Speaker 1:And we read in Mark one twenty seven that the people were all so amazed that they asked each other, What is this? A new teaching and one with authority even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him. Now, obviously here, Jesus is a pretty exciting figure and people are understandably intrigued, and so they start speaking to each other about him. None of that is particularly surprising, but look at how this scene unfolds. As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew.
Speaker 1:Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. So he went to her, took her hand, and helped her up. The fever left her, and she began to wait on them. That evening, after sunset, the people brought to Jesus all of the sick and the demon possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases.
Speaker 1:Now, what I want to pay attention to here in a fairly innocuous story is this transition from that people were amazed and asked each other what is this, to That evening, people showed up with their loved ones looking for help from Jesus. Because this is the power of a story to motivate encounter. And often, within Christianity, we conceptualize evangelism as this mission to convert someone's way of thinking. We want to convince them that they are wrong and that we are right, and that it's us versus them dynamic that Tajfel recognized that's at play in sometimes the way we conceptualize this. Here in this story, the speaking about the gossiping in that broad sense we talked about earlier does not seem to be shaped by our minimal group paradigm yet into this attempt to exclude everyone or tell them that they're wrong.
Speaker 1:In fact, the evangelizing that we see in the New Testament is primarily gossip driven, in this very basic sense of being motivated to pass along and experience one to another. The evangelism of the Jesus area was primarily doing the thing that came most naturally to them: telling each other about their encounters with Christ. Now, sometimes our retellings become colored by agendas. And of course, our desires to in and outgroup, they creep their way back in. We'll get to that gossip in a moment here.
Speaker 1:But understand that even if we could just reconceptualize evangelism as simply telling our stories, doing what comes most naturally to us and passing our stories one to another: one, it might be less weird and two, it might actually become more effective. Because we are, all of us at our core, social machines created to absorb the stories around us. And so speaking about each other, when we do our best to speak plainly and honestly, without agenda or motive, this is actually a core social function for human groups. It's essential to our well-being and our ability to work together, but it's only ever a beginning. And so what happens in Mark is that people hear about Jesus, then they speak to their friends about Jesus, then the story grows and spreads about Jesus.
Speaker 1:But then they bring their friends to Jesus. And this is the thing about our stories: eventually, no matter how good they are, they need to become embodied. And so whether we are talking about Jesus or a new friend or even just an author that you appreciate, there is a very appropriate place to speak about that person. This is how we introduce each other to new ideas and concepts and groups and people. This is part of how we actually push back the boundaries of our groups to include new people within them.
Speaker 1:The point of that speaking about is to help us filter the connections that we want to pursue directly in person. Remember that quote from earlier that I read: Gossiping is a fundamental human instinct because our lives are deeply rooted in groups, and we need to have as much information as possible about the people around us in order to know who can be trusted. So, this speaking about is important, but no matter how faithfully we represent someone, that speaking about eventually has to become this speaking to. Now, last week I threw out a really quick example of how important this is from the book of James. There's this passage where the writer encourages us to confess one to another so that we might be healed.
Speaker 1:The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective, it says. And I mentioned last week that we sort of immediately want to jump to some kind of supernatural healing when we read this, and certainly that's part of what the writer has in mind here. I'm not trying to get away from that. But the Greek here is more expansive than just that. First of all, the word healed, ia feta here, is more than just physical healing.
Speaker 1:In Greek, it can be used for recovering from a broken heart. It can be used for being forgiven of a sin or an injury. It can be used for healing from a wound or sickness. So I would argue a better translation might be something like confess that you might be made well. But then, even this follow-up phrase, the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective, more literally what this says in Greek here is that the prayer of a righteous person accomplishes many things.
Speaker 1:Look, in the ancient world, they were no less aware of their need for openness and vulnerability. Everything that we spoke about last week, emotional connection and friendship, they knew that just as much as we do today. And they knew that being well meant more than just physical health. One of the things that could be a blessing coming out of this season of social distancing is that we begin to recover some of that awareness as well. Of course, we need to protect the public health.
Speaker 1:Of course, we need to do everything we can to keep each other safe. But let's make sure we remember just how deeply we need to move from the speaking about to the speaking to. So far, we've only talked about how speaking can open up these new possibilities for us, and then how that speaking can slowly become this encounter we have between us, and that's all well and good. That may be part of what social psychologists have in mind when they speak about gossip, but that's not really what we jump to in our minds when we think about gossip, is it? Because even if our gossip is quietly opening our imagination to all kinds of encounters outside of our current reality, the gossip that tends to stick, that tends to very immediately and irrevocably leave its mark honest, this is very different, isn't it?
Speaker 1:And part of this goes back to that very purpose of gossip. If gossip is about filtering the connections that we want to pursue, a positive encounter and a new possibility might be welcome, or a warning to avoid, or a pitfall to sidestep any signal that feels like it's going to keep us safe from someone harmful, those signals really tend to stick. And I know we've talked about this before, maybe last year, but negative emotions and experiences are much harder for us to forget. One study has said that you actually have to concentrate on a positive memory for 10 times as long for it to stick as a negative one. In order to remember it, you need to focus on it, and you need to remember that.
Speaker 1:Partly, that's because we don't have as many negative encounters. But it's also because, as social creatures, we are wired to remember what hurts us. And that is social as much as it is physical. And what this means is that for every 10 experiences of positive storytelling, just one negative story, one reason to draw a line and keep someone outside the group will have the same impact on us. This is why Jesus responds to this type of gossip, gossip that's designed to draw lines and to exclude others, becomes so incredibly instructive for us.
Speaker 1:In John eight, Jesus has been teaching, and a group of people have been listening, they are not having it anymore. And they do not like what he's been saying, and in particular, they do not like this encounter where Jesus has been confronted with a woman who was caught in the act of adultery and he refuses to draw a line and exclude her. He famously responds, I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more. So this turns into a back and forth between Jesus and some of the religious leaders, and they keep trying to get Jesus to say something incriminating.
Speaker 1:But he keeps sidestepping those attempts, and then eventually they turn to using gossip as a weapon. In John eight forty eight they say, Aren't we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon possessed? Now, Samaritans seem to have come up a lot in our sermons this spring, but as a quick reminder here, they are the mixed descendants of Assyrians and Jews. Now remember, Assyrians were a hated enemy of Israel. They conquered Israel, and so the mixed descendants of Jewish people who had partnered with them were often despised.
Speaker 1:That animosity runs throughout the Gospels. But notice here the accusation: Aren't we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon possessed? Because this cuts right to the heart of it. Demon possessed. That's kind of a big deal.
Speaker 1:Nobody wants to be friends with a demon. But the Samaritan piece is insidious because it immediately others Jesus. You're not like us. Even if you don't think that Jesus is a demon, this instinctively tells you that Jesus is not like you. And it doesn't really matter that it's not true, because again, this isn't about rationality.
Speaker 1:This is about appealing to that primitive, primal, minimal group paradigm. And if we can introduce the idea into your head that Jesus is not us, well then he must be them. But look at how Jesus responds in verse 49. He says, I am not possessed by a demon. Now, you see why this is so important here in Jesus' response?
Speaker 1:Because he calls out the factual and natural. He says, I'm not possessed by a demon, but then he refuses to even acknowledge the pardon the term here social distancing that's happening in their use of gossip. See, Samaritans were a different ethnic group that practiced what was seen in the eyes of Judaism as a deficient religious form. Jesus refuses to even acknowledge that label as an insult. Think about that for a second.
Speaker 1:God does not think being associated with the wrong religion is worth responding to. But this is what we have to understand about negative gossip. It is not just factually inaccurate, that's not the issue. It is this innate attempt to other. To draw a line, to exclude, to shortcut the process of getting to know someone by immediately ruling them out of bounds.
Speaker 1:This is what matters about our negative gossip. And that's the game that Jesus refuses to play here. Because here's the thing: if we misquote each other and we mess up the facts, we do it all the time, but all of that can be corrected. But once we allow ourselves to see each other as the other, the problem is it won't matter what new information we receive, we have already ruled each other out of bounds. And this is why our words are so important.
Speaker 1:Because we can, you and I, by speaking about each other, open each other to all kinds of new possibilities. New relationships and encounters that we might otherwise never have found. But then, in the very next breath, we can, with far more potency, choose to close down those possibilities, and to draw lines that cut us off and limit our ability to discover what God has for us in each other. And so this is my advice for our big loud mouths when it comes to speak clearly and truly. Celebrate the stories of those around you that you encounter.
Speaker 1:And always use your words and ways that invite others to meet each other through you. But in the same way, with the very same care, refuse to participate in the stories that reduce someone down to what is different. Refuse to take offense at the stories that begin to associate you with someone unexpected. Choose your words in ways designed always to open up the possibility for connection, even in the hardest of moments. Trusting that the shortcut to know and the path of least resistance is also the path of least discovery and beauty.
Speaker 1:May the God who speaks good words about each of us, the God who is not ashamed to identify with any of us, the God who dreams endlessly about what could be in all of our encounters and relationships. Shape your hearts and words and your big loud mouths to always invite the new possibility that is just around the corner. Let's pray. For all the ways that our big loud mouths have been used in ways that have closed the conversation down, that have drawn lines and excluded someone else, that have spoken about someone in ways that defined them as other, different, a way out of bounds. We repent.
Speaker 1:We ask your forgiveness, and in that we invite your spirit to fill us, to shape us, to change the ways that we speak about each other, To recognize that our same words, our same gossip, our same stories that we tell can be shaped in ways that push back the boundaries and open the possibilities, invite new people into new encounters all the time, all around us. May we recognize that this is what you are doing even now. That you are speaking about each of us in ways that invite goodness, that invite conversation, that invite encounter, that you are reminding us that when we come face to face, and we share our stories, we open ourselves to each other, we see that we are more alike than we ever dreamed. And in that, we encounter the divine image placed in everyone. And we are drawn back to the heart of your goodness, your grace that sits at the very center of the universe.
Speaker 1:May our words always open the conversation. May we do everything we can, never to close it down. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.