Sermon Archive
Gossip
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Matins on 10 June 2007
Deuteronomy 6:10-25 ; Acts 22:22–23:11
Walking our dog one day last week, I met an old friend on the same errand. While much sniffing ensued between our respective black Labrador bitches, my friend and I exchanged news, at first with one another, and then with other dog-owning acquaintances whose paths crossed with ours. A few years ago my friend retired from a country parish and came to live in Edinburgh. "I thought," he remarked, "that when we left the country, there would be no more gossip. But there's just as much of it in the city, especially if you have a dog."
Gossip has often had a bad name: a gossip, the Dictionary tells is, is a 'person who habitually indulges in idle talk, especially the spreading of rumours and discussion of the private concerns of others'. But the word 'gossip' originally came from the Old Norse 'god-sib' and meant the kind of familiar talk you had with a godparent or a familiar acquaintance. Gossiping is idle, relaxed, talk between friends, in which we indulge, as much to help us feel at home in our world as to establish the truth about any particular state of affairs. Why spoil a good story for the sake of the facts? And for a long time now, our appetite for gossip has also been amply fed by the press and the other media. Media gossip about people we have never met - politicians or celebrities, for example – can subtly, or not so subtly, influence our view of them, and help us decide whether we approve or disapprove of their actions or antics, just as we do when gossiping about people we actually know.
Now because such gossip, especially in tabloids, is often trivial, intrusive or hypocritical, it is easy to criticise the media. But in the modern world we also need the media to inform us about what is going on around us, and to question what those with power of any kind over our lives want us to believe. And to bring this effectively home to us, I think, the media often need to use something not unlike gossip – the kind of stories which have what is called 'human interest''. Among the best exponents of this are some of the BBC's foreign correspondents, like Hugh Sykes for example, who bring alive to you what life is like for a person they have met amidst the pollution of a Chinese industrial city, or the bombing and kidnapping in Baghdad. And what fixes in your memory, sometimes for days, what life must be like for these people is often some small poignant detail that the observant reporter has noticed and tellingly told. Recently for example there have been a number of radio programmes marking the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War in which Israel took over the Palestinian territory of the West Bank: in one of them, a Palestinian family who became refugees after losing their house and land, were interviewed by a BBC correspondent; and the small poignant detail which brought this alive for me, and which has remained in my memory, was the moment when the grandfather of the family produced a large black key – the key to the door of the home they had lost so long ago.
And that, perhaps, brings us rather abruptly to another kind of human interest story, our Old Testament reading this morning. At Matins, we not only have the opportunity of hearing and singing the ancient and contemporary music of the Anglican tradition, which as the notes on our service sheet say, can carry us to the presence of God. We also have the opportunity of hearing read to us some quite substantial passages of the Old and New Testament Scriptures, which remind us that the religious tradition we inherit is much older and stranger than Anglicanism, or Presbyterianism, or Catholicism or even Christianity. For the next six Sundays after Trinity, for example, we shall be hearing a lot more from Acts, about the travels and travails of St Paul. And we shall also be hearing a lot more from Deuteronomy, a book which records the reiteration of the Law, in a speech by Moses to the Israelites on the eve of their invasion of Caanan, the ancient name for Palestine.
But perhaps we have heard more than enough already: '… the LORD your God' Moses says, 'has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you – a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant…'
Now what, or rather who, is missing from that prospect – airbrushed out as we now say? Surely it is the Caananite or Palestinian grandfather, with the key to the door of the home he is about to lose forever. Do we really wish our worship today to be associated with that ancient wrong, so recently re-enacted, and not for the first time? Would it not be wiser to reject this religious tradition we have inherited, or even, as some would say, religion itself, because of what has been done in its name?
How might we reply to that powerful question? One response, I think, is to remind ourselves that there is much truth in the saying that 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'. By rejecting or denying a tradition we have inherited, we do not free ourselves from it. Psychology reminds us that if we repress the past, it can return to rend us. Although we were not personally involved in either the ancient or modern dispossession of Palestinians, and although the Christian gospel and modern thinking alike mean that we cannot share many of the assumptions of the writers of Deuteronomy, our Western culture remains deeply rooted in the unique coming together of the ancient Hebrew tradition to which Deuteronomy belongs, with the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. Moreover, the relative peace and prosperity that societies like ours enjoy has all-too-often been gained at the expense of those whom our ancestors defeated in war or economic struggle. Recent recollections of the slave trade, for example, remind us forcibly that, in this sense, we too live 'in a land with fine, large cities that we did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that we did not fill, hewn cisterns that we did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that we did not plant'. To forget or deny that is not just a theoretical matter. Dissociating ourselves from our troubling history can delude us into pretending that we in Europe, or in Scotland, do not share the full moral responsibility that America, or Britain, has for the wrongs of the past. Dissociating ourselves from our own troubling history can delude us into forgetting that our current responsibilities, in everything from debt relief to global warming, are what, morally, we owe to others.
And something like that of course, is implicit in even our reading from Deuteronomy today. In it, what Moses tells the Israelites is rather more than I have quoted. What he actually says is : 'When the LORD your God has brought you into the land that he swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you – a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant – and when you have eaten your fill, [then] take care that you do not forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery'. The implications of this for the unfortunate Caananites or Palestinians, of course, still are not ones which the Christian gospel or modern thinking can condone. But the LORD, whom Moses warns the Israelites not to forget, is the one who also told Moses that God's name is 'I AM THAT I AM', or 'I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE', and thus who, the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions alike acknowledge, cannot be captured in images of any kind, or even in words.
That vision of God as 'I AM THAT I AM', or 'I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE' is crucial to bear in mind when we wonder if it would not be wiser to reject the religious tradition we have inherited, or even religion itself, because of what has been done in its name. What has been done in the name of religion, all too often is the result of what has been said in the name of religion by religious people who imagine that the Word of God can be captured, cribb'd, cabin'd, and defined, in human words. What religious people have confidently said about God, and about what God requires, all-too-often has been like the gossip I mentioned earlier, ideas which we share with like-minded acquaintances, often mainly to help us feel at home in our world and to establish our own ideas over against those of others. But the Word of God is not the words with which we respond to it. It is rather, the living Word, the Word calling Israel out of slavery, the word of Christ saying, 'Follow me.' "Why, and whither, are we to follow?" we may want to ask. But the Word of God does not tell us. Come out of your self-imposed slavery, it tells us, break the mind-forged manacles of small hopes and habits, follow the one who says 'fear not': and then you will begin to discover the why and whither for yourself. The Word of God, which we hear at first and even now very faintly, calls us to grow up into the kind of people who become capable of hearing more clearly what the Word is saying to us. It calls us to our deepest human calling: to love God and God's creation; to love and forgive our neighbour and ourselves; and never to give up hope; and thereby to discover what it is that the Word is saying to us, and even the meaning of the poet's wonderful phrase, that it is the Word that causes death's defeat.