LD 43, I Peter 4:7-11 "Set You Free" Scott Hoezee

In a new book Richard Stengel provides a history of flattery as well as a guide on how to be a good flatterer. For instance, if you met up with actor Tom Hanks and wanted to flatter your way into his good graces, it would not be enough merely to gush, "You're a great actor!" Instead get specific to show you're being thoughtful: "I was so moved by that moment in Saving Private Ryan when your chin twitched ever-so-subtly with emotion." Additionally, it's good to flatter people behind their backs--that way, if a report of your glowing words gets back to the person, she will be that much more kindly disposed toward you. But don't go overboard. If you tell a local artist, "Your paintings make Rembrandt look like an amateur," you're not going to be believed. But if you say, "You should be included in the Grand Rapids Art Museum," you will have succeeded at the kissing up game.

Flattery, Benjamin Franklin once noted, is a safe game. When you flatter someone, you never look ridiculous because the person you flatter will always take you seriously! After all, as Dale Carnegie famously said, the secret to flattery is sincerity. Once you can fake sincerity, you can get away with anything! The problem is that our entire society fakes sincerity and it does so regularly. The modern day cult of celebrities insists on an abiding, society-wide pandemic of flattery, of telling people over and again how great they are.

The explosion of cable TV in recent years has created a slew of new talk shows, each of which requires a steady stream of celebrity guests. Whether it's Rosie O'Donnell, celebrity biography shows on E! and A&E, the Today show, or Regis & Kathy Lee, there are now scores of places where George Clooney or Brittney Spears can appear daily and be feted, flattered, praised, applauded, cheered, and fawned over by talk show hosts who are only too glad to butter up, kiss up, shmooze, and adore any and every star they can get. And all of that is not to mention the ongoing award shows which stars throw for themselves.

Once upon a time it was just the Academy Awards. But now we add to that the Emmy Awards (both daytime and prime time versions), the Tony awards (which is watched by millions of folks who never get anywhere near Broadway), the MTV Awards, the VH1 awards, the People's Choice awards, the TV Guide awards, the Golden Globe awards, and any number of other such shows whose main purpose is to flatter needy celebrity egos.

Yet, as Stengel notes, it's all so desperately shallow. The modern cult of flattering speech is based only on the surface of personality instead of the depth of character. But it's not just celebrities who exist in such a world--increasingly we all do. As Rousseau noted long ago, people in the modern era increasingly exist in the opinions of other people. We form our sense of personal worthwhileness based on what everybody else thinks about us. "Image is everything," the advertising world tells us. And we've come to believe it. It's all about surveys and opinion polls and professional evaluations. Sooner or later we all get a crack at evaluating a professor, a pastor, a boss, an employee, a co-worker, a president; we all get asked our opinion, the idea being that when those poll results are presented to the person in question, this is to become the most reliable indicator of how the person is supposed to feel about him- or herself.

But when you feed off of the opinions of others, you become desperate to control those opinions. Certainly this is a trait of our president. Poll-driven politicians must control how the public perceives them. One of Mr. Clinton's presidential heroes is Franklin Roosevelt. Garry Wills has noted that polio made FDR preternaturally aware of people's perceptions even as polio's paralyzing effects made it necessary for FDR to control those perceptions lest he be seen as a helpless cripple unworthy of people's votes.

This ability to control perceptions went well beyond just hiding his paralysis, however. Economically FDR did little to end the Great Depression during his first term. Yet FDR somehow made many Americans feel as though life was better. People felt like things were moving again. Curiously, FDR's ability to control how people perceived him physically and his ability to spin public perceptions of economics coalesced in many political cartoons in the 1930s. These cartoons depicted Roosevelt as sprinting into a bright future with the Congress desperately trying to catch up with him! A paralyzed man led a paralyzed country and yet had the wherewithal to distract people from seeing either case of paralysis!

But like his latter-day admirer Bill Clinton, so Mr. Roosevelt accomplished this through telling his fair share of what Winston Churchill once called "terminological inexactitudes." Politicians frequently have a wee problem with the truth. But the deeper problem is their inability to escape living within the opinions of others.

Again, however, this is increasingly everyone's temptation as we more and more form our self-images based on what others think. Thus, we want to control our own reality and we'll fudge, finesse, flatter, and just plain lie if that's what it takes to generate a positive public image. But then, precisely this kind of control is the essence of lying. When we lie, we cut ourselves and others off from the real world in favor of a fantasy world which we create through our lies. When we lie to someone, what we in essence say is, "I will determine reality for you. By the power of my speech I will create your world."

If you lie about yourself (saying, for instance, that you single-handedly accomplished some project on which you actually had a lot of outside help from people who are brighter than you are), then you have falsely re-created yourself. But the other person doesn't know that and so comes to see you in a way that bears no resemblance to reality. Or if you slander another person behind his or her back (claiming, for instance, that Geraldine said something nasty which she never said), then you have dictated how others see Geraldine.

God took an awful risk when he gave human beings the ability to speak. So far as we know, we are the only creatures on the planet who can talk and who can deliberate ahead of time what we're going to say. This is part of the image of God in humanity. God, the Bible tells us, created the entire universe through an act of speech. "And God said . . . and it was." Now, as miniatures of God we, too, can create whole worlds through what we say.

Perhaps that is why Peter advised his readers to regard their every act of speech as though it were the speech of God. When we speak, we should say the words we believe God would say, sizing up this person or that situation with the truthful clarity of God. We try to adopt God's perspective, which is always accurate, and report matters the way God would report them. Because in the end only God is supposed to create reality--the rest of us are supposed to report on the reality God creates.

In these few verses from I Peter 4 it is so abundantly clear that Peter wants God to be like the frame around the picture of our lives. We need to be clear minded, he says, so we can pray to God. We need to be kind and hospitable so that we can become mini-decanters of God's grace. We need to watch our tongues so that we say only the words of God. We should serve generously and do so with God's strength. And the goal of the entire enterprise of Christian living is so that God may be praised in Christ Jesus. God is the touchstone, the home base, the bottom line of reality.

Everything we say is said in God's presence. The question is whether or not our words line up with what God knows. Is this what God would say? Is this accurate to what God knows? To ignore this tempts us to create a false world, which as the Catechism reminds us, is the oldest ploy in the Devil's book. When the serpent approached Eve, his first order of business was to doubt God's word: "Did God really say you must not eat that fruit?" Once that seed of doubt was sown in the soil of Eve's mind, the serpent could then more brazenly create a false world: "You won't die. You'll improve, get better, become more like God, which is certainly something God would want for you, isn't it?"

Keeping the ninth commandment means casting our speech in the light of God's speech. How can we do that? Allow me to close with a few suggestions. But I want these suggestions to hit us in our ordinary speech. Few of us will ever give testimony in a courtroom. Few if any of us will ever publish some tell-all autobiography in which we can either be honest or self-servingly false.

But every day we talk. We report on our day's activities to our spouse or parent. We chew the fat with co-workers in the lunch room at work. We grab a cup of coffee at Arnie's with some friends or hob-knob with our peers in this or that corner of the church narthex. These are the places where we live and talk and so these are the places where we express ideas, opinions, conclusions, theories. These are the places where we talk about other people. And so the suggestions that follow are aimed at these daily situations.

The first suggestion is that we learn, or re-learn, how to measure our speech. We are so bombarded by words and talk and chatter that we may forget how powerful words are. Somebody is always talking to us or at us. Cable TV commentary shows split the screen three or four ways and encourage guests to talk over and through each other, to sputter and argue because this makes for more interesting viewing. Everywhere we go we see examples of people being encouraged to fire off a thought or an opinion. Shout it out! Grab the microphone! Post your ideas on an Internet electronic bulletin board. We see examples of this all over but we seldom see examples of deliberate thoughtfulness, of hesitancy or of taking some time to think about it.

We need to recall the power of words and take some time to weigh our own before we open our mouths. Words have creative power, both for good and for ill. God calls us to speak the truth, or at least to speak the truth as far as we know it or according to an opinion which we have formed to the best of our abilities. We can, of course, be wrong without knowing it. That's called a mistake. And, because sin affects also our brains, we can muster the full wattage of our deliberative powers of thought and reason and arrive at a well-formed opinion that is singularly and disastrously incorrect.

Still, speaking the truth means doing our best even as we are very cautious. After all, sometimes speaking the truth will mean speaking a critical word. But we arrive at a criticism slowly and carefully. We recognize fully how adept we are at getting it wrong. We acknowledge up front that left to our own devices we tend to want to make ourselves look better by making others look worse. "Why am I saying this? Am I right? Or am I just helping myself?" We know our own potential for harm and error and so we slow down.

By way of analogy think of a knife: in my kitchen I've got a lot of dull knives but I recently got a very, very sharp 8" chef's knife. When I take that knife into my hand to dice an onion or bone a duck, I'm a lot more careful. I respect what that knife could do to my fingers--actually I have seen what it can do to my fingers when I've wielded it in a moment of distraction! So I slow down, watch what I'm doing because that thing can hurt me.

So also with our tongues: they're sharp little instruments which require some pretty thoughtful wielding. So especially when we feel led to speak critical words, we check ourselves first. Is this based on no more than a rumor? How do I think I know this? We do not make iron-clad pronouncements when we're proceeding on a hunch. We're careful.

And by the way we're cautious in both directions, negative and positive. We don't say flattering things about someone only for the sake of ingratiating ourselves when, as a matter of fact, we don't know how true this is. There's probably not a single celebrity about whom most people could say for certain, "That's a very nice person!" How do you know? We can create a false world through ill-conceived words of praise just as much as through ill-conceived words of criticism. (Though, of course, a legitimate praising of people who have done a good job is a wholly Christian thing to do. Here also, however, sometimes we dishonestly withhold positive words because envy silences words we should speak and, in all honesty, words which we also know this person deserves to hear.)

Still, sometimes we are silent. As the ancient philosopher Aristotle recognized, being honest means more than just unloading everything you know to everyone you meet. Being a person who loves the truth but who loves also people means that you speak the truth at the right time to the right people. If you've told me something in confidence, then that is not my truth to tell. There's a difference between lying and withholding a truth I can't divulge.

There's also a difference between lying and just keeping certain opinions to yourself. Sometimes being a kind, loving person means we don't point out faults in others. In verse 8 Peter claims that we need to be filled with the kind of Godly love which "covers a multitude of sins." I suspect Peter means that we know how flawed we all are. And so we also know that it would not be difficult to spend our days nit-picking each other to death.

Being critical is not difficult. Pianists sometimes miss notes, soloists drop lyrics, preachers stumble over their words, cooks mistime the shrimp. Some people laugh too loud, some don't laugh nearly enough. Some people talk too much, others blend in with the woodwork at dinner parties. Some people are a little too good at what they do, others struggle to keep their heads above water most days.

It is not tough to be critical. It is not difficult to find flaws in someone's character or goofs they've made. Love, Peter suggests, reminds us that we're all in the same boat. And so love, while not denying the truth, keeps us quiet about some truths. Yes, there are times when the truth requires that we confront an abuser or even just some ordinary fellow who clearly has no idea that most everything he says comes out like a sneer, to the great wounding of people he really does not mean to hurt but does. Sometimes we need to confront. But other times we need to be quiet, allowing love to let some things slide.

Doing that is not being dishonest but is instead a way to let the larger truth of our mutual difficulty with sin lead us to informed kindness. Sometimes people who pride themselves on being able to "call 'em like I see 'em" are really just arrogant nay-sayers who use their supposed commitment to the truth as a way to climb higher than everyone else by using the flaws of others like rungs on the ladder of moral superiority.

We opened this sermon talking about the tendency we have to live within the opinions of others. But there is one outside viewpoint in which each of us must live, and that is of course God's opinion. We properly assess our lives in the light of the divine perspective and we speak accordingly. "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free," Jesus once said. Of course, sometimes the truth also makes you sad, uncomfortable, afraid, and angry! Since we none of us care to feel those things we often take refuge in falsehood.

But the path to freedom threads through the truth of our lives. Because God's got oceans of grace to cleanse us of every sin we've ever committed or could ever commit and so we dare to live in the light of his truth. For then and only then can we experience the joy of being known and accepted for who we really are. Pretenses, false fronts, masks, self-protective cover stories, and coy disguises drop away as I realize, with a jolt of joy, that I am loveable; that who I am, warts and all, is precious to God. I can stop running. I can stop fudging and finessing and hiding. I can settle down in the truth of God that just is my eternal home. The truth really does set you free. Thanks be to God! Amen.