Rev. Tessie Mandeville
September 30, 2007
Christ Covenant MCC
Decatur, GA 30030

Today we continue our series on Building Relationships in Beloved Community because we are building our future together and making decisions now about how we will relate to and treat one another is the foundation of everything that we will build together.

Our relationships with one another matter. Each week we are looking at values and spiritual principles that will help us build strong and solid relationships with one another . As we talked about last week, va lues are beliefs of a person or social group (i.e. church) in which we have an emotional investment. Spiritual principles are standards, especially about behavior, that we agree to abide by. When we are committed to and guided by values and spiritual principles then our relationships in beloved community, though never perfect, will be strong, grounded in God’s love for us, and worthy of imitation.

Today I want to talk about the core value of honesty. But to be honest, I think lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people have a complicated relationship to truth-telling. All of us, no matter how we identify, are taught to tell the truth from a young age. But as we grow older, telling the truth gets complicated if your truth is: I am gay. Or your truth is: The biological body that I was born into is not who I am on the inside. In situations like these, and so many others, telling the truth is a painful experience sometimes because it causes separation from people we love who cannot support us in our coming out journeys. So what we’ve often done as LGBT people is shade the truth, or hide it, or keep in the closet.

But to agree that honesty will be a core value in our beloved community is to agree that we must find ways to 1) tell the truth about our lives and 2) to tell the truth in our relationships with one another. It takes courage to tell the truth. It takes even more courage to face the truth of ourselves first.

Some of the most honest people I know are people in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) programs who follow the 12 steps. If you’re in AA, or programs based on the 12 steps, or if you know and love someone who is in program, then you know Step 4: Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. And let me tell you something. You don’t have to be in a program to follow this step. I’ve had a couple of times in my life when to get myself back in balance, I did step 4 and it helped me tremendously.

To make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves is to take a mirror and hold it up to ourselves. I can’t say that I was fearless when I did that but remember courage isn’t the absence of fear—it’s feeling the fear and doing it anyway. To take a moral inventory is to search deep within our own hearts to discover those times where we’ve missed the mark; where we haven’t acted with right conduct; it’s checking in with our own ethical behavior and looking at our own faults first. It’s laying ourselves open and bare before the God of our understanding and saying, “This is who I am and what I’ve done. Thank you for loving me just as I am.” It takes a lot of courage to do your own moral inventory and to be that honest with yourself. It gives us the opportunity as author Sue Monk Kidd says, “…to descend into the labyrinths of self, where we set up a dialogue with our own depths, where we face the denied and undiscovered, the places we live falsely and cut off from others.”

I honestly believe this is what Jesus was saying to the Pharisees in today’s gospel. He was trying to help them reconnect with those parts of themselves that they were cut off from. The sad truth it seems is that they weren’t willing to be that honest with themselves. They were willing to take other’s inventories, but they weren’t willing to take their own. The essence of what I hear Jesus saying is this: Double standards are not allowed. You cannot hold up the mirror to someone else if you’re not willing to hold it up to yourself first. Because here’s the truth: All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

Jesus was a truth-teller and those of us that follow Jesus have a responsibility to tell the truth. David Blumenthal says it this way: “In discourse with one another and before God, we must always speak the truth, as best as we know it and can express it. Sometimes the truth is awesome; sometimes, it is awful. But we owe it to one another, to the tradition, and to God to speak the truth and to let the truth stand, unmitigated by our anxiety or our dreams—even if the truth is heretical by community standards.”

We have a responsibility to tell the truths of our lives and to let those truths stand as they are. We also have a responsibility as followers of Jesus to speak the truth to one another. But here’s the catch: The Apostle Paul teaches us in Ephesians 4: 15 & 16 that when we speak the truth, we must speak it in love. Many of us are good at speaking the truth, willing to tell others exactly what we think of them when they don’t perform to our expectations or when they’ve let us down. I worked with someone years ago who would do and say things that upset me and others and then turn around and apologize for it. And we got into this cycle of his actions being predictable and then his apologies being predictable. And in a fit of righteous indignation one day I said, “Stop behaving the way you are behaving and then you won’t to have to apologize for it all the time!” And while there was truth in that statement, there wasn’t a whole lot of love in it. And over time I came to realize that I wasn’t nearly as righteous in my indignation as I thought I was.

Aristotle said, telling the truth is not just a matter of “telling it like it is;” it is telling the truth in the right way, to the right person, at the right time, for the right reasons…and this is not easy. Just because it is not easy does not mean we should not do it. What’s more important is how we do it.

How do we speak the truth in love? We start with humility . Starting with our own moral inventories will help us start with humility toward others. “The goal of the Christian life is love, and the means to that love is humility.” Practicing humility is what we agreed to do here at Christ Covenant when we chose Micah 6:8 as our mission statement and then had it carved in stone at the entrance to our sanctuary: What does God require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God? “True humility is not an abject, groveling, self-despising spirit; it is a right estimate of ourselves as God sees us.”In her book, To Love As God Loves, Roberta Bondi says, “We will know that we are walking humbly with God when we not only love God but love God’s people who share the world with us. We love in this way by seeing other people as having the same value in God’s eyes that we do, by valuing them ourselves, and by developing an empathy with their weaknesses so that it is impossible to judge them on the basis of our own self-righteousness. This is how humility enables us to love.”

How do we speak the truth in love? We remember it’s a dialogue, not a monologue. It’s not a time for “telling it like it is” and simply dumping onto someone else everything we think about them. It’s a time for sitting down face-to-face with a person and not only talking but listening. Having a true exchange means that both people talk and both people listen. Humility requires listening to a response from the other person about how your behavior affected them too. True listening means you are not re-loading and getting ready for the next comment you’re going to say. You could have a whole list of exactly what you need to say to this person and what you think they need to hear, but when you listen to them, you might learn something you didn’t know…and the next thing you thought you wanted to say might not be what you need to say…There are times in our relationships with one another when we must learn to say everything we need to say without saying everything we want to say. Truth can be used to wound and hurt. Our task is to be honest; it is never to be cruel to one another.

How do we speak the truth in love? We remember that the goal is to build up the body of Christ. In Ephesians, the Apostle Paul goes on to tell us that, “We must no longer be children…but speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into Christ who is the head of the church, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love as each part and person does their work.”

Speaking the truth in love is meant to build up the body of Christ, not to tear it down. We all know that there are times when we can say the truth in such a way that it silences all communication. The other person is so overwhelmed by the severity of our judgment that it doesn’t matter if the judgments are true. John 8:32 says that “when you know the truth, the truth will set you free.” The truth is supposed to set us free but if we do not speak it in love, it will not set free; it will bind and wound. If we speak the truth harshly to one another, it will damage our relationships in ways that may take years to repair, and years for trust to be restored. The goal is to build up the body of Christ, not to tear it down.

Jesus was a truth-teller and those of us that follow Jesus have a responsibility to tell the truths of our lives and to let those truths stand as they are. We also have a responsibility as followers of Jesus to speak the truth in love to one another.

Choosing honesty as a core value and spiritual principle calls forth from us a high resolve to speak the truth in love. It will take courage, clear thinking, and conviction to speak the truth, but it will take humility and love to express it in such a way that it can be heard with understanding and without undue pain. And when we can do this, the whole world will indeed know we are Christians by our love. And that’s the truth. Blessed be and amen.

Dr. Susan Jeffers, Ph.D., author of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Weavings: A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life. “In the Ragged Meadow of My Soul: Solitude and True Relatedness” by Sue Monk Kidd, 1996, p. 36.

Romans 3:23, Christian Scriptures

Who is Battering Whom? by David Blumenthal, www.js.emory.edu/BLUMENTHAL/Battering.html

Quote adapted from Sam Wells’s sermon at Duke University Chapel

This quote taken from a review of To Love as God Loves: Conversations with the Early Church. Roberta C. Bondi, (Fortress Press, 1987), by Stefanie Weisgram, in Weavings: A Journal for the Christian Spiritual Life, p. 47.

Tryon Edwards

Ibid., p. 47.

Ephesians 4: 14-16

Copyright © 2007 by Rev. Tessie Mandeville. Permission granted for non- profit circulation with attribution of author and venue. Other rights reserved.