The Gospel Within Gossip

"...."Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done He cannot be the Messiah, can he?"

Look up the word "gossip" in the dictionary and you will find origins in the words "God" and "sibling" which, when put together, originally meant akin to God. Reading further, you see that in some British dialects, it was the word for godparent: one who contracted spiritual kinship by acting as a sponsor at baptism ..one who helps 'give a name to'.. a God-sib, a gossip. Further, in Eric Partridge's Origins, you are told simply to "see God," and there you find the word's antecedents include gospel, godspell, sippe (or consanguinity) and sabha, a village community notoriously inter-related. As in most things, we have strayed far from the word's original Intent, gossip currently being taken for " a) a person who habitually reveals personal or sensational facts and b) rumor or report of an intimate nature. " A thin thread remains. Gossip: One who helps give a name to.

So it is in the first place and for reasons other than theological, I seem to have become an authority on this matter of gossip. In fact I can say with confidence that anyone who has spendt any time at all in a Maine fishing village, as stranger among a half-dozen year-round residents, will the come away having gained new insite into the meaning of the word. "Allowing yourself to be the subject of gossip," wrote Kathleen Norris, a reconstructed Presbyterian poet who had returned to her small-town South Dakota roots and who, in her book Dakota, put me onto gossip's etymology, "Allowing yourself to be the subject of gossip (she says) is one of the sacrifices you make, living in a small town. " Or, I might add, being a minister of the gospel!

No sooner do I arrive every summer in little Bay Point than my nearest neighbors are separately knocking on my door and, in whispered tones, telling me of the other's recent sins. "You keep ahold o' your stuff now, Sandy," said one to me. "She'll steal you blind (referring to her neighbor of thirty-five years). She done me. Besides, I saw her name in the police report for shoplifting They say she's not allowed near the store no more." That in the morning while the other is saying to me by nightfall, "She talks like she don't drink but I know she sneaks it at night. I've smelled it plenty a' times. So she don't got no room to talk about you. Each litany would invariably end either with the words, "Don't you tell her nothing I told you--I'll deny it if ya do!" or "Don't tell her a thing unless you want it spread all over Georgetown." Gossip: one who helps give a name to.

To be sure, part of returning home after a few week's absence is catching up on all the gossip one has missed. Hearing what couldn't be read between the words of the Local's headlines about politics on the Hill; being filled in about happenings at the General Assembly and the Presbytery and fellow ministers now under suspicion because being single in the Presbyterian Church coincides with being suspect; then members catching me up about life in our little congregation; elders letting me know who said what at meetings missed; neighbors needing to inform me of what appeared to happen in my absence a few doors down. Gossip: one who helps give a name to.

"Why is it," asks Walker Percy, "that the self--though it professes to be loving [and] caring ... to wish other selves well and not ill--in fact secretly relishes ... gossip about neighbors getting in fights or being detected in scandals, embezzlements and other disgraces?" Gossip flourishes, of course, because--as that old saying goes--there is something in another's misfortune that does not displease us. There is something in another's vulnerability that positively captivates us. There is something in another's weakness that would appear to make us strong.

We live in a world that has come to thrive on gossip. Consider how it is that the winning politician is no longer the one with a positive program or a vision for the betterment of society but is the one who manages to do the best job of exposing the other candidate's weaknesses and vulnerabilities (leaving us of course to vote for the passionless and the petty). Or turn on the nightly news and notice story after story wherein people's lives are stripped of all dignity, their tragedies used for the sake of ratings, their tears the occasion for a up-close and personal interview. Gossip. Then there is the proliferation of talk shows exploiting every manner of human brokenness and the quasi-news programs which are nothing but what used to be relegated to grocery store tabloids. I would even include police blotters in local papers which ever exist on that fine line of the public's right to know and sheer gossip--stories of human beings at their most vulnerable. Told why? ... because there is something in the misfortune of another that does not displease us. There is something in another's vulnerability that positively captivates us. There is something in another's weakness that would appear to make us strong.

Appearances, of course, are deceiving. "Gossips," writes Kathleen Norris again, "don't know all they think they know, and often misread things in a comical way. My husband (she writes) was once told that he was having an affair with a woman he hadn't met and I still treasure the day I was encountered by three people who said, 'Have you sold your house yet?' 'When's the baby due?' and, 'I'm sorry to hear your mother died.' I could trace the sources of the first two rumors," Norris says. "We'd helped a friend move into a rented house, and I'd bought baby clothes downtown when I learned that I would soon become an aunt. The third rumor was easy enough to check: I called my mother on the phone. " And she answered.

But appearances are deceiving in another way. We learn, living in a world where a person's reputation can be destroyed by innuendo, living in a society which makes little room for exception, we learn to play our hand very close to the vest. We are a people who must keep our humanity pretty well defended, our weaknesses carefully hidden, our vulnerability often even a secret from ourselves . We become those who at appearing to be "together".... for sure in the places where we work, for some in the places they call home, and for most in this place where you and I have gathered to pray. Who ever would guess the number of pieces people are in on a Sunday morning as they file properly into a pew? In this place where, of all places, one should be allowed a modicum of vulnerability, God forbid that anyone at the church know how sdesperate my struggle with alcohol is ... or anyone guess how close to bankruptcy I live ... or a fellow worshipper suspect that the source of the bruise on my arm is my spouse's fist....or the minister ascertain the seriousness of my depression.

In one sense, the quiet lives of desperation so many in this place lead are nobody's business. Yet in another sense, if it is the church's business, for Christ's sake, to bind up the broken- hearted, proclaim liberty to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, then there is required of us what has already been given to us in Jesus Christ: a kind of holy tenderness with each other's broken parts that frees each one who has need to be in pieces. Where else in the world if not here can we be the vulnerable human beings God created us to be?

Hence and especially in these times, if there is any way to return the gospel to gossip's content, if there is any way to reclaim the role of God-sib, of one who stands by and for another in faith and thus bears witness to a love given without condition, if there is any way to give a name to the very ones whose names, by the world's gossip, have been ruined, then such surely must be the business of this notoriously inter-related sabha called the church.

The way, of course, is given us in Jesus Christ who is made known through this incredible compilation of gossip we call the Bible. Page after page we are given of incredible gossip! Where else, I ask you, can there be found such a collection of stories about human weakness and vulnerability? You can practically go through chapter by chapter, from Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, Jacob and Essau, all of Joseph's brothers--and they are just the main characters of the first book. If none of those names ring a bell ... there's Moses the murderer, Aaron his casually idolatrous brother, the masses in the wilderness whining, Eli and his scoundrels for sons, Saul and his paranoia, David and his wandering eye, Solomon so taken by the exotic, a multitude of kings ever whoring after other gods, a whole host of little characters whose exploits would be beyond belief except, of course, they're in the Bible. Tale after tale of better than soap opera material in the Old Testament to start.

Then think especially of the people in the New Testament whom Jesus encountered: the Garazene demoniac, the man blind from birth, the woman with a flow of blood, the pint-sized tax collector Zaccheus, the man with the withered hand, the woman begging for crumbs, the man by the pool of Bethesda, the boy with epilepsy, Bartimaeus by the roadside, the woman at the well, Lazarus in the tomb. . not to mention the disciples one and all and a multitude of Marys. We are told of men and women and children in all of their vulnerability, in all of their need, with all of their broken pieces exposed.

To be sure, in the ancient world more than in this day, their weakness their illness, their low station in the social order was believed to reveal things ultimate: all were signs of God's disfavor, of God's judgment, of God's rejection. But in the presence of Jesus, time and time again, person by person, it was their very vulnerability that became the occasion for their encounter with the Christ; it was the substance of the gossip surrounding their lives that forged in them a place for God's grace and mercy and love to be made known, it was their brokenness that gave them eyes to see the greatest of all Physicians: "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He can't be the Messiah, can he?"

"I would argue," wrote Kathleen Norris, "that gossip done well can be a holy thing." I would argue that that which could be the content of gossip about each and every one of us also could be, by God's gracious initiative, the occasion for our coming to faith. I would argue that the parts of yourself and your life you believe you must guard most closely against the world's gossip, or the church's scrutiny, are the very places where God comes most near.

To be sure, we are each one--when all is said about us and done to us--we are all as naked as the day we were born: weak, vulnerable, dependent on the One who made us thus. The question is: who tells us how naked we really are? Who will have the power to give us a name? The world (which includes the church) is full of snakes, my friends, but into the world has come one Savior who sees us just as we are and proclaims to us, in the face of the world's gossip, the Gospel: the news that, no matter what, he is by our side. So also ought his church follow suit. As a notoriously interrelated community of God-sibs, we exist to represent him until he come again. Therefore, may God grant us the grace to be bearers of the gospel to a world at gossip's mercy. Amen

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