One More Thing with Pastor Tim Burchill 9.5.2023

Gossip

      I’d preached on the Ten Commandments or the Ten Words before (I know, who would have guessed).  In that sermon I focused a bit more on off shoots of false witness such as hypocrisy and gossip.  Here’s one of my favorite illustrations regarding spreading falsehoods about others.

Gossip is one of those lies that causes forest fires, one of those viruses that can easily become a plague. 

     Bill suspected that his wife was having an affair with Joe who lived next door.  One day when he saw his wife talking and laughing with Joe across the fence, he’d had enough.  He confided in his other neighbor that his wife and Joe were cheating on him.  Later that  night, Bill confronted his wife, and she explained that she had been consulting with Joe on a set of golf clubs she was getting him for his birthday. Bill was not only relieved but felt a little ashamed of himself.

The next morning, while mowing the lawn, a woman from the other side of the neighborhood came by and sympathetically let Bill know she’d suspected Joe of being a homewrecker all along.  Horrified to find out that word had spread, Bill discovered that nearly everyone in the neighborhood had heard--from a reliable source, of course, about the supposed affair.

     Racked with guilt, Bill went to his minister and asked what he could do to make up for what he’d done.  The pastor gave him some strange advice.  He told Bill to go home, take a goose down pillow and put a handful of feathers on the doorstep of everyone who’d been touched by his accusations.  This definitely was not the kind of response that Bill expected or wanted.  He’d hoped that the pastor would tell him to pray about it and that he was already forgiven, you know, the usual stuff.  But Bill felt bad enough for his friend Joe that he went to every house in the neighborhood and dropped those feathers on the stoop.

     He came back to the pastor and asked, “Now, will God forgive me?”  The pastor then suggested something stranger still.  He told Bill to gather up all the feathers, put them back inside the pillowcase, and bring them right back to the church.  An hour later a disappointed Bill told the pastor that he could get a single feather back.  “Neither can you take back a single word you spoke about your neighbor,” the pastor said.  And only then, did he and Bill talk about God’s forgiveness.
 
     Gossip is false witness.  On the one hand it can steal a person’s reputation, one the other it can kill the spirit of those whose lives have been irrevocably damaged by it.