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Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to respond to each person.  Colossians4.6

saltLast Saturday’s shooting of 20 in Tucson, Arizona resulted in the death of 6.  Among the dead were Federal Judge, John M. Roll; 9 year old Christina Taylor Green; and Dorwin Stoddard, our brother in Christ.  Brother Stoddard died shielding his wife, Mavy, from the shooter.  She was shot several times in the leg, but not wounded seriously.  The Stoddards are members of the Mountain Avenue Church of Christ.  If you visit any major newspaper online you can read the biographies of the dead.  You would find that Judge Roll had been threatened before, that Christina Taylor Green had been born on September 11, 2001, and that Brother Stoddard told Mike Nowak, preacher of the Mountain Avenue congregation, that he and Mavy wanted to meet Representative Gifford to tell her she was doing a good job.  I wonder if he got to tell her that before he was shot dead.

Nearly all the television coverage of this event has ignored the stories of its victims.  We are told about Gabby Gifford’s fight to change the vitriolic tone typical of so much political discourse in our nation.  We are told her husband is training to be an astronaut and is scheduled to make the last Space Shuttle flight.  But we are told little else.  Most of the reporting has been about vitriolic speech, and whether it incited a troubled 22 year old man to unload a 30-shot, 9mm clip on an innocent crowd.

I have no notion of what was going on in Jared Loughner’s head.  It is reported that fellow students and neighbors were frightened of him and pegged him as a budding serial killer.  No one was so aware of Ted Bundy, or the BTK killer, though.  I also read that his library included Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Old Man and the Sea– but then again, so does mine.  If we are able to establish some sort of cause-and-effect-chain-of-events which lead to the shooting, what will we have learned?  Whatever warped reasoning produced this action was, by definition, warped – cautionary, perhaps, but not normative.

We don’t need journalists, politicians, or court-appointed psychiatrists to tell us that words have consequences.  Jesus said that hate-speech was violence nearly 2000 years ago (Matthew 5.21-22), and said it would be judged as violence.  His brother James, writing a few decades later insists that we remember our words can “set on fire the course of our lives,” (James 3.6, see 3.1-12).  Proverbs counsels: “A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger,” Proverbs 15.2.  We have the blessing of Free Speech in this nation, and it is a blessing.  But the New Testament has issued filters for the speech of a Christian.  We respond to interrogators with “gentleness and reverence,” (I Peter 3.15).  Our words are to be “wholesome,” “edifying,” and “appropriate to need,” or they are not to be spoken at all (Ephesians 4.29). 

That phrase from Ephesians, “appropriate to need,” is paralleled by the phrase “seasoned with salt,” in the Colossians 4 passage cited above.  Our language is described as “salty,” not bland.  Biblical language is anything but bland.  Every human emotion is expressed in it, and every tool of language from imprecation, to pun is used to express these emotions.  But every line of the Bible is written, ultimately, to communicate grace.  “Grace” is the word used in Ephesians 4.29, and Colossians 4.6 as the goal of Christian speech.

Grace is what is lacking in our discourse, our culture, and in personal lives.  How fortunate, then, that Grace is the message we have been given to share.  Let us share it.

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