The funny thing about sin is it has an odd way masquerading as virtue. In other words, frequently the personal qualities we regard as particularly virtuous turn out, in practice, to be seriously sinful.
For instance, a clergyman of my acquaintance was fond of declaring that he made a point of “speaking his mind.” And certainly he was brutally frank in his opinions on every subject under the sun, especially when it came to the supposed failings of colleagues and acquaintances.
However he seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that frequently his unsolicited opinions—often based on inaccurate or incomplete information—were deeply hurtful to the folks on the receiving end. Indeed, he seemed to take some strange satisfaction in his victims’ discomfiture.
In most other respects, he was a decent fellow. In fact, he had many good qualities. He was always ready to lend a hand and, financially speaking, he was generous to a fault. But his conviction that “speaking one’s mind” is a virtue cost him many friends and greatly undermined his ministry.
The trouble was that he confused speaking his mind with speaking the truth when, in fact, there is a vast difference between the two. We live in an imperfect world in which, especially today, truth can be an elusive commodity. This, in turn, means we are always at risk of making judgments that are far from perfect—not to say, utterly wrong.
It is, thus, one thing to offer frank opinions when asked, but quite another to do so gratuitously. Moreover, while lying is clearly sinful, blunt honesty can sometimes serve to cloak a malicious desire to inflict hurt. Telling the truth should always be tempered with kindness.
“Speaking one’s mind” can also manifest itself in grumbling—a very serious sin that, in fact, is rarely recognized as sinful. But read the Book of Genesis and you’ll see that God takes a very dim view of grumbling.
Indeed, it wasn’t worshipping the Golden Calf or sexual sins that led God to condemn the children of Israel to wander in the Wilderness for 40 years after their escape from Egypt. It was their predilection for grumbling—“murmuring” is the term the King James Version of the Bible employs.
Grumbling sounds such an innocuous activity that even the most saintly of us do it without thinking. Bishops grumble about the priests and parishes in their charge. Priests grumble about their bishops, vestries, and parishes. Congregants grumble about all of the above, but especially about perceived parochial shortcomings. But grumbling is, above all, uncharitable. And, as St. Paul points out so eloquently in the 13th chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians, charity is the paramount Christian virtue. Without it, nothing we say or do is worth anything. It is simply white noise.
Grumbling is usually sparked by an uncharitable misconstrual of events or actions. For example, after the Exodus from Egypt where the government was slaughtering their new-born sons, the children of Israel, in a remarkable display of ingratitude, grumbled that God had led them out so they could die in the Wilderness.
Because of the secretive nature of grumbling, the issues grumbled about cannot easily be addressed. Thus feelings of dissatisfaction fester and spread. And this causes divisions that weaken the community and destroy the unity essential for reaching its goals.
God harshly condemns grumblers because nothing more undermines the mission of Christian communities—whether they be parochial organizations, parishes, dioceses, or entire jurisdictions—than grumbling. Mercifully, we don’t suffer from too much of it at St Stephen’s. GPH✠
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