December 16, 2010 – Sirach 19

So, a lesson on gossip.  I don’t know how many of you struggle with this, but it appears to be a large issue.  I sometimes slip into it, but I don’t think it is a major struggle for me.  I believe that is because verse 9 is very easy for me.  I don’t have a good memory.  When someone tells me something it is easily forgotten, ask my wife.  Even important things sometimes just flutter away.  When you can’t remember something you heard about somebody that they heard about somebody else, you can’t repeat that to someone else and continue the chain.  That is not to say I don’t do it at all, but I think I do it seldom enough that I do catch myself and can stop it, in other words it doesn’t feel natural. 

I am around people that it seems to them a matter of nature that they must talk about other people.  If they weren’t able to talk about others, they may go days at a time without uttering a word.  Here we see why.  People do get the sense that when they learn something about someone, they must get it out of them or they will burst.  “I have to tell someone or I’ll explode.”  Why is that our nature.  I believe it is because we were not created to keep secrets, because we were not initially created to have secrets.  What was the first thing we did after the fall.  We hid ourselves and tried to keep it a secret.  But that didn’t last long because as soon as God called out, Adam comes out of hiding and says, “I was hiding because I was naked.”  We are not good at keeping secrets and those that are good at keeping secrets usually are not living joyful lives.  The important thing to remember is not that we are not suppose to keep secrets, but that we are not suppose to have secrets.

Whatever we do, we should not be ashamed of.  We talked with the teens about phones and communication last week.  They all had stories of trying to not let their parents know who was on their phone or what they were talking about.  We tried to explain that if they worried about their parents finding it out, they probably shouldn’t be doing it.  Evil loves the darkness and the shadows.  We are called to be children of the light.  If we have something we are ashamed of, we need to confess it and forget it.  Facebook and Tweeter are ways in which many are brought to embarrassment by actions that are recorded in some way and then broadcast.  This should teach us our lesson on how we need to live our daily lives.  Gossip is hard for us, not because we like to blather on about people’s business.  I think deep down we don’t like it and I know we feel that way when we discover people have been talking about us.  We do it because at our very foundation, in our very nature, we are not meant to keep secrets because we are called to a relationship with God, who knows more about us than we do.  There are no secrets with God.  Keep that in mind when you are around the water cooler.  And “Let anything you hear die within you”, so that you do not continue the chain.