Sermon: The Peril and Promise of Gossip

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The Peril and Promise of Gossip

By Charles Rush

February 11, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 7.2Mb) ]

ere is something deep wired in the human condition that loves gossip. I know I read with zeal Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who was caught on tape, in the company of a twenty year old model, younger than his daughters, saying "If I weren't already married, I'd marry you in a heartbeat…" There was more to the conversation but that will do for Sunday morning. And, there was more than one young woman who received the shower of his unasked for compliments. Ah, and the spectacle of his wife of 30 years demanding an apology in the Milan paper from him, appealing to the public to get what she claims she was unable to get in private. So Italian.

One of my fraternity brothers hosted a Superbowl party for his companies clients. The next day, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about was the wife of one of their buyers who had been well into the juice and got up on the dance floor wiggling and jiggling with man after available man, replete at one point with a leg throw, all caught on someones cell phone and probably uploaded to a special website before the morning. The world in which we live.

There is something about seeing the powerful stumble and about seeing the staid suddenly full of ribald lust that is deeply imbedded in the human spirit, not just schadenfreude but schadenfreude with attitude. And then there is just the plain old hope that life is riskier and wilder than we imagined possible.

I knew a single guy, very handsome, when we were in grad school. Some woman called him up on the phone anonymously and would describe what he had been doing that day and then would talk dirty to him. This went on every few days for months. So once a week, over breakfast, a group of us married guys would gather for 'the installation'. 'She said what? Oh my God.' For a moment, I was worried that he was playing us for a joke but this was too good to make up. You may ask why a ministerial student would indulge in something so vain, a good question. But it was a lot more interesting than studying Greek. The woman turned out to be married and what a scandal it would have been had it ever gone public. How disappointing is was when it was over. One of the guys said, 'what are we going to do this time next week?' I told him, 'we are going to pick up the pieces of our boring lives and figure out a way to go on' as we turned and walked to Advanced Latin Syntax.

The fact is that we have been indulging ourselves in a wider culture of gossip for quite some time. I remember the first time I was in England to see the advent of Page 6, where they feature the naked lady of the day and all manner of unseemly and unsavory activity in British public life. You didn't have to be a genius to figure out this would eventually migrate across the big pond and it did. Why else would anyone buy the New York Post?

But we have really ramped up the ugly Spirit of gossip in the past decade in the States and every parent is vaguely aware of this as they walk by their children glued to an episode of some reality show where two unrestrained teenagers are yelling at each other, the bleeps outnumbering the non-bleeped words. I would just shout out 'change it now', so often did I encounter this. And in the past few years, when they hit the button, it goes to yet another reality show with bleeped out words, another reality show, and yet another show with bleeped out words

I was worried that I would misspeak here since I'm too old and not punk enough to understand this programming and I don't actually watch it. So I consulted Sarah Bunting's Website 'Television Without Pity' that reviews everything actually on TV with a commentary about how 'Reality TV' started off crass and became crass squared.[i]

I suppose the mother of the series was Survivor where individuals formed alliances to compete for a large sum of money that accentuated our Machievellian instincts, as betrayal and duplicity were lifted up as the real-life skills for success.

This was followed by a host of even more dumbed-down rip offs like Big Brother, where a group of people were locked in a house for an interminable amount of time only to play cards, hang out, learn to detest one another, occasionally engage in risky trysts and cat-fight.

Or The Surreal Life, where sort of half-way Celebrities that you've never quite heard of: former TV people, porn stars, and Tammy Faye Baker types are housed in the same way to deal with the frightening ego issues of middle aged people who almost/ but not quite made it in the world of celebrity. Locked up with nothing to do, they get into it with each other exploiting their fears and weaknesses, all so we can watch another sad cat-fight.

Or Making the Band where young wanna-be rappers are under pressure to form a band, while living with each other under the tyrannical tutelage of P Diddy, and we are privy to all manner of sexual immaturity and cruel adolescent put downs, betrayals, verbal abuse, and physical violence.

Or The Real World that supposedly follows the lives of young people getting started with their lives, seemingly a useful enterprise, until the formula was over-exposed so that, in the words of the on-line review, 'todays' Real-worlder's all seem like trashing drunks and camera-whoring dullards. [So that]… 'one day not far from now, the show will cast a group that literally implodes from self-absorption, but until then we'll keep watching, because the whole point of consuming reality TV is to feel superior to its subjects, and boy oh boy does The Real World know how to serve up jackasses to that end."[ii]

And then this string of truly embarrassing shows starting with The Bachelor, followed by Joe Millionaire, where women, who were the children of the Women's lib movement, do what has to be done to beat each other and get that man… or that rich man… or that rich guy that isn't even remotely attractive… and who turns out not to even be rich. How low can this go? It can go to the Bachlorette, not nearly as interesting since it merely exposed the loutish behavior men have been known for at least since ancient Rome.

No, I think I threw my hands up at Temptation Island, a show where couples that haven't been together for all that long agree to 'test the relationship' by allowing their spouse to go off with 3 stripper quality beauties who each wine, dine, massage them and frolic together in some remote island off Belize. I said to my children, 'I wonder how this is going to turn out?'

I could go on, like those cheesy commercials for knives at 3 in the morning, 'but wait, there's more'… The Apprentice, The Road Rules, Casino. Or the entire phenomenon of E channel that just has these pseudo-commentators making catty comments about the Celeb's latest appearance at the Academy Awards.

All of them share in common an indulgence in cutting other people apart, of getting people into situations where they will fight with each other over truly petty stuff and show just how vain and supercilious we can be when we are small. They encourage back-biting and revenge, talking behind each others backs, and the stabbing virtue of hurtfulness.

This is the steady diet, the nearly unending spiritual diet that we have fed our children for the past decade. And… they have absorbed it. This is why we have these web-sites that they create for each other where you can go and make anonymous comments about your teachers, about each other- where you can let out all that catty, mean, spiteful vile that adolescent angst generates on its good days. It has always been part of growing up, only now we give it legitimate vent. No question, it is getting out of hand all around us.

All of the TV anchors expressed a certain Shock when they saw the video of the girls kicking one of their schoolmates in Long Island, all recorded on a cell phone and uploaded to a website. But spare us the indignation. We have been spiritually grooming the whole generation to indulge this side of themselves. I'm not so sure we should be shocked when verbal violence turns to physical violence.

St. Paul was very realistic when he said that although gossip is part of the human condition, you need to check it. You need to watch it carefully. I failed to appreciate his insight when I was younger, but over the years, it has grown on me. I've concluded that this is one of the principal reasons that Paul's letters to those first churches are part of the bible and not just some good advice.

Paul keeps coming back to some very basic things, things so basic that I used to say, 'this is obvious' when I was younger. But, as it turns out, basic is also perennial in human social groups.

Paul used to say that when we unleash the power of the Spirit in our midst, we lift one another up, we encourage one another like a good parent, we take one another in like orphans, we make each other stronger, we pull for one another, we pray that each other grows and becomes better and that we are all healed. When we do that, we experience real freedom.

Freedom from what? Freedom from the bondage that is the normal fare of cutting one another down, of letting jealousy and envy consume us; the bondage of revenge and hurtfulness, of strife and gossip.

You don't have to be in leadership for long at all to know how profound the difference can be. I don't care whether it is the school board, the Town Council, the Church, business, a philanthropy that you are involved with… You spend a lot of energy and focus trying to get people rowing in the same direction- and rowing in the same direction not out of coercion but because that is the way that they all want to row. Any time you are working through some kind of change, you work on the process so that people can have a productive exchange of ideas and together you can reach a consensus that is positive. You want to unleash the creativity resident in the group and successful leadership allows that to happen. You hope to see everyone together in concert.

All that positive energy can become easily upended when you have just a few people that are intent on sowing discord. Anyone who has been through a protracted difficult time at work or lived through a crisis in town politics or in their community agency knows how you can cut the tension with a knife when you walk through a room. You have groups gathered before the meeting, after the meeting, speaking furtively, people saying one thing in public, another in private. The Bible had a wonderful line to describe these difficult days of dissension. They said of the ancient Israelites, 'each man went to his own tent'. The positive group energy dissipates and you get little tribe alliances… just… like Survivor.

We can't avoid this entirely, as long as we have human egos involved… we will have to manage this at best. But, in the Church, when the people of God gather, we are to pray to mitigate this part of ourselves and to enhance our life together. We are encouraged to have honest confrontations, open disagreements that work toward reconciliation. We aren't going to stay in vindictive mode. We are going to check that in us that is small. It is always there, but we aren't going to indulge it.

Susan Blain says that what we really want, what we really need, is 'holy gossip'. She is thinking of women sharing in their profound moments, thinking of the ways our ancestors used to gather around the kitchen table across generations grandmothers and younger women, sorting through the struggles of daily living and offering practical advice on child-rearing and relationships with spouses.

We do need that. We need support, sometimes comfort, a place to share our hopes and fears, a place for rich exchange, people who will challenge us to become more, people that we can genuinely trust. We want sturdy relationships where we can experience the simple profundity of being human and participate in the Divine love that permeates the fabric of the universe.[iii]

We cannot eradicate the crass character of TV any more than we can trump the partisan sniping that characterizes Washington and Trenton, or the day in and day out machinations of our business world. But we can pledge to ourselves that we will not indulge the mean and petty side of ourselves, especially if we are regularly in an environment where that is allowed. We can pray in a direction of consensus and honesty and growth. We can do what we can, in our families, in our neighborhoods, where we are contributing to community to foster a climate of trust and encouragement. This we can do and we must do this because there is a genuine possibility that left unchecked, our children could grow up to become catty, petulant, and frankly embarrassing.

We don't want to live like this. We want to live on the warm, humane, caring, touching side of human existence. I think of the very endearing moving 'Love Actually' that features all of these different people coming out of their shells in London, trying to find love and caring, so deeply afraid of rejection and being themselves in front of another person. That is the real challenge isn't it?

There is one couple. He is a writer from London, who has rented a house in Southern France to finish his novel. There is a woman that keeps the house from Portugal. He speaks no Portugese, almost no French. She speaks no English, almost no French. Over time, they are taken with each other.

And they talk to each other in their native language which the other cannot understand. Neither has any idea what the other is saying and so they are free to speak from their hearts… unguarded.

At one point, she makes a sign asking to be driven home after work. He says "Yes, oh absolutely, that is the best part of my day. The best part is driving in the car with you." He looks at her with passion, knowing she can't understand him at all.

She looks back at him and says in Portugese, 'The saddest part of my day is when I have to leave you." Warm, touching, humane, the good passion, caring, loving- it is a language that can transcend words. It strikes me that this is pretty close to the spiritual antidote to the ethos of catty, cruel, cutting.

And it is risky because you have to put yourself out there and there is a lot of ugliness and cynicism. You can get hurt. But St. Paul was right, it is also the portal for what is best about human existence. The Spirit can indeed move amongst us. So let us pray together for that which is warm, which is touching, which is humane, that it might thrive. Amen.

[i] See www.televisionwithoutpity.com

[ii] Tara Ariano and Sarah Bunting "Television Without Pity: 752 Things we love to hate (and hate to love) about TV (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2006) p. 215.

[iii] Susan Blain "At the Kitchen Table" in Common Lot no. 109, p. 14. This citation is incomplete but I believe this is a UCC devotional publication. I thank my colleague, Julie Yarborough, for tearing out the page and putting it on my computer.