Deacon Wattles has brought the same casserole to the harvest supper for nine years and I am going to describe it once, carefully, and then I am going to be fair to him for the rest of this.
It is a bean thing. There is a topping on it. The topping is the part that has caused the most discussion in this parish over the last decade, and I am not going to say what is in the topping because I do not know and neither does anybody else, and Mrs. Ames has a theory that she has never been willing to say out loud in the hall.
Nine years. Nobody has ever told him.
What happens instead is that everybody takes a small amount, and the small amount goes round the plate, and at the end of the night there is most of a casserole left, and every single year he says, with genuine puzzlement and no bitterness at all, that people must have filled up early.
He is not a fool. That is the thing I would want said. He runs that hall. He does the flower schedule and he has never once missed a funeral, and when my mother was ill he came every Tuesday for eleven months with the newspaper and read out the parts she liked.
Last September I told him.
I did not plan it. Bucky was tied to the fence outside that hall and even he had walked away from a plate of it, which is not a thing that has ever happened before or since. Wattles said the thing about people filling up early and I was standing next to him with a cloth in my hand and I said, Wattles, it is the topping.
He went up. He inflated the way he does. And then he stood there for about four seconds and he said, in a completely different voice, that he had wondered.
We talked about it for maybe two minutes. He has been making it the way his mother made it and his mother made it in the war and it involves an ingredient people do not use anymore for reasons that are entirely sound. He brought a different one this year. It went in twenty minutes.
Toby asked me in the truck why nobody had told him before, and I said because everybody liked him, and he said that did not make any sense, and he is right, and it took me until about Christmas to work out what I actually think about it.
Truth with a manner attached
Paul writes a phrase that is quoted constantly and is almost always quoted as a limit, when in the passage it is doing the opposite.
But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ. (Ephesians 4:15)
The phrase is not truth, but gently. It is not truth, if you must. It is one instruction with two halves and neither half is a qualifier on the other, and the thing they produce together is growth.
Which means the passage does not treat silence as the loving option. Silence is not on the page anywhere. The alternative to speaking the truth in love, in that chapter, is being tossed about by every wind of doctrine, which is what happens to people nobody will tell anything to.
You are not choosing between being honest and being kind, and Ephesians 4:15 puts them in one clause. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as permission rather than as a higher bar.
Nine years of a small amount going round a plate is not kindness. It is nine years of a man being managed by an entire congregation, and every single person doing it thought they were being nice, and I was one of them for eight of the nine.
You have not been loving somebody by leaving them the last person in the room to know. The written word puts truth inside love rather than opposite it, and His Spirit is what makes that plain to a person who has been calling their silence kindness.
The proverb about wounds
There is a proverb about this that is uncomfortable in exactly the right way.
Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. (Proverbs 27:6)
Two words in that verse are doing the work. Faithful, attached to something that hurts, and deceitful, attached to something that feels nice.
It is not saying that hurting people is good. It is saying that the reliability of a thing is a separate question from how it feels arriving, and that a person who will only ever give you the nice version has arranged for you never to find out anything.
You are able to be told things by somebody who is not managing you. Proverbs 27:6 attaches faithfulness to the harder word, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a relief instead of a warning.
And the verse right after it in the same chapter is the one that makes it survivable: Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. Iron on iron is not a soft image and it is also not a fight. It is two things of the same substance in contact.
You have been given people of the same substance, and the friction is what the friendship is for. Proverbs 27:17 puts the sharpening between friends rather than between opponents, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a saying on a wall into a hall with a cloth in somebody's hand.
So here is what took me until Christmas to work out, about why nobody tells the man about the casserole.
You are not being loved by silence, and Ephesians 4:15 puts truth and love in one instruction so nobody can pick one. The Holy Spirit is what keeps that from being a slogan and makes it the thing a man says standing at a counter with a cloth.
Toby was right in the truck and I was wrong. I said nobody told him because everybody liked him, and that is not it. Nobody told him because telling him would have been four uncomfortable seconds for the person telling him, and everybody, including me, priced four seconds of their own discomfort above nine years of his.
You have somebody who tells you the true thing rather than managing you, and He calls that friendship. Proverbs 27:6 says the wounds of a friend are faithful, and His Spirit is what makes being told something feel like being valued.
And this is for the one reading it out, who has a true thing they have been holding for a long time about somebody they love. You were never asked to choose between the truth and the person. Ephesians 4:15 says speaking the truth in love and then says grow up into Him in all things, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes those four uncomfortable seconds possible.
Declare this over yourself
Say it out loud. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak over your own silence is genuinely yours, delegated and never invented. God put truth and love in a single instruction, so speak to the fear of saying it badly: you have standing to address it because He is the one who joined those two words. An ambassador carries the King's word and never his own policy, so say what God has said and leave the outcome to Him. Every line below is Ephesians 4:15 and Proverbs 27:6 handed back in your own voice, and it is His Spirit, not your volume, that makes saying it a receiving.
- Fear of saying the true thing badly, you are not a reason to say nothing. The Word of God says speaking the truth in love, and it puts both halves in one instruction so that nobody gets to choose between them.
- Habit of calling my silence kindness, you are finished in the name of Jesus. I am able to say it and stay warm, because Proverbs 27:6 calls the wounds of a friend faithful and calls the pleasant version deceitful.
- Father, You have never once managed me by leaving me the last to know. I receive that today, and I thank You that Your word treats being told the truth as a thing friends do rather than as a thing enemies do.
Ephesians 4:15
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