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“O Lord, who may abide in your tent?
Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
and speak the truth from their heart;
who do not slander with their tongue,
and do no evil to their friends,
nor take up a reproach against their neighbors…”
–– Psalm 15:1-3
12Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. 13Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, 14I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus. 15Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; –– Philippians 3:12-15a
Oh, yeah –– two words that can express agreement (Oh, yeah. I agree…), excitement (Oh yeah! Amazon delivered my new Nikes!), or a sudden memory (Oh, yeah. I have that dentist appointment today.) However, add a question mark to this common idiom and the meaning flips. There is no longer agreement but refutation –– Oh, yeah?. Very often, it is the bridge between barbs as your brain scrambles to compose a retort. Oh yeah? It is the ball in the downward spiraling volley of insults that never concludes in a good place.
Believe it or not, there was a time when I was in middle school, and yes, Seth, we had indoor plumbing. At least among the guys in my middle school, it didn’t matter if you were with friends, frenemies, or enemies, the discourse was unfailingly consistent: a festival of defamation; a den of disparagement; an echo chamber of Oh, yeahs?
Often, it would start with the clearly dated amuse bouche –– Oh, yeah, well, yo mama wears army boots! Huh? Why the contest of crudity so often began with that, I’ll never understand. What did it even mean? Spoken today, it could only be offered as a compliment indicating yo mama was either a Doc Martens wearing hipster or a laudable and courageous member of the armed forces. However, at the time it was simply an unoriginal invitation to parry, prod, and poke. And with each volley of boorish impugnment, inevitably, the images became cruder, the zingers became sharper, the aspersions became more cruel, the cuts became more devastating, and the injuries longer lasting. What do you call such a phenomenon? Well, I don’t know about your school, but in my school you could call it Monday. I wince at the memories of the insults we exchanged back then, and through which I was both hurt and hurtful. It became an art form, both twisted, and yet creative, that produced in me one emotion … regret.
I am fairly certain that my middle school was not an outlier then, and would not be an outlier today. If anything, the whole environment has become inflamed with verbal abuse, and middle school methods of caustic quarreling have become the default form of communication extending from the highest levels of governance and culture to the remotest rural communities where venomous anger rips through the social contract.
We may have no choice but to be exposed to the ugliness, for we live in an ugly time, but we by no means have to contribute to it. The Psalmist says, “O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill? Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors…” If that standard was held legalistically, every church would be padlocked and covered with signs declaring No Admittance. However, the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting, and everyone is welcome in the house of God. Yet, we should never take this grace for granted and always seek to raise the bar of civility. For Christ, we can do no less.
“Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal … but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” And what is the path that shall lead us there? “Walk blamelessly, and do what is right, and speak the truth from their heart; who do not slander with their tongue, and do no evil to their friends, nor take up a reproach against their neighbors…”
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