Hot Rhetoric and My Old Jacket

Yesterday at the grocery, someone "checked out" my old jacket (yes, I'm sure it was not me that got  "checked").  "I like that jacket."  "This?  Oh, it's about 30 years old."  "Well, whatever, it looks good."

It does.  L.L. Bean corduroy, well-made, has held up very, very well.  Bottom line, I like it and it is very good quality.  Someone else noticed and liked it, too.

Things communicate.  Good workmanship, the work of a skilled artisan, whether brickmason or artist on canvas or artist with words, all we do communicates.  It may say skill or sloth, energy or laziness, kindness or hatred, but all our acts speak.  Often they speak more clearly than our words.  And always, they touch.

So, when someone uses hate language from another era, something in our memory flinches at it.  "Blood libel" is one of those.  Twisting a Biblical quotation to excuse what we now call "ethnic cleansing" through two thousand years of anti-Semitism, this was a cover-word.  It covered all sorts of hatred, from conversions-at-sword-point to the Holocaust.  It was a rationale for killing Jews.

When that gets tossed into political rhetoric, even when the speaker has no sense of what it has meant, it is more or less like tossing a little water into a hot frying pan.

Words mean things, and the history of words brings with it healing or hatred, stirring up kindness and compassion or anger and conflict.

Traveling in Europe last fall, we saw so many echoes of the past use of these two words.  A Jewish family on a pilgrimage to remember family background had a clear toughness to them, probably because the pilgrimage was a very serious thing.  We took a walking tour, and stopped by the doorway of the last residence of Schindler, whose story was told in Schindler's List.  He saved over a thousand Jews from the Nazi Holocaust.  As we stood in front of that house, the man on pilgrimage softened his expression, stared at the identifying sign, and very quietly began to weep.  A life, a memory, an enormous act of kindness remembered had touched him.

Words mean things, and whether your audience is very large or very small, they should be used and handled with care.  They always communicate and touch.  Let them always show the love of Christ.  Let them bless, instead of curse.  Let them touch with kindness.