Sunday, September 21, 2025 – The Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
This week I refer again to another television ad which is humorous yet makes a relevant point for us to be aware of. The commercial comes from Spectrum cable/streaming services. In this brief ad, a young boy is seen taking many of his toys and other household items and throwing them down the steps of his home. He makes quite a racket doing so. His mother, noticing this, goes into the room where her son has stationed himself. She sees that he has built a tent/hut out of all the items he gathered and he is sitting inside with his laptop computer. His mother inquires what is going on. The son then replies that he had overheard his mother and father talking about online threats and he responds that his structure is an internet to block those threats. His mother responds that since they have Spectrum services, they are protected.
This cute thirty-second commercial makes an important point of being careful of the words we use and say, and how they can be interpreted to children and even to adults. I remember years ago speaking to an attorney who said we must weigh carefully the words we utter.
Children are impressionable and they listen to what adults say and can come to different conclusions which were intended by adults. I know growing up I heard my parents make some comments about topics that were factual but they scared me to death because I understood them in another context, only to learn later I had totally misunderstood what they were saying. As an adult, I have made truthful and fact-based comments which were taken out of context and were considered hurtful—which was far from my intention.
In our current age of social media and the growing murkiness of what is truth in our growing social divide, what we say and how we say it is particularly important. The best fraternal comments can be misunderstood. This is a danger in light of our use of social media and electronic communication. The best communication, in my view, when possible, is to do so face-to-face so questions and clarifications can be made. And as I believe I mentioned in the past, and most of us know, when we are physically with a person, we treat them better than communicating with them by some other electronic means.
In Scripture, Jesus goes face-to-face with the scribes and leaders of the law to proclaim a new way. He has dinner with the tax collectors. Even though we do not know the results of those social events, I believe we can be assured that they made a difference in the lives of those individuals. And this came from using the right words face-to-face to persuade—not hearsay or soundbites which could be misunderstood.
Perhaps the above can all come together through the following verse from the Book of Proverbs:
Rash words are like sword thrusts,
but the tongue of the wise brings healing. (12:18)