Title:- Murdering Mendacity
Jeremiah 33:6 Behold, I will bring it health and healing; I will heal them and reveal to them the abundance of peace and truth.
A local coffee shop I often frequent when in that area, has an architectural feature that is unique to North America- it has a tin ceiling! Originally they were designed as a practical (and cheaper) substitute for elaborately carved and moulded plasterwork.
Developed in the mid 19th century, these mass produced sheets of thin rolled tin plate, became widely available and are today in the U.S.A. at least, now emerging back onto the market.
In Britain, my nation of origin, we only had tin roofs for the outside of houses and there were no tin ceilings. One church which I pastored in the UK met in a very quaint, salmon pink painted tin hut! No honest! It really was.
From my early days, my memory still holds a picture of a ginger Tomcat, scampering speedily over the hot tin roof of a garden shed, on a sweltering summer’s day in the England of my childhood. Tennessee Williams must have had a similar experience when he wrote his powerful and highly charged moving story of a neurotic, dysfunctional Southern family, with all its rivalries and tensions and avarice. His play, ‘Cat on A Hot Tin Roof’' was produced as a film in 1958 starring, Paul Newman as ‘Brick’, Elizabeth Taylor as 'Maggie' and Burl Ives as 'Big Daddy', the plantation owner and head of the family, whose character by the way, is also terminally ill and knows it.
In one powerful scene, from the bowels of the basement of the large Southern house, where most of the acute action takes place, the father and son, that is, Big Daddy
and Brick, emerge after finally facing the truth about one another, who they are and who they have become! They ascend into the light of the sitting room, and Big Daddy turning to Brick, makes this amazing and rabid statement in front of the rest of the family members regarding the disdainful state of affairs as he now experiences it from his new position of clarified truth: “What's that smell in this room” he shouts. “ Didn't you notice it Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odour of mendacity in this room?...There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odour of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.” To be mendacious is to live a life characterized by falsehood and deception, and yes indeed, it smells like death! Tennessee Williams in ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ frighteningly reveals the immaturity, constrictions and death that mendacity brings on relationships. The mendacious path we often take is the one that increasingly diverges from the truth of who we are and what we have done to others and ourselves and maybe even, have now become.
I tell you what friends, no matter how splendid they look, I don’t trust tin ceilings and especially not tin roofs! In the wrong way, they cover a multitude of sins and heat up tremendously in doing so. Any cat will tell you that tin roofs are far too uncomfortable to sit on.
May I invite you today then, to murder mendacity and to righteously be true to who and all you really are. Take the lid off and look inside! Take the roof off and look up to heaven! Get rid of that powerful and obnoxious odour of mendacity in all the rooms of your house “‘Cause there ain't nothin' more powerful than the odour of mendacity. You can smell it and it smells like death!” BE TRUE! BE REAL! BE WHO YOU ARE!
Listen:- "That we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head – Christ….Ephesians 4:14
Pray:- Lord. Give me courage to live in the Truth. Give me hope to trust in Your mercy. Give me wisdom, to mange my mouth and Oh my God, help me today, to murder mendacity in me. Amen!
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