It was centuries ago, when all of North America (what is now United States and Canada ) belonged to its Native people. One nomadic Indian tribe in the Great Plains was blessed with a chief that was beloved and respected by everyone who knew him. He was known as a man who deeply loved his people, and he showed it…and a man of absolute justice and fairness and he showed that. One day some braves brought a very troubling report to him; there had been several mysterious thefts from people in the tribe. The chief wanted to nip this kind of stealing in the bud so he announced a severe penalty for the thief. He would be tied to a post when the sun was high, his back laid bare, and he would be beaten with a whip twenty times.

Then the chief set a trap. He asked two of his trusted braves to leave some animal pelts in front of a teepee one night and to watch all night from another tepee. It was the middle of the night when one of those braves awakened the chief with the news, “We’ve caught the thief.” “Then bring him in,” the chief ordered sternly.

You could see the reluctance and even the pain on the braves’ faces as they brought the thief into the chief’s tent that night. The chief was stunned to see who they had caught. It was his own mother. The next day, when the sun was high, everyone in the tribe gathered around the pole in the center of the village. There was heated discussion about what the chief would do. Would he sacrifice his love for his mother for the sake of justice and fairness? Or would he sacrifice his justice for his love?     Now it was time. Very sadly, two braves marched the chief’s mother to the whipping post and they tied her there as two women bared her back for the whip. “The chief is putting his justice above his love,” the people whispered as the warrior with the whip raised his right arm to administer the first lash.

Suddenly, the chief emerged from his tepee and he shouted, “Stop! Let her go!”

As the people turned to look at their chief walking toward the whipping post, they began to say, “His love is greater than his justice. He’s letting her go unpunished for what she did.”

The chief untied the thief he loved, and then to the shock of everyone, as he removed his buckskin shirt, he said, “Tie me.” Hesitantly, the braves tied their chief to the post. Then he barked out his final command, “Begin the whipping.” There, before all his people, their honored chief took the full and painful punishment for the crimes of the one he loved.

As in our Scripture and story today, He took my place, too.  Oh, what love!

Many years ago the Moody Church News carried a humorous story about a woman in a small town who was known for being a gossip. One day on vacation she visited the offices of The Chicago Daily News.  She was wearing a white dress and inadvertently leaned against a wall where a freshly printed copy of the front page was hanging.  It was a hot, humid day, and some of the print came off on the back of her white dress.  Later as she walked down the street to meet her husband, she noticed that people walking behind her were snickering.  When she reached the place where her husband was waiting, she asked him if there was anything on her back that shouldn’t be there.  As she turned around, he read the large black reversed letters: sweN yliaD (Daily News). Realizing the appropriateness of the words, he said, “No, dear, nothing’s on your back that doesn’t belong there.”

I am more deadly than the screaming shell of the cannon.  I win without killing.  I tear down homes, break hearts, and wreck lives.  I travel on the wings of the wind.  No innocence is strong enough to intimidate me, no purity pure enough to daunt me.  I have no regard for truth, no respect for justice, no mercy for the defenseless.  My victims are as numerous as the sands of the sea and often as innocent.  I never forget and seldom forgive.  My name is Gossip.  ~Morgan Blake~

I have wished a million times I had not “passed on pertinent information” (gossip) that was told to me by a friend I trusted.  Even if it had been true, I know now that I should have not passed on.  I was not part of the problem or the solution… I should have kept my mouth shut!  God forgave me, friends did, too, but the damaged caused has never been corrected.