“Simon, I have something to tell you.”  Our subject today is candor, being honest and direct in a considerate way.  We’ve all had times in our lives when we needed to tell someone a hard truth, and we had to summon our courage to be able to say what we needed to say.  But courage is also required if we are to hear what we need to hear!  I could feel the knot in my stomach spontaneously form when I read those words from Jesus.  “Simon, I have something to tell you.”  Can you feel the “ut-oh” inside of you?If we are to be people of candor, courage will be required, both as givers of truth, and receivers of truth.  Jesus said the truth will set you free.  But as one of my clergy colleagues puts it, the truth sets you free, but first it makes you miserable!Jesus’ goal in telling the truth and being the truth was never to make the world miserable.  It was to set us free.  But honestly, the truth is scary.  There’s an African proverb that says, “Truth comes to the market and cannot be sold; yet we buy lies with ready cash.”  There is something about human nature that feels it must protect itself from the truth.  Like we know it’s going to hurt, so we conjure up all kinds of ways to avoid it, even though in the end we know it will be good for us.So right away, I want to say, “Kudos!” to Simon the Pharisee.  When Jesus said, “Simon, I have something to tell you”, Simon could have said, what just a minute there mister.  This is my house.  You are my guest.  You are not in charge.  I don’t have to listen to you!  He could have been offended, defensive, protective.  After all, Jesus was letting a woman anoint his feet with perfume.  Jesus was letting a woman make a HUGE SCENE by crying dramatically over him.  Simon would certainly be justified if he insisted on proper decorum in his own home.  Yet instead of seizing on all of this, Simon softened.  He allowed Jesus to speak with candor.And speak with candor Jesus did.  Candor is being honest in a direct and considerate way.  Honest.  Direct.  AND considerate.  All three are equally important.  One of the reasons we are afraid of the truth is that it hasn’t always been given to us in direct yet considerate ways.  Consider this scene.  A patient in a hospital room, recovering from a surgical procedure, anxiously waiting for the results of an earlier biopsy.  Two physicians have the same hard truth to share.  One of the doctors leaned against the doorway of the patient’s room as if she wanted to make a quick getaway, told the patient the tumor is malignant, and then left the patient alone with this horrible truth. The second sat down in the room with the patient, and asks if they can video chat with the spouse.  The doctor shares with the patient and his spouse a little about her life, about her family and how she happened to get into medicine, and what she believed in.  One of the things she believed in is the power of hope.  The she asked the patient a little about his life and what he believed in.  After they had gotten a feel for each other’s story, she told her patient and his spouse that the tumor was malignant, but that she, as a physician with years of observing such conditions, was not giving up hope.  When she left the room, the patient’s spouse was still on the video call so they could support each other, and together lean into the hope the doctor offered.Two physicians charged with telling the same hard truth.  One told the truth with exceptional candor:  she was honest in a direct and considerate way.  The other told the truth directly, yes.  But she wasn’t very considerate.  We’ve all been in situations where the truth was told to us in a way that left us wounded beyond just the truth that was told.  And we have all had times when we were more like doctor #1, times we wished we could have spoken with greater candor.  We are not always as graceful and poised as we’d like to be.  But we can see just from this one little example that learning to tell the truth well is nothing short of learning to love well.The Apostle Paul was a big fan of learning and developing our skills so we can love well.  In our epistle lesson today, we heard how he encouraged the church at Ephesus to “become mature, attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.  Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.  Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ.”  For Paul, learning to speak the truth in love was a sign of spiritual maturity.  As was learning to hear the truth!  That we are tossed about by deceitful scheming—that, in the words of the African proverb, truth comes to the market and cannot be sold yet we buy lies with ready cash—that is a sign of our spiritual immaturity.  So again, I want to say, “Kudos!” to Simon!  When Jesus said, “Simon, I have something to tell you,” he listened.  That was a costly choice.  It is never easy to hear the truth!But I want us to notice something about the truth Jesus tells Simon.  He talks to him about this one issue, about what happened on this one evening at Simon’s house.  Jesus did not tell Simon every truth he knew about him!  He did not take that opportunity to tell the whole truth of Simon’s life, about how he had missed the mark on other occasions, how there were other sins in Simon’s life that needed attention.  Candor is not just honest and direct in a considerate way.  It is also honest and direct in a timely way!The Greek philosopher Aristotle lived about 300 years before Jesus.  He saw truth telling as an art.  Lying was considered a vice, but he observed that telling the truth wasn’t always noble either.  He developed a recipe for candor that I think Jesus would have admired:  tell the right truth to the right person at the right time in the right way for the right reason.    The right truthTo the right personAt the right timeIn the right wayFor the right reasonJesus told Simon the right truth—the truth that was germane to the situation at hand.  Not the whole truth.  Just the trust about his judgmental thoughts about the woman anointing Jesus’ feet, and Simon’s own lack of hospitality and lack of remorse for his sins.  Jesus told this right truth to the right person, directly to Simon, at the right time.  On the spot.  He didn’t let it fester.  And he did it in the right way.  He was considerate.  He asked permission first.  And since this is Jesus we’re talking about, we have to assume he did it for the right reasons.  He did it to fulfill his mission:  to bring about freedom to the captives.  He told the truth so the woman would know, her sins are forgiven, and so Simon would have the opportunity to participate in Jesus’ saving work as well.I know from my own experience, telling the right truth, to the right people, at the right time, in the right way, for the right reasons, is incredibly hard to execute perfectly.  It’s like learning to walk in high heeled shoes.  I might in the end arrive at my destination, but I can guarantee you, it won’t be pretty, and along the way, it might not just be my ankles that get sprained!  Candor is a skill that has absolutely no correlation with age.  We might be decades old but still infants when it comes to being able to speak and hear the truth in love.  But the more we practice, the better we get.    And getting better at speaking the truth in love, and hearing the truth, is a critical skill.  Without being able to speak and hear the truth, how will we be witnesses for Christ?  We will be tossed about by the waves of disruptive people.  We will be blown about by teachings that stem from impure motives and doctrines.  We have been conditioned to be polite, and not talk about hard subjects, and not challenge authority.  But Jesus never called us to be nice.  Jesus calls us to be brave.  To be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.  Jesus modeled telling the right truth, to the right person, at the right time, in the right way, for the right reason.  The end result of this hard work, of discerning, telling, and hearing the truth is trust, stability, strength, and power.  Those are all qualities I think we would like to have personally and as a church.But if we don’t do the hard work, of learning to speak and hear the truth in love, the end result is the opposite.  It’s distrust, division, distress, and frustration.  To illustrate this heavy-hearted point, please allow me to tell you a very light-hearted story. There was once a farmer who lost all trust in his dog. So he put a sign in front of his house that said, “Talking dog for sale.” A passerby saw the sign, rang the doorbell, and the farmer told him the dog was in the backyard.When the potential buyer got in the backyard, he saw a nice-looking Labrador retriever sitting there.  “You talk?” the man asked.  “Yep,” the Lab replied.After the man recovered from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he said “So, what’s your story?”  The Lab looked up and replied, “Well, I discovered that I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. In no time at all they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping.”I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running. But the jetting around really tired me out and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals.  I got married, had a mess of puppies, and now I’m just retired.”The man was amazed. He went back in and asked the owner what he wanted for the dog.”Ten dollars,” the farmer replied.”Ten dollars? This dog is amazing! Why on earth are you selling him so cheap?””Because the dog’s a darn liar. He never did any of that.” I have never met a dog that talks.  I have to say, that would be pretty amazing!  But is it any more amazing than the claims Christians make?  That our bodies are temples where the Spirit of God is pleased to dwell?  That together, using our gifts, we are the Body of Christ?  That we are a chosen people, a royal nation, guided and empowered by God to continue Christ’s mission of bringing good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind and release to the captives?  Even the name we use for ourselves, “Christian”, which literally means, “little Christs”, is incredulous.  A dog that talks is not as amazing as what we claim to be true about ourselves.          The dog that talks should be a source of joy and blessing for the farmer.  But instead, the dog has become a source of frustration because he does not speak truth.  In the same way, God’s design for the church is to be a source of joy and blessing for the world.  But if we fail to speak the truth in love, if we fail to hear the truth when it is presented to us, if we choose anything short of the wisdom and gentleness Jesus modeled, we lose our ability to be Jesus’ witnesses.  Without candor, we become a source of frustration and distrust.  Our salt and light loses is saltiness and loveliness.            In the midst of the sinful woman worshipping at Jesus’ feet, Jesus stopped everything and said, “Simon, I have something to tell you.”  Kudos to Simon for listening.  What would you do if, in the midst of our worship today, Jesus stopped everything, called your name and said, “I have something to tell you.”?  Kudos to you if you will listen.  May we, and the world, be blessed by courageous candor.  Amen.