Integrity

Eddie Haskell, the neighborhood ne'er-do-well, at the Cleaver's front door: "Oh, hello, Mrs. Cleaver. That's a lovely dress you're wearing today. I wonder if Wallace might be home today, and if I might have a word with him." Eddie walks into Wally's room: "Wally, if your dumb brother tags along with us, I'm gonna---oh, hello again, Mrs. Cleaver. I was just telling Wallace how pleasant it would be for Theodore to accompany us to the movies."

"Integrity" comes from the Latin for "whole," and that's instructive to me. I want to be a person of "integrity," not of spare parts hanging out all over the place that need to be constantly tucked back in, like Scarecrow stuffing his shirt in The Wizard of Oz. It's too much work to keep up a split personality that poses one way with one person and another way with another person. I have done that for most of my life, in degrees shading from blatant to subtle, and I want to be done with it now.

I notice that the Apostle Paul was a person of "integrity," or "wholeness." He didn't care who he was with. He was Paul. He was the same with "those who seemed to be pillars" (Galatians 2:9) and "those who seemed to be influential (what they were makes no difference to me . . .)" (2:2,6).

Peter and Barnabas may have had more of a struggle with integrity than Paul, as we learn from an anecdote in which they were rebuked by him for seeing Gentiles socially when the big shots from Jerusalem were not around, but drawing back when they would come. Paul said they were acting "hypocritically" (2:13), which is a word deriving from the Greek for "actor," and suggesting "pretending." So there again, we have an issue of "wholeness," or lack thereof. The hypocrite is two people---or perhaps an infinite number of people.

If you think it is hard to be a person of integrity, it is harder work to not be. To turn on a dime and change your voice from Maude Frickert to Marilyn Monroe when the phone rings and then back to Maude with the children you were just yelling at is embarrassing and ultimately stressful. Jesus called us to peace, and maybe integrity is part of what he had in mind.

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