"His Table Crumbs"- THE GONG SHOW

THE GONG SHOW Did you ever watch The Gong Show? It was a wildly popular program featuring a zany host, Chuck Barris, who orchestrated a compilation of contestants competing to see who could perform their particular shtick without getting eliminated by the infamous GONG. Why a Gong? I imagine because a bell or whistle didn’t have that same degrading, may I say, ring to it? Now an OOGAH would work, perhaps even better, but I can’t see the producers calling it, “The OOGAH Show.” You know a GONG is a biblical concept. The other night we had an opportunity to exercise it. We hosted a group of folks for dinner and games. Naturally, things did not go as expected and we had to improvise. We had a choice at one point, get offended or continue to graciously serve our guests. We chose the latter and things went very well. As a result “a good time was had by all.” The next morning I pondered what transpired and imagined things going another way. I remembered a scripture which actually addressed the issue: 1Peter 4:9 “Be hospitable to one another without complaint.” Short and sweet eh? Well there’s more to it. The Greek word for complaint or murmur is “gongismos”. Vines says it’s an “onomatopoeic word, representing the significance by the sound of the word, as in the word ‘murmur' itself.” Yeah, “murmur”, sounds like what it actually means, grumbling, complaining, speaking under your breath secretly. Notice the root of the Greek word. It’s GONG. Paul says if his speech is eloquent or even heavenly and he doesn’t have love, he’s “... become a noisy GONG.” Like our word, murmur, to the Greeks, complaining, grumbling was “GONGismos”, a disturbing noise. They even have a specific word for how it spreads among folks. Jesus used the word in one of His most famous parables. The one about the landlord hiring laborers for his harvest from time to time throughout the day. When the workday was through, the landlord paid those who worked the least a full days wage, each, regardless of how little they worked got paid the same. Those who worked all day, seeing what they perceived to be an injustice, began to “gongismos”, bang the GONG. They judged the landlord and mistook his graciousness for injustice. Now, I’m sitting in my father in law’s back porch watching it rain. I’ve been here in Arkansas for over three weeks and in that time it has rained every day except three. Yes, and I began to GONGisimos about it forgetting the adage, “April showers bring May flowers.” I like flowers, don’t you? How often we, like the workers, misjudge God’s graciousness in our lives? So, back to Peter’s short exhortation, “Be hospitable to one another without complaint.” Why would he write something like that? Because when we do, we forget why we’re being hospitable, for love. Instead we start banging the noisy, irritable GONG. It’s those times when we can be like our Father, gracious even when others don’t recognize it and eventually “stop to smell the flowers.”

Tom Hovsepian