I must admit that I sometimes have to watch my language. I do have a tendency to spew out a “dirty word” from time to time, though not with the explicitness nor frequency I seem to encounter on the streets or subway system of DC, where the F*bomb sometimes seems to proliferate from the mouths of people who don’t seem to recognize the violation.

Ironically, in my career as a pilot, an occasional slip-of-the-tongue by one of my more colorful colleagues was often followed by a sincere apology, as if his words were an offense to my well-known religious sensibilities. While I never wore my faith on my sleeve, neither did I hide my beliefs or the lifestyle choices which accompanied them. Nonetheless, my more sensitive fellow pilots reckoned that my “Christian” ears were not fit to hear the occasional blasphemy uttered by accident.

The unfortunate myth that surrounds my colleagues’ concern for my sensitive ears is that Christians are “nice” people who “do not cuss, or chew, or go out with girls who do.” In the minds of many non-Christians (and some believers), niceness has come to represent the essence of Christianity. As Rodney Clapp recounts in his book “Peculiar People,” he was raised to believe that Christians are those folks who are “nice to the postman.” Lots of Christians reinforce that image of niceness each Sunday as they faithfully dress in their Sunday best – and tell their children to behave because they’re “in church.” Niceness is actually a lot easier than the gospel alternative.

I suspect that the world, and the deceiver, are quite content for us to keep on being “nice.” Niceness, it turns out, might be the first-cousin of harmlessness. The gospel that Jesus preached is far from harmless – the coming of God’s Reign invites us to some hard choices: will we continue to participate in the destructive and demeaning waywardness of the world, or will we join the journey of righteousness, justice and peace that God is inaugurating? If we think that gospel-love is “being nice to one another,” we might be tempted to gloss over the real tragedies of the world – something like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. The gospel of Jesus addresses, and begins to genuinely heal, the real brokenness of the world, and Jesus invites us to join him in this task. I’ll ask Jesus to forgive my occasional fowl word, but I suspect he’s got bigger fish to fry than that.