Telling the Truth
A Sermon on the Ninth
Command by Rich Rathbun
For the Nineteenth
Sunday Following Pentecost (10 Words Series)
October 20, 2019
First Austin: a Baptist
community of faith
Good morning. Okay, I
am not going to lie, preaching a sermon about lying makes me a bit
nervous. Thanks Griff. When you hear that phrase, “I am not going to
lie,” you know someone is about to lie to you.
As I was preparing for this sermon, my 17-year-old son Ryan told me
about a book he read at school called, Everybody
Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really
Are. I think he was trying to tell me something. The book is really
interesting. Turns out we humans lie about most everything. We are telling some form of a lie about 1/3
of the time. Studies have shown that we
are consistently fudging the facts, even in anonymous Internet surveys. For example, fewer that 2% of college
graduates say they finished college with less than a 2.5 GPA, when actually 11%
of graduates fall bellow this GPA. We consistently lie to ourselves about being
above average. One company survey found
that 40% of its engineers said they are in the top 5% of performers. One quarter of high school students think
they are in the top 1% in their ability to get along with other people. By the way, statistically, teenagers lie the
most of any age group. People over 60
lie the least. While traditionally
surveys predicted Hillary Clinton would win the last presidential election
handedly, Big Data indicated much more robust support for Donald Trump. Who we are on-line seems to be very different
from who we say we are to both ourselves and other people.
Now you may think I am going in a moralistic direction. Something like, “humans are really bad
because we lie all the time.” You know,
kind of a fire and brimstone approach. I
used to be the kind of Baptist who, in order to tell people that God loves them,
I first had to convince them how rotten they are. The approach is, “you may think you are happy,
but you really are not.” Bad news before
good news. In many ways, that
evangelical approach works. That’s
because many of us really feel bad about ourselves. We say really mean things to ourselves. In my career as a pastoral counselor, I have
found that most people I work with don’t need a lecture on how sinful they
are. Rather, people usually need to
recognize and change the voices of guilt and shame that keep them in a cycle of
depression, anxiety, and hurt.
So, as we look at our passage in Exodus, I want to go to the
beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures, Genesis Chapter one, when God created the
heavens and the earth, and declared God’s creation good. And in verse 27, God created humankind in
God’s image, and God declared Humans good.
This ‘original blessing’, as theologians have identified, is what needs
to define us. You and I are created in
the image of God. Richard Rohr writes
that we need to reject the doctrine of original sin and start with a new vision
of humanity. He also notes that he has
never met a truly compassionate and loving person who did not have a
foundational and even deep trust in the inherent goodness of human nature. So it’s in this context of Original Blessing
we look at the Ninth Word.
Read Exodus 20:16,
You shall not bare false witness against your neighbor
So what’s going on here? Theologian Walter Harrelson notes that this
commandment belongs together with ‘do not steal’ and ‘do not covet.’ All three
speak to what it means to live within community.
The Hebrew grammar here indicates an emphasis on the
Witness, not the testimony. The Witness
must have seen the crime, not heard about the crime. Hearsay evidence is not permitted. The integrity of the Witness is at stake. And
it usually takes two witnesses to convict someone of the crime. The ninth Word has obvious judicial connotations and is the basis
of our legal system. But it goes beyond the Courts, and speaks to who we are
and how we are to live in our world.
The Hebrew Scriptures also teach against other forms of
lying, and thus this commandment does
serve as a primary moral code as to how we are to act in the midst of
community. Jewish tradition also teaches
that not all lies are created equal.
There are various schools of Jewish thought that argue what is
acceptable and what is not. This is of
course a complex issue that theologians, philosophers, and social scientists
have debated throughout history.
When teenagers argue, and I have one living in my house,
everybody lies, they are in fact right.
The lies we tell have different consequences, depending on the
context. But it does feel to me that we
have achieved some new lows in terms
of telling the truth within our public life.
Our world, at least our particular part of the world, is in crisis.
It is in a large part because of the blatant disregard of the ninth
commandment, do not bear false witness. The modern project has devolved into a
kind of cultural dialogue in which the truth is nothing but a social construct,
in which whoever shouts the loudest wins the truth battle. It’s toxic
and has led to a political system that no longer seems to work very
well. I lay part of the blame on our
political leaders. The desire for power
and loyalty to a particular political party supersedes the greater good of our
community. The political victory
justifies the lying. In my opinion, this is only part of the problem. Responsibility is universal. This is our
cultural sin. We have created this
world. You and me. What is required is repentance. Richard Rohr writes that one of Jesus’ first
words in the gospels is repent. The
Greek word is metenoia. He notes that
properly translated it means: change your mind.
Or go beyond your mind. This is
not about morality. He is talking about
“ a primal change of mind, worldview, or your way of processing.” Jesus is talking about “inner motivation or
intention.” It not about being good, or being moral. It is being radically changed.
The “Black Lives Matter Movement” and the “Me, Too Movement”
have best captured speaking truth in today’s corrupt and broken system. Both illustrate what it means to speak truth
to larger power structures in play. It
is very much an example of Bearing Witness, True Witness, that challenges and
changes culture. It is the kind of
cultural metanoia that is demanded by the Ninth Word.
The Second Scripture Reading for the day is from the book of
Acts. The story of Ananias and Sapphira illustrate the importance of truth-telling
within the Christian Community itself. The passage preceding this story is about
Barnabas, who in accordance to the church, living in complete community where
all resources were shared equally, sold his land and gave all the proceeds to
this new community of believers. The
story of this couple is the anti-Barnabas example. And what a story it is! It is of note that
Ananias’ sin was not that he held back proceeds from the sale to the community,
but that he lied about it. It was not
the crime, but the cover up. Sapphira
too had a choice to tell the truth but did not.
She too died. Now, the historical
validity of this story is not that interesting to me. I think its existence in the Biblical cannon
is similar to the book of Job. God is
not really playing with people by striking God’s people with illness and sudden
death. There is a deeper meaning here
about truth and how it is practiced in the context of community. Living in community demands a certain amount
of truth-telling. We cannot say or do
something that is harmful to the larger community that is hidden or untruthful. I like to think of Ananias and Sapphira as an
example of living out of ego, which always is working to hide our authentic
self. If they simply confessed their
deception, they would have been forgiven.
The life of community demands that
we live out of our Christ self, and not our ego. Parenthetically,
I like to think that this parable lifts up the fact that physical death is
sometimes that path towards overcoming the tyranny of ego. Physical death is the ultimate liberation
from the life of ego, moving into the life of the Spirit, and full realization of
Christ Consciousness.
More importantly
though, life in community, our life as part of this church and the larger
church is about telling the truth and living the truth. Walter Bruegeman writes, “Truth-telling is
subversive obedience.”
We must be honest and open to one another. This includes being mindful of the power of
our words. The book of James reminds us
how destructive negative words can be.
Tell the truth by using words that benefit your community and the
world. Blessing people through words of love and
connection should be our goal. In
Hinduism the fifth chakra is the throat chakra and is the Center of our human
communication. It is the gateway into a
deeper awareness of ourselves and of our world.
Without honesty, we can never grow spiritually.
Illustration: Lee Ann
and I are part of a new Sunday school class in which the focus is on developing
the spiritual practice of meditation or contemplative prayer. In addition to being a place where we
practice Meditation and Lectio Divina, we encourage each other to be open,
honest, and vulnerable. In a sense, we
are asked to let down our masks and tell the truth of who we are and what we
struggle with. I believe it is this kind
of truth-telling that is needed within our Christian community. We are baring witness to the truth by being
open and vulnerable with one another.
Finally, telling the truth matters to us as
individuals. Our scripture reading from
Matthew is a retelling of the Ninth commandment. Jesus’ words reflect the
thesis, antithesis formula that is unique to Matthew. Jesus is challenging the traditional Judaic
arguments that some truths are more important than others. In many ways it is similar to our own ethical
arguments today, where we suppose that in many situations a lie may be okay if
it is for the greater good. Jesus’
statement here is a restatement of the law, with his own unique emphasis. There is to be no oath-taking statements in
which God or other figures of authority are invoked to add validity to the
statement. No oaths allowed. Let your yes be yes, and your no’s be no’s. It is a demand for truthfulness of all our
words. But the context of this
truthfulness is that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, which is the
greatest commandment. Jesus is moving
from legalism to putting the responsibility on us to use words that fall within
the commandment, love your neighbor as yourself. It’s not so much about ethical decision-making
as it is living out of our true self.
Being in Christ goes beyond any kind of legalism.
Ultimately, I believe Jesus’ words here are representative
of his mystical teachings of what the spiritual path is actually about. The law is our teacher, but we cannot really
master its lessons. Anytime we claim we
are following the law, we fall short of the law. Jesus is pointing to a reality that goes
beyond being good, being right, or being ethical. It is about letting go of the ego, changing
our minds, waking up, and becoming our true selves. Our true self is our Christ self. Our true self is the Christ in you, the hope
of glory. When we wake up, when we see
the illusion we have created, we are faced with the ultimate truth about
reality. We are in Christ, you are in
Christ, and all people are in Christ. We
are actually one thing. When we wake up,
we see that Universal Christ Consciousness is what we are all part of. And if
this is too hard to accept, that’s okay;
it might just be my own dream. It may be
more acceptable to say that telling the truth is saying “it is only love that
matters.” Love is the force that creates
the universe. Jesus says, “I am the way,
the truth, and life.” We are in Christ; therefore,
we know this way. And the way is
love.
Illustration: My aunt and uncle are here today, Bonnie and
Bob. They are dear people to me and have
been a huge influence on my spiritual life.
As I was moving away from my early life religious fundamentalism, Bonnie
and Bob were talking about spiritual truths that eventually became my own. One time when we were together, likely
drinking a glass of wine, they told me, “listen to the Beatles. Almost every song is about love. Not just human love, universal love.” They told me this is just one of the ways God
is spreading the message of universal love.
Richard Rohr says the same thing.
Rohr notes the French theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote that love is the very physical structure of the
universe. Rohr notes, “Love, which might be called the attraction
of all things toward all things, is a universal language underlying energy that
keeps showing itself despite our best efforts to resist it.”
It is this cosmic
energy that drives Christ consciousness.
It is the answer to every question.
It guides every action. It is the
only thing that truly matters. When we
give and receive love, in all forms, we are living in the truth.
The best way to practice truth-telling is to live out of our
true self. What is the true self? The true self is who we really are when we
strip away our ego, which creates the illusion
that we have to do something, look a certain way, have the right clothes,
money, and address. The ego is the
ultimate liar. When we bare false
witness, it likely has something to do with the ego. The ego seeks to justify itself through work’s
righteousness. The ego keeps us stuck in
the narrative that we are not okay, and often everyone else is not okay.
When Lizzo sings at ACL that we must love ourselves as we
are, she is challenging the tyranny of the ego, and calling us to live out of
our true self. Living out of our true
self is waking up to who we really are.
And who we really are is being “In Christ.” Christ in you, the hope of glory is the true
self. The true self is Christ consciousness. This Christ consciousness is not exclusive to just the Christian
religion. It has many names in many
different religions. It is universal
Spirit. It is our true self, our Christ
self, our deep connection to universal truth and love, that keeps us from
bearing false witness, and allows us to tell the truth to our world, our
church, and ourselves.
Living out of our true self is never easy. That’s why we practice spiritual disciplines:
Meditation, prayer, scripture reading, worship, service to others,
psychotherapy, friendship building. All
of this work is how we strip away the ego to live more consistently out of our
true self. But we are not practicing
spiritual disciplines to earn the right or privilege to obtain true Christ
consciousness. Being in Christ is a gift;
it’s grace. It’s waking up to something that is already there. We practice so that we can fully see and
experience what it truly means to live out of our true self, the Christ in me,
in you, the hope of glory. Joan Chittister writes, “Lying obscures the real
self… even from the self. Lying reduces me to my own false self; it shrinks the
most sacred part of me to the unholy; it violates the image of God in me.” Or, to put it in another way, telling the
truth reveals the real self to the self. Telling the truth increases the Spirit
to my true self; it expands the most sacred part of me to the holy; it affirms
the image of God in Me and in all people.
The message of love is
the ultimate expression of truth-telling.
So, when we leave this place today, remember that the person we judge,
put down, lie about, call stupid and ignorant, ignore, don’t see… “othering.” That person is Christ. That person is you. Nothing separates us from that person,
nothing but the illusion of separateness.
Christ in You, the Hope of Glory.
Christ in me, the hope of glory.
That is the truth. From this
moment on, lets live this truth. Amen.
*artwork: Blind Truth, Drawing by William T. Ayton, billayton.blogspot.com
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