Community- Living Truthfully
Today we are starting a sermon series on the theme of community. We won’t be exhaustive in this, but for the next four Sundays we are going to be looking at practices that are important for strengthening community. … Today we are looking at the theme of living truthfully, and we will also look at the opposite, deception.
Our Old Testament reading is one of two places where we find the Ten Commandments (Deuteronomy 5 is the other). Since 1552, in the Book of Common Prayer, at the beginning of the Holy Eucharist service we are instructed to read the Ten Commandments at least one Sunday per month in a kind of responsive reading.
The minister is instructed to say:
“Hear the Law of God which was given to Israel in old time. God spake these words and said: I am the LORD thy God; Thou shalt have none other gods but me.”And the people respond to each commandment:
“Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.”
A community has to be defined, or it is not a community. There has to be a center, a fire, whose warmth we gather around. The way of life spoken about in the Commandments, and throughout the Bible, are a reflection of God’s character. The Ten Commandments have been held up as guiding moral principles for at least 3000 years. … In the Gospel of Matthew when Jesus was asked by a rich young man,
“Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?” Jesus replied by saying, “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments” (Matt 19:16-17).
Obviously, we have to read this in the context of the rest of Scripture, and so account for the cross and the grace God offers us as we inevitably fail to live up to the way God has given us to live. But, on a simple reading, this Scripture shows that the Ten Commandments were highly regarded by Jesus. And so, they should be highly regarded by us as well. They give us a standard to guide our community. Not the only one, to be sure, but a very foundational standard.
In their purest form, the Ten Commandments are, as Jesus said, about loving God and loving our neighbour (Matt 22:36-40). These laws are given to draw people towards God. To follow the principles of these commandments is to live a life that more closely reflects the character of God, and we are created to be God’s image bearers. So, these commandments also reflect us as we are meant to be. … For us to live truthfully, we strive to live according to who we say we are. That means we live according to a story, and according to a standard. Or, at least we strive to.
This can bring a certain temptation. We are a broken people, and we can have a hard time living up to any standard, let alone the Ten Commandments and the way of Christ. So, what do we do? … If we feel like we are in a safe and generous community of love, we will confess our failure and repent. We might ask for help to learn to correct our mistake. … If we don’t trust our community, we will probably lie. We stretch the truth. We spin. We tell half-truths. We withhold information that is important to share. For a variety of reasons, maybe to get what we want, or out of fear, we deceive one another. Often this is in order to manage our image and to keep ourselves from getting in trouble. … Dallas Willard tells a story about a little girl in Sunday School who was asked what a lie is. She responded by saying, “it is an abomination to God, and a very present help in times of trouble”.
We know the commandment,
“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour” (Ex 20:16).
And we see this reflected all over the Bible. In our Epistle reading from the letter to the Colossians as well- we read,
“Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator” (Col 3:9-10).You might remember the story about Ananias and Sapphira in the book of Acts (ch 5). We often don’t read this carefully, so we tend to think it has to do with money. It doesn’t. it is about lying. They wanted people to think they were more generous than they were. They were faking it. They were managing their image with lies. They brought deception into the heart of the Early Church, and that young community was now in danger because of it. That couple died as a result of their lie. It is an uncomfortable story, which shows how seriously deception is thought of by God and the Early Church. … We sometimes want to appear to be good more than we want to be good, and that mean we are inclined towards hypocrisy, which is a kind of deception. … The prophet Jeremiah said that the human heart is “deceitful above all things” (Jer 17:9).
It is made even worse when we are surrounded by attempts to manipulate us through lies and deception- by news agencies subtly “spinning” on the basis of their political leaning, or ad agencies using half-truths trying to sell us something, or images of faces using wrinkle-removing filters on Instagram, or airbrushed models on magazines that barely resemble a living human being, or resumes that are embellished, or medals given to children as a form of flattery (when they haven’t really achieved anything). … The trick often works. As a result, we are swimming in in deceptions, and so it can be tempting to try it ourselves. Maybe we fake sickness to stay home from work, or to get out of a social engagement. “It’s just a white lie”, we say to ourselves. We wont even admit to the lie, instead we say we “misspeak”, “exaggerate”, or “exercise poor judgement”.[1] Politicians do it, but if we are honest, a lot of us do too. But with every deception we add to the mess we are all swimming in. It erodes our integrity, and our community.
One of the deepest desires we have is to know others deeply, and be known deeply by others. And then in the midst of that knowledge, to be loved and to love. … A lot of us feel like if people really knew us, they wouldn’t love us. They love us as long as we protect them from the stuff they don’t want to see in our soul. But that means we hold back. We subtly deceive by not sharing what would help others to truly know us. … What we really want is to be in a community where we can share our deepest hurts, our most scandalous sins, and our deepest longings, and instead of being rejected or given unsolicited advice we meet the depths of another person’s soul as they hear us and understand us. … And in turn, we hear them and understand them. And the depth of our open soul is able to meet the depth of their open soul, and we can both stand under God’s love and grace, because He knows it all. But we yearn to have another human being know too.
That deep yearning is not able to become a reality because we drive it away with our deceptions. We keep people at a distance because there is a lack of trust. We don’t really allow people to get too close because we don’t know what they will do with the real us. … And, of course, we don’t share like this with just anyone. That kind of trust is earned gradually over time.
It’s not just that we deceive about who we are, but we don’t often tell the truth about others well, either. We ignore bad behaviour, which allows it to degrade community and hurt people. Or, we attack, which is hardly speaking the truth in love (Eph 4:1-15). We need to be wise in our truth telling, and there is sometimes the need to be silent. Christine Pohl in her book “Living into Community” gives questions to analyze our motives when telling the truth about someone else-
“For whom is this truth helpful?
Who benefits when it is told or hidden?
Who is harmed?
Why do I or we want it known?
[Then she comments] If our ultimate purpose in truth telling is helping persons and communities grow toward maturity in Christ, then our motives need to be centered in a desire to strengthen people in goodness and godliness”.[2]We may, at times, be in the position of Nathan the prophet, having to confront King David in his Sin (2 Sam 12). It is a dangerous thing to do. It needs to be done for the right reasons, for the sake of the community, and for the sinner’s sake. … but we can speak the truth about others wrongly. We can twist a truth into gossip, or slander, or we can scream it in anger, and that is hardly Christian truth-telling. We can say something in writing because we want to be careful about what we want to say, but often that is a veil over our cowardice, and it should be said face to face, especially if it is potentially hurtful. The pastor and writer Frederick Buechner has said, that speaking the truth in love means “speaking it with concern not only for the truth that is being told but with concern also for the people it is being told to.”
I would like to issue us a challenge this week. I would like us to give up lying and deception this week. Don’t bear false witness to your neighbour this week. Tell the trust about yourself (appropriate to the relationship you have with that person), and tell the truth about others as well (and that includes exaggerations about celebrities and politicians). That doesn’t mean we gush out everything that is in our head. We are allowed to keep silent. But notice if you stretch the truth, or tell a half truth. And when you notice yourself do it, ask yourself why you did it. … AMEN
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