Truth and lies

3rd before Advent Sermon
I have been wandering through a book of short stories called The Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards over the past little while. There is one about a young woman, seeking a path through a painful period of life, who finds friendship with a strange young man. He persuades her to go sky diving and she fights through her fears and makes the jump landing massively off target. He lies and talks endlessly about a jump he has not made, when she calls for the truth he becomes violent and threatening – demanding that she keep tell the lie to those who they know. She agrees but at that moment she knows their friendship will never be restored and that he will be alone.

The young man Stephen was so desperate to preserve the eccentric personality that he had built up around himself that he was willing to sacrifice friendship to preserve a lie.

Lies and deceptions are strange things. As many of us know, what starts out as an almost off the had remark can very easily spiral into a full blown deception. When these lies are localised – say about who left a favourite mug so close to the edge of a table that it fell off – they often sting – and this guilt may even prompt us to tell the truth. But the problem with humanity is that we are creatures of habit – we allow things to become true to us which are deceptive – we simply forget to feel guilty about situations which, if presented in the abstract, without our social conditioning, would have us cringing.

Advent is around the corner – that great season where we travel from darkness to light – where we try to disentangle ourselves from at least some of the lies in our lives and journey to meet God incarnate in Bethlehem. Advent is a season of joyful expectation but there are also, traditionally, some heavy themes which surround it, themes like death and heaven and hell – although in many places these have been supplanted by the apparently more accessible themes of love, hope, peace and joy.

When we look at our readings today we should be aware of the season – we are beginning to have to work a little harder.

(The passage from Job stands in sharp contrast to the other two – Job is perhaps to be regarded as a truly honest man. He has lost everything, family, wealth and even health and still he offers a testimony to the fact that God is beyond and above this present situation in which he finds himself. Write it on stone, he says, make sure that this truth is recorded as enduring.)

(But then) Both the 2 Thessalonians passage and that from Luke involve a level of deception. Paul is always realistic about his readers and early Christians lived in a world of violence and that truth was a very costly commodity in terms of human lives. It is hardly surprising that in a world where politics and religion danced as they did in the ancient world, that Paul would find himself warning against doctrinal and political usurpers. He is aware that it is all to easy for them to get blown off course by ideas which initially seem attractive but hold no substance. So he warns about not believing those who say the who say the second coming is here or those who would exalt themselves, by political means, to the role of a god.

In Luke the Saducees are not asking a question they need answering but are asking a question to which there is no answer. Jesus cannot simply offer a solution to their problem without stepping into one of several snares which are set for him. The sadducees are trying to make the point that the idea of resurrection is rather stupid – after all how could it work? Jesus challenges not the notion of resurrection but the prevailing version of it – the overly theological and legalistic view which the pharisees would have presented.

When Jesus replies to the sadducees he presents a truth which is so much greater than they had imagined and in doing this he challenges the very web of deception which they are a part of, which Judaism had become. He goes back to the ancient story of Moses as he speaks – right to the heart of things and says that Moses himself bears witness to resurrection – if they have Moses wrong, they have their whole theology wrong. There is a another choice to be made.

This choice for truth is both conscious and challenging. It demands, not an allaying of fear by societical norms and academic argument but walking through that fear into the arms of Christ. The Incarnation is not so much a reinvention of humanity as its reawakening – and through this season we can hear Jesus calling us to wake up, pay attention, find truth and throw off the shackles of deception.

The story with which I started is not a Gospel story – to be released from the fear of violence, the young woman has to hold the lie about Stephen actually making the jump – it is her power but it is also her choice. So whilst she does find freedom and strength in herself, despite the chaos which surrounds her, the cost is this deception, but to the author that just seems to be given, that allowing that piece to remain makes up the whole puzzle.

I do not want to sound judgemental – after all we all live with inconsistencies and even outright deceptions. We are painfully aware that our choice often means someone else has to pay the price. In his book “Lost Icons” Archbishop Rowan Williams looks at the subject of Educational Choice as a deception – we prize, he says, the ability to allow parents to choose their child's school (and by implication future) but the reality is, he says, that choice is only choice for some and as resources and teaching staff are attracted to places of choice there is a flip side of the coin and that becomes educational deprivation.

Whilst God is a God of abundance our political and economic systems promote a world of scarcity, of limited resources. But this is a lie – we live in a world which could feed all its citizens, we live in a world where the huge majority of people seek peace and happiness, we live in a world where many people value love above finance. And these are values which are highly incarnational – these things which go beyond the deceptions of a complex machinery of society are the fingers of the Divine.

And yet we still feel that a world of haves and have-nots is a given. It is almost impossible for a parent to add to the list of considerations when choosing a child's school – which is better for society? And time and time again we present the same conundrum – make a choice if you can for your self-protection but please do take the blame when the system wears thin in places. As a society we must work harder to protect the interests of the most vulnerable and also to debate the choices which we must make – not to remove choice but to inform it. As thinking Christians working in an incarnational setting we are called to investigate our own conflicts on choice and to push the boundaries of debate. It is not about top down administration - that is precisely what the Jewish authorities had done – they had removed choice – given religion over to a think tank of the educated elite.

What God calls us to is something wide reaching – that we do not hold on to our peace at the expense of lies which we justify our own position. And also that we do not leave those with choices to which they are vulnerable unsupported in those choices. They way God made things and the truth of incarnation requires us to look beyond ourselves and see others – to look around and see God's creation and to imagine God's truth here and now – what would that look like. How can I make that real?

(Perhaps let's finish with Job, a man who was wealthy and full but who now sits on rags, hungry and covered with sores. A man who through all this finds truth in the living God:


23 ‘O that my words were written down!
   O that they were inscribed in a book!
24 O that with an iron pen and with lead
   they were engraved on a rock for ever!
25 For I know that my Redeemer* lives,
   and that at the last he* will stand upon the earth;*
26 and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
   then in* my flesh I shall see God,*
27 whom I shall see on my side,*
   and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
   My heart faints within me! )