Moments of Truth

a sermon preached by Rev. Khleber M. Van Zandt V at First Unitarian Church of Alton, September 7, 2008

Welcome back to church after a long, long summer!   Some of you have been here almost every Sunday over the summer, and some of you have been gone off to some exotic places.   But here we are together again and ready to start the year off in a big way.   So here’re some questions:

How many of you are in school this year?   How many of you are looking forward to going to school in the next few years?   How many of you have been out of school for awhile?   How many for a long, long time?  

I’ve been in school for a long, long time.   There’s one moment in a classroom that I really like: it’s when the teacher asks a question and I think I know the answer and I hold my hand up and wait for the teacher to call on me.   Do you do that, too?   I’m always excited when I think I know the right answer, when I think I know the truth about something.

There are some kinds of questions that have right and wrong answers.   What’s two plus two?   Four is right, anything else is probably wrong.   What’s the capital city of the United States?   Washington, D.C. is right, and anything else is probably wrong. Right and wrong are one kind of true and false.

But there are other kinds of questions that have right and wrong answers that may be true or false in another way.   For example, if I asked you what your name is, you’d say, “Ben,” and that answer would be true for you.   If I said my name was Ben, that answer would be false for me, it’d be wrong.   What would you call it if I tried to tell you my name was Ben when I knew it wasn’t?   You’d call it a lie.

So there are some kinds of questions that I might get wrong – I might actually think two plus two equals five, and in that case, I’d be wrong, I’d have the wrong answer.   If I knew better, though;   if I knew that two plus two equals four but I tried to convince you that it was five, I’d be lying, wouldn’t I?

Let’s imagine we’re in a classroom.   There are desks or tables and chairs, there are other students, there is a teacher in front of the class.   And the teacher is asking questions.   The teacher might ask you math questions and you might or might not know the answers.   He might ask you geography questions, and you might know some of those answers, too.   But then she might ask you other kinds of questions, like what’s your name, or how old you are, or where you live, or what your parents do for a living, and then for those kinds of questions you know the right answer because it’s about yourself, and in that case you have to make the choice as to whether you tell the right answer or not.   You know the right answer, but you have to decide whether to share it or not.   You decide whether to tell the truth, whether to lie about it, or whether just not to say anything at all.

 

I have been thinking about this for a few reasons.   One reason is a television show I’ve seen a little bit of that is really disturbing.   The television show – which I don’t recommend anybody watch - is supposedly a game show based on people’s answers to lists of extremely personal questions while they’re hooked up to a lie detector machine.   After the question-and-answer session with the machine, the people are brought onto a stage in front of the lights and TV cameras and in front of their families and the whole world and they’re asked the questions again. The motivation to do is that they will win money if they “tell the truth” – that is, if the machine says they’re telling the truth.

I guess everybody wants to tell the truth most of the time, so what’s the problem?

Well, here it is:   some of the questions are really easy, some of the questions are pretty silly, some of them might be considered funny by somebody somewhere.   But many of the questions are not easy or silly or funny;   some are simply inappropriate for public display.   Designed not to get at a ‘truth’ but to blame, to belittle, to embarrass individuals and their families, many of the questions have pretensions to openness but are actually destructive to lives and families and, by extension, I think, destructive of the whole community.

There are questions about what you really think about your parents, about little deceits or big lies you might have told, about the worst kinds of things that happen to and between people.   Questions about being abused or about being abusive to others, about things that happen in marriages and families.   Questions about thoughts people have that are nobody else’s business, private, personal thoughts that people spend years in therapy trying to work through and here they are on television being told they’re not good people unless they “tell the truth” in front of God and everybody.   [I doubt that God watches this show, but if she did, it would be with a tear in her eye… if she has an eye…]

Supposedly exposing the real drama in the real lives of real people, it really exposes the brokenness closest to home, but also the brokenness of the system, the wantonness with which some of the entertainment media will work to destroy lives, and the extent to which they will go to make a buck.

But this leads me to something I’m trying to understand more of, and that’s an essay by Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “What Does ‘Telling the Truth’ Mean?”  

Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived in Germany back before the Second World War.   He got a PhD when he was 21 and came to attend seminary in New York City.   While he was here in this country, he enjoyed going to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem where he particularly loved the music and the way the people sang and moved when they were in church.   When he went back to Germany, Hitler was just coming to power.   Many German churches began to display the Nazi flag in their sanctuaries and to align themselves with the new government.   Bonhoeffer thought this was wrong and he helped start a branch of the church in Germany that was not government controlled and didn’t go along with what the government told them to do.

He was so concerned about the direction that the Germany government was headed and the evils that he saw happening around him that he decided to join in plots against Hitler, and for that he was arrested and thrown into a concentration camp.   While in prison, he was taken in for harsh questioning by the authorities.   When he was back in his cell, he had a lot of time to think about and write about the nature of truth, and he started writing his essay as a result.

In that essay, he gives as an example a story about a classroom situation like we talked about while ago, where a teacher is asking a little boy some questions in front of the class.   If the teacher had been asking questions about math or science or geography, that would be okay.   But in the example, the teacher starts asking personal questions, questions about the boy’s family, questions that are really none of the business of the teacher or the other students in the room.   Those questions were meant to put the boy on the spot, to make fun of him, to make him feel bad about himself and about his family.   Those questions were meant to gain power over the boy.   When the truth is used to gain power over someone, it’s no longer the truth, but has become a lie by being used in the service of a bigger lie.   Andrew Root, a seminary professor in St. Paul, gives this example:   “When the ten-year-old sister of a seven-year-old boy dances in front of him chanting, ‘I know something you don’t know,’ truth has clearly become a pawn, a currency for gaining power.   The girl is concerned not for truth, but for control.”

Bonhoeffer says that, in his example, the boy in the classroom has every right to keep some control for himself, to keep some secrets, to not tell everything he knows.   Secrets aren’t bad unless they’re used to cover up something that concretely hurts someone else and breaks relationships.   In the classroom example, it’s the teacher that’s not telling the truth because he’s asking unfair questions not designed to make their relationship better but to gain power over the boy and to destroy the relationships the boy has with the teacher, the other students, and maybe even the boy’s family.   The teacher’s secret is that he’s only interested in power over others.

This make sense when you think of where Bonhoeffer wrote this essay – in prison, being interrogated by people trying to gain even more power over him.   For Bonhoeffer, truth always exists in context – it’s not a right or wrong answer in principle but is a right or a wrong in a concrete situation, and Bonhoeffer says the teacher was in the wrong in the same way his captors were in the wrong:   The teacher had no right in the name of education to interfere in the boy’s family life in the same way that Bonhoeffer’s interrogators had no right in the name of the state and the government to interfere in his life.   But they did anyway.   And they destroyed Bonhoeffer’s relationships.   They even killed Bonhoeffer in the name of a collapsing state just before the concentration camps were liberated by the Allies.

 

Another reason I’m thinking about moments of truth this week is that we’ve just entered the final few weeks of a national presidential campaign.   [This is not gonna be partisan.   I promise…]

Is anybody else experiencing election fatigue?   It’s been hard to get away from political ads and news stories and talking heads going after each other on television and radio and the blogosphere.   It seems like the truth is one of the first casualties in this kind of national debate.

I hope you’ll notice just how much attention gets paid to the way things look rather than to the way things are.   We talk about how cool a candidate looks or how pretty she is in librarian glasses.   I heard a lot of complaints this week about the color of the background used for the speeches at the Republican convention.   The color of the background - yeah, it looked peculiar, but nothing like that should turn us from focusing on what’s important:   what exactly are politicians going to do to provide healthcare for the uninsured or jobs to the jobless or food to the hungry or education to our children?   The number of people in the hall or how loud they scream or the color of the background matters not at all in the face of those serious questions.

I am reminded of my friend, an Episcopal priest and an ardent socialist, who always wondered why the churches were willing to leave things up to the government when he felt it should be the mission of the church to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and educate our children, even to help provide healthcare to the indigent.   The deep truth here may be that we can’t rely on politicians to fix everything that is wrong around us, or to fix everything that is wrong within us – we have responsibilities, we have missions to fulfill, and we’d better get on with it.  

Nurture your spirit, help heal our world.   And we’ll talk more about the elections as time goes on.

 

Here are some things to remember as you go through this week:

Not everything you can see on TV is good for you – some of it is educational and some of it will help you grow up to be a better person, but some of it is destructive and some of it is a lie.

Also, not everything the government says is right or true or good, and not everything political candidates say is right or true or good.

You have to listen closely and test things in your own way.   Like the Buddha said,

Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it.

Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held.

Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books.

Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin.

Believe nothing just because someone else believes it.

Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true.

 

Have a great week.

 

So may it be.