How To Be Truthful--February 10, 2021

How to Be Truthful--February 10, 2021

"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." [Colossians 3:9-10]

I really hope it would have gone without saying, but just in case--we are meant to be truthful with one another. In fact, we are called to be truthful with everybody--it's not just a perk for fellow in-group members in Club Jesus that we refrain from lying to each other.  It's supposed to be our hallmark way of relating to everybody else, too. The line attributed to Benjamin Franklin is correct: honesty is the best policy.  Full stop.

I would further hope we didn't need additional elaboration, but just for clarity's sake, that means for followers of Jesus we don't give ourselves permission to lie or deceive others even when we think it will serve a purpose that would benefit us.  We don't lie even if telling the truth seems scary.  We don't lie even when the truth presents us with inconvenient facts we would rather ignore.  We don't lie even when the truth makes us look bad.  And we don't lie even when everybody else seems to think it would be politically expedient or help your group, your agenda, your party, whatever.  The followers of Jesus are meant to be different in the world, and one of the ways we are meant to be different is our commitment to truth-telling over power-grabbing, because we are convinced that being truthful people is a power of its own kind, one with greater impact and endurance than conventional power.

All of that is, I hope, self-evident.  But we may need to push just a bit farther on two related points that we don't always get around to discussing.  The first is the "why" of truth-telling.  Why should we commit to being truthful, even when it is costly?  Why should the followers of Jesus insist on being able to look everybody in the eye with our words?  These verses from Colossians help put it into focus: it's because we are being made more fully and more deeply into the image of the God who created us... and God is perfectly truthful.

This is an important thing to consider, because this means that truth-telling not simply about avoiding punishment for lying.  Of course, as children, many of us were brought up with strict rules that came with punishments for lying, and as children, we often need those clear negative consequences to help shape us into people whose default setting is truth-telling.  But ultimately, the goal of our parents and families isn't just to make us afraid of being caught in a lie (and if all we have are punishments, it will just teach us to get better at lying without getting caught, rather than giving us a positive reason to tell the truth).  Parents want their children to grow up into mature people who value truth and commit to telling the truth themselves, yes, even when it means admitting things we did not want to face or take responsibility for.

And the letter to the Colossians says the same thing: he doesn't say, "Don't lie to each other, or else you'll go to hell," but rather, "Don't lie to each other, because lying is part of the old self we are growing out of, and the new self is made in the image of God, who values truth--and who is The Truth."  And maybe this is a point we don't often consider--that God is wholly truthful.  Our older brother in the faith Martin Luther once wrote that on the days when all he can think of are the many ways he has messed up, turned away from God, done wrong, and sinned, the thing that gives him hope is God's truthfulness--he says, "I know full well that I have not a single work which is pure, but I am baptized, and through my baptism God, who cannot lie, has bound Himself in a covenant with me, not to count my sin against me, but to slay it and blot it out."  In other words, Luther knew that his hope was grounded in being able to trust God's promise to wipe out our sin--and that only works if we really believe God is trustworthy.  If there are loopholes or escape clauses in the fine print, or if it turns out that God doesn't really mean what God says, then we can't have any confidence in our forgiveness or redemption.  But if indeed God is truthful and reliable, then we can stake our lives on the promises God has made to us.  And as Colossians points out here, if God is truthful, then we who are made in God's image and being renewed in that image daily are called to be truthful as well.

Okay, again hopefully, this is all pretty straightforward: Christians (especially!) are to be truthful people, and not merely because we're afraid of the punishment for lying, but because of who God is.  Hopefully all of our heads are nodding in agreement so far--this is Basic Theology 101.

But the harder thing, especially in a time like ours, is the "how" question.  How can we be truthful people--because we live in a time when it is very easy to believe that even facts themselves are not very solid, or where I can ignore your facts and provide my own set of "alternative facts" if I do not like the implication of yours.  We live in a time when it is dangerously easy to find ways to dress up lies in a veneer of fact or something that sounds like fact, and then convinced ourselves we are being completely honest.  We live in a time, too, when it is terribly tempting to ignore what someone else says because we disagree on some things, and therefore tell ourselves that nothing they say can be relied upon--they're just "one of THOSE people" who can never face "the truth" (that we believe we possess exclusively).  And boy, if that isn't a recipe for trapping ourselves inside echo chambers, I don't know what is.  We end up then refusing to listen to voices who might challenge our thinking--precisely because we are afraid that they might challenge our thinking!  And on the flip side, we tell ourselves that we can trust anything said, posted, shared, or claimed by people we do like, because we want to believe that anything they say is true.  And we end up passing along things that are either partially false, misleading, misrepresentations, obfuscations, or decontextualized, and we don't stop to check or verify what we say because we want our claims to be true--you know, because it makes "my side" or "my group" look better, or puts me in a position for greater power or influence.

And this, I am convinced, is the greater challenge of our time--not the temptation to tell outright lies, like "The cat is brown" when it is clearly white, but rather the insidious temptation to share things that claim to be truth without our actually checking to see if it is truthful, both in letter and in spirit.  We live in a time when churchgoing Respectable Religious people all around us still say or post online that they are mad at fact-checking sites because they are just going to censor their opinions (which sounds rather to me like demanding the right to tell untruths).  We live in a time when conspiracy theories--from the laughable and harmless, like Bigfoot, to the downright dangerous and violent, like QAnon--are hugely popular, and because some of them seem basically powerless it is easy to ignore the danger of all of them.  They all start with the willingness to make claims of truth without actually backing things up, investigating, or confirming the things we say, and instead blurt out the things that adherents "want" to be true.  And while it is certainly a wicked thing to lie to someone when you know you are telling them a lie, it is equally dangerous--and out of character with Christ--to pass along things that are not true that we could have easily checked before sharing, or simply not amplified at all if we don't know something to be true.

Honestly, I don't know how we expect neighbors to believe the Good News we have to share about God's love in Jesus if they can't trust what we say.  I don't know how we think we can look our children in the eye and have them believe us when we tell them we love them if we also are sharing things--often online, but also in water-cooler talk at work or on our lunch breaks as well--that we don't bother verifying because we want it to be true and it fits the narratives we already have in our heads.  We need to take the time to stop and either verify what we say or share, or just err on the side of not sharing if we can't know something for sure.  That's not censorship--that's being responsible with the truth.  That's not silencing free speech--it's the wisdom of knowing when to keep our mouths closed about things we don't know about.  

Part of the way we are made to be different in the world as followers of Jesus is that we should be able to bear both hearing and speaking truths even when they are uncomfortable, because we are convinced that Christ's love is unshakable even through difficult realities.  And part of what will help set us apart from the noise around us is if people come to know that when we do speak up, we are telling the truth.  We talk a great deal in this country about having the inalienable right to speak, but you earn the right to be heard by someone else by showing you are truthful.  The followers of Jesus need to be known, not just for being loud (as all too often we are only that), but for being honest--even when it means owning our mistakes, admitting our failures, facing inconvenient facts, and acknowledging truths that make us squirm.

So while I hope it is an obvious thing to say we Christians should be known for not lying, let's think this one through all the way down to the bedrock and look at the ways we are called to ensure that what we say is truthful, or just not say it.

Lord Jesus, you who are the truth, give us both the courage and clarity to be truthful people in all we say and do.