A Reason for Honesty--June 5, 2023

A Reason for Honesty--June 5, 2023

"So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another." [Ephesians 4:25]

Plenty of people will advise you to tell the truth.  But here in this lone sentence from Ephesians, it's the reason that gets me.  To hear the writer to the Ephesians tell it, the reason to be honest as human beings is simply this: we belong to each other.

Some advisors might counsel you to tell the truth because it's a sin or a commandment, and you'll get in trouble for breaking the rules if you lie.  Others might say, practically speaking, that if you lie you'll eventually get caught when you can't remember what story you've told to whom, and so it's easiest to be truthful for purely pragmatic reasons. And of course there are folks who relish the idea of brandishing what they think is "the truth" as a weapon to attack and criticize whomever they don't like or agree with--you can be cruel and critical if it's in the name of "the truth," they seem to think.

To be sure, there are also voices around who don't even advise truthfulness if it doesn't serve your interests.  And in the age of social media especially, it is dangerously easily to make a wild, outlandish claim, free of tethering to reality, and post it to stir up the people you want to provoke, without any thought to whether it is true or accurate.  Bold, audacious claims will get you attention and eyeballs, but nobody notices the corrections--and rarely is anybody actually held accountable to retract something they've misled people about.  

So, yeah, there are a lot of opinions on why anybody should be truthful--or even whether it is wise to be truthful.  But over against all of those is this beautiful, compelling voice from Ephesians, who doesn't hold out the threat of getting caught or sent to hell for breaking a commandment as his reason for being truthful.  And neither does he think in terms of self-interest by saying, "You should tell the truth if it's to your advantage, but if it paints you in a bad light or doesn't reinforce your preconceived notions, maybe don't mention it."  Rather, the writer of Ephesians sees truth-telling as an act of love.  We are called to be truthful to one another because we belong to one another, and that means honoring one another with integrity in our words as well as our actions.

These days it is very tempting to commit to a set of presuppositions or a policy platform, and then only to accept the facts that reinforce our preferred way of seeing the world.  We self-select channels for news, and algorithms learn to show us more of the content we already have "liked" or "shared" or agree with, until we don't even realize we are in echo chambers anymore.  And in that kind of setting, it's easy to feel like you have to shout what you want others to believe, and to you have to stifle the voices saying anything different, because you don't want "them" to "win."  If that isn't a lot of folks' primary approach to being on social media, I'll eat my hat.  Once we've given our allegiance to a particular narrative or group or side in a culture war, we've already accepted the presumption that we're in a conflict with winners and losers, and the goal of defeating the "other side" becomes an end in and over itself. And when that happens, "truth" becomes just a tool, or a weapon to attack with when the facts of a moment suit your perspective, but dropped when it is not useful for your case.  That turns the people with whom I do not agree into foes to be attacked, and it hardens me against a being open to reconsidering that I might possibly be wrong, because that kind of reconsideration would be a "defeat."  And from there, we find ourselves not just in echo chambers, and not just stuck in increasingly divergent understandings of reality, but forced into seeing others as an enemy army.  Sound familiar?

That's what makes this verse from Ephesians so powerful for our time.  It doesn't see truth-telling as a matter of convenience, or a way to avoid punishment for lying, or a weapon to attack "those people" with.  But rather, being truthful is an expression of loving other people--whoever happens to cross our path.  We owe honesty not just to fellow Christians or people we think of as "on our side," but anybody whom we encounter, because a neighbor is anyone who is at hand. The biblical witness says that I owe my fellow human beings honesty and truth-telling, not simply out of fear that I'll get zapped if I tell too big a whopper, but because we have an obligation to each other to be real.  The only ground for  a healthy relationship is honesty, and being followers of Jesus puts us at least in relationship with all people as neighbors.  Being truthful with them, even when it is not convenient or doesn't fit my pre-conceived narrative for the world, is a way of loving my neighbor. 

In the last number of years, I suspect we've all been pretty disappointed from time to time when people we respected (or used to respect) made outrageous claims, shared something obviously misleading on social media, or reinforced the echo-chamber mentality for them and others around them.  And I'll bet that a lot of those folks are ones who would say they are followers of Jesus, which makes it even more disappointing to see or hear what they say.  I get that--I've lost connections and respect for others in that way, too.  Maybe others have felt the same about me--this is the challenge of our time.  But today begins a new opportunity to do something different.  Today is a chance to make the intentional effort to be honest, not just in daily conversation (don't tell someone over the phone that it's raining when it's sunny, I suppose), but in the platforms we have to persuade and influence others, too, with things that aren't grounded in reality.  Today is a chance not to just blurt out sweeping generalizations or news stories without context, but to be diligent about what we say, what we share, and what we pass on to others as credible.  And we will do those things because we are no longer conscripted fighters in someone else's culture war, but because we see the people around us as neighbors, whom we are therefore called upon to love.  Maybe today is a day to see truth-telling as a matter of loving others, not merely avoiding punishment or scoring victories.  

Let's see what happens if we try it.

Lord Jesus, enable us to love the neighbors you send our way by leading us to be people of honesty and integrity all around.