— A Sermon by Robert W. Prim —
~~~ 6th Sunday after Epiphany ~~~
Matthew 5:33-37
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“Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”
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A summary of this sermon hangs in my office.
A summary of these four verses
from the Sermon on the Mount hangs in my office.
A summary of one important part
of how Jesus would have us live our lives in community
hangs in my office.
It is a short aphorism.
It was given to me to hang in my office
by Gloria Kidd Brown – one of our departed saints.
It was given to her by her father – J.M. Kidd.
It is a framed saying that captures
where I’m trying to go today in this message – here it is:
Were there no heaven nor hell
I should be honest.
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Sayings like this one can come in and out of our awareness based on the circumstances within which we are living our lives. At another time in our common life together or in my personal life I might pass by this saying without giving it a second thought. If I did take notice of it I might say to myself – of course I should be honest. Everyone knows that we should be honest – no big deal, no great philosophical insight. The saying, now, however, does not seem to me to be so inconsequential, so ordinary, so normal.
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When Jesus said –
Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’;
anything more than this comes from the evil one –
he was speaking to a culture where oaths could take many forms and quite often the more elaborate the oath the more it was being used to deceive and with no intention of keeping the promise being made. “I swear by heaven… by the throne of God…by the earth…by the holy city…by the hairs on my head” these grandiose statements were sometimes used to couch lies in pietistic language. Because of this religious leaders seemed to have worked out a system for determining which oaths were truly binding and which were not. If you swore an oath to God then that one was sacrosanct. All the others were less binding. Jesus wanted his followers to be people who were honest and could be counted upon to be truthful in what they said and what they promised even without an oath to God; so, there was no need to add elaborate oaths to establish the veracity of one’s word.
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Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’;
anything more than this comes from the evil one
Were there no heaven nor hell
I should be honest.
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These teachings stand out at this time in our common life. It has become clearer and clearer to me, given the assault against truth and facts in which we are living today, that Jesus was offering a prescription for how communities survive and thrive. A community that cannot tell lies from truth, facts from fiction, honesty from dishonesty will have a very difficult time living in freedom and fairness. What Jesus is saying is we are to be people whose word can be trusted. We are not to lie. And we should not treat those who do lie casually as if they are doing no harm to the well-being of our community. Lies and dishonesty tear at the fabric of a vibrant, free, and healthy society.
The Sermon on the Mount and this teaching about honesty are meant to show us how to live with one another in communities on earth. These teachings are not some obscure tests to help us make it into heaven; rather, this teaching is about being people whose word can be trusted and is meant to help us live in a way that makes our lives together on earth as it is in heaven.
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We are to be people whose word can be trusted and who expect our neighbors and our governments to be truthful. I heard an interview this week with David Rennie of the The Economist magazine. He was talking about how China is dealing with the corona virus. He told a tragic story about Dr. Li Wenliang, a 34 year old Ophthalmologist who identified the virus before anyone else late last year. Dr. Wenliang wrote some of his colleagues about it. The government of China got word of what Dr. Wenliang had written and made him sign a letter saying that he would stop spreading rumors, that he was a liar, and that he would never speak of the virus again. In a cruel irony, Dr. Wenliang died on February 7th of the corona virus. Millions of Chinese people are protesting this doctor’s death and the lies they were told by the government. On one social media site the angst of the Chinese people was expressed this way – “Those who tell the truth are arrested for spreading rumors and those who tell nothing but lies become the leaders. What a sign of our times” (from 1A, NPR, 2/11/2020).
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When governments and government leaders lie to us we are put in danger. We do not know what to believe and what not to believe which means we do not know how to act or behave in ways that will keep us safe.
Tragically, some government leaders around the world and here use lying as a tactic to garner power and the end result is to turn society toward authoritarianism. When you cannot believe what you are hearing, when you cannot tell what is a lie and what is fiction, when you cannot discern truth from falsity then we tend in the direction of accepting a single leader’s version of reality. We do so because the confusion and avalanche of mis-information and lies leads to fatigue and disorientation and it is easier to mindlessly follow a dictator. At least with a dictator we can organize our world around simply staying clear of offending the King or the Dear One or the Commander.
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The political theorist Hannah Arendt once wrote that the most successful totalitarian leaders of the 20th century instilled in their followers “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” When they were lied to, they chose to believe it. When a lie was debunked, they claimed they’d known all along—and would then “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” Over time, Arendt wrote, the onslaught of propaganda conditioned people to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
(From “The 2020 Disinformation War” by McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, March, 2020)
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We are living in an age of massive disinformation,
and Jesus’ teaching that we should be honest
and let our yes be yes and our no be no
could not be more relevant.
We have never needed principled journalism
more than we do now.
We have never needed honest business people
more than we do now.
We have never needed honest men and women
in our schools, churches, religious organizations,
civic organizations, medical facilities, government offices
more than we do now.
We need more than ever
people willing to speak the truth
even when the consequences for doing so
might be losing position or being ridiculed.
Unchecked lying and disinformation
will undo our fragile democracy
and bring the world into even greater disarray.
Part of the point here is that being honest is not just about personal morality – I think we all know that our relationships with one another will fray and break if we become untrustworthy to one another by lying and making false promises. We all know of the importance of honesty; we know it instinctively or we know it because we have learned it the hard way. Honesty is vital to personal relationships but …. honesty, telling the truth to one another, is the glue that holds our larger society together as well. Without honesty we can drift into fascism and authoritarianism.
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In 2017 Dr. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale University, wrote a book entitled On Tyranny. The book offers twenty lessons from the twentieth century based on democracies that failed and drifted into authoritarianism and fascism. In his introduction to the book Dr. Snyder wrote this – Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.
One of the twenty lessons in the book is entitled – Believe in truth. Dr. Snyder’s opening thesis for this chapter is this:
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.
If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power,
because there is no basis upon which to do so.
If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.
The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
Dr. Snyder then uses the insights of Victor Klemperer, who wrote a secret journal entitled I Will Bear Witness about his living in Germany during the Nazi years. Victor Klemperer outlines the four modes by which truth dies.
First mode is open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts.
Second mode by which truth dies is shamanistic incantation. Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable.
Third mode by which truth dies is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction; e.g., cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These mutually contradict, and it is magical thinking to believe that they do not.
The fourth mode by which truth dies is misplaced faith. At the end of the war, even then, a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Fuhrer.”
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Jesus was right…
we need to be a people who embody and demand
that “yes be yes” and “no be no.”
We need to be a people of truth and a people
who stand with the truth.
We do this not so we get into heaven but so that
the kingdom of God will come on earth as it is in heaven.
I’m grateful for the reminder than hangs in my office –
Were there no heaven nor hell
I should be honest.
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May it be so.
Amen.
Addendum…
A Shepherd Boy tended his master’s Sheep near a dark forest not far from the village. Soon he found life in the pasture very dull. All he could do to amuse himself was to talk to his dog or play on his shepherd’s pipe.
One day as he sat watching the Sheep and the quiet forest, and thinking what he would do should he see a Wolf, he thought of a plan to amuse himself.
His Master had told him to call for help should a Wolf attack the flock, and the Villagers would drive it away. So now, though he had not seen anything that even looked like a Wolf, he ran toward the village shouting at the top of his voice, “Wolf! Wolf!”
As he expected, the Villagers who heard the cry dropped their work and ran in great excitement to the pasture. But when they got there they found the Boy doubled up with laughter at the trick he had played on them.
A few days later the Shepherd Boy again shouted, “Wolf! Wolf!” Again the Villagers ran to help him, only to be laughed at again.
Then one evening as the sun was setting behind the forest and the shadows were creeping out over the pasture, a Wolf really did spring from the underbrush and fall upon the Sheep.
In terror the Boy ran toward the village shouting “Wolf! Wolf!” But though the Villagers heard the cry, they did not run to help him as they had before. “He cannot fool us again,” they said.
The Wolf killed a great many of the Boy’s sheep and then slipped away into the forest.