Can We Handle the Truth?

Texts: Psalm 1; Jer. 17:5-10; Luke 6:17-26

Feb. 11, 2007

I have been accused, from time to time, of preaching at a, shall we say, hyperintellectualized level – sermons from the lofty mountaintop of theoretical reflection. I suppose that’s a working hazard of having a doctorate in postmodern philosophy. Coming one week after a sermon in which I cited Heidegger and Sartre and Jung, oh my, I suppose I have no choice but to plead “guilty as charged.”

On the other hand, sometimes I preach “up here” because “down here” is too difficult. That is to say, to take scripture seriously – though not literally – and to apply it to our day-to-day lives raises the stakes too high. I feel, sometimes, like the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men. “You want the truth? … You can’t handle the truth.”

We – you and I – can’t handle the truth, I sometimes fear, because it asks too much of us.

You see, if we take the plain and simple truth of scripture seriously it asks us to change our entire lives.

But this morning, we have no choice, really. For to be true to the text of Luke’s gospel, we must follow Jesus and preach from the plain – from the down low of every day life. There is blessing to be found in this, to be sure; but there is also woe, as Jesus – like Jeremiah before him – makes abundantly clear.

The blessing comes in the same measure as the woe, and from the same calculation: the measure of how seriously we take scripture. This is what the psalmist teaches: ‘Happy are those whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and on God’s law they meditate day and night.”

This is the truth that will set us free, but it is also, too often, the truth that we simply cannot handle.

For example, scripture clearly demands of us that we welcome the stranger, the alien in our midst for as the Exodus people were reminded, “you shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt (Ex. 22:21, 23:9).

Scripture clearly demands of us that we love our neighbors as ourselves.

Scripture clearly demands of us that we live in community, and suggests often that such community will only be strong and binding to the extent that we give up our ties to things and money.

Scripture clearly demands that we honor creation because the earth is the Lord’s and all that is therein (Psalm 24).

Scripture clearly demands of us that we seek peace and pursue it (Psalm 34 and 1 Peter, for example).

Scripture clearly demands of us justice and righteousness – not just at 10:00 a.m. Sunday, but all day, every day, in body, mind and spirit. As Paul put it to the church at Rome, “I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1).

Scripture clearly demands of us that we love God, and that we put this love at the very center of our being ahead of every other claim on our lives, even those of family and kin and loved ones.

Finally, in all of these specific demands, there is this central demand: that we trust God above all else; that we not put our trust in rulers or corporations or real estate investments or family members or weapons systems or intelligence or money or success or any of the other false gods that we raise up in our lives; but that first, last and always we trust – at radical risk to our own interests and even our own lives – that we trust God above all else.

These demands are what it means to follow Jesus – and the baseline meaning of being Christian is captured in the simple question: are we following Jesus? Before you answer that, consider for a moment what happened to those who followed him in scripture – they were reviled, excluded, defamed and hated. But, remember this as well: they were blessed.

These scriptural demands will change our lives – from broken to blessed – if we let them.

Consider the demand that we welcome the stranger in our midst. Somehow I think this means more than saying, “hello, welcome to Clarendon Presbyterian Church, please join us for coffee after worship.” That’s the beginning, to be sure, and, especially for those of you who are strangers to this community, we do mean it: please stay and join us for a while. But it also means busting out of small groups of good friends to form new relationships and widen the circle of community here and wherever else we find ourselves. To put it plainly, God doesn’t like our cliques – whether they are in church, in school, in the workplace. God calls us to create community without walls, not voluntary associations of like-minded individuals. Can we handle the truth?

Then there’s the demand that we love our neighbors as ourselves. I don’t know about any of you, but I don’t even know most of my neighbors, so I certainly can make no credible claim to loving them. To love them requires the great emotional risk of opening my life to the lives of people who may well be quite different – especially the guy who lives two doors up from us and can be reliably counted upon to post campaign signs for all the wrong candidates. Indeed, for us, in elections where we are ignorant, his signs provide guidance. If he’s for them, we’re against them! And he is the neighbor I am required to love. Can we handle the truth?

What of the demand to live in community? As it was said in Acts of the first church “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. … There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold … and it was distributed to each as any had need.” Day by day the Lord added to their number. This scripturally mandated community welcomes everyone, without regard to distinction of creed, color, sexuality, economy. Indeed, it requires a fundamental rethinking of economy such that the measure of our lives is not what we have but what we give away.

As we consider community life here, we often fret over the congregation’s budget. If we truly measured our lives by what we give away – and took as a point of departure the Biblical tithe, or 10 percent of our incomes – the only question we would have about our budget is how to most faithfully direct mission giving. We have approximately 40 pledges in this small community – which is wonderful. If they averaged $5,000 – considerably less than 10 percent of the personal per capita income in Northern Virginia – our annual budget would have a surplus of $100,000 instead of a deficit of $20,000. It is not a question of ability; it is a question of choice and of lifestyle. I’ll be doing our income taxes soon. It will be a reality check, and it will confirm what I know: I don’t give enough to change my life in ways that reflect what I say I believe. Can we handle the truth?

Next, take the demand to honor creation, please. If we take that seriously we might just have to give up our cars and start riding bicycles. As I look around this morning, I think only Sam Foulke, among us, would look at this circumstance with a smile on his face. For those of you who don’t know Sam, he works at Spokes – best little bike shop in Northern Virginia. And even when modern life forces us into cars, the scriptural truth that creation belongs to God demands that we think with care about what we drive, and how often we drive. Alas, style and status and convenience are not Biblical criteria for such considerations. That’s why we got a hybrid when the minivan died. Now, if I can just get the bike out of the shed a bit more often … Can we handle the truth?

Perhaps if I – and millions of others – could make that environmental and lifestyle change, this next demand might come more easily, for it is surely connected. Scripture demands that we seek peace and pursue it. The peacemakers are blessed, and will be called the children of God. What of the rest of us, who tolerate endless war waged in our names, with our resources, and our passive acceptance? What shall we be called? Can we handle the truth?

The truth is, true peace will not come with the cessation of hostilities in Iraq because, as the poster that hangs in my study reminds me every day “true peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.”[1] Scripture demands that we do justice; not merely consider it, talk about it, long for it – but do it; not just now and then when it is convenient and doesn’t cost much, but always in every aspect of our living. As Obery Hendricks puts it, “justice is the divinely ordained way of relating to one another in human society.”[2] Or, as Micah put it succinctly, “what does the Lord require of you? Do justice.” Can we handle the truth?

John’s gospel assures us that the truth shall set us free. What is the nature of such liberation? Well, if we can handle the truth, it liberates us from idolatry – it frees us from so many culturally created idols and from rushing to and fro to do obeisance to such 21^st-century American idols as fashion, success, celebrity, power, influence and affluence.

Sometimes the truth that scripture calls us to strikes us as difficult, and as requiring great sacrifice of comfort and security. At such point, we despair of being able to handle the truth, or simply recoil from it altogether. On the other hand, while there is risk, in all this, to be sure, there is also abundance. An abundance of joy, of hope, of love.

The faith that scripture calls us to, the trust it asks of us and invites us to share, requires risk, and it also requires us all. For we are called to sojourn together, bearing one another’s burdens, binding one another up, loving one another. It really is all that easy … and, of course, all that hard.

That joy, that hope, that love that come when we journey together toward God, lie at the heart of the experience some of us will share this Lenten season in the “journey toward enough.” For learning to live abundantly together is, I firmly believe, the heart of what it means to be Christian. It is following Jesus. It is the way and the truth and the life. And I know, I am a witness here, we can handle the truth. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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[1] Attributed often to Martin Luther King, Jr.

[2] Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. The Politics of Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 2006) 44.

This Time It Is All About You

Texts: Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11
I began this sermon in fits and starts, writing and rewriting its beginning. I discarded one draft and posted it on my blog in the middle of last week.
I’m not sure why this was a struggle. These texts – from Isaiah and Luke – are among my favorites, and they focus on what I understand as the two central questions of our age. Not just the central Christian questions or, more generally, the central theological questions of our age, but the central paired questions of the age: who are you and what is your purpose? Who are you, and why are you here?
The great and fundamental spiritual crisis of our time is a crisis of meaning, and it is captured in the titles of the past century’s great philosophical texts from Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul to Heidegger’s Being and Time on to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
It emerges from the laments of our poets. From Dylan Thomas’ “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” to Ginsberg’s
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz
To our troubadours who sing about being “born to run,” and who, despite international celebrity and acclaim can sing, “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
The best of the singular 20th-century art form, film, give us images like “that guy in the Seventh Seal watching the newly dead dance across the sky while the eye of God blazes at us like the sun.”[1]
Our time. Our age. Our central questions. But also, clearly, questions that have troubled every age and pressed in upon people in different ways in every time.
Perhaps the power of the Isaiah text lies in speaking so personally about such timeless questions. While his vision of seraphs may fall strangely on our modern ears, his experience of call transcends time in it crystal clarity: “whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”
“Here I am; send me.”
Against the madness of an age of exile, among a people of unclean lips, this simple declaration: “here I am; send me.”
Against the dying of the light, when the best minds of a generation are destroyed by the madness of the age, is it possible still to utter such a simple declaration? Who can, this day, say so simply, yet with such power and conviction: “here I am; send me”?
Is it you?
Is it me?
A decade ago, when I was struggling mightily with my own sense of call, I can recall sitting in the pews at Maxwell Street Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Ky., and listening to Dana Jones preach about call. He had a way of making you feel like you were the only person in the sanctuary, and that God was speaking through him directly to you. It got your attention.
I don’t know how to do that, but I wish I could this morning, because this is about you. It’s your life that is at stake.
Now I don’t mean your immortal soul; God has that well in hand. But I do mean your salvation – your wholeness in the here and now, to be worked out day by day in fear and trembling. After all, the way you spend your time is the way you spend your life.
Are you doing what you are most clearly called to do? Are you using the gifts that you have been given to be a light in the darkness, to fish for people who are adrift in a sea of despair?
Why should I care about this? I mean, beyond a certain professional obligation and some curiosity, why should I care about your salvation – your wholeness, your communion with God, your place in the commonwealth of the beloved?
Why? Because your salvation is intimately tied to mine; your wholeness is bound up with my wholeness; your hopes shape and are shaped by my hopes. Your laughter and my laughter resound together to echo deep joy; your tears and my tears flow together in rivers of sadness.
We are woven together from many threads into a single strand that binds us to a common destiny.
Salvation may be personal, but it is never private, for we are called not only to live transformed lives but also to be agents of transformation in the life of the world.
Are you doing what you are most clearly called to at that point where your thread joins the larger strand?
If you can sit here this morning and say, “yes,” with clarity and conviction, then thanks be to God.
I wish I could join you in such affirmation. Yet I know that I am not living fully into my own calling because so many others are not living into theirs. If my wholeness is tied up with that of every other one, then in a world of such deep and abiding brokenness I can never be at ease about living into my own calling.
What stands in the way of living into my calling more fully and completely? Well, for one thing, I am, I hope, in the middle of my life. Our callings, announced in our baptism, are not complete until death. It’s a journey that continues in a wondrous array of expressions throughout our days. But, for another, I am often afraid of living fully into my calling, because I am often called to places of risk where I’d rather not go. My own need for comfort and security gets in the way, as does a too-easy cynicism that seems to come with our postmodern age and to which I too often succumb. Cynicism is far easier than love. The escape into clever conversation sometimes masks the call to kindness and generosity. The dreams of consumerism are more tempting than waking up to lives of service.
Nevertheless, we are always called to lives of loving service. That is, ultimately, the Christian response to the questions of our age. Who are you and why are you here? Well, let me pose that question again: who are you?
I am a child of God.
To be child of God means that we are loved, and that we are called to love all those others who are, equally, children of God. So long as our sisters and brothers suffer, we are called to ministry. To various callings, yes, according to our gifts and the world’s deep needs, but we are each and every one of us called to ministry.
Where there is war, we are called to make peace. Where there is sickness, we are called to heal. Where there is loneliness, we are called to comfort. Where there are sisters and brothers wondering lost in a culture of despair and meaninglessness, we are called to bring hope and meaning.
Isaiah heard the voice calling, “whom shall I send and who shall go?
“Here I am, send me.”
Are you doing what God is calling you to? Are you living your calling out in the world? Whom shall I send, and who shall go?
Here I am, send me.
Amen.

[1] Singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn captured the image from Bergman’s film with this line.