“Living in Truthsville”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On November 23, 2003

The New Testament lesson for this morning comes from the Gospel of John. This is the Lectionary gospel text for this day, which means it is the gospel text that is being used by millions of Christians as they gather for worship around the world in hundreds of countries. It is a sign of our unity, and it is also a sign that in the liturgical calendar, this is the last Sunday of the liturgical year. It is an event that most of you won’t note, and perhaps there is no particular reason why you should. But for preachers and musicians and worship planners, fifty-two Sundays are coming to an end and another fifty-two are getting ready to start, because the church year begins with Advent. Believe it or not, I’m telling you the truth. Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent. If it’s a surprise to you, imagine what it is like to me! I’m still back at Labor Day, and it is Advent.

 The last Sunday in the liturgical year is always Christ the King Sunday. I love it when it coincides with the American civil holiday. I think it is a spiritual holiday of Thanksgiving, because it lifts up the notion of Christ the King, and that we given thanks for that. The Lectionary gives us a text about the kind of kingdom that Jesus rules.

Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you this about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

  John 18:33-18a

Charlotte Hunter liberated me a little bit in my preaching when she told me that in his retirement, her father, my mentor, Irving Williams, had started watching a lot of movies. Because he was an English major from Hamden Sydney, and a Union Theological Seminary graduate, I knew that he moved to the great texts. But when I heard that in the latter part of his life he watched movies, and they showed up in some of his sermons, I felt okay about their showing up in mine sometimes.

I had this movie that I have really been touched by in the last three years, I guess. It’s probably older than that, but I’m usually about two years behind on my movies. This is a movie entitled, “My One True Thing.” It is based on a book by Anna Quindlen, and it stars Meryl Streep as the mother, and the actress who plays the daughter (you’re going to have to help me with this) is Renee Zellweger. Anyhow, she does a great job in this movie. She plays the part of an aspiring journalist who is living in New York City. Her father is a professor of literature who has won the national book prize in a college community nearby. It may be Connecticut. Her mother is a kind of quintessential homemaker. Because she aspires to be a journalist, she has kind of grown up admiring her father, and as she moved into her own career, sort of diminishing her mother. Her mother comes down with cancer, and the story is the story of the year that she has to come back home and take care of her mother, and how in the course of that year, she learns to value her mother’s particular gifts, and to prize her mother as perhaps her true thing in her life. There is a line near the end of the movie where the father says about the mother, who has died or is dying, he says, “She was my one true thing. My North Star, the guide by which I knew all other things that were true.”

Who is your one true thing? Who is the North Star for you? Who is the guide by which you can balance the other things in the world that are true or untrue? How do you know what is true?

“What is truth?” said Pilate.

William Burroughs has a quote. He has a quote I like about truth. It says, “The statement I don’t have any whiskey is not a truth. It’s a fact.” Truth has much more vitality than a simple statement of fact. Truth is that which expresses reality. Truth is that which is in accordance with all that is real about the universe. Do you understand the distinction? This is a light is a true statement, but it is not a truth. It’s just a fact. But saying I love you, that is closer to a truth, because it is a statement in some world which says the world is the kind of place where love is possible and love is a dynamic that in some way speaks to the character of the universe.

What is your one true thing? In the Christian faith, the one true thing which reveals to us the nature of God is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the one true thing in the Christian walk, in the Christian tradition. The one true thing for Christians that best expresses what is true about the nature of reality, the one true thing that best gives voice to what is true about the fundamental assumptions of the universe, is the life, the character, the presence of Jesus Christ. Like with the movie, it’s a person who becomes the North Star by which all other truths or untruths are ultimately measured.

This is a bold affirmation, to say that what Jesus says about God is the truth of the universe. It’s a bold affirmation for Christians to make, because there is so much in the world that every day seems to deny it.

Three boys in foster care nearly starved to death in New Jersey.  How can that happen if God is in charge of the universe? There are so many things that happen every day that seem to deny this truth. So Christians, when we make it, we are making a bold affirmation that often flies in the face of many people’s daily experience. Nevertheless, it is the affirmation that the Scriptures call us to make, and for the last two thousand years, it is the affirmation that the Church has made in good times and in bad. Jesus is our one true thing. Jesus is the revelation of what is true about God and true about the universe.

Bombs and disasters and small personal cruelties are present with us also, but in the face of those, we say Jesus is the true revelation, and the character of God in the universe.

In the Christian faith, this is the work of our proclamation. Sometimes it’s easy work. On Thanksgiving morning, it’s not a hard thing to say in most households. Sometimes it’s hard work. Sometimes it’s emotional work. Sometimes you feel foolish in the midst of that work, making that affirmation. But that’s our work, our mission, to give voice to that affirmation about what is true. In the face of the Pilates of the world, to say, “God is truth, and what Jesus taught us about God is truth.”

This is a great scene from the Bible, where they bring Jesus to Pilate, and Pilate says in essence to him, “Why are you here? These people claim that you are a king.” Jesus says, “My kingdom is not a political kingdom. It’s not a geographical kingdom like Syria or like Zambia. My kingdom is not of this world.”

And Pilate says, “Ah, so you are a king?” He thinks he’s tricked him or caught him. “Oh, so you are a king?” Jesus says, “You say so, not I.”  Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it was, my followers would be fighting right now to keep me from being in this spot. My kingdom is a different kind of kingdom. My kingdom is the kingdom of God. My kingdom,” says Jesus, “the kingdom of truth.”

Pilate, in a move that all of us make and can make, Pilate avoids the dilemma of having to acknowledge whether indeed Jesus is king is a truth or not by standing in the honest ambivalence of knowing what is truth. What is truth? says Pilate. Who can know what truth is?

But he’s standing in front of Jesus, whose very presence makes the assertion that truth can be known. In the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus says, “I am the truth.”

The ancient church father, Turtullian, said many centuries ago, “Truth engenders hatred of truth. As soon as it appears, there is the enemy.” Because you see, whenever truth is suddenly apparent, or whenever it is even slowly made known to people, then everything that isn’t true, that is in the light of it, is exposed, and it hates the truth. Because it makes it clear that the other things are false. It undermines what deceit would say about the nature of the universe and about the nature of reality.

We have the hard work as Christian disciples of trying to be people who are truthtellers. Who, (I made up this clever little sermon title) who live in a community of truth, who live in Truthsville. The community where people speak the truth to each other. Who live in a context of truth. That is our work, and I don’t know about you, but I want you to know from me, it is hard work day in and day out.  It’s not easy.

I think for some people it is easier than it is for others. But it’s hard work. “Are you busy, John?” Boy, I just lie to that every time. Every time I lie to that. “No. Come on in.” Well, you know, the pastor should be accessible. You want to see people. That’s the right move, I think it is.

You know where I have a hard time telling the truth every week is at the intersection of Henderson and Neptune, at that light.

Where is truth hard for you?

My friend Bill Lee, if you go out to eat with him and a waitress or a waiter comes up, and they will pour coffee in our cups, and she’ll say, “Is everything okay?” Bill will say, “Is everything okay? Is everything okay? The economy is tanked. There is war in every country of the world. The state of Florida has a foster child crisis going on. And you ask if everything is okay!”

But again and again we say, “Sure, yes. Fine.”

These are the small, civil deceits that we live with as a way of being in community. In a larger scale, it’s work day in and day out. We say, “Liberty and justice for all.” But it’s hard to mean that, isn’t it, and to actually pay the costs of being that inclusive. Peace for all.

It’s scary, dangerous work, particularly when it’s your child who is headed over to Baghdad.

What is truth? Isn’t it hard work living in Truthsville? Hard work being people who seek to tell the truth.

Christians seek to live in the truth, which means we seek to listen to Jesus and to live in a way that is honest just about every minute and step in the day, we have to seek it and to do it.

In 1940 the world was involved in that great war, and the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was preaching a sermon on this text from the Gospel of John where Pilate says, “What is truth?” He said this: “The only kingdom which has the possibility of defying and conquering the world that we encounter every day around us is one that is not of the world. That is the only kingdom that really has the possibility of triumphing over the injustice and the violence around us is the kingdom that isn’t actually of this world. This conquest is not only an ultimate possibility…” which is to say we know ultimately God is going to triumph. But Niebuhr says, “It’s not only an ultimate possibility, but it is also a constant and immediate one.”

The kingdom of truth can triumph before the service is over today. The kingdom of truth has at least a fighting chance of triumphing in this sermon. The kingdom of truth can triumph in your life in one or two places before you put your head down tonight. It is not only an ultimate possibility, but a constant and immediate one. In every moment of existence, those who are of the truth (that’s you) may hear Christ’s voice, sometimes softly, sometimes louder. Sometimes we ignore it, sometimes it just strikes us in the heart. Those who are of the kingdom of truth may hear Christ’s voice warning, admonishing, guiding them in their actions and their words, in their living.

The real truth condemns the lies. Pure justice indicts injustice. The law of love is always exposing selfishness, and the vision of God reveals the true center and source of our existence. We may continue to be disobedient to the heavenly vision, but we could never live as if we haven’t seen it.

The kingdom of God is relevant to every moment in history as an ideal possibility and as a principle of judgment upon the present realities. And sometimes it must be obeyed in defiance of the world.

What is truth? Are you going to live in Truthsville? Are you seeking to live in Truthsville? I am. And it’s hard work, but it’s the work I think we are called to.

This is Thanksgiving week, and I want to offer you an action toward living in the Truth. I don’t mean simply saying, “Yes, I love the shrimp and oyster dressing.” I want to offer you thanksgiving feast as a means of truthtelling. I mean, I want to offer you the celebration of thanksgiving itself as a way of witnessing to the truth in the world around us. Because there are a lot of things this week that will try to stand up and say to you, “There is no reason to give thanks in this world.” And when the Christian community gathers and holds their hands around tables wherever they are and says, “This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it,” that is a statement, an affirmation of what is true over and against the defiance of the world.

You are gathering together this week and giving thanks, and to witness to what you think is true. God bless you in it. The world needs you to make that witness. It needs you to lift up that vision that God is great and God is good. The simplest of table prayers is a witness to the ultimate reality in the world given to us in the love of Jesus Christ over and against every act of cruelty and injustice. God is great and God is good. You go say it. You go pray it. You eat an extra helping of turkey with it.

The pilgrim fathers and mothers really did gather and have a feast, and the really did sing hymns. I don’t know, but maybe they sang “All Creatures of Our God and King.” You could probably write a doctoral dissertation about that. But how about this sixth verse as an example of truthtelling?

    All creatures, your Creator bless,
    And worship God in humbleness.

Because when the creatures bless their creator, that’s a form of truthtelling.

    And sing ye! Alleluia! Alleluia!

If you sing Alleluia, that’s a form of truthtelling. That’s a form of saying This is what I think is true about the world.

    Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son,
    And praise the Spirit, Three in One!
    Alleluia! Alleluia!
    Alleluia! Alleluia!

Alleluia!

©John T. DeBevoise 2003