November 24, 2024

Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

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.”

Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.

Which obviously leads to a question: what is the truth?

Something is true if it is an obvious and accepted fact. Truth is a way of describing reality as it is. That does not necessarily mean it is good or fair or pleasant. It is true, warts and all.

True can also be a quality of character. Someone is true meaning constant or reliable. Trueness in this sense is more like straight and narrow, which is intended as a positive description, but it might also suggest a woodenness of personality. True is perhaps a more polished way of saying predictable, maybe even a wee bit boring.

True can also mean faithful, as in faithful to something rather than having faith in something. I am faithful in my adherence to a way of living.

What did Jesus mean when he said those belonging to the truth? With so many definitions of truth floating around, both in Greek and English, it might be hard to figure out. But that is why we gather on Sundays, to sort out such questions together. And, no, I do not have a definitive answer for you. What would be the fun of that?

This reminds me of a favorite New Yorker cartoon. It is a drawing of God speaking with an angel up in heaven. And God says to the angel, if I explained to them the meaning of life, it would ruin the joke. I love that idea because you only laugh at a joke when you understand something initially unrealized in a situation. You laugh because it hits you finally and you notice that you were missing something. Hopefully we do not spend all our lives missing that particular joke.

This week, we watched another movie in the parish hall. It was a Western, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford as two outlaws in Wyoming in 1899. The 20^th century was looming, and the ways of the Old West were falling away. But Butch and Sundance are still plugging away, robbing banks and trains.

It is interesting that we are rooting for these two characters. It helps that they are attractive men—men who generally played the good guys, the romantic leads, the ones you are meant to cheer for rather than against. You want them to succeed. Which is odd because there is nothing admirable about their characters.

They are not Robin Hood and his merry men. They rob from the rich to give to themselves. There is a pair of scenes in which they stop a train and the man guarding the money refuses to let them into the rail car. They banter pleasantly through the door and then use dynamite to conclude the argument. The man is left bloody and unconscious. On the return trip, when they rob the same train again, the man is in a sling and otherwise bandaged up. They trick him into opening the door by threating the life of an old woman who resented being robbed at gunpoint.

Isn’t it humorous?

But weren’t they just stealing from rich fat cats? Weren’t they taking it to the Man? A nice message for a movie made in 1969.

To be accurate, they were stealing the payroll being shipped to miners, meaning the miners did not get paid. They were stealing the deposits of ordinary citizens from banks long before those deposits were insured, meaning your life savings would be lost. But at least Butch and Sundance got to go on vacation with your money.

What are our thoughts on stealing? The Bible says thou shalt not steal, so we might be against it on that basis. Stealing assumes that someone owns something and someone else has taken it without permission. But what if we do not like the person who owns something? What if they are bad guys in our eyes or even our sworn enemies? Then is it okay to steal?

In the example of Robin Hood, we hate the noblemen who are oppressing the peasants and love Robin Hood for redistributing that ill-gotten wealth. But other than on the pages of a book, when does stealing become okay? If someone is starving and they steal a loaf of bread? When someone is being oppressed and they seek retribution against the one who did all that oppressing?

Some people gathered here this morning own houses, I am guessing. Houses in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or perhaps somewhere else. That house or condo or apartment was built upon land. Who owns that land and who used to own that land? That land was taken from someone, whether it was the Massachusetts tribe or the Wampanoag or some other indigenous group. Every inch of American land from the Atlantic to the Pacific was taken in some fashion. Now, depending upon how you define this situation, you either rightfully own that stolen land or you do not.

Just to make things clear, you in all likelihood legally own that land, assuming your lawyer did not mess up. Land that was forcibly seized from other people and then divided up over the ensuing centuries to people like yourselves. For you see, it is not theft if you or your ancestors decided that it was legal. Whether that decision was right or wrong, well that is why we gather on Sunday mornings.

Legality is not the same as morality. No member of the Massachusetts tribe could come and demand the return of this church building. This land was conquered and the people who did the conquering decided it was okay. And that is that.

All Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid needed to do was to get elected to Congress and declare their thefts to be legal. Instead, they fled to Bolivia and took on the Bolivian army. As you might imagine that did not end well.

These are examples of something bad being transformed into something good, or at least something legal. What about something good being changed into something bad? This happens all the time. It happens frequently in the case of language, words that were once acceptable becoming completely unacceptable.

For example, in 1910, a word was invented. It was invented to describe a medical diagnosis of someone who had a mental age between 7 and 10 years on the Binet scale, a scale for scoring intelligence. Such a person was to be called a “moron.” Moron is derived from the Greek word moros, meaning dull. A moron had an IQ score between 51 and 70. If you had an IQ score between 26 and 50, you were an imbecile. If it was between zero and 25, you were an idiot. Again, these were medical terms used to describe people and to make decisions about their care and wellbeing.

For example, in 1927, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. used the term “imbecile” in the infamous decision of Buck v. Bell. The Commonwealth of Virginia was seeking to forcibly sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old woman who was said to have a mental age of 9, and who had a child out of wedlock.

The Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision decided that forced sterilization in the name of genetic hygiene, or eugenics, was an appropriate form of vaccination–their term, not mine. As Justice Holmes put it, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” In case you were wondering, the case of Buck v. Bell remains good law, straining the meaning of the phrase “good” law.

It is good law, but the terms moron, imbecile, and idiot are not quite so good. They are no longer medical terms in clinical use and are typically used as personal insults.

As I was researching these terms, I came across an interesting social theory. It is the euphemism treadmill. Over time, words that were meant to serve as euphemisms for something become taboo words that are unacceptable. This was the case for moron, imbecile, and idiot. This was the case for “mental retardation” which was a term used in federal statutes until 2013. Now, it is a slur against people with mental disabilities, though the term disability is falling out of favor itself in favor of differently abled.

This is also the case for racial terms. When I wrote a book a few years ago, in the initial draft, I used the term African-American in various places. Through the editorial process, I was asked to change that term to Black, with a capital “B.” I did so without objection.

But then I was asked to change another term which was much more cumbersome. I made frequent references to a particular religious group in several chapters because I was discussing their legal treatment under the U.S. Constitution and within the federal court system. That group is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Historically and in many legal opinions, these folks are referred to as Mormons. However, a few years ago, the LDS Church issued a request that they no longer be referred to as Mormons but instead Latter-Day Saints or simply Saints.

My editor asked me to make these changes, but I pushed back against the request. There were frequent quotations in the book from 19^th century legal and historical sources containing the word “Mormon” and I did not want to edit source materials. There are also other religious groups who refer to themselves as “Saints,” including on occasion Puritans who were also featured in the book. So, I ended up with a smattering of references to Latter-Day Saints and a few more uses of the acronym LDS.

Which leads me back to our question this morning: what is the truth? Is it truth meaning agreed upon facts? Is it truth meaning on the straight and narrow? What does truth mean in a world of many different languages, cultures, and religions? Is there such any such thing as the truth?

Now, some people might be thinking that I am heading down the road to moral relativism. That there are not clear, moral rules for us to follow. Actually, I believe in clear, moral rules. The problem is not about their clarity or their morality. It is a problem of breadth. I do not think there are, or even should be, rules that cover every situation, every single scenario in life. Similarly, I do not think there should be laws for every conceivable circumstance. There is a tendency among some people for there to be strict rules to follow so that we have an orderly society.

The Bible itself contains extensive rules about all aspects of life, at least for Ancient Israelites. There are rules about food, the basis for modern kosher dietary practices. There are rules about clothing—please note that you should never wear clothing that contains more than one type of fabric. And yes, that would include stretch fabrics for any of you seeking more comfortable clothing this Thanksgiving week.

For me, the rules we follow should have to do with what truly matters in life. Many of the other rules we generate are busy work. They are basically forms of etiquette. Other rules are about social control, ways of restricting behavior that someone does not like for some social, cultural, or religious reason.

For example, Massachusetts allows people to smoke or ingest cannabis. Just across the border in New Hampshire, medical marijuana is legal, but recreational use is illegal. Head down south and it is illegal for all purposes in places like Texas and Georgia.

Which is correct? Which should it be? You may have opinions about the subject, but are those anything more than opinions, more than person preferences?

How do we decide what should be against the rules and what should be allowed? And how is that the same or different from the truth? That which truly matters?

For example, should we make rules against things that are harmful? Let us prohibit that which is harmful to society, to those around us, or to ourselves.

This means we have to agree about what is harmful. Carrie Buck was harming society because she was supposedly an imbecile having children. From the perspective of eugenics, it would be best if the wrong sorts of people could not have children.

And then there is the language about mental capabilities, those offending words of moron, imbecile, and idiot. They have not exactly been banned but they are on the naughty list at least when it comes to socially acceptable language. We still call one another idiots but we are not surprised when someone takes offense.

Still, I think making rules about harming each other is at the center of what it means to be a moral person. I am less comfortable with rules that prevent us from harming ourselves, like rules against smoking. Not because I think smoking is a great idea. But historically such rules have done little to prevent harm and often lead to unexpected and wider forms of harm.

America’s experiment with banning alcohol during Prohibition led to organized crime and a casual disregard for the law across our society. I think our laws should focus on protecting people, but we need to be careful when we are trying to protect people from themselves.

I think the Book of Leviticus is a great example of what not to do. There should not be a laundry list of bad behaviors that some version of the morality police goes around to enforce. If you ever wondered why Jesus was often fighting with the Pharisees and Temple officials it was because it was the Temple’s self-given job to micromanage people’s moral lives. They would go around and point out your shortcomings and demand that you shape up. It would be like me wandering around Chestnut Hill peeking into your windows and measuring the length of your lawns.

Jesus was trying to get away from that strict code of moral conduct and instead provide broader and more basic rules of behavior. The Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, relies upon a principle of empathy to build a moral framework.

Obviously, people might disagree about what they like to do in their lives, but people generally agree that they would prefer not to be harmed. That does not mean that my preferences are the basis for morality but that my sense of personal wellbeing is the first step in understanding what not to do to others.

Then there is the so-called Platinum Rule: Do unto others as they’d want done unto them. The Golden Rule assumes that what I want is the same as what others want. The Platinum Rule extends that empathetic moral push, require us to inquire into the wants and needs of others.

The fundamental problem with the Platinum Rule is that we are not always good about being empathetic. We do not or cannot understand the wants, needs, or desires of others. When Jesus was talking about those who belong to the truth, he was perhaps talking about those who follow him and understand what he was trying to convey.

If you build your life around the principles of Jesus, you understand the truth. If you make moral decisions based upon what Jesus taught, you understand the truth. Does that mean truth is understood through the teachings of Jesus? Yes, I think that is what Jesus was trying to say.

But does that also mean that truth can only be understood through the moral perspective of people calling themselves Christian?  I can only speak for myself, but I would say absolutely not. I would further say that the label “Christian” often has little to do with what Jesus had to say, let alone that which is true.

Jesus taught using stories, the many parables we hear on Sunday morning. Our job is to place ourselves into those stories. But remember that we are not always the hero or the victim.

In the Good Samaritan, we are not always the person helped or the person in need of help. Sometimes we are the priest or the Levite who passed by without helping.

In the Prodigal Son, we are not always the wayward son getting into trouble or the loving forgiving father who welcomes him back. Sometimes we are the angry brother who resents that the other son is so easily forgiven.

Sometimes we are sinned against and sometimes we are sinning.

When Jesus spoke to his disciples, he was teaching them but he was also with them. With them in a community of people that kept on learning and growing together. Learning and making mistakes. Growing and making mistakes.

The purpose of being together in a religious community is both to help guide everyone forward but also to help model good behavior among people committed to one another. If we fall down, someone is there to pick us up. Their job is not to yell at you for falling down, but to explain what happened and how a similar problem might be avoided in the future. But, fair warning, they still might yell at you. Because people are people.

Society has laws about what is legal versus illegal. But those laws are not the same as morality. You can make stealing legal. You can make killing legal.

To understand what is moral, you have to reflect upon the system of morals you aspire towards, in our case the system taught by Jesus of Nazareth. That system is a lot more than quoting the Bible at people. It is about being in community with them in a relationship built upon care and concern for others.

Does that mean that the morals of the religious community might differ from the surrounding legal or cultural expectations of society? I sincerely hope so. Because there will be times when the legal or cultural expectations of society change. When the behavior that is permissible outside these doors is far less than what is expected within these doors.

When respect for the dignity of others becomes lacking. When the language or behavior people use towards others is below what a follower of Jesus would be expected to say or do.

And there will sadly be times when that unacceptable language or behavior is being said or done under the banner of Christianity. That label does not make it right. That assertion does not make it anything approaching the truth. If Jesus would not say it or do it, neither should we. And if on some days we are confused about any of that, then it might be time to stop in church for a refresher.

Jesus commanded us to love God and to love one another. If anything we are about to say or to do falls short of that mark, then you might want to hold your tongue or to stay your hand. At least until you can reflect upon what Jesus might do or what Jesus would not do. Amen.