1 Peter 3:8-22 "Loving the Truth" Scott Hoezee

"You will not die, you will be like God." That lie, told by the devil via the serpent in the Garden of Eden, is what started humanity's spiral downward into sin. Ironically, part of that original lie was that eating what was forbidden would make Adam and Eve "like God." That is ironic because when you get right down to it, playing God resides very near the core of all our lying and deceptions.

We lie for lots of reasons. We lie because we are afraid. We lie because we are ashamed. We lie because we just don't like somebody. We lie to make ourselves look better. We lie to make someone else look worse. We lie because we think it will spare someone else's feelings. We lie because even we don't much like the truth about our own selves sometimes and so we sure don't feel the need to let anyone else in on the know of what we are capable of. We lie to keep things the way they are because we sense that if the truth about such-and-such got out, it would mess up everything.

But whatever the motivation behind the telling of a lie, what we are at bottom doing is playing God. We are shaping other people's reality. When I lie, it means that I have decided that I possess a truth that I deign not to share with anyone else. Your world will be shaped according to how I decide. Being in the dark, you will proceed forward in life operating on a set of assumptions that are faulty, incomplete, or just plain wrong but you don't know that because I have created a false world for you.

In other words, lying can make you feel powerful. Were I to stand here in this pulpit and knowingly, willfully tell all of you a lie about something, I would be reaching into the minds of several hundred people all at once, sending you back out into the world after the worship service with an idea I created for you. If the lie in question concerns a certain person, and if you were to run into that person at some point in the following week, you would treat that person according to how I had determined things for you.

Each of us has a limited grasp on reality at any given moment. No one of us is wise enough to know all that there is to know. That is God's place alone. The best that even the smartest of us can do is to know some truths, some facts about life but we can't know everything. However, a good deal of what we do know comes from others. You realize how dependent you are on others when someone innocently gives you mistaken information. In my first congregation before a morning service one Sunday, a reliable person told me that a certain person had died. I announced this to the congregation, prayed about it, and so sent a lot of folks home that day feeling sad.

Problem was, it was wrong information! I learned my lesson about announcing something without outside confirmation, but the fact is that for a while there, before we all discovered the goof, I had shaped, molded, and in that case darkened the world of a lot of people. What they believed to be true about reality came from me. That was just a bad mistake. But the same dynamic is at work when we face the choice of telling someone the truth or telling them a half-truth or telling them a boldface lie. What kind of a world do I want you to live in? What do I want you to believe is true about me, about reality, about some other person? The power to make a world for you is in my hands. "You will be like God" the devil said in the beginning. Ever since, we have found that prospect just intoxicating enough that through our lies we take on the prerogatives of God.

God created the world in which we were to live. In the beginning, everything was good, beautiful, well-ordered. But there was one being who didn't like that world, and that was the devil himself. He wanted to make a different world and so called Adam and Eve into his service in accomplishing that task of unmaking all that God had made. He used a lie to get things rolling but ever since, lies have continued to serve the same purpose of making alternative worlds in place of the world God created.

In its typically incisive style, the Catechism takes the ninth commandment's rule against bearing false witness and expands on it brilliantly. If you are looking for some justification for things like white lies, half-truths, gossip, rumor-mongering, and the like, Q&A 112 won't provide that cover for you. The Catechism is uncompromising in saying that every form of deceit and deception comes straight out of the devil's toolbox. And if it seems harsh to say that such things call down "God's intense anger," remember what I just said: God sees such lies as part and parcel of a systematic attempt to dismantle the world he created in order to supplant it with a world that better suits the evil one's tastes.

In his first letter, the Apostle Peter is also keen to make the Christian community, and every member of it, transparent to the truth. In a world rife with slander and deceit, with false accusations and scurrilous charges leveled at especially God's people in the church, Peter says that it requires real effort to remain gentle, to remain committed to the truth, and to be able to answer a world full of lies with the simple truth of the gospel. Peter hammered home this message all throughout this letter and he did so because he was well aware of the challenges facing Christian believers at that time. But he also knew that our most natural tendency is to deal with the world in a tit-for-tat fashion.

There's a scene in the movie The Untouchables in which a hardboiled ex-cop is telling Elliot Ness about "the Chicago way." Elliot Ness is a federal officer trying to bring down the nefarious gangster Al Capone. Initially, he wasn't very successful. So the ex-cop informs Mr. Ness of what he needs to do. He says that if Capone insults you, you insult him back even more harshly. If Capone bloodies one of your men, you send one of his men to the hospital. If Capone sends one of your men to the hospital, you send one of Capone's men to the morgue. "That's how you get Capone" he says.

In the end Ness adopts this "Chicago way," and it works. Near the end of the film, he says to a judge, "I have broken the very laws I am sworn to uphold and I have become that which I despise and I am convinced I have done what is right." The wisdom of our world says that the only way to deal with evil is to do evil yourself. You trade insult for insult, blow for blow. When the rhetoric gets ratcheted up against you, you ratchet yourself to match it. When the going gets tough, the tough get going; you have to give as good as you get.

The gospel calls us another way. Last year we did an evening series on I Peter and those of you who were there the evening I preached on this same passage may recall that in verse 9 Peter says that our Christian, Christ-like response to even the most vitriolic of insults should be "blessing," which in Greek is a form of our word for "eulogy." At funerals, a eulogy is a kind of blessing, a way to speak well of the person who has died. So also in this chapter Peter says that when people tell lies about you, insult you, and revile you, you need in turn to find the spiritual strength to speak well of those very people. It is particularly when the rhetoric around you turns deceitful that you need to refrain from taking deceit onto your own tongue and instead speak words shot-through with love, blessing, gentleness, and respect.

None of us will need much convincing that this is a tough thing to do! We not only find ourselves tending more in the direction of "the Chicago way," we sometimes find it vastly more appealing, too. But Peter says that by refraining from falsehoods and hot speech, not only are we demonstrating the example that Jesus himself gave us to follow, we may in the end create in our own examples the best counter-argument there is against those who lob false accusations. If they succeed in drawing us out, in making us join in on the shout-fest of hot speech and angry rhetoric, then it's that much easier for our opponents to say, "You see! They say they're so different but they're not so very different from the rest of us. Just listen to them!" But if we can maintain Christlikeness especially when caught in the crosshairs of our enemies, then Peter suggests that it will be their own slander that will become for those folks a source of shame and embarrassment.

Peter knew this was a struggle in his own day. But allow me to suggest that it may be even tougher now. And I would say that a chief reason for this is very simple: cable television news. The advent of all those 24/7 cable news outlets has been positive in some ways. But as is so often true, with the good can come also the bad. The fact is that not every day contains enough news to fill all those hours that need filling. So what happens is that networks compensate by talking on and on and on about lesser matters. And in order to boost the ratings as high as possible, hot-button matters related to religion are often the target of these never-ending analytical discussions.

It's amazing how many people there are out there who seem to know exactly what we Christian people believe. It's amazing how many religious leaders seem willing to go onto talkshows whose staple is the fostering of shouting matches in which no one ever finishes a sentence or a coherent thought but that's just where the drama lies, too. People don't watch most of those shows to become better informed. They watch to catch some good theater and to have their prejudices confirmed. Nine times out of ten on any TV news show or network you could name, what you get from watching these spectacles is just enough information to confirm some stereotypes but not enough to really give you something to think about (much less to give you cause to rethink something).

Neil Postman was right in the book he wrote even before cable and satellite TV took off: we are "amusing ourselves to death" in this country. A recent survey of cable news channels revealed that despite what you might think, and despite the sheer number of hours that these shows are broadcasting live every day of every week, we are not getting more news. We don't learn more about the wider world, we don't find out more about what's going on in Africa, China, or other far-flung places on earth. Instead, the same half-dozen stories from this country get re-hashed over and over.

But what does this have to do with the ninth commandment and with truth-telling? Perhaps this: inevitably in the hurly-burly world of so much talk, so much shouting, things get said that are simply not true, or at least that are not the whole truth. Of course, none of us is getting asked to appear on CNN or Fox or MSNBC but the danger of watching such shows over and over is not only that we end up absorbing a lot of falsehoods, we are tempted to imitate such forms of communication even at work, at church, around the dinner table in our own homes. But when we do this, are we in a position to give accurate voice to the hope that is in us? Or will we discover, perhaps too late, that by comporting ourselves to what passes today for intelligent conversation, we have had to engage in speech that ends being less-than-truthful?

The Catechism warns us against twisting the words of others. Today there are many who make a living out of twisting other people's words. We dare not enter that market ourselves. The Catechism warns us against condemning anyone without permitting time for a thorough investigation and a hearing out of the person's stance. We need to guard and advance our neighbor's good name, and among other things that calls us to avoid black-and-white caricatures of other people's ideas--the kind of thing that fits into a "sound bite" but that is just a snippet of the larger truth not the whole truth. In an article a couple of years ago, Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote what could be called the eleventh commandment but that really serves as a corollary to the ninth commandment. Wolterstorff wrote, "Thou shalt not take cheap shots. Thou must not sit in judgment until thou has done thy best to understand. Thou must earn the right to disagree."

In a cheap-shot society, Wolterstorff is his usual trenchant and poignant self in recommending this to the Christian community. Far too many people today speak first and think later (if then). But that way of speaking will never serve the gospel well as a loving witness. We need instead to operate from a position of strength and repose. If we have, as Peter says in verse 15, set Jesus up as the Lord of our lives and if, as Peter says in verse 22, we have the calm assurance that all things are already in submission to Jesus, then we have good reason to adopt a calm and loving attitude in our conduct and speech.

Practically speaking, how might we help to foster this in our lives? First, we need to watch what we say. That's about as inane a piece of advice as you've ever heard me give! But when you reflect on the fact that so few people today actually do this, actually try to keep themselves from saying whatever comes to mind, having the patience and the reserve and the slowness of speech required to check yourself may well be more counter-cultural than you think. Especially when it comes to conversations with our non-Christian co-workers and neighbors, are we sure we are correct in what we say? Have we, as Wolterstorff recommends, done the hard work of earning the right to disagree with someone by carefully listening and hearing someone out? Have we done some research, listened to more than one person, before drawing conclusions?

Along these same lines, a second thing I might recommend for our mutual consideration is going on a cable news diet. We should limit the amount of time we spend watching those shouting matches where people (and even the show's host) constantly cut each other off. We should ask ourselves if this is the best place in which to do research on how different people think. If we do watch some of this, we need to be careful to balance it out by taking advantage of other sources of information. We need to read thoughtful newspapers and magazines and also talk directly and calmly with a person who represents a certain point of view about which we are curious to learn a bit more.

The Catechism reminds us, and Peter is keen to teach us, that any time we engage in speech that is uninformed, under-informed, or misinformed, we are at risk for trading insult for insult, for twisting someone's words, for making a declaration before we have given someone a hearing. Guarding and advancing our neighbor's good name is never more difficult than when the neighbor in question represents a point-of-view with which we disagree at a pretty basic level.

After all, even when you have listened to someone very thoroughly, you may still have to conclude that you flat out disagree. Telling the truth means being up front about that. We do not serve the cause of our Lord by pretending we agree with all we meet. We don't. We can't. But Peter says that gentleness and respect still set the tone for how we express even difficult truths.

As we said earlier, lies are an attempt to re-shape reality for the people around us. But as people who serve Jesus as Lord and who believe that all things are in submission to Him, we need to live humbly and joyfully in the world God made. Jesus is Lord, and that's the dearest truth we know. But we can't proclaim that central truth if the rest of our lives is saturated with lies. Sometimes when people try to bolster their own credibility, they will say, "Hey, I'm telling you the gospel truth here!" But as followers of Christ, we know the real gospel truth. Can those around us see that we love that truth? Amen.