A sermon shared at the Suttons Bay Congregational Church, August 24, 2025
Scripture: John 8:21-32
You’d have liked my dad. He was funny and smart. He disliked bullies. He liked sticking up for the little guy. He loved God and Johnny Cash, usually, but not always, in that order.
My father grew up very poor and over time acquired an arsenal of scrappy strategies for survival. Among other things, he cultivated the art of the not-false-but-not-quite-true declaratory statement, which served him well on multiple occasions. I’ll give you just a couple of examples.
My father drove a tank in Italy and North Africa in World War II. When he returned to the United States after his Army service, the GI Bill provided funds for him to pursue a college education. Unfortunately, he faced a daunting obstacle: he hadn’t graduated from high school. He had dropped out of school so he could go to work to help support his father, mother, and siblings.
He applied anyway, and when the college admissions office asked about the conspicuous absence of a high school transcript or diploma, he explained that the high school in his neighborhood had burned down, destroying all of the records inside. That statement was absolutely true: the high school in his neighborhood did, indeed, burn down. My father just neglected to mention that none of the records inside it related to him.
Many years later, after my father had suffered a number of significant setbacks, he applied for a job that he hoped would put him on a better trajectory. The prospective employer liked my dad—as I say, pretty much everyone did—and offered him the job. But then he added: “Oh, there is one thing I should have mentioned. This position requires a basic understanding of computers.”
My dad puffed up his chest and responded: “My current employer can tell you how much I know about computers!” Again, that statement was absolutely true. His current employer could have told his prospective employer exactly how much my dad knew about computers, which was: nothing. My dad got the job and we saw little of him for months, because he worked all day and secretly took computer courses at night.
When, early in my professional life, I tried my own hand at this technique it met with considerably less success. I was in law school looking for my first summer clerking job at a firm. Firms came from all over the country to interview students at the law school, making it easy for us to explore job prospects in multiple cities. I was interviewing in as many different cities as I could to try to enhance my prospects for employment.
One day, I was running late and dashed into a job interview for which I was less than fully prepared. As I entered the room, it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the city where the firm was based. Detroit? Chicago? New York? Boston? Washington, D.C.? Los Angeles? Miami? I had no idea. As fate would have it, the very first question out of the interviewer’s mouth was: “So, in looking at your resume, I don’t see any connection with our city? What attracts you to it?” This question presented me with a serious problem, because—other than Detroit—my resume showed no connection with any of the many possibilities.
Desperate, I tried to channel a little of my dad. “Well,” I replied enthusiastically, “what’s not to love about … your city?” And then I tried to think of all the things that every major city has and that are loveable. I went on: “There are the museums. The sports teams. The parks. The restaurants. But, of course, it’s really all about the people, don’t you think? Ah, yes, the great people of … your city.”
I paused. I had run out of steam and creativity. The interviewer smiled a knowing little smile at me and I could tell that he understood exactly what was going on. We chatted a few minutes more, he politely sent me on my way, and I received his rejection letter so quickly that I think he must have typed and mailed it himself immediately after I left. I took a lesson from the experience: My father had developed pro-level skills at this technique; a rank amateur, I should not have tried it at home.
In none of these instances did either my father or myself cover ourselves in glory. In all of them, we were trying to avoid telling the truth. But, for our purposes today, the more important point is that he and I were also trying to avoid something else. We were trying to avoid telling a lie. And we were doing that because we understood a basic moral precept: lying is wrong.
We all recognize that lying is wrong—and why. Lies can do untold amounts of damage to individuals and institutions. They can spread quickly and irresistibly. Mark Twain is often quoted as saying that “a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.” It’s a great quotation and it has gone around the world countless times but, ironically, Twain probably didn’t say it.
And, of course, lies can erode our capacity to tell what’s real from what isn’t. “A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” the infamous Nazi propogandist Joseph Goebbels said. Or did he? Like the Twain quotation, this one too has gone around the world countless times, but may also be a false attribution.
Now, as with any basic moral precept, we have to proceed with caution when speaking in absolute terms. Some great thinkers have argued that lying is always wrong, admitting of no exceptions; the German philosopher Immanuel Kant was among them. But many prominent philosophers have disagreed, and we can imagine circumstances in which lying might indeed seem ethically justifiable. A lie told in order to save a human life is often cited as an example; if a Nazi asks someone where Anne Frank is hiding, don’t we want them to lie about it?
For today, we don’t need to try to sort the question of whether lying is always wrong, which is fortunate, because great minds have been trying to do so for a few thousand years, and I’ve got a mind but not a great one, and I’ve also got only about fifteen minutes. For now, it suffices for us to note our shared agreement that lying is at least almost always wrong. And the fact that we have to work so hard to come up with exceptions serves only to substantiate the point.
Jesus talks a lot about lies and about truth, as does the Bible generally. And we might think that all those passages just tell us the same thing that our moral common sense tells us: lies are bad and the truth is good. But, this morning, I want to suggest to you that when we talk about the truth in the context of the Christian faith we are actually talking about a much bigger and more complicated idea. And it’s bigger and more complicated in ways that should matter to all followers of Christ, but that should matter particularly to the followers of Christ who are inside this very meeting house on this very morning. You see, every person gathered here today—you and me and the folks to your right and your left—has made a special commitment to the truth.
As many or all of you know, Pastor Robin has recently been using some of her sermons to explore the Covenant that appears in Article I of this church’s bylaws. It’s the paragraph we read together last week when we received new members into the church. But last week we didn’t just read it together; we recommitted to it together.
A paragraph in a set of bylaws may not sound like the most interesting or inspiring thing in the world, but the principles expressed there are foundational to our identity as a congregation. And the very first sentence of that Covenant states: “We are banded together as a Christian Church to maintain the worship of God; to proclaim the gospel of Christ; to develop in all a consciousness of their relations and duties to God and to one another and to inspire them with love for truth, passion for righteousness, and enthusiasm for service.” Focus for a moment with me on these words: “love for truth.”
That phrase—“love for truth”—clearly calls us to a place far above and beyond the basic task of not lying. It makes a remarkable demand of us—not just to speak the truth, which we all know we’re supposed to do, but to love it. And to love the truth necessarily means to seek it, to find it, to know it, to embrace it, to cultivate it, to nourish it, to share it, and to defend and protect it. That’s what we do with the things we love. And our Covenant does not just commission us to do these things as individuals; it binds us together in the doing of them as a community of faith.
This is a central part of who we are. It helps make up the core of our spiritual identity. We are a people who share, and who inspire in each other, a love for truth.
In the passage from the Gospel of John that we heard this morning, Jesus makes a similarly remarkable statement about the power of truth. The truth, he says, will set us free. That statement has become so familiar to us that we may have lost our capacity to wonder over it. But, if we pause a moment to think about the idea, we may find ourselves puzzling about exactly how this works. To take an almost silly example, if I hold up a pen and say “this is a pen” then I’ve said something that is true; but it’s awfully hard to understand how the truth of that statement does anything to make anyone free.
In my view, to understand what Jesus means when He says that the truth will set us free, we have to look in the exact opposite direction. That is, to understand the power of truth, we have to understand the opposing power of lies, especially certain kinds of lies. We need to recognize that some types of lies can imprison us—they can trap us, hold us, bind us, punish us, and ultimately crush us. Jesus’s statement that the truth can set us free only makes sense if lies and falsehood can put us into cages. And so they can.
This theme—that lies can imprison us—so pervades the gospels that we could read our way through those texts with these two questions always in the back of our minds: (1) What is the lie that is at work here? And (2) what does Jesus do to repudiate the lie? Those questions offer a powerful lens through which to view the gospels from beginning to end. Let me give you just a couple of examples.
One comes in the gospel story that I focused on in the last sermon I shared with you—the story of the woman who breaks open the expensive oil and anoints Jesus’s feet with it. As we discussed, when Judas condemns the woman for failing to sell the oil and give the proceeds to the poor, he’s lying. He doesn’t care about the poor at all; he just wants to make the woman feel bad. And Jesus calls out the lie for what it is.
As I suggested in that sermon, at its heart that gospel story is a story about hypocrisy. And what is hypocrisy but a form of lying—and an especially pernicious form at that, because it comes wrapped in a pretense of moral superiority? Over and over again, throughout the gospels, Jesus shines a bright, hot, penetrating light on the hypocrisy of others. And he calls the lie a lie.
Or consider the healing stories that we find in the gospels. In many of those stories, everyone—including the person burdened with the disease or illness—assumes that some error on their part, and God’s judgment of them, has caused their malady. Everyone around them thinks, and they have come to believe, that they are to blame for their suffering. But, again, Jesus calls out the lie. And he proves it a lie by healing them—something he couldn’t do if the doing of it ran against the judgment and will of God.
Or consider all those instances where Jesus rejects a pernicious stereotype —another kind of lie. Samaritans are no good, the people declare. Jesus says: that’s a lie. He tells them it’s a lie by sharing a story about a Samaritan whose goodness transcends that of everyone else who happens upon an injured man. And he shows them it’s a lie by visiting with a Samaritan woman at a well, talking about who she is and the things she has done.
Tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, all manner of social outcasts—worthless, the people declare; unworthy; unclean. Jesus says: that’s a lie. He tells them it’s a lie by preaching the good news that God welcomes everyone into the kingdom of heaven. And he shows them it’s a lie by bringing those people into his arms, into his fold, into his family.
In our house, Lisa and I talk a lot about the idea of “chosen family,” the friends who have a special place in our hearts because we have welcomed them there. Well, we are all members of the chosen family of the Son of the Living God. And anyone who tells you otherwise, Jesus says, is telling you a lie.
If we encounter the gospel texts through this lens, then we discover that it is, in a strong sense, a book of lies—of lies that society promotes and perpetuates, of lies that Jesus rejects and resists. A book of lies disproven. Lies dissected. Lies dismantled. Lies destroyed, and left scattered all about the battlefields of truth, and grace, and love. In our faith tradition, we talk a lot about how Jesus is the way and the life. We should perhaps talk more about how he is also the truth—just as he says he is.
Of course, in our quest for the truth we can encounter obstacles. Sometimes the truth may seem to us less than completely clear. And humility requires us to entertain the possibility that we may be wrong. But we shouldn’t use complexity as an excuse to avoid our responsibility to seek the truth and defend it. And humility does not require us to ignore the evidence. Our young and fearless prophet didn’t hesitate to call a lie a lie. We shouldn’t hesitate, either.
Jesus’s command that we love the truth and that we become champions of it asks a lot of us. It may put us in uncomfortable positions. It may demand that we express unpopular opinions. But ours is a faith of uncomfortable positions and unpopular opinions.When the world says greed, we say generosity. When the world says scarcity, we say abundance. When the world says revenge, we say forgiveness. When the world says conquest, we say compassion. When the world says material things and death, we say spirit and eternal life. When the world says abiding grievance, we say amazing grace. When the world says fear, we say faith. When the world says the convenient lie, we say the inconvenient truth.
To escape that discomfort and that unpopularity we may feel tempted to pretend we know less than we do. We may blink and give ourselves a little bit of that thing Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace” and say: “Oh, we’d serve the truth if we knew what it was, but it’s such a slippery and elusive thing.” And sometimes it is—although, I suspect, not nearly as often as we claim.
If we find ourselves yielding to that temptation, then the gospels have some news for us, but it is both good news and bad news. The good news is that there is strong historical precedent for shrugging, washing our hands of responsibility, and saying: “What is truth?” The bad news is that the precedent comes in the person of Pontius Pilate, who uttered exactly those words right before he condemned Jesus to death.
Truth doesn’t get much love these days. As a society, we have become callously indifferent to its welfare. We listen to lies—without flinching; we accept lies—without questioning; we repeat lies—without hesitating. We have lost our capacity for outrage at lies, even when they come to us from the podiums of public officials and the pulpits of populist preachers. Lying has become business as usual, and when we read in the Gospel of John that Satan is “the father of lies” all we can think is that a lot of people apparently want to challenge him for the paternity.
Imagine, in the midst of this pestilence of lies, what it means for us to be a people who have covenanted to inspire in each other a love for truth. Think on how this covenant summons us to serve as a tiny impediment to a tidal wave of social forces; tiny, but powerful, like the lone protestor standing in front of the row of tanks in Tiananmen Square, bringing all the might in the world to an abrupt stop. Consider how this covenant requires us to be different, to make another kind of choice, to step down from the rising towers of falsehood and to kneel down at the communion table of truth. Wonder at how this covenant implicitly reassures us that the Truth will not only endure but prevail.
If all this seems impossible, then remember that we have two formidable forces at our disposal. We have Christ, through whom we can do all things. And we have each other, our sacred bond, our holy covenant, our shared promise to love the truth and to inspire each other to do the same.
In circumstances like these, we might do well to remember the words of Nelson Mandela, who understood what it means to conquer the seemingly unconquerable. “It always seems impossible,” he said.
“Until it’s done.”
Praise God that it is so.
And the people said: Amen.
