Ten Words That Matter: If You Can’t Say Something Nice
Dr. Tom Pace
August 6, 2017
Exodus 20:1-2, 16, Matthew 5:33-37, 7:1-2
We’re going to be continuing our series on the Ten Commandments and I’d like to invite you to listen now as we hear the Scripture read as we talk today about “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
Then God spoke all these words: I am the Lord your God, Who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. Exodus 20:1-2, 16
“Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God,or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No;’ anything more than this comes from the evil one. Matthew 5:33-37
“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Matthew 7:1-2
The great theologian Groucho Marx said, “It’s easy to know if a man is honest – just ask him. And if he tells you he’s honest he’s a crook.” Because we all lie. We’re going to talk about that today.
Let’s pray together. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, open our ears that we might hear and open our hearts, God, that we might feel. Then O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
We all know that dishonesty is wrong, or course, but it doesn’t seem to stop us. I ran across this novel by a guy named Jerome K. Jerome and he wrote it in 1889. I love the title. It’s called Three Men in a Boat Not to Mention the Dog. It’s a novel and in there he says, “I knew a young man once who was a most conscientious fellow. And when he took to fly fishing he determined never to exaggerate his hauls by more than 25%. ‘When I have caught 40 fish,’ said he, ‘then I will tell people I caught 50 and so on. But I will not lie any more than that because it is sinful to lie.’”
I think lots of us deal with that. We all lie, we all cheat and I may even suspect we all steal. We sometimes do it for ourselves and sometimes we do it for others. Sometimes we do it for good reasons and sometimes for not so good reasons. Sometimes we do it intentionally and sometimes we don’t even recognize we’re doing it. Sometimes they’re overt, obvious lies and sometimes they’re so subtle you really have to work to figure out if they’re a lie or not.
In my research for this sermon I have to say my eyes were opened by a book by an author named Dan Arieley. He wrote it about five years ago and it’s called The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone Especially Ourselves. He’s a social scientist and in the book it’s filled from beginning to end with stories and studies about our human dishonesty. I started thinking, “Oh, I’ll just glance through this for the sermon” and I found myself reading it from the front to the back.
It is eye-opening. And what it says is that every one of us - every one of us - lies not just once in a while but every single day. I thought, “Wow.” Let me read you kind of a summary of the book: “We human beings are torn by a fundamental conflict. Our deeply ingrained propensity to lie to ourselves and others and a desire to think of ourselves as good and honest people.”
The truth is that we have trouble even identifying what truth is anymore. That’s what hard. You see, our minds, our spirits, our egos, are so full of pride that we always want to return to a state of homeostasis. In other words, we don’t want to change, we don’t want to grow; we don’t want to admit we’re wrong, so what we always want to justify where we are. So what we do is we filter out any evidence that comes our way that contradicts our held opinions and way of life.
And anything that reinforces our opinions and way of life, we tell that story over and over again. We repeat that narrative and it becomes engrained and becomes our story. This is the way it is. And after a while we don’t even know what truth is.
Pontius Pilate looked at Jesus and said, “What is truth?” His wife was telling him, “You better watch out.” Jesus was saying, “Hey, you’re the one who’s saying I’m King of the Jews.” It’s as if he’s saying, “I don’t even know what truth is.”
So what happens is because of this propensity we have to put in these social structures, moral codes, that hold us in, that keep us from going too far afield. And I’ll tell you that the Old Testament, the Torah, is one of those, the Ten Commandments the core of it. Six hundred and thirteen rules that are designed to create a community of trust. We’re going to create a community where we deal with each other in a place of trust instead of mistrust. And here are the rules we’re going to follow and we’re going to hold one another accountable to those rules, then we’ll trust each other. That was the idea.
Now here’s what I would tell you. I believe that we are living now with the consequences of just regular violation of the ninth commandment. We don’t live in a community of trust, we live in a community of mistrust.
I’ll confess and I suspect many of you are the same way. You listen to someone say something. It might be a news outlet, it might be a government statement, and it might be from one of our leaders. It might be from a church or from a school. We don’t say, “Is that true or not?” What we say is, “What’s their angle? What are they trying to do?” We receive everything with skepticism. We really don’t believe anybody anymore.
The days when Walter Cronkite would finish his news broadcast and he would say “And that’s the way it is on August 6, 2017…” We believed. That’s the way it is. We don’t believe that anymore.
Wayne Day was one of our mentors. He was the pastor at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church when I came into ministry and then he went to be the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Ft. Worth. When I came to St. Luke’s he took me to lunch and we had a great conversation. Now when he went to Ft. Worth he went to a church that had a history of some pastoral abuse and deceit. He was talking about that experience and then he went on to say, “It’s not just there.” This was his story, “When I started in the ministry I could say to my church, ‘Let’s do this!’ And they would either say, “Yeah, let’s do that’ or they’d say, ‘I don’t think we ought to do that.’ But now when I say, ‘Let’s do this’ my church says, ‘What are you really trying to do? What’s your hidden agenda? What are you trying to trick us into?’”
I think that’s just culture-wide. We live now in a community of mistrust, and it is a consequence of regularly violating, perhaps not on purpose, this ninth commandment. So what’s the antidote to that? Well, when we look at the commandment, it was originally designed to deal only with sort of legal issues. How you would testify in an adjudication of some sort. At that time it wasn’t always a trial, but you wouldn’t testify against someone something that was false because the consequences would be significant. They could be executed, they could be banished, and all sorts of things might happen if you said the wrong thing about them.
But interestingly, very early in the history of Israel, by the time Deuteronomy comes along, which is sort of restating of the Ten Commandments, it’s interpreted to apply to deceit of any sort. It wasn’t just in trials, but you were to tell the truth all the time.
Those of you who are regulars throughout this series, we’ve been saying that Jesus takes the Ten Commandments and calls us to an ethic that is both higher and deeper. It goes to the core of who we are and it calls us to a higher standard. And I think that what Jesus does in this commandment is provide a response to this community of mistrust by calling us to this higher, deeper standard in two ways.
I want to look at the first part of the commandment and the second part of the commandment, and see how Jesus calls us to a higher and deeper standard in both of those categories.
Here’s the first. The commandment is “Do not bear false witness” and here’s what Jesus says, “Again, you have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’”
Then he goes down to verse 37 where he says, “But instead, let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”
In other words, he’s saying, “You need to be people of integrity and transparency and authenticity. It isn’t just what you say, it’s that everything about you - your word is your bond, your actions, your thoughts, your feelings, your words, all of those things have integrity. They all line up.”
Here was Jesus’ greatest criticism of people. When he would speak to the Pharisees his greatest criticism was, “You are a hypocrite.”
Now it’s interesting. The word hypocrite is a Greek word and we’ve now just taken it and put it into the English language. It means actor. People who would take the profession of being a hypocrite were people who did the Greek tragedies and comedies. They were actors. His greatest criticism was, “You’re a faker. That’s what you are – you’re a faker.”
Jesus is calling us to live authentic lives, to be honestly and authentically the people God made us to be. That sounds easier than it is, friends. From the time we were tiny children we have been programmed, taught to seek approval. When you’re small you seek the approval of your parents and your teachers around you. Then when you’re an adolescent you seek the approval of your friends, then you grow up and you’re seeking the approval of your boss, and your neighbors and your church members. It begins to be a habit. You get pretty good it – we become highly adaptive to try and act and behave in certain ways, to seek the approval of the people around us. After a while we forget how to live out of something beyond what other people think we ought to be.
Mary Sarton has written a poem that I’ve always loved, and somebody gave it to me about ten years ago. The title is the first line of the poem and I’m only going to read a few passages. She says, “Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places, I’ve been dissolved and shaken, worn other peoples’ faces…”
Have you worn other peoples’ faces? Been somebody you think they want you to be? Now I don’t want you to get me wrong. When someone says to me, you’re sort of calling them into account for something, and they say, “Man, I’m sorry. That’s just the way I am.” I always want to say, “Well the way you are isn’t good enough then.”
I’m not saying that just because you feel like something, you ought to do it. No, what Jesus is saying is that God made you in his image. God made you to look like Jesus. That’s the image. And what happens is over time sin, decisions we make, and other things that happen to us, begin to distort that image.
Thomas Merton, a Catholic author, refers to the true self and the false self. The true self is our best self. It is that self God made us to be. And the false self is that self that has been formed and created and distorted by the expectations of others and by sin.
Paul calls the false self “the flesh.” It’s kind of an unfortunate term because we like to think of the flesh as our bodies. But it isn’t about our bodies. It’s talking about that brokenness that has begun to distort that created self within us.
Here’s my challenge to you. I want you to really think about who you are at the very core of your being. I would suggest to you that when you look deep deep down inside you’re going to see goodness. Goodness – that you know at your heart you’re really good. That God made you that way. Yes, you can see all the ways you’ve messed that up. Of course you have. But live out of that place that when God created you after God formed you with his hands he jumped up and clapped his hands and said, “Well done, good job! You did it great. This is very good.” That’s how God made you. Live out of that. That’s authentic, that’s transparent. That’s really being honest.
So then he goes on. “Do not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” And here’s how Jesus responds to the “against thy neighbor” part. He says, “Do not judge so you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”
So not only do not say false things about your neighbor to hurt them, don’t say true things about your neighbor to hurt them. Ooo – now we’re getting tough! Not only don’t say true things about your neighbor to hurt them, don’t even think bad thoughts about your neighbor. Don’t judge them at all. Don’t judge them internally or externally. Don’t judge at all.
Oh, man! We grew up with the statement: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” And most of us live instead by believing, “If you can’t say something nice come sit by me.” That’s from “Steel Magnolias” and I think it was originally Alice Roosevelt Longworth who said that –Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter. But that’s how we do, we kind of like that, talking about others. We kind of like judging them in our heads because it makes us feel better about ourselves. Sort of. Until we’re done and we begin to sort of think about it, we don’t feel better about ourselves.
On Monday of this last week we had a memorial service for Missy Bandy. She was an amazing woman and was the co-founder, along with Rev. Dean Robinson, of the Amazing Place Memory Care program that started here at St. Luke’s and now is a premier program well known throughout the country.
But Missy passed away and we had the memorial service, and as I was visiting with her family about her, her son said something and it’s stuck with me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. He said, “You know, my mom didn’t waste much energy in being disappointed in other people.” Wow – it takes energy for us to sit around and judge others.
Now I want to be clear – there’s a difference between judgment and accountability. Of course we are to hold one another accountable and I don’t really have time to go through all the differences, but I want to rapid fire just a few things to try to get you thinking about the difference.
The main difference is that accountability comes out of a covenant relationship. So you choose to be held accountable. You enter into a relationship knowing that accountability is part of that. So therefore accountability begins with the one being held accountable, not the other. When you get married you’re choosing to be held accountable by your spouse. You’re inviting that.
I have a personal trainer and when I enter into a relationship with a personal trainer I’m inviting that personal trainer to hold me accountable to exercise and all the other junk that goes with it. Isn’t that the truth? But if I had not entered into that and had run into that fellow on the street and he said, “Man, you’re looking pretty sloppy and lazy.” That would be judgment.
It’s not your job to be doing that. I haven’t invited you to do that. When you get a job at work you are implicitly inviting accountability of that community. When you join a sports team you are inviting, asking, signing on, for accountability. When you become a part of a church… uh, oh – now you start meddling. When you become part of a church you’re inviting accountability. Now a church of our size, that’s difficult but what we do invite you, encourage you - one of the reasons we like to focus on small groups is that you’ll have some people whom you trust enough to look you in the eye and say, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
So accountability comes out of covenant. There are a number of others as well. Accountability focuses on behavior, judgment focuses on character. Accountability means one holds oneself to the same standard as one applies to someone else. Accountability focuses on a single action whereas judgment keeps a record of wrongs. I Cor. 13 says “Love keeps no record of wrongs.” How many times do you get in a fight with your spouse or a friend and all of a sudden everything you’ve done wrong for the last 20 years comes out onto the table? And that’s not the issue at all.
So what we’re called on, friends, is to be people of grace. To be people of grace. Accountability is part of it but in the midst of accountability there is this offering of grace. Accountability is designed to help us grow and change, judgment is designed to knock us down. We’re called on to be people of grace.
Many years ago I was pastoring in a small town and there was a guy that was involved in the town community who was a member of my church, and he was mean. Mean-spirited, I guess that’s the best way I can put that. I didn’t know him, he never come to church. I got to know him at the Lions’ Club breakfast. They invited me to come to work at the Lions’ Club pancake breakfast and he was there. Before the morning was over I was just fuming. His ongoing racist remarks just kept bubbling up. I just wrote him off to be a jerk.
It wasn’t long after that that he became very ill – terminally ill. His children called me. They knew he was a member of the church although he hadn’t come. I was to go see him in the hospital and ultimately to officiate at his memorial service.
So I went to see him in the hospital and I sort of braced myself to see him. I walked into the room and he was not glad to see me at all. But his grown children were there. You know that little rolling table in the hospital that’s put beside your bed – that you eat off of? On that were two old photographs. One was of his wife who had passed away from cancer when his children were in elementary school, and the other was of his son who’d been killed in Viet Nam. They were both there.
In the midst of the conversation his grown kids told me that their dad had chronic pain that he’d had all his life and it came from when his father pushed him out of a moving car when he was ten years old and never coming back to pick him up. He had been a POW in the Second World War in the Philippines. So I looked at him and I thought, “How can I judge this man? Who am I to judge this man?” There’s no excuse for acting like a jerk, but sometimes we can look at people with a little grace. We don’t know what they carry.
One of the things I do visually as I prepare to worship is I look out at all of you and I imagine that there’s a column sitting on top of your shoulder. Each one of you. And packed into that column is all your stuff. All the burdens, all the brokenness, all the hurt, all the unmet dreams, all the hopes, all that stuff. Just sitting right on top of you, and I just hope that the Holy Spirit comes and fills your heart and spirit. We’re to be agents of God’s grace.
So here’s what I would tell you. How do you deal with a community of mistrust? What’s the antidote? “Do not bear false witness against your neighbor?” Live real, authentic, honest lives of integrity and transparency, and be instruments of grace to the people around you.
Gracious God, we confess that we have been a part of this community of distrust and as easy as it would be to blame others, we’re a part of it. Forgive us, God. And by the power of your Holy Spirit come and chip away everything that’s false, everything that’s not who you created us to be. And then use us as instruments of your grace. In the name of Christ, Amen.