Falsehood
Ephesians 4:25-5:2
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One of the earliest game show programs on TV was titled, To Tell the Truth. Maybe you remember it. A celebrity panel of sorts was introduced to three individuals all claiming to be the same person- usually with a unique or unusual story. The program consisted of the panel asking these three people questions regarding the story they had been told, and then they were challenged to determine which of the three was telling the truth. I still remember the tag line for the big reveal at the end of the segment, “Will the real Mr. So-and-so please stand up.” It was a solid concept. The show ran on CBS from 1956 until 1968, and then got picked up for syndication and ran for another 10 years, or so.
If one is seated between two imposters who are claiming one’s story as their own, determining which of the three is the real Mr. So-and-so is a ultimately a simple matter of identification. One has the documents to prove they are who they say they are, and the other two do not. That is unless the person we’re talking about is Alecia Faith Pennington. Alecia was born into a family with some very strongly held ideas about the world. Born at home in Houston, Texas, the midwife the family used for her delivery agreed to their request that she not file a birth certificate for Alecia. As you might imagine, her family also failed to apply for a Social Security number for their daughter. Because she was homeschooled, Alecia had no school records. And since she wasn’t taken to see either doctors or dentists, she didn’t have medical records either. At the age of 18, she begged her grandparents to let her come live with them. They agreed, against her own parents’ wishes. But when she finally got the chance to live in the wider world, she couldn’t. She couldn’t get a driver’s license, or a job, or enroll in college, or even open a bank account. With no record of her existence, she couldn’t even prove that she was a legal citizen. She could say that she was Alecia, born in Texas. She could recount her life as far back as she remembered, but who could say if she was telling the truth?
I was listening to a conversation this week between two people who were discussing the moment they began to understand that they were not, in fact, who they thought they were. Not in some strange, switched-at-birth way. But in the simple sense that they found out that there were certain things that they believed about themselves that turned out to not be true. One of them described how for the longest time he sincerely believed one of his best qualities, one of the things that others liked about him most, was his driving ability. Which, when said out loud, sounds somewhat absurd. The other thing, he admitted, was that he thought people really appreciated his readiness to step in and do combat with anyone acting in unjustly. Until he began dating his wife who set him straight; that looking for fights was not, contrary to his own understanding of himself, one of his more winning qualities.
I think that may be some of what this letter is getting at when it talks about putting away falsehood. To be sure, there is plenty of falsehood in this moment we find ourselves in. The habit of calling things that are factually verifiable ‘fake’, and then turning around to lift up lies as truth has been elevated to a whole new level. You might call it a whole new art form if it weren’t so terribly destructive. That kind of thing is certainly worrisome, but it isn’t the central spiritual concern at issue in this letter to the church. Or rather, that kind of thing is only the tip of a much larger and more substantial spiritual iceberg, one that begins in the depths of who we think we are, and how we tell the truth about ourselves.
Of course to make sense of this injunction about putting away falsehood, and the subsequent list of moral directives that follow- about anger, theft, and hate speech- is the second half of a much bigger idea. “So then,” it begins. Meaning that what follows is the rhetorical and practical conclusion to what has come just before. In this case, what has coms before is a reminder about what the church had been taught about putting away one’s former way of life, one’s old self, and through the renewal of the spirit of one’s mind, putting on the new self- a self that is created in the likeness of God. If that language about ‘likeness’ sounds familiar, it’s because these words harken back to the story of creation and the first human beings, who in the book of Genesis, we are told, are made in the very image and likeness of God. So basically what the letter is saying is that as the people who have been called by Jesus into a community of faith, we are to put away the version of ourselves that is a corruption of the goodness in which we were made and through a new mind set to put on the re-created version of ourselves that we were meant to be all along.
Of course doing something like that, putting away that false representation of ourselves isn’t always easy. For many of us, it’s the fake version we want everyone to see. The fake version is the one that says that everything is fine, even when it’s not, because we don’t want people to see our struggle and pass some kind of judgement on us as a result. The fake version is the image we project because we don’t want to be seen as a failure, or a screw-up, or as simply weak. We don’t want people knowing our business, and then thinking that they know us. So instead what they know is the propaganda we put out about ourselves. It’s the annual Christmas letter, or the social media profile that only tells people about us at our best, but rarely at our worst. And the sad fact of church is that we can be the worst purveyors of this kind of thing. Somewhere along the line we seem to have gotten it into our heads that God’s blessing is only for those who deserve it, those who look the part. Which means that if we come to church and let people see our hurt, or our pain, or that we are barely keeping it together, they will certainly see that not only have we not been blessed, but that there might be a reason for that. That is why I often think that recovery meetings do church far better than most churches do church. Everybody at a 12-step meeting knows why they are there. Everybody is up against the same kind of demons and have mustered the courage to speak honestly about it because they know that they are not alone. No one at a 12-step meeting is pretending that they have it all together. They’re just taking it one day at a time. So as those who have been called to put away the old self by putting away falsehood, let’s be honest shall we. There is a reason why we all say the prayer of confession at the outset of our gatherings here on Sunday. It isn’t to make people feel bad about themselves, or to condemn their failures. We confess our sin together because there isn’t a single solitary person here, including (and maybe especially) the people up front, who aren’t dealing with something; who don’t have some pain, or heartache, or struggle, or failure in their lives. There isn’t a person here who doesn’t feel like a fraud sometimes, or doesn’t completely lose it out of anger or frustration. And pretending otherwise doesn’t get us anywhere. It certainly doesn’t get us closer to God. I recently heard someone say that they really aren’t interested in other people’s stories of success, how they won at something, or achieved some great thing. It isn’t that they aren’t happy for other people’s success, or are unwilling to celebrate with them. It isn’t bitterness, or apathy. The point was those aren’t usually the stories that connect us to one another. In fact, what they often do is set us apart. No, this person who was talking said that the stories that he finds most compelling, the ones that create genuine connection with another person are the stories about what went wrong, the misteps, or the epic fails. Yesterday I presided at the wedding of a child of this church. It was beautiful and there were several nice touches that made the day special. But I told them afterward that the story they will tell about that day will be how halfway through the ceremony the New Mexico monsoon clouds rolled through and opened up on them and their guests. Because like the recovery meetings, it’s those stories that make us feel like we are not alone. It’s when we stop trying to impress each other with these fake versions of ourselves that we can finally be who we really are- people who stand in genuine need of grace just to make it through the day sometimes. Sometimes the best success stories that we have to share are the ones about how we failed, and it didn’t kill us; how we got knocked down, but weren’t knocked out.
That may be part of what it means to be renewed in the spirit of our minds. It means to change the way we think about these things. To change the way we think about our anger as a reaction to own fear or sense of injustice without letting it own us in a ways that drive a wedge between us and another person. To change the way we think about what we have, how we get it, and what the having is for in the first place, which is to share with those in need. To change the way we talk about others, not just because of the injury it does to them, but also because of the harm that it does to us.
It sounds as though what ultimately grieves the Holy Spirit, is not our sin, so much as it is our pretense, our reluctance to be honest about all the ways that we fall short. Because true kindness isn’t something that you can fake. That’s “nice”. Nice is not the same as kind. True kindness is born of the willingness to receive another person’s imperfections with a certain measure of grace because we understand just how much we rely on that same grace ourselves. What grieves the Holy Spirit is the attitude that we can do any of this on our own; bootstrap our way to the truth without God’s help, and certainly without anyone else’s help either. When it comes to being children in the household of God, we are either in it together, or we are not in it at all. It turns out that to tell the truth, is to speak honestly about our absolute reliance on the Holy Spirit to renew our hearts and minds, so that we can stand up as who we really are.