September 19, 2021: The Truth Project: Hearing Truth
John 8:31-47
Rev. Rhonda Blevins
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?”
Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not have a permanent place in the household; the son has a place there forever. So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed. I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you look for an opportunity to kill me, because there is no place in you for my word. I declare what I have seen in the Father’s presence; as for you, you should do what you have heard from the Father.”
They answered him, “Abraham is our father.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing what Abraham did, but now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. This is not what Abraham did. You are indeed doing what your father does.” They said to him, “We are not illegitimate children; we have one father, God himself.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now I am here. I did not come on my own, but he sent me. Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot accept my word. You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? Whoever is from God hears the words of God. The reason you do not hear them is that you are not from God.”
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In last week’s sermon, the first in a three-part series I’m calling “The Truth Project,” I told a fable about two brothers, one named “Lie” and the other named “Truth.” “Lie” took his brother’s clothes, leaving him “naked Truth.” Later, I was talking about “naked Truth” with our board president, Tom Mann, and he quipped, “The truth will make you free!” I laughed and said, “We’re not talking about THAT kind of freedom.”
Something else funny, or maybe ironic, happened after last week’s sermon. After the message a couple of people commented to me, “Preacher, that was a pretty conservative message.” Another couple of people said, “Preacher, that was a pretty liberal message.”
I’m not sure what to make of that, but I wonder if a lot of us are conditioned to see a discussion about truth in this polarized, binary way: “conservative/liberal.” Of course, we all want to believe that truth is on our side. Maybe some of us judge ideas primarily through a political framework or worldview—for some, politics is the primary way through which we see and understand the world.
But what if truth isn’t the “property” of the left or the right? What if no political party has a monopoly on the truth? (Spoiler alert: they don’t.) What if instead of looking for truth through the lens of politics, we could train ourselves to look for truth first through the lens of faith? Is it possible to shift, even if ever so slightly, our worldview from a political left/right orientation to a worldview that has a different, faith-inspired metric? And if so, what would that metric be?
Let’s turn to an interesting passage of scripture to help us. In John 8, we find Jesus at the Temple at the time of a festival. There’s a lot of drama in this and the preceding chapter as the authorities are looking for a reason to arrest Jesus. There’s a funny scene in which the chief priests and Pharisees send the Temple police to arrest Jesus, but they don’t arrest him. When the chief priests and Pharisees ask the Temple police why they didn’t arrest Jesus, the Temple police say (my paraphrase), “Have you heard this guy? He’s awesome!” You can almost see the chief priests and Pharisees doing a collective facepalm. They ask the Temple police, “Surely you have not been deceived too, have you?” In the meantime, Jesus keeps teaching in the Temple. Some are listening and following him; others are pushing back and arguing with him.
So that’s the scene when Jesus drops his famous line, “You will know the truth and the truth will make you free.” With this comment, even the Jews who are following Jesus push back. They don’t like this insinuation that they aren’t free. “We’ve never been slaves to anyone! What do you mean?”
Let me stop there and point out the irony in their rebuttal. If you know anything about the Bible or Jewish history, you know that indeed they have been slaves—first in Egypt and then in Babylon. While it is true that they weren’t exactly slaves in the first century, Jesus insinuates they are captive in some way.
As 21st Century Americans, we could easily overlook this passage as “slavery” seems anachronistic—a throwback to some ancient past that has no relevance today. If Jesus showed up today and told us, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free,” can’t you hear someone saying, “Dude, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. What do you mean, ‘The truth will set us free?’ We’re already free!” But are we? Really?
Sure, we’re not in chains. We’re not in prison. We move about as we please for the most part. But what about our minds? Are our minds free?
Not according to Jonathan Rauch, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. “You’re being manipulated,” he says.[1] He suggests that we are living in an age of epistemic warfare—information warfare—a “war on our system for creating truth. So what’s that? That is efforts to organize and manipulate the social and media environment for political advantage, specifically to dominate, divide, disorient and ultimately demoralize a target population.” Guess what we are? We’re the target population. The target in classic warfare throughout history, was land, to expand borders, or resources like oil. In this war on the nature of truth, the target is our attention, and ultimately, our fealty.
Rauch not the only one sounding the alarms.
Last year both self-proclaimed conservative and liberal friends recommended a documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma, so I watched it. (That may have been my tipping point with Facebook and why I largely got off.) One big takeaway from The Social Dilemma for me: if a platform is “free,” then you are the target, not the user. In other words, the user or customer is the advertiser or the investor. What are they buying? Your attention. Your attention (and eventually your data that tracks your habits and preferences) is the commodity that’s being bought and sold.
Our minds and attention—bought and sold. Like a slave.
So let me ask again, “Are we really free?”
Jesus said, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” In this short passage, Jesus uses the word “truth” (or some version of it) nine times. He accuses his challengers of being descendants of “the devil.” (Apparently Jesus did not read How to Win Friends and Influence People.)
You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
Jesus sets up this dichotomy: truth is from God; lies are from the devil. Lies keep us in bondage; the truth will set us free.
Father Richard Rohr unpacks Jesus’ words here this way: “Once we truly see what traps us and keeps us from freedom, we should see the need to let it go . . . the freedom Jesus promises involves letting go of our small self, our cultural biases, and even our fear of loss and death. Freedom is letting go of wanting more and better things; it is letting go of our need to control and manipulate God and others. It is even letting go of our need to know and our need to be right—which we only discover with maturity. We become ever more free as we let go of our three primary motivations: our need for power and control, our need for safety and security, and our need for affection and esteem.”[2]
I first heard about these three primary motivations from our minister of education, Joe Creegan, who discovered this teaching from Father Thomas Keating. Keating got it from the field of psychology. Let me name them again: our three primary motivations are 1) our need for power and control, 2) our need for safety and security, and 3) our need for affection and esteem.
If you think back to lies you’ve told, chances are your motivation for the lie was one of those three things.
I remember back when I was little, maybe 7 or 8-years-old, I went to an after-school program. I decided one day to tell the kids and even the teacher that I knew how to use a lasso. I told them that my grandfather had taught me how to do it. Now, the only truth in that statement was that I had a grandfather. He didn’t know how to lasso (to my knowledge). He didn’t teach me how to use a lasso. I didn’t know how to lasso. The next day when I arrived at the after-school program, my teacher surprised me with a rope, so that I could demonstrate my mad lasso skills. Guess what. I couldn’t lasso. I blamed it on the rope. “This is a different kind of rope,” I remember saying in my defense.
Now, why would I tell such a ridiculous lie? Was it 1) a need for power and control, 2) a need for safety and security, and 3) a need for affection and esteem. I suppose it was the third motivation—I was seeking esteem. So I made a ridiculous claim. And the next day when my lie was outed, I felt deep shame, which is probably why I remember this event from 100 years ago.
Again, Rohr suggests that freedom results from letting go of these three primary motivations. The Christ-way is to replace these motivations with love—love becomes our primary motivation. And as we grow and mature in the way of Christ, as we grow increasingly motivated by love, it becomes easier to detect lies. We grow more astute at detecting motivations outside of the motivation of love. We can recognize with increasing clarity when something comes out of a desire for 1) power or control, 2) safety or security, and 3) affection or esteem.
That’s the truth that sets us free!
The goal of this series, “The Truth Project,” is not that I impart “Truth” to you, as if I have a handle on truth and you do not. No, what I hope to accomplish is to help us all think a little more deeply about how we discern what is true and what is false, that maybe we can grow in our ability to recognize truth and lies in an age of mass deception or what Jonathan Rauch calls “epistemic warfare.”
If our minds and our fealty are today’s battlefields, we must do everything in our power to protect our minds and our fealty from the entities seeking to keep us in prisons of division and discord and chaos and disillusionment. How might we do that? It’s not easy. There are not “Three sure fire steps to protect your mind from those with Machiavellian interests.” But I do believe there are small things we can do that add up to greater intellectual freedom.
Last week I concluded the message with three little steps to better discern or “see” truth, with an acronym, “SEE”:
Switch Off the Screen. Screens are the primary weapon used in today’s information warfare.
Engage With People in Real Life. We do not have real relationships with people we only know on screen.
Embody Truth. We must invest ourselves in a radical commitment to the truth.
Today, let’s add to this list how we might better discern or “hear” truth, with an acronym, “HEAR.”
Harness Your Attention. Don’t give your attention away for free! It’s a valuable commodity; people are making billions off our attention. Make deliberate, conscious decisions about who or what will get your attention.
Examine Your Perceptions. Did you know that IQ is not a great predictor of how likely you are to fall prey to misinformation? In fact, people with high IQ are better at rationalizing falsehood, using their mental horsepower to justify their biases. So even if you’re exceedingly smart, (like a brilliant scholar once said) dare to think you’re wrong. Be ready and willing to change your mind.
Amplify Truth. These days the misinformation and disinformation floodgates are wide open. Rauch calls it a “firehose of falsehood.” It’s an old form of information warfare. We must learn to fact check and help others learn to do the same. That’s what I’m doing today, in fact. I’m using my voice and my sphere of influence to help others think about and lean into truth. You have a voice and a sphere of influence different than mine. How might you amplify truth in your sphere of influence?
Resist Complacency. One of the goals in information warfare is to throw out so much disinformation, even multiple lies around a single subject, that we, the hearers, throw up our hands in resignation, saying, “I don’t know who or what to believe any more.” Score one for the “father of lies.” We must not grow complacent. Last week we looked at Paul’s “armor of God” passage from Ephesians 6, in which Paul says we must put on the armor of God to “stand against the wiles of the devil.” This is no time for apathy. The “father of lies” rides our complacency like the pope rides the pope-mobile.
Like I said, this isn’t easy, this work. But through disciplined practice, our ears will grow better attuned to the resonance of truth—lies will have a distinct dissonance that leaves us unsettled. “You will know the truth,” Jesus said, “and the truth will make you free.” I want greater freedom for you and for me!
If all this is too much to remember, I’ve got a shortcut for you. Whenever you wonder, “Is this truth or is this a lie?” try to reframe the question to, “Does this sound like love?” If not, you’ve got your answer: if it doesn’t sound like love (genuine love, not flattery) it’s a lie. Love is the metric. It may be tough love—it might be truth you’d rather not hear. (We often prefer an easy lie to a difficult truth.) But your heart knows the difference. Truth always sounds like love.
Next week, be sure and come back for the third and final part of “The Truth Project.” I’ll show you how good I am with a lasso! (And if you believe that, I’ve got some ocean front property in Jerusalem I’d like to sell you.)
[1] https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/06/24/jonathan-rauch-in-defense-of-truth