A Different Word for It.

In the movie, The Invention of the Lie" there is a society in which every one says one the truth. Everything anyone says is the truth so everyone believes what a person says. In the movie, if you told the bank you had 800 dollars in your account, the clerk believes you and give you 800 dollars. There is one man who when his mother is dying in a hospital cannot stand to see his mother so upset and troubled about the thought of dying and just disappearing. One moment you are and the next moment you are nothing. So he begins to tell her a vision of what happens after death. He paints for her the standard vision of heaven with mansions, golden streets, and banquets for all. She believes him and dies happily.

It turns out that all the nurses and doctors have been listening to him and they also believe that he is telling the truth. They want to hear more. The word spreads and people flock to his home to hear about mansions in the sky and the vision of heaven. He comes forth with his complete version of Judaism and Christianity. Man in the sky, who controls things, who has a good place and a bad place, and he judges. It is a wildly amusing scene as he tries to deal with all the questions and ramifications. Of course, at the end of the movie he has to tell his "girl friend" that he does not really know, that he made it up. That it was a lie.

My sadness is the word "lie." We are using that word so much now. The South Carolina Congress man who yelled at Obama during the State of the Nation speech. The different sides of the health care debate are calling each other liars. It is a loaded word and a painful word.

Those in the political world know very well that issues are much too complex and complicated to be able to be described in right or wrong, yes or no categories. The reduction of future benefits is not a cut in current services. To stop the rate of growth in a thing is not to reduce the present rate of something. To increase the number of people covered by a law does not increase the burden on those already covered by that law. To say that the health care program will not cover illegal immigrants is not the same as saying that they will not get emergency health care in emergency rooms. Issues are so multi layered.

Those who express their faith in all religions are speaking of things that are not verifiable in the scientific sense but they are not speaking untruths in the scientific verifiable sense either. The professions of faith in the realities of religion are not, it seems to me, in the same category as "is it raining." If the sun is shining and I tell you it is raining, it must be a joke or it is a lie. But for me to tell you that there is a new and better reality prepared for us after death is a hope and faith proclamation that
can not be discredited as untrue any more than I can "prove" that it is true. But it does not seem to me that those faith statements should be described or attacked as lies. The Muslims who die in holy wars have been promised that they would be greeted by seven virgins as their reward. Who knows? As Blood Sweat and Tears once said, We will never know by living, only by dying will tell." I will not call it a lie. It is a version of a hope that I do not share, but I will not insult the faith by calling it a lie.

Why Would You Tell This?

I had never seen him before in my life. I was coming out of a restaurant in a small rural North Carolina town. I had been taken to lunch by the fellowship committee of the church I preached in. I was wearing a clerical collar. He asks me "Episcopalian?" No, I said. "I'm a Presbyterian, but we sometimes wear these too." I pointed to the collar.

He then proceeded to tell me that his brother had been an active member of a Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. He gave the name of the church, and I had heard of it. He said that his brother and the family had made all the arrangements to have their children baptized at that church. A couple of weeks before those baptisms were scheduled the minister announced that his wife was pregnant. The congregation was all full of warm affection for him and his wife.

Then on the day that the baptisms were scheduled; the children all dressed and the family there for the baptisms, during the announcements that came before the Baptisms the minister announced that he and his wife had had tests run on the baby and discovered it was a girl. They wanted a boy, and so had the baby aborted. The man telling me this story said his brother immediately grabbed his children, got up and left the Sanctuary and never returned.

I don't know why that man told me that story. I don't know of any reason he would not be telling me the truth. There were too "many rabbits" running around for me to know what to say and how to respond. But the question that has stayed utmost in my mind was why a minister would tell his congregation that kind of personal stuff? I realize I am very old school. When I learned preaching we were told to make ourselves the examples in a sermon about once a year. "Keep the "I" pronouns out of your sermons. Of course, the message is now to make the sermon personal, but this seems way too much personal stuff. The whole ethical debate about that minister's choice is another matter. It does not seem to me to be a matter for public proclamation during a morning worship service. Why did he have to tell them all of that? What do you think?

Do Different?

It has been observed that we live going forward, but we only find meaning in our lives by looking backward. We may not see the reason for things as they happen and as we have to face them, but when we get some distance on things and look back we see how life has been fulfilled.

Maybe it is the work of retirement to look back and see how things have gone. One obvious pattern in my life has been the constant moving. We moved about every five or six years at the beginning of my life and I ended up repeating that movement with my family. The moving made me a bit introverted, but they also made me independent and they provided lots of evidence that people do have many ways of doing things. Traditions and customs may be different but there are a lot of similarities in every place.


There has been a lot of attention given to the affirmation that we are all given a Purpose and our lives should be Purpose Driven. Looking back in my life I see that there were a number of events that moved me in a particular direction, and a number of choices that would have made possible a number of different careers. I have always thought that I might have enjoyed being a lawyer if I had not chosen ministry. I have also considered that I would have enjoyed buying run down real estate and "rehabing" it and selling it. But I have never felt that I had a single clear purpose in life; that I had one particular destiny that I had to fulfill. I had a woman tell me not long ago that we "are on this earth for a purpose and when it is done we will die." That may be so, but I have no idea what that purpose is.


My own conviction on that is that each of us has the great purpose to work to make a better community for all of us. Each of us has the calling to enrich the lives of all of us, because the time we have is short and what we can do is limited but we have a way of putting our efforts on the side of that which makes that time healthier, more enjoyable, safer for all of us or we can make it a hell of a mess for people. We can not do everything and we cannot do it all, but what we can do is something and we will find our own lives better if we do what we can.

Too much stuff

My prophet friend, Jimmy Buffet, the song writer, complained that "Now times are tough, I got too much stuff." He was complaining that the time and effort to keep up with all of it, to keep it safe, to use it, and to pay for it consumed too much of his life and so he had little time for relaxation and leisure.

So I found it very interesting to find a quote from about a hundred years ago that sounded very much the same. "People forget that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it, and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lose the sense of surprise, and surprise is the secret of joy."

Joy comes from those "ah" moments that are not expected. The great joy we get from giving a gift to somebody of something very special but which was not expected by the recipient. The joy we have when somebody compliments our work when we were not expecting it. Maybe that is why some people still do not want to know the sex of their baby before it is born.

Then there is the great delight in being able to take time to think about, to savor it, to relive it, to let it soak in. What kind of joy is it when the coach says that the great unexpected victory will have to be forgotten and the focus has to be the next game. There ought to be a bye week after those kind of games. The great pleasure comes in allowing the surprise to soak into and through our lives. To take time to immerse the soul in the event and to accept it and appreciate it. To say thanks to the world for it.

If the quote has any truth in it, then perhaps the fascination with more stuff, instant messages, constant games, texting, and trying to live 24/7, always wanting to do things and go places, ultimately works against our deepest and best joy. Be still and enjoy the surprises in your lives.