Sermon: Our Truthiness - God's Reality

John 18:33-38b

Our Truthiness – God’s Reality

James Sledge                                                                              November 25, 2012

If I were forced to choose, I think I would probably say that the best show on television, certainly the funniest, is The Colbert Report on the Comedy Central.  If you’re not familiar, Stephen Colbert is a real person, but also a character, a parody of an egotistical, conservative, cable-news talk show host, and one of the better satirists since Will Rogers. 

One of the recurring features on the show is a segment called “The Word” which is always introduced with the phrase, “And that brings us to tonight’s word,” eliciting wild cheers from the studio audience.  The segment appeared in the show’s premier episode in October of 2005, and that night’s word was “truthiness.” 

Truthiness made fun of the all too common practice of cable news pundits stating as fact things that are only the speaker’s opinion.  Colbert says facts are not things you get from books but that you feel in your gut. “That’s where the truth comes from ladies and gentlemen, the gut,” says Colbert.  “Did you know that you have more nerve endings in your stomach than in your head?  Look it up. Now somebody’s gonna say, ‘I did look that up, and it’s wrong.’ Well mister, that’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time, try looking it up in your gut.”

For some reason, the word “truthiness” caught on.  You can find all sorts of articles on it.  It is actually in the New Oxford American Dictionary, with Colbert credited for it.  The American Dialect Society named it their word of the year for 2005, defining it as “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”  I suspect the word caught on because it is such a perfect word to describe what is sometimes passed off as truth.  But I wonder if it doesn’t also resonate simply because we humans have such a difficult relationship with truth.

We say that we value truth, yet we struggle actually to speak it. We feel the need to embellish it, to contextualize it, to spin it.  We just completed an election cycle where truth was often in short supply.  And it seems we both expect and accept this.  Telling lies does little to discredit a candidate, and they seem to think we would rather hear lies than truth.  And maybe they’re right.  After all we lie about how fast we were going with the cop pulls us over.  The football receiver insists he caught the ball even though it clearly bounced off the ground.  We pad or fudge our résumés because everyone does it.  Maybe the line from the movie is right.  We can’t handle the truth.

Not that this is anything new.  In our gospel today, Pilate is unimpressed by Jesus’ claims to be about the truth.  Pilate knows what a slippery thing truth is.  He knows about truthiness, even if he doesn’t know the word.  “What is truth?” he asks.

But Jesus says his kingdom is about truth.  He came into the world to reveal truth, and those who belong to the truth heed his voice.  Truth is a big deal in John’s gospel. In the prologue where it speaks of Jesus as the Word made flesh, it also says, The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 

John’s gospel is also big on the categories of light and darkness.  The world often prefers darkness,  “But,” Jesus says, “those who do the truth come to the light.”

Our gospel reading today is a part of one of the more artfully constructed scenes in the Bible. It’s sometimes referred to as Jesus’ trial before Pilate. But if you look our reading at the entire trial scene, you will see that Pilate is not in charge at all. He is on trial more than Jesus.  Pilate scurries back and forth between Jesus and the Jewish authorities outside.  By title, Pilate is the most powerful man in Jerusalem, but in fact, he is trapped.  He is captive to his fears about what might happen if he doesn’t execute Jesus. He is trapped by political expediency.  He is living a lie.

Jesus offers him an escape, a chance to come clean, to be honest about the proceedings.  “Do you ask me if I’m a king on your own, or did others tell you?”  But the truth is too scary for Pilate, and so he changes the subject, asking a new question. “What did you do?”

Jesus doesn’t really answer him, but instead goes back to the question of kingship. His kingdom is not worldly, not the sort that threatens Pilate’s position, at least not in any traditional way.  As proof Jesus points out that no followers try to prevent his being handed over.  No, his kingdom is not from this world.

At this point, I think we often misunderstand Jesus, though I don’t know that Pilate does.  Jesus does not say that his kingdom is somewhere else, as in off in heaven.  Rather he says that its origins are heavenly.  But it’s quite clear that this kingdom exists here and now. It is about truth, and  those who belong to the truth listen to Jesus and are part of that kingdom already.

That is too much for Pilate. Jesus has now twice invited him to step into the truth, to admit who he truly is, what motivates him, what traps and controls him, but Pilate is not interested.  He dismisses Jesus and his reign of truth.  “What is truth?”

Truth is about reality.  We tend to think of truth as merely about accuracy, a measure of reliability or dependability.  We all know that the statement, “The sun will rise tomorrow,” is true.  It is completely reliable and dependable.  Other statements are less so.  “I’ll get right on that.”  “It’s almost done.”  “It will be ready tomorrow.”

But in the Bible, and especially in John’s gospel, truth is much more than a measure of reliability. Truth is an understanding, a reality even, a way of perceiving and living that is in tune with God.  John’s gospel can speak of doing the truth, meaning to live in conformity with God’s will.  And Jesus is the embodiment of this.  This is why we can speak of Jesus as the Word made flesh, as Incarnation.  His presence is revelation.  It reveals truth, the true nature of life, life with God and with others.  And that truth creates a kind of crisis.  That’s what happens with Pilate.  He encounters truth, but he is caught up in the ways of the world.  He can’t handle the truth, and so he dismisses it.  “What is truth?”

Truth is about the nature of reality, and so is Stephen Colbert’s truthiness. Truthiness isn’t simply a refusal to believe facts I don’t like.  It is the construction of a reality that feels right to me, a reality that conforms to what I want and what I feel “in my gut.”  Truthiness is much more powerful than any intellectual understanding of truth because it defines my world and governs how I live.

Like Pilate, we are all captive to the ways of the world on some level. We are governed by its truthiness so that it is difficult for us fully to embrace Jesus and his ways.  Our guts tell us that it can’t be right that we will find true life, abundant and eternal life, in conforming completely to God’s will.  We’re not convinced that we need to be transformed, that we need to reorient our lives so that they are radically turned toward God and others.

But because God so loves the world, because God so loves us, Jesus continues to confront our truthiness with his divine reality, longing for us to trust him.  “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth – to God’s reality, to the true nature of all things.  Everyone who belongs to the truth – to God’s reality, to the kingdom that the world cannot yet see – listens to my voice.”

Truthiness… or reality?..