23rd Sunday, 1997

Truth, Love, and the Cross

The reading today is almost a continuity with the readings from last Sunday. Remember, last Sunday was the feast of "The Triumph of the Cross", and it is kind of odd because that feast did not follow the liturgical year but because of its importance they stuck it in and cancelled out the Sunday reading that should have been there.

But clearly, today's readings are kind of resonating with that notion of the centrality of the Cross and because the Cross is this elusive, and to be eluded reality in so much in the life of the church, I think it is worthwhile to spend some more time examining it. I would like to propose an anecdote to get this thing started. About thirty years ago a Protestant minister friend and I were going to be doing a wedding together and I knew this guy very well, and we had done lots of things together in the city where I was working. We were sitting, preparing with the couple, and I heard this guy say to them, "well, of course you know we cannot talk about truth and love together", or something very much like that. Even at the time I heard that I was severely jolted, although, I did not say anything. But for all these years I have not forgotten that kind of thing because it is not an unusual attitude: love is one thing, truth is another thing. That sort of notion comes from a kind of Richard Rogers or Walt Disney school of theology. It certainly does not have anything to do with the gospel but I know how it works. We are all aware that we fall in love with love. And it does not take too long after the first glow of infatuation begins to fade that we become vaguely aware, maybe, of falling in love more with our own ideas of the other person rather than the other person as she, or he, really is. Or falling in love with our own set of needs and then simply projecting those needs onto the other, and saying "ah there it is folks, it is all wonderful".

There is a wonderful line from a novel I have been trying to remember, but cannot, where a wife says "I woke up one morning and found myself sleeping beside a stranger". The stranger happened to be her husband of twenty-five years. Not an unusual phenomena, I think. And I think today that the problem in all those instances is the same: where is the truth? This problematic should be fairly clear with just a little thought: if you do not love somebody as they really are whom do you love? If you do not know that other that you seek to love, and if you do not really try to know who that other is... if you do not try as hard as you can to come to the truth of that other, however elusive and however partial our knowledge is, what is love? It is not love, it is just another form of self-indulgence. And if we do not give ourselves as truly as we can to the other, what is going on? We keep missing each other and this is a huge problem. Love is the hardest thing in the world and to systematically separate love from truth make it not only hard but impossible.

This becomes a greater difficulty for us who live in the twentieth-century, I think, a society where the pervasiveness of untruth, half truth, distorted truth, is larger and more widespread than, probably, ever in the history of the world because I think television does it. There was an extraordinary program last week on PBS called "Affluenza". Scott Simon, the narrator, said at one point, "In the course of our normal human life-span today we will have spent one full year of our life looking at ads, absorbing ads". It has been known for years that everyday just walking around London, Ontario reading the newspaper, picking up the Gazette, whatever, we see three-thousand ads a day. Ads are just one instance of the "big lie" coloring our world. Where else is this kind of facade? The government? Businesses? Even Academics have been known to lie. Even academic institutions have been know to promote themselves at the cost of truth. Even the Roman church. And I would like to spend just a couple of minutes talking about the Roman church because there is an urgency in this question of truth telling, in the context of the church, that does not obtain with the Bank of Montreal, or Canadian Tire, or even the University of Western Ontario.

I am sure everybody remembers the sad history of the former Archbishop of Halifax who had to resign because, for months and months and months, he hid the fact, or denied the fact that there was sexual abuse of young people going on in his diocese, or he blamed the young people themselves. My home diocese of Springfield, Illinois has a number of priests in jail for this activity. The Archdiocese of Chicago, whose seminary I attended, has a number of priests in jail and although Chicago is a little better than most, in almost every instance there has been denial. They are always denying. As recently as a month ago the Archdiocese of Dallas was hit with a lawsuit and a priest was convicted. Now the diocese owes twenty-two victims of a priest one-hundred-and-forty-million dollars. And all kinds of diocese' have become nearly bankrupt from paying off victims, quietly, out of court. What was going on in Dallas? This individual's actions were known, even before he went into the seminary. All kinds of priests in the diocese knew.

But is it just in the sexual abuse of either women and children? I do not think so. What about the priests who have absconded with parish funds, these double bookkeepers? What I am getting at should be very clear. If the church is the place where we are supposed to learn how to love, then what is going on here? If the church is incapable of saying the truth, or listening to the truth and hearing the truth, what are we doing? Furthermore, it is not just the Roman church. We say, as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, that religion is supposed to put us in touch with the real, like nothing else is. Yet if we outright lie, can we learn to love? Can we learn to let ourselves be loved? It is more urgent, it is a more critical question as to whether the church lies, or lets itself be lied to knowingly. Now what does this have to do with the Cross? For example, an individual like Socrates got killed for suggesting to people that they are not thinking, or that they are lying about something...He is one of the first of a long list of martyrs to the truth...Let me urge the question again. If everybody fakes it, how do we get from faking it to not faking it? There lies the Cross. This is what I am suggesting. Anybody who has tried to urge themselves to the point where they can say the truth, or hear the truth, knows what the Cross is. That is, telling the truth is a form of dying to oneself, for the sake of new life. Anybody who knows, who has been able to crawl out from one under their own lies, knows what resurrection from the dead is like. This is what we are talking about and that is the Cross.

Why did Jesus get killed? Precisely because he told the truth all the time. Precisely because he outstripped the canton, the narrowness and the hypocrisy of his own society and his own religion. So, there we are. That is the state of the question, as we used to say. The questions we ask ourselves. The questions we ask our church and the questions we ask of God when we finally go to pray.

What do we do when we pray? I believe that we pray to be able to come before God and each other as truthfully as we can, and as always you cannot do something with God that you do not do with yourself and with other people. So, is there a connection between truth, love, and the Cross? Absolutely.

To other sermons

RT 13/10/