What is truth?

We can babble on and on, trying to convince ourselves about how wise and thoughtful we are, so advanced in our thinking, so far beyond those primitive people of 2,000 years ago.

But sooner or later we will run into some hard words that are either true as they stand, or else the whole enterprise is a foolish waste of time.

I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other.

That promise and that command are either true always and everywhere, or else in this building and this gathering we are engaged in a great deception.

Christ is King always and everywhere, or else we're living a fantasy.

Pilate was not equipped to handle the truth; are we?

They are not called the Ten Suggestions, but the Ten Commandments.

And with every thought and action in daily life we are banging into them, and as good theologians such as Martin Luther regularly remind us, we are brought up short by the encounter, and we are either reshaped and redirected, or else we stumble into the swamp of self-deception.

Oh, we would love for things to be other than that!

We want to be in control of things ourselves.

Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, Third President, visionary of the Louisiana Purchase, and other good things, was still caught on this point as are so many others.

He sat down with two old Bibles and a pair of scissors and literally cut them apart, and pasted the parts he liked into a blank book, discarding the rest.

Things like the miracles, Christ's divinity and oneness with the Father, and the resurrection were ...gone.

What was left he titled The Philosophy of Jesus, and he read from it regularly.

But lest we be too hard on Jefferson, we must realize that all of us play the same game; perhaps not as dramatically, but still the same old thing

Jesus may be King on Sunday morning, but not so much the rest of the time.

We may not use scissors and paste, but still we pick and choose what makes us comfortable or not.

We tend to edit out the things that are difficult to hear, the law that accuses us, the judgments that bring us up short.

In scripture we find things that are unpleasant or inconvenient.

Last week our Sunday School group was studying the speeches of Paul in Acts and we imagined what he might have said if he had been on one of those shows where folks are to give testimonials about how their lives are wonderful now that they have found Jesus: “earlier I was miserable, but with Jesus now I'm so happy with new car, new wife...etc.”

What would Paul have said?

“Earlier I was quite satisfied, educated, a rising star among the Pharisees.

Then Jesus got hold of me, and since then I have been stoned, beaten, shipwrecked, ostracized, and more; and there is more to come.

And still, I am filled with the deepest kind of joy, in being known by Jesus, and serving him.”

Here we get to the center of things.

What is truth? Jesus, Son of God, true God and true man at one and the same time, one with the Father and the Spirit in creating, saving, and making us holy, King from beginning to end.

Like it or not, convenient or not easy to take or not, there it is.

There was a church in the Berkeley California area that had in its narthex large portraits of various people such as Mahatma Ghandi, Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, and Jesus. Above them was a bronze engraving “You are all the children of God...” with Galatians 3:26 as the reference.

But when one checks out that passage, one sees immediately how the artist edited out what he didn't like.

The whole passage is “You are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ.”

I don't know what God is doing with Socrates and Ghandi; that is his business, not mine.

The commission that you and I have received is to help everyone we can know Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, resurrected on the third day, ultimate cause, ultimate future, ultimate and present reality, from before the “big bang”to after the last breath, truth for all time and every person and place.

Sure, we continue to have lots of questions, some serious, some silly.

What is heaven like?

What is God's will for my life right now?

When will Christ make his final return?

WWJD...What would Jesus drive?

Like Pilate, we have questions about truth, but we do not ask the questions with half-bored flippancy.

We open our hearts and minds to study the scriptures; we open our hearts and mouths to the food of the Holy Communion.

Remember how John's Gospel ends: These signs are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

And little by little, we will know truth; and his name is Jesus Christ, the King. Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.