Our scripture today is Genesis 31 verses 3 through 5 and 14
through 18 selected verses from a larger story.
And I want to give you the context before I read the verses
because the verses will make it make a little more sense.
So Jacob has been working for his father-in-law Laban for for
well over 14 years now. And Laban's wealth has been
decreasing and Jacob's wealth has been increasing.
And Laban is now having a less than happy attitude toward
Jacob. They made a deal that Jacob
takes care of all of the tending of the flocks.
He ever sees all of that and and all of the breeding of the
flocks, he ever sees all of that.
And they made a deal that after an X certain period of time,
Jacob would get to keep all of the goats and sheep that were
speckled, spotted or striped, and Laban would keep all of them
that were solid white colored. And, and suddenly, and Bible
tells us through God's intervention, there's a lot of
speckled, spotted and striped livestock being born.
And so Laban's flocks are shrinking.
Jacob's flocks are increasing. Laban is not happy about this.
And God appears to Jacob in a dream and says, it's time for
you to go home, go back to the land of your father, face your
your past and but it's time to go back.
And so Jacob is concerned at this point that his wives,
Rachel and Leah will not want to leave their home.
And so he goes to talk to them. So that's the context here.
Then the Lord said to Jacob, Go back to the land of your
father's and to your relatives, and I will be with you.
So Jacob sent word to Rachel and Leah to come out to the fields
where his flocks were. He said to them, I see that your
father's attitude toward me is not what it was before, but the
God of my father has been with me.
Then Rachel and Leah replied, Do we still have any share in the
inheritance of our father's estate?
Does he not regard us as foreigners?
Not only has he sold us, but he has used up what was paid for
us. Surely all the wealth that God
took away from our Father belongs to us and our children.
So do whatever God has told you. Then Jacob put his children and
his wives on camels and he drove all his livestock ahead of him,
along with all the goods he had accumulated in Padan Aram to go
to his father Isaac in the land of Canaan.
May the Lord add his blessing to the reading and hearing of his
word, talking about truth or consequences today.
There was one. Once Upon a time there was a a
husband and a wife. They've been married for a
number of years. They were driving down the road
together. The lights flashed in the
rearview mirror. The husband was driving.
He pulled over the the patrolman walked up to the window and
said, Sir, I suppose you know why I pulled you over.
And the husband said, I'm, I'm afraid I don't know why you
pulled me over the officer, the officer said, well, you were
doing 75 in a 55. And the husband said, no, no,
no, no, no, I, I couldn't have been driving more than 65 miles
an hour. And his wife said, no, honey,
you were doing 80. And he looked at her sternly,
need to look back to the office. And the officer said, well, and
since I've pulled you over already, I'm going to need to
give you a citation for your broken taillight.
And the husband said, I have a broken taillight that must have
just happened. I didn't know anything about it.
And his wife said, no, honey, you've been complaining about
that light for weeks. Husband looked at her again, and
this time he shook his finger at her.
And he said, look, woman, you need to shut up or I'm going to
shut you up. The officer said, hey, hey, hey,
hey, hold on. He leaned in and he looked at
the wife and he said, does he always talk to you this way?
His wife said, no, officer, only when he's drunk.
There can be such a thing as too much honesty, right?
That, however, I am convinced is the exception rather than the
rule. Yes, there are those times to
save people's dignity and save people's feelings.
We might tell them that their haircut is better than it really
is or their clothes fit better than they really do.
But those kinds of things that help people help guard people's
dignity. Those are those are you know,
no, we're you know, we're not talking about that today.
We're talking about honest to goodness deception.
Maybe that's not the best way to phrase that lies and dishonesty
and this whole series of events that we've been looking at in
Genesis are are riddled with lies and dishonesty and the
consequences of these lies told for short term game.
The consequences are long term and devastating.
When we look at wrong button, when we look at Jacob and Laban,
they both have a legacy of lies that wreaked havoc in their
lives. Laban Laban, who had two
daughters, Leah, the oldest, Rachel the youngest, has his
relative. Jacob comes to town, falls in
love with Rachel, asked to marry her.
He says, oh sure, just work for me for seven years.
Jacob works for seven years. And on the wedding night, Laban
switches daughters and sends Leah in instead, deceives his
son-in-law and uses his daughters in a deceptive way.
He says, well, you can still marry Rachel.
You just got to work for another seven years.
And so Laban's lie got him seven extra years of free labor from
his son-in-law, Jacob. And now years later, Jacob is
leaving with great wealth. God's told him to go back to
Canaan, and he's concerned that his wives won't want to go.
And so he goes and he invites them all the way.
They notice he didn't go back to where they're, you know, they
were all their tents and everything were set up.
He invites his wives to come out to the field, get them as far
away from Laban as possible and says, hey, God says I need to go
back to Canaan. They're like, fine, What's our
father done for us? He's disowned us.
He's treated us worse than foreigners.
He deceived and he lied and he sold us, and then he squandered
what he got for us. Laban's lies cost him his
relationship with his daughters. Laban's lies was about to cost
him his relationship with his grandchildren.
And by now he had a lot of grandchildren.
All because he wanted to get ahead.
All because he lied. All because he deceived.
Relationships were broken. It's a legacy.
Let's just read that first
again, Rachel and Leah's response to Jacob's concerns
about whether they would want to leave their father.
Not only has he sold us, but he has used up what he paid for us.
Surely all the wealth that God took away from our Father
belongs to us and our children. So do whatever God has told you
to do. Broken relationships with his
own family. It was Laban's leg.
The legacy of Laban's lies. Jacob had a legacy of lies as
well. He, he, he could be legitimately
upset about Laban lying to him, but he really wasn't in a
position to throw stones because he was definitely living in a
glass house. He had lied.
He had deceived his own father to steal the blessing that his
father meant to give to his older brother, Esau.
Isaac was going to bless Esau. He he wanted Esau to prepare a
very special meal before that and and Esau had to go hunting
to get the meat to do it. And while he was out, Isaac, I'm
sorry. Jacob dressed up like with the
help of his mother, disguised himself as a brother, went into
their father who was blind, pretended to be his brother, and
stole through that deception the blessing that Isaac had intended
to give to Esau. He gave to Jacob instead a
blessing that placed Jacob over Esau and authority and position
and power and the covenant of God.
Now God had already promised that to Jacob, and he told Ray
or told his mother Rebecca about that before he was born.
But rather than trusting God to do what God was going to do,
they lied, they deceived. And it was the same kind of
response. Shattered relationships, a
family torn apart. This was Esau's response.
Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his
father had given him. He said to himself, the days of
mourning for my father are near. That is, my dad's going to be
dead soon. Then I will kill my brother
Jacob. And so Jacob fled for his life.
Legacy of lies. A legacy of deception, tearing
apart families, destroying relationships.
Where there should have been love, honesty, peace and
harmony, there was violence. The threats of violence use
using people instead of loving people, deceiving people instead
of being real with people and that broke their families and
very, very tragic ways. One of the things I love about
the Bible is that that even the heroes of the Bible are not
painted as perfect. We see them as flawed, broken
human beings, just like we're flawed, broken human beings.
And God can and does work through that.
And with that, we'll talk about that a little more next week.
But but here we see, you know, these broken people living very
real lives and having the same kind of consequences that lying
and deception have today. Broken relationships, broken
families, this business of deception and dishonesty, it's
an increasing problem in our culture.
I don't think people lie anymore now than they used to.
I think people are people, and people have been people for
since the Garden of Eden. It's just we've got better tools
for lying than we used to. We can do it a lot more
effectively than we used to be able to.
Part of the problem and now and I think probably also in the
past is we sometimes glamorize lying and, and we will, we will
glorify really, really good liars.
You ever you ever hear of Frank Abagnale Junior?
Does that name ring a bell to you?
It was a movie about his life a few years ago called Catch Me If
You Can, starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Really good movie. If you haven't seen it, a lot of
fun. It's got Tom Hanks and Leonardo
DiCaprio in it. It's going to be a good movie.
Frank Abagnale Junior, a real guy, a con artist.
He started off passing checks, bad checks and making money that
way. And, and he went on to he, he,
he through deception, got a pilot's uniform from a major
airline, pretended to be a pilot with that airline and got free
passage on airplanes back and forth across the country for
years. He, he, he took the bar exam.
He never became a lawyer. And he took the bar exam in one
of the southern States and practiced law without a license
for years. He pretended to be a doctor and
worked in a hospital for years, actually providing medical and
health care to people. And you can hear him talk about
that. He, he went to prison for a
while. He got out and he became an
agent and worked with the FBI to catch fraudsters and to help
them find people that were committing fraud.
And then he went on the talk show circuit.
There were clips on YouTube of him on The Tonight Show with
Johnny Carson entered Carson interviewing him and telling
about his escapades and he became a folk hero for all of
these things. Now.
Now, here's the irony is Frank Abingdale Junior is a liar and
he lied about his history as a con artist.
He passed some bad checks. He went to jail, but once people
fact checked his book, back when the book came out, people did a
little less fact checking than they do now.
Once they fact checked his book, they discovered that there was 0
evidence he had ever posed as an airline pilot and gotten free
rides across the country. There was 0 evidence they had
ever been posing as a doctor, working in a hospital and giving
healthcare, and there was 0 evidence they did ever.
Not only had he not taken the bar, he'd never pretended to be
a lawyer and to see people that way.
And while he worked as a consultant a little bit for the
FBI, he was never an agent with the FBI.
He lied about his lies, made a lot of money doing it later made
a lot of money doing it. But, but that's not something,
it's a good movie. I can't lie to you.
It's a really good movie, but that's not something that should
be celebrated. Lying to people and conning
people hurts people. Abby Ellen will tell you that
she wrote a book a few years ago called Duped, and she had her
own experience of a con artist, a man who came into her life and
lied about his past. And there was enough truth in
his lies that even though she her career was an investigative
journalist, it took her months and even after she was engaged
to him before she finally unraveled the lives and was
devastated in that relationship. This man whom she had loved,
whom she had shared her life with for a time, had deceived
her so thoroughly. She felt humiliated and
disgraced and ashamed, even though she hadn't done anything
wrong. She just believed someone who
was a really good liar, and she writes about that in her book
and how people's lies and deceptions devastate people that
they're close to. And it's not an uncommon
problem. It's a very common problem.
We see that in the world around us and relationships around us,
people that simply don't tell the truth or they only tell
enough of the truth to to get what they want.
And they use lies and deceptions and half truths to manipulate
and control and gain a temporary advantage at the cost of a long
term relationship of trust and it hurts people.
The challenge now is our tools for lying are so good and so
effective that even now on when when we get information
digitally, it is very, very difficult, sometimes impossible
to tell whether what we are seeing and hearing is real or
fake. Now, sometimes you can,
sometimes there are context clues.
I, I, although I was fooled a few times before, I realized,
yeah, probably there aren't eagles flying into people's.
When, when I saw the video of the eagle grabbing the toddler
and lifting it up in the air while the dog was holding on to
the toddler's pants to keep the And I was like, I don't think
this is real. Was it real?
Those are funny. Those are silly.
At the end of the day, those don't hurt anyone.
Their exercises and video making.
But there was a video out on YouTube now by oh, I should have
checked it. Feynman.
Did anyone know what's the There's a physicist, very famous
physicist. His last name is Feynman.
I can't remember his first name. I blanked out on it this
morning. I'm still anyone know?
That's all right. Feynman.
Richard Richard Feynman. That's it.
Very famous physicist from decades ago.
And there's a video on YouTube that that was him explaining why
lightspeed is the upper limit of speed.
And now it's not really what we think it is and all of that sort
of thing. And I started listening to it
because I'm interested in that kind of stuff.
And, and, and I'd heard of Richard Feynman.
I was listening to it. That sounds a little odd.
And it went down into the description and it was all fake.
It's all fake. His voice had been synthesized
and according to one comment that that at most 85% of the
video were things that Feynman had actually said are written
and the rest was made-up. Within a few years, none of us
will be able to tell the difference and when we when we
watch the news. There was a what MSNBC did that
recently. It was a one of the folks killed
up in Minnesota, I think, and they doctored his picture to
make him better looking so people would be more sympathetic
to him. Now, now that for one hand
leaves me concerned that if I ever get killed, I don't think
that if, if you have to be good looking to have sympathy when
you're killed. I'm in trouble.
I'm in big trouble. But but they and and they almost
got away with it made him look better.
Just changed, changed how we looked just a little bit
doctored those photos. Within a few years we won't be
able to tell. We won't be able to tell.
And that's, that's a, there's a lot to be concerned about with
that as as our lives are increasingly online and
increasingly digital, as the information we received is
increasingly digital, to be able to distinguish truth from
falsehood, lies from reality, it's going to get harder and
harder and harder and more and more important.
But because of the nature of that, because of the reality of
it, and it's there and there's nothing any of us can do about
it. That's just the world we're
living into right now where it's we can lie that effectively that
we won't know. Now.
Now you can get robo calls. I haven't had this, I haven't
experienced this yet, at least as far as I know.
But you can get a call from someone who you know, and their
voice has been perfectly duplicated, but it's all faked,
asking for money, help for this, that and the other.
Anyone experienced those yet? I've heard about them.
I haven't received one of those calls yet.
You've gotten one. OK.
Yeah.
It's it's it's nuts.
And this will continue to have an increasingly challenging toll
on our group psychology, our emotions, our relationships, as
it becomes harder and harder to know what's real and what's not.
And this is the world that we're living into.
This is the mission field that we're living into.
And so this is part of Our Calling as a church.
And Jesus, although it was, you know, he lived thousands of
years before deep fakes. Jesus spoke to us and has
already given us vision and direction in this regard.
And there's more at stake here than just don't tell lies.
There's more at stake here than just you know.
Thou shalt not bear false witness.
While that's important, this, this notion of being able to
trust other people in our culture and society, how do we
trust? How do we know what's real?
How can we have a culture if we can't trust and we don't know
what's real? How can we have a society?
How can we have a community that's more than just following
rules? That's how do we do life
together? We don't know where all of this
is going. We don't know what tomorrow
holds. But we know who holds tomorrow.
We know who holds the future. We know who holds our hand and
and Jesus is already there. None of this is surprising.
God and Jesus has a plan. He's got a purpose, He's got a
direction. There's a place that God is
leading all of us in all of this and we don't know what it's
going to be. We don't know what the next, we
don't know what the next five years is going to look like,
much less the next 45 years. But we do know this, that Jesus
is already there and he already knows.
This is the same situation the disciples were in.
Disciples the night before Jesus was going to die and Jesus keeps
telling him he's been telling him for weeks now I'm going to
go to Jerusalem. I'm going to be betrayed.
They're going to kill me on the 3rd day.
I'm going to rise from the dead. And they kept thinking he's
talking in parables, he's talking in riddles.
They had no idea that he was given the literal truth and they
were so confused. And he's telling that and
they're like, I'm going to go into prayer place for you and
that where I am, you may also be.
And Thomas says, how are we going to get there?
We don't know where you're going.
How do we know the way there? And that's the situation we're
in. We don't know where Jesus is
going. We don't know where our
culture's going. We don't know what the church is
going to look like in 10/15/25 years.
We don't know what schools are going to look like.
We don't know what politics is going to look like.
We don't know what entertainment media is going to look like.
We don't know what our jobs are going to look like.
We don't know any of that 152530 years from now, but we have the
same answer now that Jesus gave Thomas.
Then Thomas said Lord we don't know where you're going so how
can we know the way? And Jesus answered, I am the
way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father
except through me. If you really know me, you'll
know my Father as well from now on.
You do know him and you have seen him.
Jesus says I am the way. That's all the GPS we need.
That's all the road map we need to go into an uncertain future.
Jesus is the way and and Jesus is also the truth and that's a
foundational thing for us. Lies and deceptions are the tool
of the devil. Lies and deceptions are the tool
of the enemy. And we cannot do the Father's
work with the devil's tools. And so Our Calling as a church,
as we move into this world where it's harder and harder for
people to trust, is for the church to be the one place and
maybe the only place. But for the church to be a place
that is is a haven of honesty and authenticity where folks can
say, you know what? I don't know where if I'll get
the truth and I'll get what's real anyplace else.
But I know at Rock Springs United Methodist Church, those
folks are real. Those folks are honest.
And when I go there, I know that what I see is what I get.
They're not. They're not out there just
pushing a brand. They're not out there pretending
to be something they're not. They're not out there putting on
a show. They're not out there trying to
be fair. They're just real folks who love
God and who love each other. And they'll love me too.
And I know they'll love me just as I am because they love each
other just as they are. And that's who we are called to
be and how we are called to be honest and authentic.
And that can be so hard. It can be so hard.
The the temptation. There's a song from a few years
back, you know, the group Casting Crowns.
They had a song a number of years ago called Stained Glass
Masquerade about how people put on their Sunday best before
going to church. And they're pretending
everything's OK when it's not. They're pretending their lives
are different than they are. Better, more perfect, perfect,
less flawed, less broken. And and we cannot afford to be
that kind of church. No church could really afford to
be that kind of church, because we'll never be as good at
dishonesty and deception as the world is.
We we just won't. They got more money and better
tools than we do. They just do.
It's like, you know, we'll never have as good a music.
If we if we had Jelly roll maybe as our worship leader, then we
would, you know, but but we're never going to have Jelly roll
as our worship leader. We're never we're there's always
going to be able to. We'll be able to get better
music out in the world. People be able to get better
preaching. There's always better preaching
that's out there. There's always better teaching
that's out there. There's always fancier buildings
with, with, you know, you know, more modern.
All of that's always going to be there.
We're never going to be able to compete.
If we try to turn ourselves into a brand and market ourselves as
a brand and, and, and put on a good show, the world will always
win that battle. But, but the world has already
reached a point where it can't be honest anymore or it has to
be deceptive. They're always covering stuff
up. They're always, and you see it
in in individuals online influencers are not people.
They're a brand and they know that and they present themselves
as a brand. And that's why they have such
fear of truths from their past coming up, because it will
destroy their brand image. And then they lose their
sponsors and they lose their money and they lose their income
and they lose their influence and they lose their money.
And so the brand is what's matters, not the person, not the
reality, not the authenticity. But we in the church, we don't
have to worry about all of that because our God already loves us
just the way we are, flaws and warts and brokenness and all.
Our God already cares about us just the way we are.
So we don't have to put on the front.
We don't have to play the stained glass masquerade.
We can have the courage to be honest.
We can have the courage to be ourselves.
We can have the courage to let others be the same.
And the church can be one of the few, maybe the only place in the
world where people can come and say, I know at least things are
real there. I know at least the people are
real there. And that's what we're called to
be. Now, there is such a thing as
too much honesty. And sometimes we got to say, oh,
the haircut looks great. Even if the haircut doesn't look
great, We got to say that, oh, yes, those clothes fit
perfectly. They're very slimming even when
they're not those. That's guarding people's
dignity. But we need to have the courage
to be honest. I got time for one more story
and I'm I'm was hoping I would have time to get this one in,
too. It was that Once Upon a time
there was a king and a very great and vast Kingdom many
years ago. And the king had no children and
the king was aging and he knew he was not quite as effective as
he used to be. And it was time to name and
train a successor. And he wanted someone young,
someone young who would be able to live and lead the Kingdom for
many, many years. And, and, and so the king
decided that to choose a successor, he would call all of
the young people of the Kingdom, all of the youth of the Kingdom
together. And he would give them all the
same challenge. He gave them a seed.
He said, take the seed home and plant it.
And a year from now, everybody come back and show me what
you've grown. So everyone got their seed.
They went home, they planted them in a pot.
They put in the soil, they watered, they fertilized, they
grew. And there was young, one young
man that just a few weeks before that one year anniversary when
they were all to bring their plants back, he looked at his
mom and his mom. It's not nothing's grown.
It's been almost a year and nothing's grown.
He did everything he was supposed to do.
He watered it. He's fertilized, he kept it in
the sunlight. All of the things he was
supposed to do in the sea didn't grow.
And he's like, I'm I'm not going, mom, this is
embarrassing. I'll be humiliated.
I'm not going to take this to the king in front of all those
people, people I know and people I don't from all over, all over
the Kingdom. And his mom said no, no, you
need to go, you need to go. This is important.
Just explain to the king what happened.
Sometimes seeds don't grow. Just explain what happened.
The king will understand. So the son, much against his own
better judgement and and and desire, he went and he took his
empty pot and we got there into the the, the gathering space at
the palace. His worst nightmares came true
as he looked around and he saw people with these amazing
plants, some of them in pots that had to get big pots and
bring them in on carts. And some of them were were giant
vegetables, other were were small fruit trees that were
already bearing fruit. Some of them were were were
beautiful flowers and these giant, you know, floral things.
It was just incredible. And young person after young
person had these wonderful plants and pots of all different
sizes, and they were lining up to present to the king these
things they had grown. And the king was looking and he
didn't seem particularly pleased or particularly distressed at
anyone. But every once in a while he
would look up and look around the room and finally caught the
eye of the young man and he noticed him carrying an empty
pot. King snapped his fingers and
said Hey you boy come on up here and bring your pot.
Boy was now he was like maybe I can wait till last and no one
will see but he's making me walk up in front of everyone.
And he was humiliated. It was beet red and he was
embarrassed and he walked up to the front of the line and he
held up his empty pot before the king and the king said you
didn't grow anything. The boy said I tried Sir, I put
the seed in, I watered, I fertilized, I kept it in the sun
but nothing grew. I'm very sorry that I failed
you, Your Highness, the King said.
I think I found my successor. I said, see, last year when I
gave away those seeds, I boiled every single seed before I gave
it away. None of them could grow
anything. And you're the only one that had
the courage to be honest and bring me back the seed that I
gave you. This is what Jesus calls us to.
The courage to be honest. The courage to be ourselves.
The courage to let down the masks, put the stained glass
masquerade behind us. The courage to be who we really
are, flaws and warts and brokenness and all successes and
hopes and and achievements as well.
All of it all mixed together. The good, the bad and the ugly.
The courage to be honest. The courage to be authentic
because Jesus loves us as we are and other folks need to see us
doing the same thing, loving ourselves and loving each other
as we are, so that they know they don't have to put on a show
when they come here either. They can be themselves too, and
they'll be loved too. And they'll be received too
honestly and authentically in Jesus name.
Amen. Amen.