There was a man and a woman. They were driving down the road.
They've been married for a while.
He was driving. She was in the passenger seat.
And as they were going down the road, the lights flashed in the
rear view mirror, the blue and red.
And the husband pulled over and the patrolman walked up and he
came to the window and said, so I guess you know why I pulled
you over. The man said, no, officer, I'm
sorry, I don't know why you pulled me over.
The officer said you were doing 75 in a 55.
The man said, officer, no, no, no, there's no way.
I was going above 65 miles an hour.
His wife leaned over and said you were going 80 miles an hour.
My husband glared at her and the patrolman said, well, since I
pulled you over, I'm going to have to give you a citation for
your broken taillight as well. And husband said broken
taillight, that I didn't know I had a broken taillight.
That must have just happened. And his wife said, what are you
talking about? That tail lights been broken for
weeks glared at her again. This time he said, now look
woman, you better shut your mouth or I'm going to shut it
for you. The officer said, now hold on
Sir, shouldn't talk to her that way.
And the officer leaned in and said, Ma'am, does he talk to you
like this all the time? She said, no officer, only when
he's drunk. There, there is such a thing as
too much honesty, right? Sometimes, Sometimes, sometimes
it's good to tell a little white lie.
Sometimes you tell people the haircut looks great, even if the
haircut doesn't look great. Sometimes you say those clothes
fit even if they're a little snug.
I don't know. That's just, we do those kinds
of things at time to protect people's dignity and and not to
shame them in some way. And I think that's, I think
that's a godly thing, a good thing.
But today we're talking about a whole different category of
deception, which are lies and deceptions that are told for our
convenience, for a short term gain that might have long term
consequences that are negative. Leyben and Jacob both understood
this. They both had that as part of
their part of their lives. This, this legacy of lies they
were, they were well acquainted with deception.
Laban who, who was Rachel and Leah's father, you know, and
Jacob got there and he fell in love with the younger Laban's
younger daughter Rachel and said I want to marry your daughter,
work for me for seven years then you can marry my daughter. 7
years of labour came, the wedding night came and Laban
deceived Jacob and sent in his older daughter Leah to be
married to him instead. And so Leah married Jacob.
Jacob was angry, Leah was not happy either, and Rachel
certainly was not happy. But Layman said oh worries just
work for me another seven years and you can go ahead and marry
my daughter Rachel as well was lies, lies and deception.
And then years later, Jacob who had been again working for well
over 14 years for Layman, I think by the time of the events
of the story, it's close to 20 years.
And and his flocks, Jacob's flocks have grown dramatically
and Labans have shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.
And Bible tells us that was divine intervention that God was
doing that. And then Laban was now not real
happy with Jacob. And he decided, well, Jacob had
a dream in which God said it's time for you to go back home,
time to go back to Canaan, time to go back to your father Isaac.
And Jacob was worried that his wives would not want to leave
their father and this place where they had lived their whole
lives. And so we called them out to the
fields where he was, and he explained what God had said to
him. And this was their response.
Not only has he sold us, Leah and Rachel said, 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. You want to leave here.
That is fine with us. Our Father is nothing to us.
Our Father sold us and then squandered what He got for us.
Whatever we can get from him now, whatever you can get for
Him for us to use, we're OK with that.
We are happy to leave and take as much of His wealth with us as
we can. Laban's lies, while giving him a
short term gain cost him a relationship.
Multiple relationships. Relationships with his
daughter's, relationships with his grandkids.
Laban's lies broke his family and he paid the long term
consequences for that. Jacob had a right to be upset
with Laban for his deceptions in his lies, but Jacob certainly
couldn't throw stones because Jacob was definitely living in a
glass house. Jacob was there because of his
own lies. God had promised his mother that
he, the younger of the two twins, Jacob and Esau, he would
rule over the older. The older would serve the
younger, but they weren't patient.
They didn't trust God enough to let God make that happen.
And so when Isaac was old and blind and wanted to give his
blessing to his oldest son, Esau, when Esau had gone out in
the fields, Jacob, you know, Isaac had said, hey, I want you
to prepare this Stew for me. And he knew what kind of animal
he saw went out to hunt and kill the animal to prepare the Stew.
And in the meantime, with his mother's help, Jacob disguised
himself as his brother, went into his father's tent
pretending to be his brother, deceived his father, and his
father gave Jacob his brother's blessing, A blessing of wealth,
adult blessing of power, a blessing of legacy, of ruling
over his younger brother. This lie also for short term
gain, also showing a lack of faith in God to care for him and
also destroying relationships. This is how Esau responded.
Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his
father had given him. And Esau said to himself, the
days of mourning for my father are near.
My father is an old man and will die soon.
In other words, then I will kill my brother Jacob.
That's about as broken as a family can get right there.
Short term gain, short term benefit leads to the long term
shattering of families and relationship and trust.
Simple fact is the common and increasingly challenging problem
of deception. Deception is I don't know the
people lie anymore today than they used to lie.
Our tools for lying are much better now than they used to be.
We've got really good tools for lying and deceiving people.
Now you can get a phone call and hear the voice of someone you
know very well asking you for help.
Just send money. Just send a card.
Just wire some cash. And it's someone whose voice you
know and its voice you recognize.
But it's a total fake computer generated.
Now we can watch videos on TV and not know whether they're
real or not. They're that good.
Most of them are still, you can tell that at least the at least
the one I, I don't know. The ones I can tell, I can tell.
Maybe there's some on there that I can't tell.
Within five years we won't be able to tell, period.
There's videos out there now that are relatively harmless.
Animals doing crazy or silly things or babies doing crazy or
silly things that if you think about it, yeah, this is probably
not real. But when you realize people can
do that with any news story at any time now, they can make
anything look real. They can make anyone say
anything, anyone do anything in the digital world.
And it's so real, we can't tell the difference.
And if that's happening across the country or across the world,
how do we know? How do we know what's real and
what's not? The level of lying and
deception? Again, I don't know that there's
any more of it now than there ever used to be, but it is so
much easier in the digital world to lie and deceive, and so much
harder to really get to the truth of what's going on.
One of the challenges is that sometimes we glorify this kind
of lying, deception and fraud. You ever heard of Frank Abigail
Junior? He's a con man was very popular
a few years ago. They made him.
He wrote a book, wrote an auto. He went to prison, got him for,
you know, passing bad checks, went to prison for a few years,
wrote an autobiography and telling about his exploits and
and owning up to all sorts of things he done pretending to be
a doctor, working in a hospital and providing healthcare to
people. That movie they made about him
was Catch Me if you can, Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.
It's a really good movie. Pretending to be an attorney,
passing the bar down South, but not having an attorney's
license. Purdue, but practicing law
without a license. He he obtained a uniform from a
major airline, a pilot's uniform and pretended to be a pilot and
got free flights around the world.
After he got out of prison, he got he got hired by the FBI and
worked for the FBI to help uncover fraud.
He also did the talk show circuit.
You can find interviews with him when he was on The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson, interviewed by Johnny Carson should have
going through some of its exploits and some of the things
he did, lying and deceiving and cheating people.
And he was kind of hailed as a folk hero, victimless crimes.
Isn't this amazing what he did? Now there's two things. 1 is
most of it was an absolute lie. People didn't Fact Check quite
as much back then as they do now, particularly when it came
to books who would confess to doing criminal things that they
didn't really do well. Frank Abagnale Junior did.
They fact checked. There was 0 evidence he had ever
worked in a hospital anywhere, much less the hospital he
claimed to work in. There was.
He had never taken the bar, much less past the bar. 0 evidence
he'd ever acted as an attorney. Zero evidence they did ever
actually fooled an airline into thinking that he was a pilot and
gotten a bunch of free flights back and forth across the
country. He had passed a few bad checks.
He'd gone to jail. He manufactured an autobiography
and made a lot of money doing it.
He was celebrated for that as a con man, became a folk hero.
Abby Allen tells a different story from the other side of
dealing with con men. She wrote a book called Duped a
few years ago, and she had fallen in love with a man who
presented himself to be one thing.
And there was a lot of evidence that was out there that some of
what he was saying was real and true.
And, and, but, but she was taken in.
And it wasn't until months later, after she was engaged,
that she began to see him for what he really was, which was
full of lies and dishonesty and deception.
And the emotional and spiritual and psychological toll it took
on her was devastating. When we lie and deceive, we hurt
people. When we lie and deceive, we
break relationships. When we have a culture in which
lying and deception is so easy and so common that we really
don't know what's true and what's not, I don't know how we
have a functioning society within that.
Within 10 years, when the deep fakes are so easy and so
believable that we can't tell what's real and what's not, I
don't know how we will function as a culture and as a society.
It's a challenge that's only going to grow in the years that
come. And there's more to this than
just don't tell lies. There's more at stake here than
just follow the rules, tell the truth, don't tell lies.
What's at stake is, is trust. It's love, it's community, it's
connection. What's at stake is, is, is to be
able to have the opposite kind of relationships that Laban had
with his family, that Jacob had with his family.
For people to be able to live and trust and walk and work and
laugh and play together without wondering is it real or not.
I don't know where all this is going.
I don't think anyone really knows where all this is going.
I I think the the next, it's hard to know what the next five
years are going to be like what much less the next 45 years.
We don't know. We know.
We know our jobs are going to change.
We know school is going to change.
We know politics is going to change.
We know military conflict is going to change.
We know the church is going to change.
We know all of these things are going to change.
We just don't know what they're going to become.
We don't know where this is all going, but this is exactly where
the disciples were right before Jesus died, that night before
Jesus died. And he'd been telling his
disciples for weeks, maybe for months, maybe for years.
Going to go to Jerusalem. I'm going to be betrayed.
I'm going to be killed. I'm going to die.
I'm going to be buried on the third day.
I'm going to rise from the dead. And the disciples all assumed he
was talking in riddles and parables when he was just
telling concrete truth. But that night before he said,
Hey, you know, I'm going to my father, I'm going to prepare a
place for you. If that weren't true, I wouldn't
tell you. And there.
And he said, and you know the way place, right?
You know the way to where I'm going.
And Thomas is like, we don't even know where you're going.
How do we know the way? How do we know the way?
And Jesus said, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
If you've seen me, you've seen the Father and you know the
Father. We don't know where all of this
is going, but we know Jesus, just like Thomas and the other
disciples had no idea where this whole Messiah thing was going to
go. Not at all.
They believed that Jesus, far from dying, he might go through
some kind of experience, but there's no way the Messiah would
die. Far from dying, he was going to
establish Israel again as a great Kingdom on earth to which
all other kingdoms would flock and come for wisdom and truth
and light. And instead, the next day their
Savior was murdered and he died and he was in the ground.
And then he rose from the dead. And they still didn't know.
They still thought the moment Jesus was about to ascend into
the heavens, the last question they asked him was, is are you
going to do it now? Are you going to establish the
Kingdom of Israel now? They were looking for a Jewish
Messiah to establish a Jewish Kingdom that the other kingdoms
would look to for inspiration and guidance and direction that
would be the model for all the kingdoms of the earth.
They had no idea what God was really up to and where all this
was going. They would never have guessed
that you and IA bunch of gentiles with mostly northern
European ancestry would be living in a continent that they
didn't know about, worshipping Jesus in a building with
stainless. No concept.
No concept, but God knew. God knew.
And Jesus said you don't need to know anything else but this.
You need to know me. I am the way and I am the truth
and I am the life. And that truth is such an
essential thing here for us because in a world where
deception is common, where sometimes deception is praised,
and a world where it's difficult and sometimes impossible to
distinguish truth from reality, lies from honesty, and that kind
of world, we need to be totally committed to Jesus as the truth
and totally committed to the truth.
The church, I believe, needs to be a haven of honesty and
authenticity. And this world right now, people
don't know where they can go for real.
They don't know where they can go for, for anything that's
real, anything that's honest. Everyone kind of knows the
politicians lie, but what can we do?
Everyone knows that the advertisements for the products
that we buy and use and consume are, are, are, are deceptive and
untrue and they just don't expect them to be true.
And pretty soon we won't know the folks we're talking to
online or well, we already don't know if they're real people or
not. If you talk on social media, we
don't know if the videos that we see will be real events or fake
events, people doing real things or fake things.
We already see some of that even among the major where there was
one of the people killed in Minnesota here recently, and I
believe it was MSNBC doctored his photo to make him better
looking, believing if he were better looking, people would
have more sympathy for him and they got caught doing it.
That's a major news outlet engaging in openly engaging in
deception. Now, part of that makes me worry
if I ever get killed, then if you got to be good looking to
get sympathy, I'm in trouble, in big trouble.
But changing a photo to make someone look different?
This is the world we live in and it's only going to get more
deceptive as time passes and harder to distinguish the truth.
And I believe we are fast approaching and may already be
in a place that the one, One of the few things that the church
can offer the world that they can't get anywhere else is
full-fledged honesty and authenticity.
Or folks can say, I don't know if the people at McDonald's and
the people at Goodyear and the people at Boeing and the people
at Apple and the people at SpaceX are lying to me or not.
But I know those folks at New Beginning United Methodist
Church, those are real people. They're real, they're honest,
they're authentic. I know when I get there I will
hear truth and not branding 'cause that's Jesus is the
truth. Jesus isn't a brand.
Christianity isn't a brand. This church isn't a brand.
It's one of the I my heart goes out to social media influencers
because they become a brand. They stop being honest,
authentic human beings and they become a brand.
And the reality of who they are becomes far less important than
who they can present themselves to be.
In fact, they go to great lengths to hide anything about
the reality of who they are that might interfere with their
branding and disrupt their influence and their cash flow.
And yet they present themselves as authentic.
So people will follow and be influenced by them, but they're
not authentic. And people know it.
They know it, but they kind of play the game.
And we just don't know. And who is real.
And we can be real. We can be real because we don't
have to be worried about protecting our brand because we
already know that Jesus loves us and receives us and accepts us
just as we are, broken, flawed, warts and all, with all of our
failures and all of our successes, with all of our
achievements and all of our disasters, with all of our our
accomplishments and all of our mistakes, all of it we can
bring. And Jesus is like that.
You. I just want you more than
anything else. Jesus wants from us
authenticity, for us to be with him, who we really are.
And then he calls us and invites us to be the same with each
other, to be who we are. Few years ago there was a well,
there's still a band. The band Casting Crowns a few
years back had a song called Stained Glass Masquerade and it
was about how it church, so many church people go and they they
put on a stained glass masquerade.
They pretend to have it all together.
They pretend to be gooder than they are.
They pretend to have all of the faith and all of the hope and
all of the joy and all of the love and everything is always
all right and God is good all the time and all the time God is
good. And they never show what's
really going on on the inside because they feel like they
won't be accepted. Everyone else has it together.
I have to look like I have together, too.
I think if the church is going to survive in this country in
the next 5 and 45 years, we've got to lean into the things that
we can do that the rest of the world can't.
And because our God loves us, because our Savior died for us
as broken, flawed human beings, we don't have to protect our
brand. We can be honest and authentic
in a way that no other organization in the world can.
We can be who we are. One of the things I keep hearing
over and over again with both ends of the political spectrum
is, is, oh, you can't say the quiet things out loud.
We all know there's things we don't, we're really after and
we're really wanting to accomplish.
We really can't tell anybody about those things.
The church doesn't have to play those games.
In fact, we shouldn't play those games.
We just go out and be who we are, flawed human beings, loved
and forgiven and received by Jesus Christ and allowing other
people to be who they are too. We can be that one place in the
world where folks can come and say, I can be myself with these
people and they will love me and respect me and care for me.
And I know that because they are themselves with each other and
they love and respect and care for each other.
That's the gift. That's the calling that we have.
Lies are the tools of the devil. The devil is the father of lies.
Lies are the tools of the devil. We can't do God's work with the
devil's tools. We need to be authentic.
We need to be real. I think I got time for one more
story. I do.
It's a king.
Once Upon a time was a king. The great Kingdom long ago in a
faraway place and he was getting old.
He had no children. He needed to choose a successor.
He wanted to choose someone young so that they could be
trained. And he he wanted to choose
someone that would live and be able to lead wisely for many,
many years. So he he decided how he would
select his successor or at least narrow down the field.
He would have a contest among the young people, the youth of
his Kingdom. And he called them all together
and he gave them all a seed. And he said, here's the
challenge, go home, plant your seed next year, one year from
today, gather back here and bring with you whatever plant
you have grown so that I can see how you've used this seed that
I've given you. So everyone got their seeds,
they went home, they planted them, they water, then they
fertilized. And there was young one young
man that with with just a couple weeks left before that one year
anniversary And his mom came in and checked on him again.
And he was like, mom, my seed still hasn't grown.
I've been doing everything I'm supposed to do.
I've watered it, fertilized it, I put it in the right soil.
I've had it in the sunlight the right amount of time.
I've done everything I'm supposed to.
And the seed hasn't grown. And mom said, well, you'll just
have to take the empty pot. That is no way I'm going.
I'll be humiliated. This is embarrassing.
His mom said, no, no, this is important.
You need to go. Just explain to the king what
happens. Sometimes seeds don't go.
I'm sure he will understand. He's a wise king and so much
against his own better judgement.
With the strong encouragement of his mother, he carried his empty
pot to see the king and we got into the audience hall.
His worst nightmares were confirmed as he looked around
the room and he saw these big beautiful plants, someone pots
of large. They had to be pulled in carts
by by horses, some with small trees in them, others with these
giant vining vegetables in them, others with beautiful tall
luxurious flowers in them. Everyone's smiling, everyone
pleased in a big line as people were walking and bringing their
plants forward to show the king one at a time and see how the
king would respond. And the king was paying
attention. He never seemed to be really
super pleased or really super upset, but every once in a while
he would look up and look around the room and scan the room until
finally while he was scanning the room, he caught sight of
that young man and his empty pot.
The king called for quiet and he called that young man to come
forward. And as the room grew silent,
that young man walked forward and he was humiliated and
embarrassed and and everyone could see it and kind of hope he
could wait till last and no one would notice.
But now everyone could see his empty pot.
And he walked up to the front and he stood before the king.
And the king said, I see you have an empty pot in your hands.
Explain yourself young man. Young man said your Highness,
I'm sorry. I planted your seed.
I watered it. I fertilized it, but nothing
grew. All I have to give you is an
empty pot, the king said. I think I have found my
successor said. You see, every seed that I gave
away last year, I had boiled first.
None of them would grow anything.
And you're the only one who has the had the courage to be honest
with me. And he made him the successor.
This is what God calls us to. The courage to be honest, the
courage to be authentic. The courage to be who we really
are, flawed and broken and sometimes dysfunctional as we
may be, but also loving and caring and compassionate and
desiring to do the best that we can for our Lord and our Savior
and to love as best we can in this community.
And that's what God wants from us.
The courage to be honest in Jesus name, Amen.
Amen.