What Is Truth?
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on The Fifteenth Sunday of Pentecost (C), September 18, 2022.
1 Timothy 2:1-7
For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth (1 Tim. 2:7).
“What, art thou mad? Art thou mad?” Falstaff questions Prince Hal in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. “Is not the truth the truth?”
Of the course the irony here is that Falstaff has been lying full stop and this is his reaction to Prince Hal’s exposure of that. He digs in. Resists.
“Is not the truth the truth?” [1]
Falstaff’s notion of the truth is duplicitous, this we know. And certainly, in this day and age, duplicitous notions of the truth are everywhere –hiding behind conviction, self-righteousness, ignorance, manipulation, and even sometimes good faith. There is the sense that truth is in the eye of the beholder.
And yet, the author Salman Rushdie would remind us that there was never a “golden age where the truth was uncontested and universally accepted,” no time where there was “blissful consensus. The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea.” [2]
How then do we know what is true? Well, we can know things are true in a scientific sense. Using our rational minds, our scientific methods, our human reason we can discover things that are true yesterday, today, and always.
But there is another way to truth. A way of deep knowing, of deep truth-seeking and truth-telling, that begins and ends with the heart.
Of this kind of truth, Madeleine L’Engle writes:
Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous. [3]
The much-esteemed theologian Albus Dumbledore would agree. “The truth.” He sighed. “It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and therefore should be treated with great caution.” [4]
Saint Paul knows something of this danger, and yet time and again he assures those to whom he writes that he is speaking truth.
I am telling the truth, I am not lying. He writes to Timothy. And again in Romans: I am speaking the truth in Christ –I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 9:1).
Paul’s letter this morning urges its reader to be faithful in prayer. A first century Jewish prayer life –with which Paul and Timothy would have been familiar –involved many modes of prayer and yet prayer more generally was defined as “service of the heart.”
Service of the heart.
As the early church faced controversy and attempted to strike out on its own faithful path, Saint Paul urged prayer, service of the heart, and assured that such a path, is right and is acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).
Prayer a pathway to truth.
When we spend time in prayer, we practice releasing the bonds of what we know in exchange for a truth we could never fully know and yet a truth that knows us well.
Once upon a time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said this at a press briefing:
There are known knowns
Things we know we know.
There are known unknowns,
That is, we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know. [5]
If you missed some of that because you’re still trying to process the fact that I just quoted Rumsfeld from the pulpit, I understand. It took me a minute to recover from that as well. So let me say it again:
There are known knowns.
Things we know we know.
There are known unknowns,
That is, we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know.
We don’t know.
While said in a rather confusing yoda-esque way, Rumsfeld is onto something here.
So often, what comes between us and truth is us. The truth is, after all, dangerous. It confronts us. Convicts us. Destroys the worlds we build for ourselves, the lies we tell ourselves, the reliance we place in ourselves, in favor of submission to something beyond ourselves.
We stubbornly and all too often believe we know the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help us God.
And we hold tightly to what we think we know, when really the pathway to truth is one of surrender.
You see, it’s hard to see the truth with a closed heart and a clenched fist. To journey towards truth requires a letting go.
Artists, writers, musicians, and poets know this pathway well, seeking after the deepest truths in service of the heart. Revealing something of the truth to any who would look deeply in wonder.
Take literature, for example, one of my greatest loves. Again, Salmon Rushdie writes:
“When we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true.” [6]
To really enter a work of art, a work of literature, we must surrender. Because in front of us is a mystery –an external validation of the connection between each of us. A pathway to something deeper and truer that rests in the relationship between us.
For this I was appointed a herald and an apostle (I am telling the truth, I am not lying), a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
Paul wrote to Timothy then but speaks to us now. In a world confident of so much, the truth can be elusive. And let be clear, by truth, I mean what lies beyond and below. What pulses through the created world and beckons to all God’s beloved. Our worldly truths must take a knee before this eternal truth. The pursuit of which can be difficult and often counter intuitive, and yet we have on our side a God, who desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
And we come to the knowledge of the truth not by certainty, but by faith.
Our faith, our Scripture, encourages encounters with the unknown. Moses on the cloudy mountain. Abraham trekking toward a sacrifice his heart may not survive. Mary arriving at an empty tomb. How and why on the lips of so many faithful.
Our faith, our Scripture, encourages humility in the face of what we think we know so that we might draw closer to the truth that knows each one of us: Jesus.
Jesus. About whom it is said:
And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
Jesus: the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).
Jesus who knows something about the danger that is truth.
“Are you a king?” Pilate asks, and Jesus answers: “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
And Pilate asks: “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38).
Much like Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Pilate digs in. Resists. You can almost hear him: Is not the truth the truth?
In answer, Jesus humbles himself, completing a perfect sacrifice for the whole world, in life, in death, for this time, and for all time, Jesus, in the ultimate act of surrender, opens a pathway to truth in and through His very being.
Jesus is the truth embedded so deeply within us that we seek him without ceasing, even without knowing. He is the truth of our hearts.
The truth we meet in art, literature, music, and all manners of prayer.
The truth we embrace in deep loving.
The truth we surrender to as we sing.
Be thou my wisdom, be thou my true word;
I ever with thee, and thou with me, Lord.
Born of thy love, thy child may I be,
Thou in me dwelling and I one with thee. [7]
Truth is not in the eye of the beholder, my friends. Truth is the very heart of God.
A truth we follow by faith and not by sight. A truth we cannot fully know but which knows each of us completely. A truth that is, in the words of L’Engle, “deeper and wider and much more demanding than many people would like, . . . but Jesus promised [that it is the truth] that will set us free.” [8]
Amen.
[1] William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Act 2 Scene 4.
[2] Salman Rushdie, “Truth, Lies, and Literature,” The New Yorker, 31 May 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/truth-lies-and-literature.
[3] Madeleine L’Engle, “Acceptance Speech Upon Receiving the Margret Edwards Award, 27 June 1998, Washington, DC, http://gos.sbc.edu/l/lengle.html.
[4] J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Scholastic, 1998), 298.
[5] United States Department of Defense, News Briefing, 12 February 2022.
[6] Rushdie, “Truth, Lies, and Literature.”
[7] The Hymnal 1982, 488.
[8] Madeleine L’Engle, A Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth (Convergent Books, 2018).