Star of Truth

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
December 11, 2016
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org

Our principles talk of a free and responsible search for truth and meaning. How do we seek the truth? Can we be like wise magi, bringing our gifts to the newborn Light?

Call to Worship
by Denise Levertov

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise, iron ball, egg, dark horse, shadow, cloud of breath on the air,

Dwell in our crowded hearts, our steaming bathrooms, kitchens full of things to be done, the ordinary streets.

Thrust close your smile that we know you, terrible joy.

Reading
by Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro

Bless Adonai
who spins day into dusk

With wisdom watch the dawn gates open;
With understanding let
time and seasons
come and go;

With awe perceive
the stars in lawful orbit.

Morning dawns,
evening darkens;

Darkness and light yielding
one to the other,

Yet each distinguished
and unique.

Marvel at Life!
Strive to know its ways!

Seek Wisdom and Truth,
the gateways
to Life’s mysteries!

Wondrous indeed
is the evening twilight.

Sermon

Here we are at the season of holy days, when most religions originating in the northern hemisphere celebrate the return of the light. Hanukkah is the Jewish celebration of the light that burned in the temple longer than it could naturally have burned, a miracle of light in the darkness. Hinduism celebrates Diwali, the Pagans celebrate the Winter Solstice and Christianity celebrates the birth of the son at the same time that its Roman rulers were celebrating the birth of the sun. No one knows the historical truth of these stories, but we feel in our hearts that they have a different kind of truth, an inner truth that can teach us about ourselves, about how to live well, how to get along with the way the Universe seems to work, a truth of the spirit. We usually call these faith stories, and we contrast faith stories with historical truth. There is sometimes overlap, but that overlap is unimportant to the faithful.

I quake to speak about the truth today. I have been casual in my thinking. I assumed that the truth is something that agrees with facts, something most people agree on together and that people feel it’s important in news and conversation. I have spoken confidently about the thing called “the ring of truth,” saying that most of us can recognize it when we hear it. We say we affirm a free search for truth and meaning. You can’t have meaning without truth. A pile of lies can have no meaning other than someone feels contempt enough for the world that they blatherate a pile of lies and leave it there in the road for the rest of us to step in. To be asked to find meaning in a pile of lies is cynical and abusive.

We can have a free search for truth, but we have seen a shift. It used to be that we expected some spin in advertising, but there were truth in advertising rules that were enforced. It used to be that we expected some spin from politicians, even outright lying, but we remember when Paul Ryan shaved over an hour off his marathon time and the media chewed on that lie for weeks. It used to be that people hung their heads when they were caught lying. There was some sense of shame. We have had experience with people of no shame before. Rumsfeld, Cheney. We have had loads of experience with lying politicians, but there is a shift now to a politician who lies and acts as if you are stupid for expecting him to have told the truth. Now a PPP poll shows that 60% of Trump voters believe “millions of people voted illegally,” with no evidence and strong denials from Republican election officials. 67% of them believe that unemployment is up, even though the fact is that it has gone from 7.8 in 2009 to 4.6. 40% of Trump voters believe that he won the popular vote.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” You can say ” Facts show that millions of people did not vote illegally.” Those citizens say the so-called facts are being reported by biased sources. They don’t believe the New York Times or the Washington Post. They say Snopes.com is only accurate 50% of the time, even though Factcheck.org says it’s accurate most of the time. Factcheck is a program of the Annenburg Foundation. These citizens would say they don’t respect the Annenburg Foundation’s facts. They are compartmentalizing their faith from their intellect. Many of their preachers have trained them in not applying their minds to their strongly held faith. The stories they believe are faith stories, not historical facts, and they’re ok with that.

They have faith in Donald Trump. We’ve all seen the interview with one woman, who, shown that Trump had lied, said “I believe what he said because he said it. If he says it, it’s true.” I do not think Trump voters are stupid. I think they are treating their belief in him as they would a religious belief.

Epistemology is the study of how we know things. When you ask yourself “How can I know what is true?” You are asking about epistemology. You can dig one level deeper and ask “how do we know anything?” You discuss that different colors of light have different wavelengths, which are measurable. Data. But we interpret that data inside our minds, so we don’t know that the way I see that wavelength is the way you see it. I say “trees are green,” and you nod and agree, but there isn’t a way to know whether we are both seeing the same color. Science has its way of seeking truth which has to do with whether a certain result is able to be reproduced, whether a certain way of getting to your results is respectable. Peer review is a way of getting to truth. Can you get consensus? Do a certain number of scientists agree on this thing, which we might now call a “fact.” Philosophy has its way of talking about truth. Some philosophers say you can’t say anything is Truth with a capital T, but there are certain assertions we all believe, which we agree to act upon. We agree to act as if certain things are true. Some even assert that there is no way to know that you even exist. What if you are a puppy in Peru, dreaming that you are a human sitting in this sanctuary? Descartes says “I think, therefore I am,” but another philosopher is only willing to say “there is a thought.”

I don’t have the patience, these days, though, for relaxed discussions about the nature of truth. When you say “millions of people voted illegally,” that is either true or it is not. If it’s not true, it’s a mistake or a lie. (or you are “isolated in your own reality,” which is a way of talking about some forms of mental illness. This is not a fact about which the data sets can be interpreted many ways. It’s true or it’s not. The sense of alarm many of us feel is that we meet so many people who are isolated from reality. As a group. I imagine many of them feel that same alarm about liberals who believe the New York Times and Factcheck.org.

Our principle says we search, (in freedom and responsibility) for truth. We are at a strange point where it’s the preacher has to talk about defending, not a divine truth, but defending facts. I think those are things we can all agree happen in the actual world. Perceptions differ, true. Interpretations of data differ. But there are things we all agree to act upon as true. When millions of people agree to operate as though wholly different things are true from the ones we are acting on, a kind of vertigo results. It becomes difficult to find common ground.

I would have said, in more innocent times, that we all mostly agree that the New York Times aims to be truthful. When they are not, they apologize. They feel shame. We all would mostly agree that the Washington Post publishes the truth. If they find they are inaccurate, they apologize, they feel shame. I think they are still trying to live in that reality.

Now from the President-elect, the lies come fast and loud, and there is absolutely no shame in being found out. People in Macedonia make up fake news stories, and no one knows how to tell the difference. Some of us are learning to
1. Check the source. Is it a satire site? A fantasy news site? Is there a button you can push to make them show the actual news story highlighted in yellow?
2. What is the date on the story? Is it from yesterday or from 2011?
3. Does it sound too strange to be true? Does it fit with the facts as you know them?
4. Why would people do what the story says they did? Does it make sense?

We are in a morass of lies, and as of now it’s up to us to discern what’s true. In Europe there are laws about social media content, so the fake news is damped down a bit. Here, we are just starting to see that. Don’t be part of thoughtlessly repeating things that are deliciously shocking but possibly less than true.

What is truth? Is an ancient question. When Rabbi Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate for judgment, Pilate asked You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

The Christian scriptures which talk about Rabbi Jesus as if he were a special part of the Divine call him the Word. The Greek in the New Testament translated this way is the Greek word logos. Logos is a concept whose many layers of meaning include not only “word,” but more on the order of “reason,” “structure,” “organizing principle.” Scholars think the author of this part of the scripture was educated in the Greek manner but was born a Jew. In the Jewish scriptures, the word is a creative force, especially the word of God. It’s how they described the creation of the skies, the oceans and the earth. In this religion, the creation wasn’t a birth from a great mother or a star, it was done by words. So when the gospel writer says “in the beginning was the word,” and implies that Rabbi Jesus and that word are the same, he is trying to communicate that he wants people to worship the reason of God, the Creative power of God, the underlying principles by which everything in the Universe is laid out. In this same gospel, the spirit of God is called the “Spirit of Truth.”

In my opinion, when we talk about truth, “capital T Truth,” we are talking about something that has this kind of generative power. We find truth and it changes things. It’s not just something to which we assent by nodding our heads sagely or clapping our hands and rejoicing that we have another bit of knowledge to add to our cocktail party conversation or our discussions with friends. In the view of these scriptures, love, light, reason, and the truth of things are ways of describing the divine.

Truth changes things. It’s moving or funny or challenging. When two people are talking authentically to one another, when they are connecting in truth and in love, they are having a nourishing, transformative experience. When someone lies, especially when they don’t care to pretend they’re not lying, the ground beneath our feet shifts, and we lose our balance. Something inside struggles to refute, struggles to understand, to derive meaning. The person who lies claims they are speaking impressionistically, speaking in “euphanism,” and that you are stupid for not realizing that. You quote them to themselves and they say “I never said that.” When you show them the video, they say “you were taking it out of context.” Unless you surrender to their worldview, your choices are to be stupid, to be confused, to be wrong, to be mocked, or to be an enemy.

This is how abusers set things up in a relationship. Their reality is the only one that has any worth. If you don’t share it, you are silly or dangerous, or misguided, or crazy. You can’t ever find your balance because the rules constantly change. Reality changes, and the only one who knows where it’s going isn’t telling you. You stop trusting your own perception of reality. Is the only way to respect the leader to surrender to them completely? Is disagreement disloyalty? If you stay in the abusive situation, your reality gets overwritten so many times you begin to doubt yourself.

This season we celebrate the birth of the Spirit of Truth. Let us bring the truth our gifts of attention, responsible evaluation of what we are told, let us acknowledge its importance in keeping the ground solid under our feet. Follow the star of truth, and it will get us through these days. The star is big enough to follow. It’s there in the day time, but it’s when the darkness falls, when you can’t see your way, that the star shines the brightest to guide us on.

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