Lies Without Error

Lies Without Error

I’m in trouble is the opening phrase. The last word is war. Not a happy song but an honest and necessary one.

Men are set against each other. Women are at each other’s throats. We are taught rivalry from the womb. The world is restless, always spoiling for a fight. No one seems to know how to live in healthy relationships. We persist in turning every community into a sect, every enterprise into a war. We realize, in fugitive moments, that we were made for something different and better—“I’m all for peace”—but there is no confirmation of that realization in our environment, no encouragement of it in our experience. “I’m all for peace; but the minute I tell them so, they go to war!”

The distress that begins and ends the song is the painful awakening to the no-longer-avoidable reality that we have been lied to. The world, in fact, is not as it had been represented to us. Things are not all right as they are, and they are not getting any better.

We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.

How we can keep on believing this after so many centuries of evidence to the contrary is difficult to comprehend, but nothing we do and nothing anyone else does to us seems to disenchant us from the spell of the lie. We keep expecting things to get better somehow. And when they don’t, we whine like spoiled children who don’t get their way. We accumulate resentment that stores up in anger and erupts in violence. Convinced by the lie that what we are experiencing is unnatural, an exception, we devise ways to escape the influence of what other people do to us by getting away on a vacation as often as we can. When the vacation is over, we get back into the flow of things again, our naiveté renewed that everything is going to work out all right—only to once more be surprised, hurt, bewildered when it doesn’t. The lie (“everything is OK”) covers up and perpetuates the deep wrong, disguises the violence, the war, the rapacity.

Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we had assumed was the truth is in fact a lie. Prayer is immediate: “Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.” Rescue me from the lies of advertisers who claim to know what I need and what I desire, from the lies of entertainers who promise a cheap way to joy, from the lies of politicians who pretend to instruct me in power and morality, from the lies of psychologists who offer to shape my behavior and my morals so that I will live long, happily and successfully, from the lies of religionists who “heal the wounds of this people lightly,” from the lies of moralists who pretend to promote me to the office of captain of my fate, from the lies of pastors who “get rid of God’s command so you won’t be inconvenienced in following the religious fashions!” (Mk 7:8). Rescue me from the person who tells me of life and omits Christ, who is wise in the ways of the world and ignores the movement of the Spirit.

The lies are impeccably factual. They contain no errors. There are no distortions or falsified data. But they are lies all the same, because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God. They talk about the world without telling us that God made it. They tell us about our bodies without telling us that they are temples of the Holy Spirit. They instruct us in love without telling us about the God who loves us and gave himself for us.

Lightning Illuminating the Crossroads

The single word God occurs only twice in this psalm, but it is the clue to the whole. God, once admitted to the consciousness, fills the entire horizon. God, revealed in his creative and redemptive work, exposes all the lies. The moment the word God is uttered, the world’s towering falsehood is exposed—we see the truth. The truth about me is that God made and loves me. The truth about those sitting beside me is that God made them and loves them, and each one is therefore my neighbor. The truth about the world is that God rules and provides for it. The truth about what is wrong with the world is that I and the neighbor sitting beside me have sinned in refusing to let God be for us, over us and in us. The truth about what is at the center of our lives and of our history is that Jesus Christ was crucified on the cross for our sins and raised from the tomb for our salvation and that we can participate in new life as we believe in him, accept his mercy, respond to his love, attend to his commands.

John Baillie wrote, “I am sure that the bit of the road that most requires to be illuminated is the point where it forks.”1 The psalmist’s God is a lightning flash illuminating just such a crossroads. Psalm 120 is the decision to take one way over against the other. It is the turning point marking the transition from a dreamy nostalgia for a better life to a rugged pilgrimage of discipleship in faith, from complaining about how bad things are to pursuing all things good.

This decision is said and sung on every continent in every language. The decision has been realized in every sort of life in every century in the long history of humankind. The decision is quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) announced from thousands of Christian pulpits all over the world each Sunday morning. The decision is witnessed by millions in homes, factories, schools, businesses, offices and fields every day of every week. The people who make the decision and take delight in it are the people called Christians.

A No That Is a Yes

The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world. It is a renunciation of the lies we have been told about ourselves and our neighbors and our universe. “I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar! My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors.” Meshech and Kedar are place names: Meshech a far-off tribe, thousands of miles from Palestine in southern Russia; Kedar a wandering Bedouin tribe of barbaric reputation along Israel’s borders. They represent the strange and the hostile. Paraphrased, the cry is, “I live in the midst of hoodlums and wild savages; this world is not my home and I want out.”

The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance. It is always and everywhere the first word in the Christian life. John the Baptist’s preaching was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 3:2 RSV). Jesus’ first preaching was the same: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Mt 4:17 RSV). Peter concluded his first sermon with “Repent, and be baptized” (Acts 2:38 RSV). In the last book of the Bible the message to the seventh church is “be zealous and repent” (Rev 3:19 RSV).

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding that you were wrong in thinking that you had, or could get, the strength, education and training to make it on your own; it is deciding that you have been told a pack of lies about yourself and your neighbors and your world. And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth. Repentance is a realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace.

Repentance is the most practical of all words and the most practical of all acts. It is a feet-on-the-ground kind of word. It puts a person in touch with the reality that God creates. Elie Wiesel, referring to the stories of the Hasidim, says that in the tales by Israel of Rizhim one motif recurs again and again: A traveler loses his way in the forest; it is dark and he is afraid. Danger lurks behind every tree. A storm shatters the silence. The fool looks at the lightning, the wise man at the road that lies—illuminated—before him.2

Whenever we say no to one way of life that we have long been used to, there is pain. But when the way of life is in fact a way of death, a way of war, the quicker we leave it the better. There is a condition that sometimes develops in our bodies called adhesions—parts of our internal organs become attached to other parts. The condition has to be corrected by a surgical procedure—a decisive intervention. The procedure hurts, but the results are healthy. As the Jerusalem Bible puts verses 3-4, “How will he [God] pay back the false oath? / of a faithless tongue / With war arrows hardened / over red-hot charcoal!” Emily Dickinson’s spare sentence is an epigraph: “Renunciation—the piercing virtue!”

God’s arrows are judgments aimed at provoking repentance. The pain of judgment called down against evildoers could turn them also from their deceitful and violent ways to join our pilgrim on the way of peace. Any hurt is worth it that puts us on the path of peace, setting us free for the pursuit, in Christ, of eternal life. It is the action that follows the realization that history is not a blind alley, guilt not an abyss. It is the discovery that there is always a way that leads out of distress—a way that begins in repentance, or turning to God. Whenever we find God’s people living in distress, there is always someone who provides this hope-charged word, showing the reality of a different day: “On that day there will be a highway all the way from Egypt to Assyria: Assyrians will have free range in Egypt, and Egyptians in Assyria. No longer rivals, they’ll worship together, Egyptians and Assyrians” (Is 19:23). All Israel knew of Assyria was war—the vision shows them at worship. Repentance is the catalytic agent for the change. Dismay is transformed into what a later prophet would describe as gospel.

The whole history of Israel is set in motion by two such acts of world-rejection, which freed the people for an affirmation of God: “the rejection of Mesopotamia in the days of Abraham and the rejection of Egypt in the days of Moses.”3 All the wisdom and strength of the ancient world were in Mesopotamia and Egypt. But Israel said no to them. Despite the prestige, the vaunted and uncontested greatness, there was something foundationally alien and false in those cultures: “I’m all for peace; but the minute I tell them so, they go to war!” Mesopotamian power and Egyptian wisdom were strength and intelligence divorced from God, put to the wrong ends and producing all the wrong results.

Modern interpretations of history are variations on the lies of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians in which, as Abraham Heschel describes it, “man reigns supreme, with the forces of nature as his only possible adversaries. Man is alone, free, and growing stronger. God is either nonexistent or unconcerned. It is human initiative that makes history, and it is primarily by force that constellations change. Man can attain his own salvation.”4

So Israel said no and became a pilgrim people, picking a path of peace and righteousness through the battlefields of falsehood and violence, finding a path to God through the labyrinth of sin.

We know that Israel, in saying that no, did not miraculously return to Eden and live in primitive innocence, or mystically inhabit a heavenly city and live in supernatural ecstasy. They worked and played, suffered and sinned in the world as everyone else did, and as Christians still do. But they were now going someplace—they were going to God. The truth of God explained their lives, the grace of God fulfilled their lives, the forgiveness of God renewed their lives, the love of God blessed their lives. The no released them to a freedom that was diverse and glorious. The judgment of God invoked against the people of Meshech and Kedar was, in fact, a sharply worded invitation to repentance, asking them to join in the journey.

Among the more fascinating pages of American history are those that tell the stories of the immigrants to these shores in the nineteenth century. Thousands upon thousands of people, whose lives in Europe had become mean and poor, persecuted and wretched, left. They had heard of a place where a new start could be made. They had gotten reports of a land where the environment was a challenge instead of an oppression. The stories continue to be told in many families, keeping alive the memory of the event that made an American out of what was a German or an Italian or a Scot.

My grandfather left Norway a hundred years ago in the midst of a famine. His wife and ten children remained behind until he could return and get them. He came to Pittsburgh and worked in the steel mills for two years until he had enough money to go back and get his family. When he returned with them he didn’t stay in Pittsburgh, although it had served his purposes well enough the first time; he traveled on to Montana, plunging into new land, looking for a better place.

In all these immigrant stories there are mixed parts of escape and adventure: the escape from an unpleasant situation, the adventure of a far better way of life, free for new things, open for growth and creativity. Every Christian has some variation on this immigrant plot to tell.

“I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar! My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors.” But we don’t have to live there any longer. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.