Sermons for the Month
Twisted Truth
DATE: May 21, 2000
SERVICE: Easter V
TEXT: 1 John 4:7-21“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN
Bryan Winter has a national reputation, but, unfortunately, it's headed south - fast. Here's why. The story goes like this: About a year ago, Bryan Winter met this woman in a Washington, D.C., bar. They had some laughs. They danced. They exchanged e-mail addresses. Some time over the course of the next week, the ritual of cyber-courtship continued. But then it disintegrated faster than a California marriage. The woman e-mailed Bryan with a couple of get-to-know-you questions like, "Hey, what's your last name?" And what happened next made history. Perhaps it was all-too-easy to blow this woman off, considering the anonymity of e-mail communication. Was Bryan simply a do-right guy with an extraordinarily lousy sense of humor? Or was he indeed a narcissistic prig? For whatever reason, Bryan responded to his dance partner this way: "You seem like a nice person, and I don't mean this as badly as it might sound, but I don't have time for twenty questions by e-mail. I met five girls Saturday night, have already booked a first coffee with three of them, and meet more every time I go out dancing ... and I go dancing at least three times a week." He went on: "Now, maybe you'll find someone who's so taken by a single dance with you that he's willing to negotiate by e-mail for a chance to trek to your suburban hideout to plead his case. But you might not. And if such a person does exist, and you do happen to cross paths with him - what do you imagine a guy that desperate would have to offer?" Unfortunately for the dismissive Mr. Winter, he had blown off the wrong woman, a supremely unwise move in these days of instant digital communication. While the shredding of reputations by lies and gossip is an ancient art, today one can take it global with the click of a mouse. Bryan Winter's ice-cold rejection would soon travel to the desktops and laptops of countless young women across the city and throughout the nation, mostly because of an addendum supplied by one of the earliest forwarders: "In the hopes that this e-mail might get back to him after being seen by countless thousands of young women along the way ... please send this on to a friend!" The woman scorned knew that, first, nothing is secret in cyberspace, and second, anyone can alter and forward e-mail communication with the click of a finger. Bad news for all men named Bryan Winter. By the end of the month, Bryan Winter's reputation was toast - not only in Washington, D.C., but throughout the nation. A Web site manager named Bryan Winter received dozens of angry e-mails from strangers who assumed he was the cavalier cad of cyberspace. Never mind that he had a wife and child and lived in Wisconsin. Another Brian Winter - with an "i" not a "y" - looked suspiciously guilty simply because he was a 27-year-old medical student at Georgetown University. A long-term girlfriend rushed in to serve as his alibi. Still another Bryan Winter, a Washington hair stylist, received "hundreds" of harassing phone calls at home including one call from a person who remained silent while playing creepy music. He - and his wife - insist that he is not that Bryan Winter either. From California to New York, the word was out on Bryan Winter. Well-educated, well-bred, professional women in offices from Capitol Hill to Wall Street to Hollywood participated in this shred-fest. Few hesitated to click the send button. Few had any qualms about passing along an ostensibly private and personal message. The story seemed "true," what with the "documentation" to prove it - a real e-mail from this perpetrator of "dating hara-kiri." Yet for all we know, Mr. Winter's vengeful dance partner might have initiated this cyber spat. We never saw her letter to him, now did we? Today more than ever, what "everybody knows" is controlled by digital communication which can be altered, twisted and hyperbolized and then launched around the world in a matter of seconds. Computer experts remind us not to trust anything that can be digitally altered, from e-mails to photographs to audio recordings. So what is a person of faith to believe in this untrustworthy world of twisted truths? Today's text argues that one truth that cannot be twisted is this: "God is love." But what does that mean to the rescue volunteer who has clawed a limp baby from under the wreckage of a high-rise apartment, leveled days before by an earthquake. Ask the social worker who has visited her 21st abuse victim this week, all under the age of twelve. Ask the doctor who tells the young mother that she has a rare brain disease and that she should begin to tell her children "good-bye." Ask the emaciated AIDS patient who picked up the virus doing missionary work in Malawi. God is love? Then explain the Holocaust. Explain ethnic cleansing, replete with the rape of children and old women. Explain the agonies of debilitating disease. Explain the 17,000 dead in the earthquakes of Turkey. Explain the thousands missing in the floods of Venezuela. Explain that to the victims of drive-by shootings. Or the slayings by children with handguns of other children. In the face of these calamities, we must stop uttering the platitude of our text as a merely feel-good mantra, a theological Band-Aid for those in the depths of grief. Instead, we must start the conversation about the love of God with the admission that there are things in the world which do count against the notion that God is love. This is important, because if an assertion cannot be false, it also cannot be true. Consider this adaptation of Basil Mitchell's parable of the Stranger: During the war in Kosovo, a leader of the Kosovar Liberation Front (KLF) meets one night with a stranger who deeply impresses him. They spend that night together in conversation. The Stranger tells the rebel that he himself is on the side of the Kosovars - indeed that he is in command, and urges the KLF to have faith in him no matter what happens. The man is utterly convinced of the Stranger's sincerity and undertakes to trust him. They never meet like that again. But sometimes the Stranger is seen helping members of the Kosovar resistance, and the leader is grateful and says to his friends, "He is on our side." But sometimes he is seen in the uniform of the Serbian secret police handing over Kosovars to the occupying Serbian officials. On these occasions his friends murmur against him, but the leader still says, "He is on our side." He still believes that, in spite of appearances, the Stranger did not deceive him. Sometimes he asks the Stranger for help and receives it. He is then thankful. Sometimes he asks and does not receive it. Then he says, "The Stranger knows best." Sometimes his friends, in exasperation, say, "Well, what would he have to do for you to admit that you were wrong and that he is not on our side?" But the head of the resistance refuses to answer. And sometimes his friends complain, "Well, if that's what you mean by his being on our side, the sooner he goes over to the other side, the better." The KLF must now admit that the Stranger's behavior does count against the assertion that "he is on our side." If he refuses, his claim becomes silly in the face of the overwhelming evidence. The unbeliever quickly argues that the evidence points to the conclusion that God is not love at all, and likely never was a God of love. The believer, because he is a believer, admits that the evidence counts against the assertion that God is love, but because he is a believer, he does not think it counts decisively against the assertion. This is a legitimate conclusion to take. God is love. The statement is an affirmation of our faith. It is not an assertion intended to answer the Why question when the specter of evil shows its face. The God of the text is described in terms of relationship. We experience God, if we are paying attention, as One who sometimes blesses and sometimes curses, who sometimes gives meaning and sometimes gives what is meaningless. We are asked simply to "abide in him" (1 John 4:13). God loves by dwelling with us, living with us whether we are in the throes of agony or in the sublime joys of all that is meaningful. Much of life may not seem to make much sense, at least on this side of the grave. For many of us, God is the Stranger who acts or does not act. And yet, we abide with this Stranger and sometimes behold a glimpse of meaning. Sometimes God becomes present to us and dwells with us because of the jarring, meaningless experiences of life. In his Gethsemane ordeal, even Jesus was given pause by the shocking turnabout of events in his life. For him the love of God was decisive, enabling him to live - and die - in the midst of the tragic, the devastating, the soul-wrenching. His enemies thought he was twisted: They were wrong. He was convinced by the relationship he had with his God. Whatever, he was not alone. And so we are never alone. He, like you and I, are believers who live life with a twist. God is love. And He is our love. As twisted as it sounds in this crazy world, this is the ultimate truth. AMEN