Is Honesty the Best Policy? -- FPC sermon excerpt

Being the parent of teenagers is one of life’s biggest challenges — I can tell you that I have earned every single one of my gray hairs. You all know the difficulties: High school parties where alcohol is served, driving on hazardous Northern Virginia roads, pressure to be sexually active.

My wife and I know the dangers, and we take them very seriously. We don’t expect our children to be saints, but there is one thing we demand of them: Honesty.

When it comes to drinking and driving, for example, they know that they can get a safe ride home from us if they call us and ask for a ride. If they are honest, there is no penalty and no punishment. But if they drink, drive, and lie to us — goodbye driving privileges.

In our house, honesty is more important than perfect behavior. But I also know that we live in a society where honesty is not always the best policy.

On the one hand, we admire George Washington for saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” And we look up to Abraham Lincoln, calling him “Honest Abe.” But on the other hand, we tell our children that there are instances in which we should not be honest.

We say, “Tell your grandmother you like the gift — even if you don’t.”

Or we make the comment, “That doesn’t look like a toupee at all!”

Or we say to young parents, “What an adorable baby!”

These lies are designed to please others, says Robert Feldman, a social psychologist who studies lying in everyday life. Experiments have found that ordinary people tell about two lies every ten minutes. Some people get in as many as 12 lies in the same amount of time.

But here’s the interesting part, according to The Washington Post (February 19, 2007): Liars tend to be more popular than honest people. Knowing when to say something, and when not to be completely blunt, is, in fact, a social skill. People say they want the truth, but do they really want to hear a list of everything about them that is really annoying?

I don’t think so.

All of which brings us to Luke 16 and the parable of the dishonest manager. Jesus tells us that there is a rich man who has a manager, and the manager is found to be squandering his master’s property. So the rich man fires the manager, and the manager panics, knowing that he is not strong enough to dig, and much too proud to beg (Luke 16:1-3).

So he comes up with a plan. He summons his master’s debtors, and gives them deep discounts on the amount they owe. A debt of a hundred jugs of olive oil becomes fifty, and a debt of one hundred containers of wheat becomes eighty.

The manager does this to please people, so that when he loses his job as manager he’ll have some friends that he can stay with (vv. 4-7). He would rather be popular than honest!

The story’s big surprise comes at the end, when the rich man commends the dishonest manager for his shrewdness (v. 8). This compliment strikes us as odd, because it seems strange that the master would be happy about losing money to his debtors.

But maybe the manager didn’t cheat his master very much at all. It could be that the manager was taking these discounts out of his own commissions, and was only giving the impression that he was stealing from his boss.

Scholars have discovered that it was a common practice of first-century lenders to write debt obligations in such a way that there was no differentiation between the principal and the interest. They may have done this to avoid revealing that they were charging high interest — there were no “truth in lending” regulations in those days. We all know that it can be a shock to see how much interest you are paying on a 30-year mortgage, or even a 4-year car loan.

If this is the case with the dishonest manager, then what he is removing from the bill is his own commission, plus some of the interest that would have accrued to the master.

So he is dishonest, yes — but not quite the cheat he first appears to be. The master gets his principal back, and the manager makes some friends that he can stay with when he is out of a job.

If this is the case, it suddenly makes sense that the master would commend his manager for acting shrewdly. As a businessman, the rich man would admire the manager for using the money under his control to make some friends for himself.

Only in the Gospel -- FPC sermon excerpt

A cigarette butt tumbles in slow motion into a pool of gasoline, creating an enormous fireball.

Just about everybody has seen this. It’s an ear-splitting, eye-brow-singeing, cinematic spectacle. Guaranteed to please the action-adventure crowd.

It’s also largely make-believe — one of the many things that happen only in the movies.

Richard Tontarski is an expert in forensic fire at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms research lab in Beltsville, Maryland. He became interested in the link between cigarettes and gasoline because arson suspects frequently claim that a gasoline fire was started by accident. They say things like, “My girlfriend was smoking, I accidentally threw gasoline on her, and she burst into flames.”

Yeah, right. A likely story.

So Tontarski and his colleagues went to great pains to create fireballs. It’s fun work, if you can get it. They dropped burning cigarettes into trays of gasoline. They sprayed a fine mist of gas at a lighted cigarette. In more than 2,000 attempts, the gasoline did not ignite. No fireballs.

Tontarski can only guess why, reports an article in The Guardian (February 27, 2007). He thinks that perhaps the layer of ash on the tobacco prevents ignition, or that gasoline vapor naturally moves away from the hottest part of the cigarette.

Please, do not do any research on this topic yourselves. Instead, enjoy watching fireballs in the safety of the movie theater.

There are plenty of things that happen only in the movies, and they should never be confused with real life. The Nostalgia Central website lists 40 of them, such as:

- In the movies, it is always possible to find a parking spot directly outside the building you are visiting.
- The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window of any building in Paris.
- Plain or even ugly girls can become movie-star-pretty simply by removing their glasses and rearranging their hair.
- Anyone can land a 747 as long as there is someone in the control tower to talk you down.
- And, in line with the cigarette-and-gasoline phenomenon: Cars will explode instantly when struck by a single bullet!

Is this true? Only in the movies!

Reading the Bible is sometimes like going to the movies, in the sense that we encounter stories that don’t quite ring true. A man leaving 99 sheep to look for a lost one, or a woman throwing a party to celebrate the finding of a lost coin? Does anyone actually do that?

It seems unreal … like in the movies, when one person starts dancing in the street, and then suddenly everyone else starts to dance along with him. And they know all the steps!

The lost sheep and the lost coin. These are things that happen only in the Gospel.

But maybe stories from Scripture point to a deeper truth, one that is even more real than our day-to-day lives. Perhaps the stories of the Gospel are God’s truth, not human truth.

Returning to the Well -- FPC sermon excerpt

John 4 begins with Jesus walking into a Samaritan city called Sychar, and taking a seat by the town well. This is a surprising thing for a good Jew such as Jesus to do, because the Samaritans are considered outsiders and enemies. It’s true that the Jews and Samaritans share Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as common ancestors, but the two groups split apart when the Samaritans built a shrine on Mount Gerizim, setting it up as a rival to the temple in Jerusalem. For at least 200 years, Jews have looked down on Samaritans and considered them to be unclean and unfaithful to God.

So Jesus makes a bold move when he sits down by Jacob’s well. Then a Samaritan woman comes to draw water, and Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink” (John 4:7). This request shocks the Samaritan woman — shocks her for several reasons. First, Jews are not supposed to have contact with Samaritans, and second, Jewish men are not supposed to have public conversations with women. According to Jewish wise men, “He that talks much with womankind brings evil upon himself.”

Now, men … I’m not suggesting that you stop talking with your wives or daughters or sisters. These words are from the ancient world, and Jesus clearly doesn’t endorse them. But we need to understand what is going on in this passage, so that it makes sense when the Samaritan woman asks, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (v. 9).

She simply doesn’t understand why Jesus is talking to her, a Samaritan and a woman.

But Jesus is on a mission from God, and he is not one to allow social or cultural barriers to keep him from doing the will of the Lord. “If you knew the gift of God,” says Jesus to the woman, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (v. 10). Jesus is hinting at his own identity as the Messiah, the gift of God, and he is suggesting that he can give her something special — something called “living water.”

But what is this special water? The Greek of the New Testament says hydōr zōn, which can be translated either “fresh, running water,” or “life-giving water.” When Jesus offers this gift of living water, the Samaritan woman first thinks he is talking about fresh, running water. That is why she says, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (v. 11). She knows that you cannot get fresh water from a well without a bucket.

Jesus is talking about the other kind of hydōr zōn, however — life-giving water. Hydōr means “water,” which we still see in our English word “hydration,” and zōn comes from the Greek word for “life,” which we have turned into the English word “zoo.” Hydōr zōn — life-giving water. “Everyone who drinks of [well] water will be thirsty again,” says Jesus, “but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (vv. 13-14). The hydōr zōn that Jesus gives is not water at all — it is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which connects us to God and to Jesus for all time. It flows into us and through us, and brings life to the parts of us that feel the driest and most dead.

I’m a runner, and one of the hardest parts of marathon training is staying properly hydrated, especially on hot summer days. Last Monday, my son Sam and I went on a 20-mile training run, and all was going well until I hit a long, hard uphill climb at about mile 17. Sam, of course, had left his old man in the dust. The sun was baking down, and my water bottle had run dry. I didn’t know how I was going to finish, until I stumbled into downtown Vienna and refilled my bottle at a water fountain.

After a good long drink, I felt that my energy was coming back. It was as though the life was returning to my aching body. I finished the run — not particularly quickly, but alive and well.

In a similar way, the life-giving water of Jesus revives us when we are feeling dried out and discouraged, downtrodden and depressed. It brings forgiveness of sins … it gives us strength and hope … it satisfies our thirst for a connection with God … it offers refreshment, renewal, serenity, and joy … it carries the gift of eternal life.

Each and every one of us needs this water. We need it when our jobs are unsatisfying, and our supervisors are more clueless than the pointy-haired guy in “Dilbert.” We need it when we try to do the right thing, but keep making the same mistakes over and over and over. We need it when we feel so alone in the world, wondering if God really loves us and cares for us and is watching out for us.

Everyone needs this water, including the woman of Samaria. “Sir, give me this water,” she says to Jesus, “so that I may never be thirsty” (v. 15).