- When President Clinton admitted that he had lied to a grand jury, the surprising thing was, we were not surprised. On news broadcasts, when his lying was mentioned, there was always someone present to say, hey, he wasn't the first president to lie, what is the big deal? True, President Bush lied about his pardon of President Nixon who lied about his role in Watergate. President Regan lied about his arms for hostage deal with Iran, and of course we voters find it difficult to be too negative about presidential lies. We voted for them in great part because of their lies, not despite them. They told us they wouldn't raise taxes. They told us they were model husbands. We knew they were lying and we loved it. A recent poll found that 91% of us lie regularly. Most of our lies are told to friends and relatives. 31% of us believe that we've been lied to by our doctors. 42% of us believe that lawyers have lied to us. The University of Virginia psychologist had his subjects keep a diary recording the lies that they tell each day and says, people tell an average of two lies a day or at least that is how many they admit to. Maybe by the time we reach adolescence we have been bombarded with so many advertisements claiming wealth and peace and happiness and instant joy that we just stop expecting the truth. At the same time, we curiously live in a tell-all culture, at least on TV. What was once reserved for the priest's confessional becomes standard fare on daytime television, on Jenny and Sally Jesse, before millions. We appear to live, Donald McCullough says, in a kind of schizophrenic environment where we are stretched between wide-scale pervasive deceit on the one hand and tell-all TV confession on the other. We're not very adept with the truth. Aristotle said that telling the truth is a difficult matter because truth-telling is often a matter of relationship. Aristotle says true honesty is more than simply spilling our guts, unloading everything we think about somebody on them. Rather, true honesty, Aristotle said, is speaking the right truth to the right person at the right time in the right way for the right reasons. There may be truths which I know, for instance, which are not really mine to tell. If you tell me something in confidence, asking me to keep a secret, if I tell that secret, I have stolen something precious from you. Not every person has a right to know all truth that we know. One of the reasons that we enable counselors and attorneys and others to keep confidence is it when you tell a truth to a stranger, how do you know that that stranger will not use the truth against you to hurt you? Truth, truth is power, and so Aristotle stresses how the truth is used as an important matter. Timing is important with the truth. There are some things which are true which don't need to be told at this time. When my friend's son is just flunked out of college is not the time to tell him the truth that my daughter's on the Dean's list. Truth, even so noble a thing, can be used as a weapon to hurt and to wound. When I was attempting to help reform my own denomination. On a number of occasions I said that we were being poorly lead that our current crop of bishops were uncreative inept. I still believe those judgments to be true and yet I learned that there are lots of different ways to say the truth. You can say the truth in such a way that it just silences all communication, the other person is so overwhelmed by the severity of your judgment, it really doesn't help to say, well, my judgments are true. So Aristotle stresses, the wrong truth or more specifically, the wrong person telling the truth at the wrong time or truth told in the wrong way for the wrong reason, does damage to truth. Honesty and cruelty bid quite well together, but I suppose that few of us are guilty of great, big, obvious lies. More frequently, our downfall is the so-called white lie. I hate that term. The lie which is allegedly told out of compassion. When you thrust your simian newborn in my face and say, isn't this the most beautiful baby you've ever seen in the world? And what's the harm of my indulging in the white lie? Why yes, of course, your baby is beautiful. Trouble is, it's not so much the lies that we tell others, but also the lies we tell ourselves. So when I say, I was not completely honest with this person because I didn't want to hurt her feelings, be suspicious. A good test of our allegedly innocent lies is to ask, does this lie protect the other person or is it mainly protection of me? I'll admit it isn't always easy to tell the difference. I've had doctors justify their lack of candor with a patient saying, I know that his disease is terminal, I know that he is beyond medical cure, but why tell him, what is the point of destroying all of his hope with the truth. On the surface that lie appears to be protecting a sufferer from additional pain, however, on closer examination it also serves to protect the doctor from being in the discomfort of being in the presence of someone who's just heard bad news. We all know the tendency of people to associate bad messages with the messenger. President Clinton said that he lied because he wanted to protect his family. We do well to be suspicious of such claims. Most of the time, when I tell you, look I'm only saying this to you for your own good, what I mean is I do most things for my good, therefore the truth becomes important to cling to despite my reasons. For instance, in my experience, medical lies are terribly insidious. To give a patient false hope is to deny that patient opportunity to make important decisions, to put affairs in order, to do whatever that person needs to do with the truth. Besides, who am I to assume that a person doesn't have the moral resources to handle the truth? More typically, it is I who do not have the resources to say painful things to other people and risk their reaction. There are lies which you tell, so called white lies, which do seem to lubricate the friction which is inevitable in relationships. A person called you and says, we thought it would be just great if we could go out to dinner next week. Wouldn't you love to go out to dinner with us next week? And you think to yourself that you would love to do anything but go out to dinner with these people. You've been out to dinner with them before. All it means is a large check in an expensive restaurant, a couple of hours of being exposed to their Neanderthal politics, but you say, of course, I am sure that we would love to go out with you to dinner. Now admittedly that lie hides some of your true feelings, and yet what harm does it do? You may through this lie be forced out into a dinner that may turn out to be better than you thought, and why bring unnecessary hurt to another? I chalk that sort of lie up to simple courtesy, and yet in the present context, maybe it's time for us to admit that even these occasional white lies, in which we fail to tell the complete truth to one another, that even these are dangerous. Aristotle stressed that lying is always a political matter. It relates to the whole social fabric. We are utterly dependent as a society upon people's word being trustworthy. If we can't be counted upon in most of our inner actions to be truthful, we will end up in fragmented isolation. It would be an untrustworthy, extremely frightening world if you couldn't count on the trustworthiness of people's speech. Truth is a bridge that we keep building to other people. Telling the truth to another demonstrates not only that you are a person of truth, but it's also a gift in which you trust the other person to be the sort of human being who can be truthful. A student asked me to spend a perfectly good Saturday working on a Habitat For Humanity house. I responded that while nothing would make me happier than to spend my Saturday morning on a roof of a house loading shingles and nailing them down, I really needed my Saturdays to prepare for my work on Sunday. She persisted, is there another day of the week that you could prepare so that you could join us at the Habitat project on Saturday? I told her that my week was much too filled, that there would be no way that I could rearrange my schedule. Wouldn't it be more true to say that you simply don't want to give up a Saturday? I can understand that, she said, after all you're busy. I know that you think Habitat is an important undertaking, but you do not think it's important enough to rearrange your life for, okay? Her words hurt, she took an ax out and slashed through all my justifications and alibis, and it was painful. Precisely because it was true. Duke's Bill Poteet used to paraphrase Jesus. The truth will make you free, but before it does, it will make you miserable. And if there is no one in your life to tell you the truth, you are a sad person, you're growth is stunted. If someone cares enough about me to tell the truth, I am enabled to make an accurate assessment of my life, an accurate assessment of who I am in the world. I can grow. In Ephesians four, it's interesting that Paul says, we are to speak the truth to one another in love, yeah, so that we can grow up into Christ in every way. There's an interesting linkage not only with truth, with love, but truth with growth. It's sad that most of the lying we do is done to friends and family because lies are the death of relationship. If you can't know the truth about someone, you're only related to their false image. Real joy of friendship is being appreciated for who you really are, and the great joy of being a friend to someone is the courage to be in relationship with that person as that person really is. In fact you might take that as a definition of friendship. A friend is someone to whom you are able to tell the truth. Maybe more importantly, a friend is someone from whom you're able to receive the truth without hating the person for it. Still, speaking the truth in love, maybe there is something to be said for not always blurting out the truth. I think Donald McCullough gives some good guidelines. First, the truth needs to be pertinent to the situation. I expect a doctor to tell me the truth about my health, not to make a judgment about my personality. In preaching, you ought to expect a pastor to tell the truth about the gospel, but the pastor doesn't need to tell you how she feels about the church board. I've known people who pride themselves on being honest, totally honest, but many times that meant that this was a person always offering to other people their opinions and judgments even unsolicited. I suspect that they were always telling this truth because it was their way of keeping other people at a distance. There are times when we ought to refrain from telling the truth, but that doesn't mean to lie. Rather the time honored, no comment, ought to be recovered. It's better to say nothing than to lie. Second, the truth oughta be used to build up rather than tear down relationship. I take this from Saint Paul, who when discussing some particular worship activity in the church, always had this test, does it edify, does it build up the church? As we said, the truth can be used to hurt. It can force somebody into silence or submission. It can take away a person's dignity. Those who truly care about the truth ought to practice custody of the tongue. Truth is power, that's why Aristotle stresses, truth always ought to be spoken in relationship. Power must be used responsibly. Again, Aristotle said that telling the truth is not just a matter of telling it like it is, but rather, telling the truth in the right way to the right person at the right time for the right reason. We are greatly dependent upon God to tell us the truth about ourselves, and most of the time, God tells us the truth through other people. We won't come to see ourselves accurately or to see the world as it is unless there's somebody to tell us the truth. As your preacher, you ought not to expect me to be entertaining or innovative, but you ought to expect me to tell you the truth as God gives it to me. Anything less is a waste of your important time and a cruel disregard of the demands of discipleship. Here at the university, this is an important topic because we have a particular responsibility to tell the truth. One thing I love about the sciences for instance is their exceptionless view of truth telling. A biologist is always, in any circumstance, obligated to tell what she knows about biology. Whether you like it or not. I'm concerned about universities. We've developed large offices of public relations where people write carefully crafted news releases, and periodically engage in various forms of spin in order not to tell the truth about some embarrassing episode at the university. All these buildings and all these people are here for one major purpose, to tell the truth. Truth is our only commodity here and so a college is particularly under obligation to nurture, honor, and encourage truth telling. Alas from what I've seen, we intellectuals are prone not toward better truth telling, but toward particularly skillful forms of deceit. As recent chair of Duke's United Way campaign, my most discouraging experience was not only how little faculty give to the United Way, 'cause I've been around here too long to expect faculty to be generous, but what got me was the silly deceptions given for not giving. "I have certain ideological reservations about the" "United Way and some of their philosophy of philanthropy." Look, spare me, it would be refreshing to hear from you, look, I'm at Duke, I'm well paid, I believe that whatever I have is mine to keep and you're not gonna get any of it for the United Way, that would be refreshing. (audience laughs) It is a sad perversity of a university education when intellectual resources enable us more skillfully to evade the truth rather than tell and to live the truth. In a discussion with a faculty member of our law school, I was moved when he said, "Listening to the president's" "performance before the grand jury, as a lawyer," "I felt ashamed, here was someone who'd been" "the beneficiary of the very best legal education," "only to utilize those forensic and rhetorical skills" "in order to lie about something as trivial as sex." all I wanted to say today was, those of us who dispense and acquire the very best education, here, we ought to ask ourselves, how well has my education enabled me to serve and to receive or to evade the blessed truth? As we sing in the next hymn, we tell the truth as a way of praising God, this is our way, every time we speak the truth of testifying that the God of truth makes possible even for us to be people who can be trusted with the truth. Amen.