Living The Truth: From Havel To Jesus

We connect Jesus’ call to be salt and light with Havel’s “power of the powerless,” Chernobyl’s warning about lies, and Isaiah’s demand for justice. We name silence as a tool of harm and outline concrete ways to act with courage, mercy, and truth.

Transcript

Law Fulfilled, Not Abolished

Havel And Living The Lie

Chernobyl And The Cost Of Lies

Jesus Confronts Empire’s Illusions

The Call To Be Salt And Light

Isaiah’s Fast And True Righteousness

Silence Equals Death: AIDS Lessons

The Church’s Voice And MLK’s Charge

Hope, New Things, And Daily Courage

Final Charge And Blessing

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Our gospel this morning comes from Matthew chapter five. Jesus said, You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. But people do not light a lamp and put it under a bushel basket. Rather, they put it on a lampstand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way let your light shine before others, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until it is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the dominion of heaven. But whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the dominion of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the dominion of heaven. Please be seated. Let us pray. Warm us, O God, with your word. Warm us with your love, your spirit, and the hearts and minds of this community gather together around your promise, around your gospel, around your son. In Jesus' name. Amen. In 1985, 40 years ago, the Czech dissident Vaclev Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, in which he reflects on how empires and regimes like the Soviet Union, which occupied his native Czechoslovakia, perpetuate their power and what average ordinary citizens can do about it. And he begins this essay not in the halls of power, but with the neighborhood green grocer. Havel describes how each morning when the grocer opens his shop and sets out his fruits and vegetables for the day, he also puts a sign up in the window that says, Workers of the World Unite, a Marxist political slogan that became a state-mandated symbol in the USSR. Now the grocer doesn't believe it, but he puts the sign up in the window anyway, as a symbol of his acquiescence, his compliance, in order to avoid suspicion, as a way of saying that he can go along to get along and doesn't want any trouble. And in doing so, in this seemingly small act, Havel says, he props up the power of the regime by what Havel calls living the lie. The lie, the very source of the regime's fragile and brittle power, because it is dependent on everyone pretending that things are the way they say they are. And Havel writes because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past, it falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics, it pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing. He says individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For this, by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system. It reminds me of the climax of the TV series on HBO called Chernobyl. The main character, nuclear scientist, is reflecting on the how the Chernobyl nuclear disaster could have happened just a year after Havel published his essay. And his conclusion is lies. He says, We're on dangerous ground right now because of our secrets and our lies. They are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can't even remember that it's there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth, and sooner or later the debt is paid. That is how a nuclear reactor core explodes. Lies. The antidote to all this, Havel argues, is living in the truth, to stop pretending. For the green grocer to no longer put the sign up in his window. This, he says, is the power of the powerless that belongs to and lies within the capacity and agency of each person. Havel says that when the grocer doesn't put up the sign, he breaks the rules of the game and exposes it as a mere game. He says that the grocer has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened. By his actions, the green grocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. We see these same dynamics in the life of Jesus. Jesus and his followers, fishermen, tax collectors, women, everyday people lived under the weight of the Roman Empire, the Roman regime. And its power, too, was based on everyone living the lie. Roman propaganda, which was just as potent as the Soviets, heralded the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, which was no kind of peace at all, and certainly not for those residents of first century Palestine. It was a peace achieved with war, bloodshed, slavery, subjugation, and brutality. From the beginning of his life, we see Jesus and his family engaged in a struggle with Rome. They flee to Egypt after he is born because of King Herod's paranoid fear of a rival king. Herod orders the slaughter of all male children under age two in Bethlehem. And later, as he carries out his public ministry, Jesus encounters religious leaders who were living the lie, who were going along to get along. But Jesus refused to do this. He lived in the truth. And this led to his confrontation with the regime on Holy Week for a mockingly entering into Jerusalem as a king, riding a donkey, turning over tables in the temple, and confronting Pontius Pilate, the embodiment of Rome itself. And when Pilate offered to the people to release Jesus or the bandit Barabbas, they chose Barabbas because they had been conditioned to know what the regime would want. They knew that was the right answer. Jesus was crucified as a symbol of what happens when you don't live the lie. Living the truth is the secret source of our power, but not without consequence or cost. In our gospel today, Jesus urges his followers, us, to live the truth, to be salt and light, to be salt, to give flavor, to enhance and preserve the good in this world, to be light and not hide it under a bushel basket, but to let it shine in our lives and into all the dark and forgotten and hidden places that those in power would like us to ignore, to spice, to shine, to serve, and to speak. As one commentator says, the danger for the disciples is that they may lose that capacity to elicit goodness by forgetting that they are to disorder the status quo, by valuing those who are dispossessed, caring for those who suffer loss, seeking to do justice, showing mercy, having integrity, being peacemakers, and courageously standing for what they believe. Disciples who do not engage in such practices that humanize life on earth will be like salt that has lost its taste. Or, as the prophet Isaiah said, is not this the fast that I choose? To loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house? When you see the naked to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly. All of the Hebrew scriptures, including Isaiah, were written in the shadow of occupation and captivity to other empires: Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Greece, Rome. Again and again they refused to acquiesce, they refused to give up hope, refuse to abandon their neighbors. They claim their voice and their power, they summon their strength, their faith, and claim their fundamental power to live the truth, God's reality, what Jesus called the reign of God. We are called to claim that same power, to be salt and light for the world, to love and serve our neighbor, to stop living the lie and pretending, to follow in the faith of our forebears, faith in the face of empire. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, a saying emerged. Silence equals death. The silence surrounding the epidemic didn't just reflect indifference, it intensified the crisis. While AIDS affected people of all kinds, queer people, especially gay men, were denied care, compassion, and even funerals, not because they were sick, but because they were queer. That silence, fueled by stigma and myth, compounded their suffering and contributed to countless deaths. And forty years later, that phrase echoes within the queer community and beyond as a reminder of the harm caused by our silence, silence we may perceive to be neutral, though it is not, and by living the lie, which leads to the death both literally and spiritually of our neighbors. And just so that same silence foretells our own death, the death of the church. If we too pretend, if we cannot address the world and one another, if the church becomes only a hideout and a hideaway, if we live the lie rather than living the truth, we will become less vital in the world, and our faith will become increasingly alienated from our own everyday experiences and lose its meaning. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King once said that our lives begin to end the day we become silence about things that matter. This is true for people as well as institutions. And yet we have so much to offer our neighbors in this moment. Love, hope, community, tangible help, advocacy, and a scripture and tradition that have so much to say about being human in such difficult times, and about claiming a different kind of power, following a different kind of king who reigns with compassion from the cross, whose throne is an empty tomb, who's always bringing life out of death. In these days, we must show courage to be salt and light, to show up and speak up and stand up for our neighbors, following the example of Jesus. Otherwise, our silence equals death. We can no longer hang the sign in the window and pretend. For as the poet and activist Ardra Lorde once said, your silence will not protect you. Havel, for his part, remained hopeful in all this. He concluded his essay saying, the real question is whether the brighter future that we long for is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness have prevented us from seeing it around us and within us and kept it from developing? Well, that is a good thought. That the seeds of the future are already here in the accumulation of our daily courageous acts. And Havel was justified in his hope. Six years later, the Soviet regime crumbled, and Havel became the democratically elected president of Czechoslovakia. God says in Isaiah, I am about to do a new thing. Do you not perceive it? The question isn't whether God is doing something new. God is always doing something new. The question is whether we will recognize it and whether we will join in. Because this is the moment to stop pretending, to stop going along to get along, to take down the sign in the window, to live in the truth, to be salt, preserving what is good, resisting what is corrosive, adding flavor to a world that has grown bitter with despair. To be light, casting out shadows, exposing injustice, guiding others towards hope. To be a church that refuses to be silent and shrink from the pain and the beauty of this world. To stand with the vulnerable, to speak with compassion and conviction, to act like Jesus matters not just on Sundays, but every day, not just in our hearts, but in our habits, our voices, and in our communities. This is the fast that God chooses. This is the truth that sets us free. This is the power of the powerless. And the world is waiting for salt, for light, for us. Now is the time to show up and speak up and live in the truth. May God give us the courage to do it. Amen.