Sermon – Do You Want the Facts or the Truth?

We live in an age that is overly concerned with facts. Everyone is after more and more facts. We want the facts about the stock market, the facts about our retirement accounts, the facts about the government, (have fun getting those) and on and on we go. We usually gather these facts in an effort to “discover truth” in some way, shape, or form. And there is a degree of helpfulness in having as many facts as you can about a subject. They can be especially helpful in regards to legal situations and the court system. However, as we have probably all seen on the news or discovered in our own lives; truth is sometimes overlooked or missed regardless of how many facts are acquired. Having a lot of facts on hand does not necessarily mean that truth will be discovered. There can be an overemphasis on the importance of facts.

They start out to prove that other religions are wrong; which usually does a terrible disservice to other religions because they’re judged by people on the outside, people who don’t really understand the religion, and who have already decided the prognoses before they start. Then they move on to proving other denominations wrong. And finally, when they’ve run their full course they attempt to prove all other churches in the denomination wrong. This comes from the presupposition that facts are always the determiners of truth. I think this is placing too much emphasis on facts; facts which are always changing, which means your truth is always changing.

The Age of Reason and Science only made it worse. As we have unearthed more and more biblical manuscripts, none of which agree with one other, it makes for an interesting challenge in thinking about your faith. Why? Because the facts in the stories contained in the manuscripts are not exactly the same. Granted, most of the them are nearly the same; but if you’re looking at facts, then even a small difference causes trouble. But we needn’t look to different manuscripts to see this; take the Bible in front on you in the pew, look and compare the stories in it long enough and you will see some differences in the stories.

This morning I hope to be able to show you that as followers of Christianity we need to be more concerned with truth than with facts. We need to show others truth rather than overwhelm them with factual information. As most of you know, I tend to follow a lot of scholarship in the field of religion, particularly Christianity. Hopefully I can contribute to that field one of these days. But in saying that, please don’t assume that I’m going to attempt to deny that there was a Jesus or that there aren’t enough facts to show that. What I’m referring to is the overemphasis we place on facts to determine truth and the problem that causes us. We have to learn to look beyond the factual and get to the truth that was being communicated. Let me give you some examples.

Take the crucifixion and resurrection stories. What exactly happened? Did Simon of Cyrene carry Jesus’ cross as it says in Matthew, Mark, and Luke? Or did Jesus carry it all the way by himself as it says in John? What did Jesus say just before He died? Matthew and Mark say he cried out and then immediately died. In Luke 23:43 he says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” and then immediately dies. But in John 19:30 he says, “It is finished” and then immediately dies. Who was at the tomb and how many were there when the women showed up early Sunday morning? In Matthew they see an angel sitting on a stone. In Mark they see a young man inside the tomb. In Luke they see two men. Or for that matter, who actually went to the tomb at all? In Matthew it’s Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James. In Mark it’s Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. In Luke it’s Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Joanna and several other unnamed women. But in John it’s just Mary Magdalene.

We can go the route of the apologists who creatively come up with ways to “fix” these problems; but in the end that only causes more problems. You can say that John didn’t say that the other women weren’t there; he only said that one was there. These kind of word games only make the writer of John out to be either stupid or an attorney! Or you can try to combine all of the accounts together, cut and paste a little, throw a few things out like the apologists do, and come up with something that sort of works. The only trouble is, you’ve created your own book of the Bible. You’ve written a book that says something that no book in the Bible actually says. I’m not comfortable with writing my own book of the Bible. Or you can go the route of saying that those problems are simply the result of difficulties in translating from Greek to English. Unfortunately, that’s not the case; the problem is only worse when you can read Greek. You can also say that the scribes made some intentional changes. For some problems this works, and we certainly have evidence that this occasionally happened; For example, specific references to the Trinity were inserted in the King James Bible when in fact, they didn’t exist in the text. Rather, I should say, they didn’t exist in as complete and thought out of a form as what was inserted; although the ideas behind the Trinity were already there. Or we can talk about how research has shown that eyewitness testimony is not always very accurate. And there are several court cases where the evidence finally overthrew the eyewitness testimony. Not because the person was lying; but because they simply didn’t see things correctly. Ask any police officer at a accident site; the stories are never the same and it’s not because everyone is a liar.

Or, we can take a step back and ask ourselves, “What were the writers attempting to communicate in this text?” Is the point of the death and resurrection of Jesus really about how many women went to the tomb? Is the reason behind the crucifixion really to know whether he said “It is finished” or “into your hands I commend my spirit?” Or is the point deeper than the words? Because if we relegate everything only to the facts, and completely overemphasize them, then we have problems, don’t we?

Another example of a problem would be the story of Elijah that we just read in our God Sightings reading schedule. In I Kings 18:40 we see Elijah killing all of the priests of Baal. According to I Kings 18:19 that would be about nine hundred and fifty people. Who here is really okay with that kind of behavior? We read and talk about how God devoured the sacrifice and showed himself to be the only true God. But we tend to skip over the slaughter of the priests. Granted, they weren’t exactly perfect themselves, however, we would be appalled if something like that happened today, regardless of whether or not it was to people of our religion or to another religion. This is not easy to explain away. In looking through my commentaries, only one said anything about it. What they said was that we should keep in mind that these priests had been responsible for the death of many Israelite priests. That may be true, but it still grates against our reason and sense of justice that one man can kill nine hundred and fifty people. The other commentaries didn’t say anything, they just skipped over it. So what do you do? Throw it out because it doesn’t fit in our society anymore? Or do you look for the deeper meaning behind the words; that being that God is real and powerful and will protect his people. We can all relate to that message. That is a message that transcends the different cultures and times. In our day and age, Elijah’s actions wouldn’t be the way to express those eternal truths; however, in his day it was. When you encounter some of these difficult places in Scripture, always remember that it’s okay to say, “I don’t know why.” That truly is a most appropriate response.

When we argue too much about facts we tend to miss the truth of the story. Let me give some examples of this by telling you a story. See if you can figure out what story I’m telling you before I finish it.

As all good stories do, this one happened a long time ago. There was a boy who wanted to do more in life. He felt like he was made for more. He had never seen his father, and his mother had died when he was a baby. As a result, he had lived and grown up with his extended family. As chance would have it, one day his extended family was murdered. But, on that same day he also happened to meet a stranger that was able to continue educating him. This stranger became a good friend and introduced him to the higher life that he had always wanted to experience. In time, he became a great warrior and was the hero for the cause of goodness and justice. He became the leader of those that were trying to remove the influence of evil from their worlds. At this point he finds himself going through several trials and seeing visions. In one of these visions he is fighting the second most evil bad guy in the universe. In the vision he strikes bad guy number two down, only to realize that he was fighting himself. In due course, he had a face to face confrontation with bad guy number two, only to discover that bad guy number two was actually his own father, whom he had never known. Now he struggles to reconcile fighting for good, with the realization that his father is fighting for evil. Eventually his father brings him to his boss, bad guy number one. Bad guy number one is a really bad guy. He attempts to force our young hero to fight on the side of evil. When he doesn’t succeed he attempts to kill him by torture. Not able to see his own son suffer any longer; bad guy number two picks up bad guy number one and drops him down a large hole where he dies. The process of doing this leads bag guy number two to the brink of death itself. And so, after having a few brief words with his son, and turning back to the good side, he dies in peace.

How many know this story? I’m sure you do; it’s Star Wars. What are the truths contained in this story? There are several; but two of the most important would be that you don’t have to follow in your parents’ footsteps. If they chose wrong, you can decide to chose right. And the second would be that, no matter how far down the wrong path you’ve gone, nor how long you have been doing it; you can choose to change. Good truths for all people. Is Star Wars factually correct? Did it really happen? Of course not. But the more important question would be this, “Do the facts about it happening or not have anything to do with the truths contained in it?” Not at all; truth is truth. We recognize this, even though we know that the vehicle it was communicated through isn’t quite historically accurate! If we can see that in a story that we know has been entirely fabricated, how much more should we not be bothered with questions about whether or not there were one, two, three, or more women who went to the tomb? Please remember that I’m talking about overemphasizing the small details. I’m not suggesting that the story of Jesus is no more factually accurate than Star Wars! Please don’t hear that. It was a good example by being an extreme example!

Let me bring it a little closer to home. Take this cross behind me. Do you know what that symbol represents? I’m sure all of you do. In fact, I would be willing to bet that most people in our country, even those that would say they aren’t “religious,” could give you some legitimate meaning to what that symbol represents. However, factually speaking this cross is wrong. For starters it’s too big, they didn’t make crosses that big. Why? Because it would be too heavy, which is another strike against it’s historical accurateness. It’s way too heavy for one man to carry; if not several men. Another thing wrong is that it’s varnished. They wouldn’t have done that either. And finally, it’s just too expensive. They couldn’t have afforded to crucify all of the people they did if every cross cost what this one cost. But after saying all of that, is the meaning behind this symbol any less real simply because some of the facts about our representation of it aren’t accurate? Not at all. You know exactly what this symbol/picture means. In fact, it probably means more to you than you or I could put into words. Why? Because a picture/symbol is worth one thousand words. That’s a phrase that also shouldn’t be thought about too much or it looses it’s meaning. A picture is not literally worth one thousand words, it’s not an equation; but you understand that.

This cross behind me has so much symbolic significance that I really wouldn’t have had to preach at all this morning. I would be willing to bet that I could have stood up here, told you that we were going to stare at the cross and meditate on it for 10 minutes and then go home, and more than one of you would have left with tears in your eyes. The reason is that your mind isn’t bothered about the inaccurate details, because the truth of what it represents goes so much deeper than those details. In some ways, the more I were to try and talk about what the cross really means, the more I would mask it’s true meaning, because for some things in life, words can get in the way and cause a lot of misunderstanding. Heinrich Zimmer, a mentor of the great mythologist Joseph Campbell, once said, “The best things can’t be told; the second best are misunderstood; the third best have to do with history.” You might need to read that one more time. What he was saying was that the best and greatest truths in life – the death of Jesus and what that means for us – can’t really be fully told in words. When they are, they become the second best things because the moment we use language, something gets lost. It’s a truth communicated to the heart, not just by the mouth. The third best things are history; meaning facts and figures and all of the small details that really don’t mean a lot. So back to the question of: does is really matter how many women went to the tomb? Or does it matter that the tomb was empty, a point which all of the Gospels agree on? I’m sure you know which one matters the most.

In closing, I hope you are able to look beyond the “facts” of the faith; seeing as how they can change as archaeologists dig up more facts and unearth more manuscripts. I also hope you don’t throw all of the facts out of the window; but that you always remember that there is a truth that goes beyond the facts. In fact, truth is so deep and real that it doesn’t need facts to back it up. Whether the facts line up or not doesn’t change it. That truth would be God’s love for you and me and everyone else in this world, and also that he demonstrated it by his death. To quote Jesus himself in John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” AMEN.