by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning!

We come to this place today

To remember who we are,

To remind ourselves of our truest values,

To move toward what we know we wish to become.

Come, let us worship together!

A few months ago I was involved in a little fender-bender out here on the corner of 14^th and Salmon, and this is how it happened.  I was going east on Salmon, headed downtown to a movie, about to cross 14^th, when the driver of a large van in front of me took off down 14^th, a one-way street, in the wrong direction.  He realized his error, attempted a U-turn, and upon completing his turn hit my right rear fender as I crossed 14^th.  I stopped and got out, and he stopped and got out.  He was a young man, maybe in his early 30s.  He came over to my car, inspected the damage, and apologized profusely three times.  “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said.  “I just didn’t see you.”  “That’s okay,” I said.  “These things happen to all of us.”  He had insurance, as did I, so we exchanged information, and went on our respective ways.

I thought that would be the end of it—but a couple of weeks later, I got a call from my insurance agent saying that the other driver’s company was denying my claim.  “What?”  I said.  “Why?” 

“Well, his story won’t hold up, because after all he hit you from the rear,” my agent said, “but he claims that you changed lanes illegally and hit him.  Now this will have to go to arbitration.  In the meantime, you’ll have to pay your $500 deductible.”

“That’s a big fat lie!” I said.  “I can’t believe he said that!  I’m going to call him right now.” 

“No, just let us handle it,” my agent said. 

“No,” I said.  “The other driver (and we’ll call him Roy, because that’s his name) Roy knows he’s lying.  He apologized to me.  He has a responsibility here.”  So I did.  I called up Roy at his place of business. 

“Roy here,” he said. 

“Hi, Roy,” I said.  “This is Marilyn Sewell.  You may remember me.  I’m the woman whose car you hit a few weeks ago.” 

“Oh,” he said. 

“I just heard that you’re claiming that I changed lanes illegally, and that I hit you.  Roy, you know that’s a lie.” 

Silence on the other end of the line.  “Well,” he said, clearing his throat a lot, “I guess my agent went out there and investigated at the scene of the accident.”

“Roy, we had been gone from the scene of the accident for two weeks by then—there was only the street for him to investigate.”

“Well, isn’t your insurance company going to pay?” he said. 

I explained about the arbitration and that I would have to pay the $500, and then I said, “Look, we both know that you lied to your agent.  Do you really want to live with a lie, Roy?  Is it worth a little bit of money to have this lie on your conscience?  (If I had been a Fundamentalist minister, I might have told him he would burn in Hell, but I didn’t do that.)  Now I want you to call your agent up right now and straighten this out.  Here is his number.  Okay?”  More silence. 

And then Roy said, in a gruff voice, “Okay.”  And I gave him the number and hung up.

Now I don’t know whether or not Roy called his agent or whether or not I’ll get my $500 back.  But what I didn’t explore with Roy and what was really significant about his lying is what it did to my sense of trust.  The next time an incident like this happens, will I feel obliged to call the police and get a report?  Will I feel a need to stop witnesses?  Will I worry that I just can’t accept the good word of a fellow citizen?  I feel less safe in the world than I did before, and my fearful attitude will be communicated to those I know, either subtly or overtly. My agent told me when I complained, “Oh, this kind of thing happens all the time.”  It does?  If so, each time it happens, the fabric of trust in our society has been weakened just a little bit more.  Personally, I want to be a trusting, loving, open person—and I want you to be—and that’s a lot more important than any $500.  That’s what lies do—they make us pull back, tense up; they make us wary and distrustful; they separate us from others.

In thinking about this situation, I began asking myself—how did it come to this?  How is it that people lie so readily, and with so little sense of the consequences of their lies?  This kind of reflection soon led me to the conclusion that Roy’s lie seems to be the natural outcome of the kind of culture in which we find ourselves today.

Lies permeate our society.  Some of these are not outright lies—just suggestion and manipulation, as in the inescapable flood of advertising that engulfs us on TV, the radio, magazines, billboards.  You have no idea of the effect of this barrage of advertising until you go somewhere where there is none—I had this experience when I visited Cuba.  Why did the airport and the highway and the buses seem so strangely empty?  Then it hit me.  No advertising anywhere.  I say advertising is lying not because it literally is, but because it suggests terribly destructive untruths to us—it’s not just that we are shown attractive goods that we might enjoy.  It’s not just that we’re encouraged to buy one brand over another.  It’s that we are told time and time again, in message after message, that if we don’t have this or that, we will not be loved.  Being loved is for human beings a survival need—it is connected with mother’s milk, it is connected with being accepted by the tribe—it is that primitive.  And so we get that sleek new car, ask our doctors for Viagra, go for that botox treatment.  The lie is—and it is a big one—the lie is that these things will bring you love, acceptance, peace, a respite from your terrible longing and loneliness—and they will not.  

The language of public discourse is full of lies and half-lies.  When we kill our own troops by mistake—a tragic, soul-rending error—we call it “friendly fire.”  The prisoners at Abu Ghraib are called “detainees,” a newly created word.  “To detain,” means merely to “hold back for a while,” or “to keep in custody.”  That’s not exactly what was happening at Abu Ghraib.  And then of course there’s that recently concocted legislation, the “Patriot Act,” which takes away civil liberties and implies that those who object are not patriotic.

We have lies coming at us from places of authority and power, from people we should be able to trust.  We lost our innocence as a nation with the lies told during the Vietnam War—lies about who was dying and how many and why.  And the lying has continued.  No, we have to say to our children, no, there were no weapons of mass destruction.  We can no longer hear the words, the stirring challenge, of John F. Kennedy without feeling jaded and foolish: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”  We need to be able to say those words again, in pride, and mean them, and be willing to give of ourselves for our ideals—not pull back in cynicism, thinking instead of what can I give, how am I going to “get mine.”

It is particularly disturbing when people in high places, people in positions of public trust, lie to us.  Former Governor Neil Goldschmidt is truly a tragic character, a man of many noble qualities felled by personal weakness. And now it appears, according to this morning’s Oregonian, that our present governor Ted Kulongoski knew of this crime when he appointed Goldschmidt as education czar.  Kulongoski is denying this—I don’t know, but I do know that one lie leads to another and another and another. 

The lies of our last two Presidents are fresh in our memories.  We all remember Bill Clinton looking directly into the television camera, perspiring profusely, and declaring, “I did not have sex with that woman,” his words being the occasion of many conversations about just what sex is, anyway.  President Bush purposefully and consistently over a period of months conflated the terrorist attacks on 9/11 with the deeds of Saddam Hussein, thus deceiving a good number of the American public and leading us into a war under false pretenses.  Clinton was impeached for his unfortunate behavior, but then forgiven rather easily, because his personal morality was flawed, but not his social morality, for most people approved of the direction in which he was taking the country.  It is Bush’s social morality that is flawed, and we shall see how forgiving history will be of that.

We have all just experienced the funeral rites of a former President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.  What will history say of him?  I predict that he will be remembered as a strong political force that turned this ship of state in a radically different direction.  He was personally a kind and compassionate man who turned this country away from kindness and compassion.  You may remember that he said, among other things, “What I want to see above all is that this remains a country where someone can always get rich.”  What if he had started his term by saying, “What I want to see above all is that this is a country where no child goes to school hungry in the morning”?  What a difference that would have made—but no, he ushered in an era in which the free market has been the measure of all things, an era unlike any other since the Gilded Age of the late 19^th century. 

Some theorists say that deceit is built into our genes—that it is part of Darwinian survival behavior.  But we are not chameleons or scorpionfish who have to change our color in order to protect ourselves from natural enemies.  We are not orchids that pretend to look like insects so we can get pollinated.  In fact, the reason lie detector tests work on human beings is that when we tell a lie, even a little lie, our system becomes distressed. Lies freak out our brain.  We are not made to lie.  We are made to tell the truth. 

Throughout history, various eras are dominated by certain ideas or philosophies.  When our country was settled, religion was dominant.  Then came an emphasis on expansionism and national unity, and in the latter part of the 19^th century, the Industrial Revolution changed the order of things.  The excesses of the Gilded Age called for reforms, and those reforms came, and Unitarians were right in there helping to make change.  Roosevelt ushered in Progressivism after the Great Depression, and that era held until the economic turmoil of the 1970s led to the resurgence of a market ideology that began to be codified in the 1980s under Reagan.  The big lie of that era—our own era—is that winning is everything. That success in the marketplace is the most important value, trumping duty, tradition, rules, and justice.  Too many people in high places and in low places—too many people everywhere—live by that lie.  This is trickle-down economics:  it has trickled down from Kenneth Lay to Roy.  And my fear is that it will trickle down to my kids and yours.

We exist in what David Callahan has called “a plague of market fundamentalism.” But we should remember that no era lasts forever, that each is supplanted by the next, and it seems to me that there are lots of signs that we are ready for a new way.  I hear people being fed up with lies, wanting the truth, wanting something to believe in again.  I see people trying to balance their lives, trying to give more time to family.  Many are trying to live more simply, trying to sustain our groaning planet.  These are the precursors of a new day.  And this church is a part of the coming of that new day.  Here we are given opportunities to grow spiritually and to live lives of authenticity, not ruled by the materialism of the culture.  Our social justice task forces are actively working to bring us into the next era, and it will be one in which the market will not be God—the market, the economy, will be a tool in service to human beings, a tool for the greater good, not the good of the few.

You in your own personal life can do a lot.  You can do the opposite of what Roy did.  You can reweave the warp and woof of the fabric of our society by the way you choose to live, by the example you set.  You be the one who continues to file the honest tax return.  You be the one who knows where your money is invested, and cares.  You be the one who tells Allstate that your boyfriend does in fact live with you and does drive your car.  You be the lawyer who bills only the hours you work.  You be the athlete who stays clean of drugs.  You be the parent who never, ever lies to your children—no matter what.

Because you know what?  It matters.  It matters to Roy.  It matters to our kids.  It matters in our own lives that we are able to trust and to hope.  It matters that we turn this country around, and I believe we can.  As part of Reagan’s funeral ritual, Sandra Day O’Connor quoted from the Massachusetts Puritan John Winthrop, quoted the famous passage from his sermon on board ship before landing in the New World: “We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Yes, it is time that we take our moral leadership seriously, that we take responsibility for our deceptions, and that we repent, as a nation.  I do indeed believe that we are being called to a new day, and we are in the pangs of birth pain just now.  We are a great people.  We are a great nation.  May we truly be the “light upon the hill,” and lead in the ways of righteousness and justice and peace, and use our vast powers for the good, as we are called to do.  So be it.  Amen.

We come before you today, O Spirit of Life, knowing that much is wrong that must be set right.  May we start with our own lives.  Give us the courage to see the lies we tell ourselves because we think the truth would be too much to bear.  May we live each day with integrity, and when we’re tempted to cut corners to achieve our ends, help us to see the foolishness of our ways.  Bless this country, and guide our leaders and guide all of us to higher ground than we have yet rested on.  So be it.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, know that if you would be free, you must dwell in the truth.  Go in love and go in peace.  Amen.