SING OF LIES

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Psalm 5:1-8

June 17, 2007

 

Psalm 5

1    Give ear to my words, O LORD;

       give heed to my sighing.

2    Listen to the sound of my cry,

       my King and my God,

       for to you I pray.

3    O LORD, in the morning you hear my voice;

       in the morning I plead my case to you, and watch.

4    For you are not a God who delights in wickedness;

       evil will not sojourn with you.

5    The boastful will not stand before your eyes;

       you hate all evildoers.

6    You destroy those who speak lies;

       the LORD abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful.

7    But I, through the abundance of your steadfast love,

       will enter your house,

     I will bow down toward your holy temple

       in awe of you.

8    Lead me, O LORD, in your righteousness

       because of my enemies;

       make your way straight before me.

 

What’s the harm in a little lie?  Aren’t there many levels of lies?  Fibs, exaggerations, poetic license, and flattery are lies we easily tolerate.  “Did you eat your peas, young man?”  “Yes, ma’am, I did”– even though the dog has little green bits of food between his teeth.  That’s called a fib.  No harm done, right?  “I played basketball at Butler University on their championship team,” he said to us, though when we began practice for our first church league game, it was obvious he had never played at the collegiate level or even the high school level.  That is called exaggeration.  No harm done?  Her make-up was caked on as if she had been trying to use up the entire supply in one sitting, but you remarked, “My dear, you look lovely tonight.”  That is called false flattery.  No harm done?  Your essay says that the incident happened to you when in reality you it happened to a friend of yours.  That is called poetic license.  My wife claims that I use it in my sermons all the time!  No harm done?  These are all lies, aren’t they?  Yet, given their mild nature, we would have a hard time agreeing with the psalmist who says that God destroys all those who speak lies.

 

But lies progress in subtle increments, so the problem comes in drawing the line.  When do you have to stop lying and start telling the truth?  Your child is fighting sleep and calling for you.  You call back that you will be there in a minute, having no intention of going, hoping the child will give up and fall asleep.  A harmless lie.  Later in life that same child now a teenager is fighting peer pressure, wanting guidance.  She asks you if you ever sneaked out of your bedroom at night when you were a teen, or ever drank with underage friends, or ever…whatever.  Afraid of giving her permission by your bad example, you lie and tell her, “No, never, I would never have done that.”  And the gulf between you widens and the silence falls because she can see the lie in your eyes.  Honesty that could have meant so much to the two of you has now been removed from your relationship.  The problem with lies is in finding a stopping place once you have got started.

 

Is it all right to lie if you think some good will come from it?  Is it all right to lie to protect yourself or someone else?  Is it all right to lie in order to get ahead?  And if we say yes to any of those, what do we do with commandment number nine, “You shall not bear false witness”?  James Mays writes, “The lie is one of the most dangerous and detestable forms that evil takes.”  Satan is known in the Bible as the “Father of Lies.”  Is the difference between truth and lie a simply a matter of convenience or is it a matter of faith?  One line we might draw about our telling of lies is whether the lie is intended to do harm to someone else.  That’s the situation in Psalm 5.  Someone has accused the psalmist of idolatry and if he cannot prove his innocence, then he will be barred from the temple.  But how do you prove that?  A couple of weeks ago a pickup truck struck my daughter’s car in the rear while she was sitting at a stoplight.  But the father of the boy driving the truck claims that her rear bumper had previous damage and the insurance company should not pay the full claim.  Since the bumper is now marked and mangled, how do you prove what it looked like before the wreck?  That is the power of the lie.  We see it all the time in political ads.  It doesn’t matter if an accusation is factual, only if it can be attached to some candidate’s name.  We can say, “It is all in the game.  Nothing personal.  It’s just politics.”  But the lie was intended to help one candidate by harming another.

 

I don’t know about you, but I am sick of being lied to, sick of listening to lies spread about those seeking public office, sick of being lied to by candidates with empty promises and stances that are spun to meet the approval of whomever the audience might be.  Do you want a leader who tells lies or one who tells the truth?  It seems like a simple question with an obvious answer, but it is a lot more slippery than that.  Would you approve of a candidate who tells lies in order to get elected so that he or she can lead us truthfully after the election?  Would God approve of that?  What does that teach our children about lying?  And is it any less wrong for our candidates to allow political strategists or political parties to lie for them while keeping some moral distance and claiming that the lie did not come from them themselves?

 

And the psalmist says, “Lead me, Lord; lead me in your righteousness.”  Whether the intent is to do harm to someone else or to further your own goals, lying is offensive to God.  For when lies are told, they are told not only against another person but also against the God of Truth.  God is on the side of truth.  As the psalmist says, “For you are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil will not sojourn with you.”  If we are lying, we are not walking with God and God will not walk with us.

 

The importance of this on Father’s Day cannot be overstated.  Our children see more than we want to admit.  They watch us and pick up cues for how to handle life situations.  When stopped by the State Trooper and asked how fast you were going, a son will notice if his dad says 55 when he had seen the speedometer on 65.  What the boy has just learned is 1) that it is okay to lie to police; 2) it is okay to lie to get out of trouble; 3) that we can disregard God’s laws if it would be an inconvenience to keep them; and 4) that money (the avoiding of paying a fine) is the ultimate arbiter of what is good and what is not.  All lessons learned without a word being spoken.  Making yourself tell the truth is often a difficult task, but we must teach our children not to always take the easy path in life.

 

Our sinful lies are not just against each other, but are against God.  The damage done is not just to our neighbor but has worldwide and even eternal consequences.  God abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful, says the psalm.  Nothing has caused more suffering on our planet through the centuries than war.  It has killed more people and devastated more lives than disease and disaster combined.  And most wars begin with lies and deceit.  Most wars are justified by demonizing whole tribes of people, lying about their nature.  Most wars are engineered by those for whom battle and blood are the only paths to glory.  But God will not sojourn with evil.

 

Sometimes I despair that we humans will never be able to see God’s path again.  At Camp WaKondaHo, our church camp in a hill-ringed valley of Casey County, a path wound back and forth across the face of a deeply wooded hillside, finally leading you to a perch atop the valley that offered views of the entire camp and the surrounding farms.  It was my favorite hiking destination.  But a violent ice storm one winter dropped entire trees and thousands of limbs across the path.  Clearing it was going to be a huge task, so we put it off, waiting for a time when we could give full attention to it.  As we carried on our camp routines in the following years, the path got dimmer and dimmer, grown over, no trampling boots and shoes to keep it well-marked.  Today that path is indiscernible, buried beneath years of neglect, perhaps never to be found again.  The psalmist writes, “Make your way straight before me.”  “Let me see the path, Lord, so that I might walk it.  Make clear to me the direction I should take in life.  Show me without a doubt what I need to do to be in your favor.”  But given how long we have pursued our human goals, given how long we have neglected God’s will in order to advance our own standing, given how unaccustomed we have become to sojourning with God, sometimes I despair that we humans will never be able to see God’s path again.

 

But then the psalmist encourages me.  “I will enter your house, I will bow down toward your holy temple      in awe of you.”  Like the psalmist, we will throw ourselves onto God’s mercy.  We know that the first step is to pray, to cry out to God, to plead our case before the Almighty Power of the Universe, to enter God’s house in humility, and to ask that the path be made clear.  Lead us, Lord; lead us into a day of truth.