PLAIN TRUTH

May 24, 1992

~

8:30 and 11:00 a.m. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan
‘Fourth Presbyterian .church, Chicago

Scripture
Romans 8:31-39
John 10:22-30

++."If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly."
Y
~John 10:24 (NRSV)

"If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly." "...in words we
can understand; the facts, please; just the simple, unvarnished,
plain truth." Who here this morning couldn't say that, or hasn't
said something like that?

Lewis Thomas, President Emeritus of the Sloane Kettering
Cancer Center provides a helpful commentary on the text in the
first chapter of his recent book. In an address to colleagues
with whom he graduated from medical school fifty years ago he
said: -

"Almost precisely fifty years ago, all of us
passed a milestone in our intellectual develop-
ment. Within my own memory it was more than a
milestone: it was a monument of achievement. You
will all remember it, even though it lasted only
for a brief period, the Span of time between the
final examinations and the first weeks of intern-
ship. It was that best of all possible times in
our lives, the moment when we knew absolutely
everything about everything. And for most of us,
certainly for me, it was the last moment of its
kind in a professional lifetime.

"Ever since, it has been one confusing ignorance
after another, fifty years of knowing less and
less about more and more."

"Tell us plainly?" ‘Thomas lists some of the "items of
-ignorance," things he doesn't understand, picked up over fifty
years. "The Federal Reserve System - what it is, what it does or
how it does it... the stock market, the bond market, the word
processor, the universe, black holes... and the human mind." We
don't have a clue, he Says, about what the human mind is. [The
Fragile Species, p. 3, 4, 111, 115]

The most valuable lesson science has for us, this distin-
guished scientist says, is not revealing to us the plain truth
but helping us to comprehend something way different - "how

little we know, how still less we understand, and how much more
there is to learn."

The text almost pleads: "Tell us plainly. Give us plain
and simple truth." Lewis Thomas reminds us that truth is not

often simple or plain, and that if you assume it is, you may miss
it altogether.

Now, we would all benefit in general from a little more
simplicity and little less complexity. From IRS forms, to assem-
bly instruction for children's toys, to penetrating a voice mail
system and actually talking with a person, to transferring a car
title - life does seem cluttered with unnecessary complexity.

The professions all seem to be conspiracies against simplicity.

I think it was C. S. Lewis who observed that every profession
develops a complex vocabulary which functions, at least, to keep
outsiders out by making matters so complex that only insiders
will understand. Physicians, attorneys, bankers, have linguistic
enclaves, special vocabularies, which intimidate most of us with

their sheer complexity. "Tell us plainly," we plead. "How sick
am I?" "How much is it going to cost?" "When can I have my
money?"

Theology and religion are no exception. We have a jargon we
use which is not accessible to the uninitiated. The story is
told about the day Simon Peter and the distinguished twentieth
century theologian, Paul Tillich, approached the pearly gates
together. They were met there by Jesus who said, "Peter, who do
you say that I am?" And Peter responded, "You are the Christ,
the Son of the living God." Jesus said, "That's right, Peter.
That is who I am. Please come in. Professor Tillich, who do you
Say that I am?" The brilliant scholar adjusted his vest, rear-
ranged the tobacco in his pipe, lighted it, took a deep draw and
said, "Well now, ontologically speaking, you are the ground of
being, being as such, actually. And in the existential dimen-
Sion, it is plausible to posit that you are the Divine-Human
encounter, transcendence. and immanence, eternal and finite, the
human race's ultimate concern about being and non-being resolved.
And in an eschatological dimension, you are future hope, essence
of a new Weltanschaung for the cosmos." And Jesus said, "Huh?"

So there. is a-conspiracy of complexity and we need ‘more
simple, plain truth in life including religion. But the real
issue is that the truth is not often plain or simple. A real

issue before us always is the danger ‘of oversimplification, of
reducing. complex questions to simple answers and in the process
missing something important. I do not think it is even close to
reality, and therefore dangerous, to characterize what happened

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in South Central Los Angeles three weeks ago as a result of a
"poverty of values" or "reproductive righteousness." The Presby-
terian Church is preparing to address once again the Biblical,
theological and ethical dimensions of abortion. It is a highly
volatile and enormously complicated issue. We have produced
another lengthy and complicated study. No one is very happy with
it. There are many people who know with absolute certainty what
the plain truth is in this matter. They know that abortion is
the taking of a human life and always wrong. But there are many
people for whom truth is not that plain in this matter. And our
church will, I fear, once again, make people unhappy because it
does not appear to be ready to reduce this complicated issue to
Slogans and bumper stickers.

Sometimes you can't tell it plainly because the truth is not
plain. That is how it was on a cold winter day in Jerusalem
many years ago. The issue for the people who were there was very
important. Some of them also thought it was Simple. I love to
picture this scene. "The Festival of the Dedication took place
in Jerusalem. It was winter, and Jesus was walking in the Tem-
ple, in Solomon's Portico." It's a dusty, sand-colored scene by
Zeferelli. A harsh wind blows out of the east, cold. It's why
Solomon's Portico had a closed side, to protect it in the winter.
For some reason I always think of the opening lines of King

Richard III, "Now is the winter of our discontent," when I read
this text.

Jesus is walking - it doesn't say why or where, .perhaps on
the way inside to observe the Festival of Dedication, Hanukkah we
call it, when the successful insurrection of the Macabees,
against the Syrians and the reclaiming of the Temple are cele-
brated. People gather around him; they are walking there too, I
suppose. They are not happy people. They are on their way to
celebrate a moment of high and holy patriotism in their nation's
history ~- Memorial Day for them. But they have made compromises;
they have accommodated an enemy. They are not free. It isa
“winter of discontent."

I stumble when I read it the way it is written. John says,

"The Jews gathered around him." Later, "The Jews took up stones
against him." Later still at the end, "the Jews demand his
crucifixion." But Jesus was a Jew. So was the man who wrote the

Gospel. They all were. I stumble on the words because anti-
Semites have used them wrongly, to substantiate their evil rac-
ism. Please remember always that when the Fourth Gospel says,
"the Jews," it does mean "the Jews." It means a cabal “of “oppor-
tunistic political and religious. leaders who for their own bene-
fit collaborated with the Romans. Caiphas, the chief priest, was
the chief collaborator. So were some of the Pharisees and Sadu-
cees. Those are his advesaries. These are the ones who arranged
his execution. When John says, "the Jews," he does not mean
Jewish people. He means these opportunists who arranged the

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crucifixion of his Lord. And because I cannot say all that every
time I read from the Fourth Gospel, I sometimes change it to
read, "they."

so "they" gathered around him and now we know who "they"
were and they say, "How long will you keep us in suspense? If
you are the Messiah, tell us plainly."

Why do you suppose he didn't simply say, "The suspense is
over. I am the Messiah"? Why all the metaphors. "I am the Good
Shepherd." I am the light of the world." Why the secrecy? Why
not simply tell the plain truth?

Some have suggested that he didn't say it that day walking
in the portico of the Temple because it would have resulted in
his immediate arrest and crucifixion. Could be, but I don't
think so. There is no lack of physical and emotional courage in
Jesus that I know of. -I think the reason he didn't say it plain-
ly was, at least in part, because they meant something very
different by "Messiah" than he did. That is, it wasn't plain or
simple. For them Messiah was a stereotype, a military-political
leader who would rally the nation and lead the revolution. Jesus
did not see himself in that role.

The confining stereotypes of Jesus have always been a prob-
lem for our religion. -Someone is always forcing Jesus into a
theological or cultural or political mold. The miracle is that
Jesus manages to accept and love equally people who believe very
different things about him and won't even speak to each other
because of their differences about who they believe he is.
Catholics, Protestants, evangelicals, liberals - people who love
him but won't sit down together at his table. Martin Marty mused
once about the trouble. Jesus would have even moderating a meeting
just between the following Baptists: Jimmy Carter, Harvey Cox,
Jesse Jackson, Jessie Helms.

One day, not long.ago, I took leave of common sense and
tried to engage in conversation the young woman who was handing
out evangelist materials on our corner - practicing a kind of
confrontational, "in your face" proselytizing. I disagreed with
the content of the material and the way it was being presented.
I said something to the effect that I didn't think what she was
doing was appropriate. She was stunned - I think angry, although
the anger quickly became a sweet smile and she said, vehemently,
"You must not know my Jesus. Let mé tell you about my Jesus."
All I could think to say was, "I didn't know he was yours." It
was a mistake!

He is not hers, or theirs, or mine, or yours, or the Pope's
or the Presbyterian Church's. He does not belong to us. If
anything, we belong to him. If he is Messiah, he is the embodi-
ment of something larger than each and all of us, to which we

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belong. Jesus did not belong to them. Their stereotype was not
the truth about him. So he did not tell them plainly.

Simplicity, plainness, clarity, misleads sometimes. There
is information that is accurate but not the truth. The little
child who fills a sand bucket with water and says, "See, I have
the ocean in my bucket," is accurate but not true. School chil-
aren were asked to tell the class what their parents did for a
living. One five-year-old said, "People come to my father for
help. He gives them powerful drugs. And when the drugs make
them unconscious, he cuts them with a knife. When they wake up
he makes them pay him a lot of money. He's a surgeon." Accu-
rate, but not quite true. [See Leslie Weatherhead, The Christian
Agnostic]

The "heresy of exactness," Ernest Campbell called it.
Sometimes it's better not to succumb to the temptation to preci-
sion and simplicity. Sometimes it is better to confess that this
truth is not plain at all. Ernie Campbell remembers a wartime
friend who was distraught because his dearest friend was killed
in battle. He went to several chaplains asking why and each in
turn tried to give an explanation, a theological rationale.
Finally he found a Southern Baptist chaplain who listened to his
grief and simply wept with hin.

Great realities are not often plain: grief, patriotisn,
passion, love, faith... Sometimes only a poet or the poet in us,
can begin to express these truths.

Why doesn't truth strike all of us identically, with the
Same force and the same depth? Isn't it Significant that stand-
ing in front of a work of art, some are powerfully moved and. -«-- =-<:
others don't get it; or that great music is experienced as pro-
found pleasure by some but by no means all. So, perhaps we must
be receptive, open, eager, willing to be possessed by new truth.
"I have told you," Jesus said, "but you do not believe." It is
true, is it not, that words you have heard all your life, one day
shout and penetrate deeply: the National Anthem, the Lord's
Prayer, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Plainness is not the only
question; of equal significance is our readiness to experience

new truth. [See E. Campbell, Locked in a Room With Open Doors,
p. 46-54]

it

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Christian faith is not plain and simple. It is, at least in
part, pure mystery. It is at least in part the confession that
there is more to reality than I will understand. It is, borrow-
ing a page from Lewis Thomas, acknowledging our modesty, how very
much about nature and ourselves we do not understand. It is the

very basic theological acknowledgement that there is reality
larger than I.

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And Christian faith is also the life-long responsibility of
thinking it through, of trying as plainly as possible to know
what we believe and to understand what it means. Having poked a
little fun at professional theologians, faith praises God for
Paul Tillich who, when the world says, "Tell it plainly," writes
three volumes of brilliant Systematic:Theology, which thousands
of us will read, and be stimulated and fed and nurtured and
amazed. [Ibid, Campbell]

He did not tell them plainly. What he said was:

"My sheep hear my voice, I know them...
no one will snatch them out of my hand."

There is a final plainness to this matter, an ultimate
simplicity. It is, Christian Faith, not finally a matter of
having definitions of Jesus pinned down and ratified. [It is,
Christian Faith, a matter of knowing that you are known by the
Good Shepherd...

"My sheep hear my voice: no one will snatch
them from me."

Listen to this testimony by Gerald May, M.D., in his book,
Addiction and Grace, about his own journey in the 60s and 70s:

"I studied all the great slew of psycho-spiritual
pop and pap that was percolating across the na-
tion. I read... I meditated. One evening, about
six months after my quest began, I was diligently
practicing a form of yoga meditation that encour-
ages the free coming and going of all thoughts.
In the freedom... one of the thoughts that came
was prayer. It was, in the beginning, the prayer
of a nine-year-old, embarrassingly immature.
‘Dear Jesus, help me.' I would have stifled it
immediately had I not been allowing all my
thoughts to come and go. As months and years
passed, this prayer grew, and with it, my aware-
ness of my desire.for God. I realized my explora-
tion was less a professional research project and
more a personal spiritual journey." [p. 7-8]

You and I may never have it all figured out and nailed down
neatly. Truth may never be plain. But somewhere in you there is
a place, a capacity, a willingness, and an eagerness which is not
expressed in intellectual categories so much as the nine-year-
old's prayer, "Dear Jesus, help me."

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You may think about it and struggle with it all your life,
but somewhere, I believe, in each of us is a place where we can
know the truth - that we belong to the Good Shepherd. That he
will never let us go - that there is nothing, as St. Paul put it,

nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God
in Jesus Christ our Lord.

That is the truth — plain truth.

Dear God, help us. As we struggle with mystery, as we engage the
perplexities and dilemmas of our complicated lives, give us grace
to rest in your love, and the peace which comes to those who
trust your son, Jesus, our Lord. Amen.

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