Will Rice - Sermon 22 - Truthiness is a Word, Really

Rev. Will Rice
Grace United Methodist Church
Corpus Christi, TX
pastorwillrice@gmail.com

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5

John 8:30-32

“Truthiness is a Word, Really”

I am a big fan of the franchise of television shows called C.S.I. There is now C.S.I., C.S.I. Miami and even C.S.I. New York. I draw the line at C.S.I. New York but I watch the original, set in Las Vegas and the Miami spin off. I like the original the best because it is the most realistic. It is so realistic that I have become pretty convinced that if this whole pastor thing doesn’t work out, that I could be a crime scene investigator. Now any actually crime scene investigator would tell me I better stick to the pastor thing because what I see on T.V. is not real, but it sure looks real.

I wonder how many doctors and nurses find themselves getting corrected by their patients because they aren’t following the procedures that they saw on E.R. or on Grey’s Anatomy. I wonder how often jurors fight the temptation to judge the merits of a case based on something they saw on Boston Legal or Law and Order.

All of these shows have an air of “truthiness.” Yes, truthiness is a real word. It has been with us since 1824.[1] The American Dialect Society named it the 2005 word of the year.[2] Truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. It is “the notion that what ‘feels true’ must be treated as true.”[3] It refers to our temptation to say, “that sounds good, I am going to believe it, now don’t bore me with facts.

I am going to talk a little bit about Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code and the movie that came from it today. But, don’t worry if you haven’t read or seen it or don’t even plan to read or see it, because today’s sermon is about something much more important than one book or movie, today’s sermon is about truth.

As Christians, we have an interesting relationship with truth.

truth - (trth) n.

1. Conformity to fact or actuality.
2. A statement proven to be or accepted as true.
3. Sincerity; integrity.
4. Fidelity to an original or standard.
5. That which is considered to be the supreme reality and to have the ultimate meaning and value of existence. [4]

We are the most interested in that last one. We are most interested in truth when it refers to ultimate reality. Our truth is more than just a collection of facts. “As United Methodists, we have an obligation to bear a faithful Christian witness to Jesus Christ, the living reality at the center of the Church’s life and witness.” [5] That is what our truth is about. As United Methodists, we see Jesus as a living truth. We don’t have a rigid, fixed set of doctrines that you must believe in - in order to belong. We are together on a journey, a search for Truth.

The spiritual father of the Methodist movement, John Wesley believed that truth was not something that the church handed down as an edict, but rather it was something that we could all understand together. He believed that the living core, the truth of our faith was “revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.”[6]

Scripture, tradition, experience, reason, they have become known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We believe that Scripture is the primary source of what we believe. However our understanding of it doesn’t have to start over with each of us. We have a rich tradition that informs our study and understanding of Scripture. But we don’t just take historical tradition and understanding as its stands, we look to understand it through our own experience of God in our lives. Finally, we believe in the power of our own human reason to put this all together. We use reason to see if it all fits together, the Scripture, the tradition, and our own experience.

Any one of the dimensions of this quadrilateral can be dangerous if taken alone.

I have seen a bumper sticker that spoke of scripture reading, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” I don’t even really need to give an example, but I will. Leviticus 19:19 reads:

You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; nor shall you put on a garment made of two different materials.

If you spend any time reading the Bible you know as well as I do that some things need some input from tradition, experience and reason to even make sense.

If we weigh too heavily on the aspect of tradition we can get stuck just following what has come before, even if it turns out to be wrong or even if God is leading us somewhere else. Ask any of the church reformers like John Wesley, John Calvin, or Martin Luther.

Experience can get us in a lot of trouble if that is all we pay attention to. Experience separated from scripture and tradition can lead to us all developing our own personal religion separated from the community that God calls us into.

And reason, there is trouble there too. As I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, we face the temptation of letting our own reason rule the day. If it sounds good to us, it must be true. A lot of people reasoned for a long time that the world was flat. It made sense at the time. But when it turned out people never fell off the edge, it became time to start weighing the facts.

It is our over reliance on reason that made the Da Vinci Code such an intriguing book for some. Now some people read the book or saw the movie and said, “nice story.” But some, looked at what Dan Brown proposed and said, “it sounds reasonable, it must be true.” That goes back to that concept of truthiness, “the notion that what ‘feels true’ must be treated as true.”

In case you didn’t read the book or see the movie, let me give you a little synopsis. (Before I do that, in case you are thinking, “I don’t really care about the Da Vinci Code, get back to talking about Jesus.” Let me say this. It is very likely that someone you know, maybe someone who does not have relationship with God is going to see this movie and is going to say to you, “what did you think?” Let me also say this, I can’t count the number of times people say to me, “Will, I really want to talk to my unchurched friends and family about God and Jesus and the Bible, but I just don’t know how to bring it up.”) “What did you think about the movie?”

Alright, here is the basic gist.

The curator of the Louvre Museum is Paris is murdered, by an albino monk of all things, and in his dying moments leaves a cryptic message. Harvard cryptologist Robert Langdon is called to the scene to solve the puzzle (by the way the police also think he is the killer). Another police officer, Sophie Neveu, who turns out to be the dead man’s granddaughter shows up, gets Langdon out of there because they think Langdon committed the murder and are ready to arrest him. Together Langdon and Neveu dodge the police and other evil types while putting together clues left behind by the dead museum curator (Sophie’s grandfather). The clues lead them to a secret society that holds knowledge that could, and I quote “devastate the very foundations of Christianity.” This knowledge is about true nature of the Holy Grail. In their quest, our two heroes find out some amazing things, including the “fact” that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and had his child. They also find out that Jesus’ ancestors are alive to this day and that bloodline is what is actually the Holy Grail. However, all the information about all of this has been suppressed since the fourth century when emperor Constantine got rid of all the information about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, elevated Jesus’ status from mortal to God and decided what would be in the New Testament.

The book and movie make some pretty remarkable claims, which is fine, if you are writing fiction, which Brown is, except that before the book even starts, Brown makes some claims about the truth, including this:

All descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.[7]

Now, I know nothing about artwork, architecture, or secret rituals, but I do know enough to know that Brown didn’t do a whole lot of research into the sacred documents he references. I will have more time to go into the details of this in the session on Tuesday night, but suffice it to say, Brown makes some factual mistakes. Let me show you one real quick. It is easier to reference the book since it goes into a little more detail. On page 245, one of the characters says,

These are photocopies of the Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea scrolls, which I mentioned earlier,” Teabing said, “The earliest Christian records. Troubling they do not match up with the gospels in the Bible.”[8]

There is really no scholarly argument about this, there is nothing at all Christian about the Dead Sea scrolls, they are completely Jewish, with no mention of anything Christian.

The same character goes on to quote the Gospel of Philip and then point out something about the Aramaic language it is written in. Unfortunately, that Gospel was written in Coptic, translated from Greek.[9]

In some ways, this all seems unimportant; we usually leave this sort of stuff for academics and theologians. However it shows that Brown is mixing fact and fiction even when he seems to be talking about fact. And the problem with that is this, when we read a book like this, we have no way to separate the historical fact from the fiction.[10] The danger is that we say, “it sounds true, it must be true.”

The Da Vinci Code is not the first time we have been called to weigh truthiness against truth. Over the past few years, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins painted a picture of what they thought the Book of Revelation was actually about with the Left Behind series and many people did and still do believe it to be true. In 2004 Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ was released. While that movie was based on Gospel accounts, in order to make it into a movie, Gibson had to use his imagination and people were left having to decide, which is the Gospel and which is Mel Gibson. In 1988 it was Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which outright offended many Christians, but left many others trying to wonder if it could all be true.

If a book or movie is written well enough, it will cause our reasonable self to ask, “is it true?” But what if we engaged the Wesleyan quadrilateral I mentioned earlier to judge. What if we looked at the Da Vinci Code through the lens of scripture? What does scripture say about Mary Magdalene, Jesus and the Holy Grail? I will leave the first two up for your exploration but I will tell you--you won’t find the grail in the Bible.

What about tradition? Well the tradition of the church stands contrary to the claims in Brown’s book. However, Brown makes it sound like there is some secret conspiracy, hiding all sorts of documents to hide the truth. If it is a conspiracy at all, it is a conspiracy of boredom. All this history, all these other gospels, all the research are quite available if people want to look.

The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary, the Gnostic gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, are not tucked away in a vault somewhere, you can pick them up at Barnes and Noble or order them at Amazon.com. You will probably find them quite boring and you may see some obvious other reasons that they didn’t make it into the New Testament.

What about reason? I said earlier we rely too heavily on reason, but our reason can help us when we don’t forget about the other parts. If we really consider scripture, in other words, read it ourselves, if we really look at tradition, not as the definitive answer, but as the faithful effort of those who have come before us to understand, we can make reasonable decisions about what it is we believe. We don’t believe something because Dan Brown makes it plausible, we believe because we have looked for ourselves.

Then what about experience? The movie version of The Da Vinci Code betrays the book in a wonderful way. At the end of the movie, just after the most climactic moment, (there weren’t really that many exciting moments) Robert Langdon, played by Tom Hanks reveals that he, as a child had an experience of Jesus. He had fallen down a well as a boy and in his fear had prayed to Jesus and had a powerful feeling that he “was not alone.”

Moments later Hanks says something that all of those who decided to boycott the movie will miss out on, he says, "What matters is what you believe."[1]

What matters is what you believe. And I when I say that, I am not asking you to say “I intellectually concur with some widely accepted views on God’s existence, character and activities.”[12] I am instead saying, what matters is that you have a relationship with God, one that is growing, one that is deepening. One that is seeking and self critical. One that seeks answers in scripture and tradition. And one that goes beyond factual answers and seeks the experience of relationship.

When books and movies like The Da Vinci Code come out, we are not all going to agree. Some of us will want to boycott them, some will want to read and see them, some will just not care. Some will build up walls to defend their faith, some will use them as opportunities to examine what they believe. For some they will cause a crises of faith, for others they will cause unimagined growth. For some, they will just be a moment to be entertained.

I believe in God and I believe that God works through all things, even over imaginative books and poorly lit, slow moving Ron Howard movies. If through all this one person comes and begins a relationship with God through Christ, if one engages their faith at a new level, I will thank Dan Brown, even if he was just trying to tell a nice story.

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[1] According to the American Dialect Society, see http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/truthiness_voted_2005_word_of_the_year/

[2] Ibid

[3] Rodney Clapp, “The appeal of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s truthiness”, The Christian Century, May 16, 2006, 22

[4] Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

[5] “Doctrinal Standards and Our Theological Task”, The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, 2004, (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House, 2004) 76

[6] Ibid, p. 77

[7] Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, (New York: Anchor Books, 2003) front matter

[8] Ibid, 245

[9] Bart. D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures, Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) 19

[10] Bart D. Ehrman, Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, (New York: Oxford, 2004) 189

[11] Thank you to the folks at Newsday for printing this quote, I wasn’t able to write it down exactly in the dark at the theatre. I got it from Carol Eisenburg’s article, “’Da Vinci Code’ Movie Not Exactly by the Book”, May 19^th 2006, online at http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/movies/ny-lidavi0519,0,5986963.story, accessed May 27, 3006; internet\

[12] Leonard Sweet, Out of the Question, Into the Mystery, (Colorado Spring: WaterBrook Press, 2004) 65