I still haven't gotten the audio for this one yet...but as soon as I do I'll add it.
Grace, mercy, and peace to you from the Holy Trinity. Amen.
This week on my Facebook page I asked people what the best lie their parents told them was. Here are some of my favorites:
The official language of Delaware is not English.
The ducklings hatched in the night and went away in the night but you just missed them. Two decades later I learned that a raccoon had eaten the eggs.
You can tell the difference between boys and girls by looking into their eyes.
You could probably make a pretty good case that these stories some of us were told did nothing to harm us (in fact, I know each of the people that had these things said to them, and they seem pretty normal to me) and were all in good fun. Or maybe they were said out of exasperation when their parents heard nothing but "why?" for hours on end.
So, while these little white lies are easy enough to dismiss as acceptable fibs, it's much less easy to dismiss other lies we're told...either as individuals, or as a society.
Paul gets at that, in his self-righeous, sort of overdramatic way, in the reading from Galatians we just heard today. He's pretty angry at the church in Galatia for not listening to the true gospel, and instead listening to the false gospels that were being preached by people.
And that got me thinking about the false gospels we hear every day. There are obvious ones....like how we can only be pretty if we are thin and tan. Or that we can only be successful if we reach the top of the corporate ladder. Or that money buys happiness (and while it does buy prozac, that's not really the same thing).
Those are pretty easy to point out, critique, and dismiss.
Then there are other things we hear that we think might be gospels... ones that aren't so easy to rid ourselves of. These sticky lies we get taught haunt us in the middle of the night. Some of them are ones we hear from the voice in our own head:
What am I thinking? I look like a fool. I'll never be good enough.
things that if some guy said to us on the street, we'd think he was an ignorant asshole, but if the voice in our head says them...somehow it's the voice of reason.
And there are the lies, proclaimed as gospel truth, by those around us...things that we believe and take to heart because we are inundated with them every day.
Like being told when we were young that the only possible route to heaven is by believing everything in exactly the correct way. Which leads to lots of anxiety when, as a child, you don't know the answer to every theological question which means your salvation is at stake.
Or like hearing that the rapture is a real thing and then having a panic attack when your parents don't come home from work when they said they would, causing you to fear you've been left behind.
Or like hearing that God doesn't give us more than we can handle...which, if were true, would mean that God is a bad judge of the amount which we can handle which is not a really healthy way to look at the stuff we have to deal with on a daily basis...depression, cut off relationships with our siblings, or parents, heartbreaking stories our clients tell us.
Or like the decal on the truck I saw every day in my high school parking lot that belonged to one of my fellow students. It was a picture of the Trix rabbit and the text next to it said "Silly faggot. Dicks are for chicks." Or any number of other homophobic slurs I heard in the hallways between classes...all, of course, spoken by the 'cool' kids.
Which, as a young kid who knew he probably was gay but prayed really hard not to be, became truths I told myself.
These lies, preached by others as gospel truth, when they become so prevalent to us that we begin to believe them, keep us chained to a false reality. They keep us buried in thoughts that do not allow us to have hope God will come into our places of despair, fear, or loneliness.
Paul speaks about wishing to curse those people who speak false gospels...and I get it.
I want to curse those people who manipulate others in the name of God. I want to curse those people who were too cheery to me when I walked through the valley of the shadow of death. I especially want to curse those people who created a reality for Drake, telling him he wasn’t welcomed, wasn’t loved, and wasn’t worthy of being treated like a fellow child of God...which caused him to take his own life. Those are the people I want to curse...because they manipulate and twist the Gospel into something that does more harm than good. Something that promotes hate instead of love. Something that teaches kids that their worth is based on lying to themselves and to others about who they are instead of being a beautifully unique child of God.
I get Paul’s anger here...I don’t want to have to continue grieving the senseless deaths of children where the only response I feel like I can say with any meaning is “what the hell do you say to that? Lord Have Mercy. Christ Have Mercy. Lord Have Mercy.” I get his frustration that there are so many things besides the truth that we get coerced into hearing, and believing. And I pray, like Paul, that Christ comes again to set us free from this present evil age.
So, we wait. We wait for a new heaven and a new earth, for all the saints to come together in a world where pain and death and hurt is no more, and all God’s children are celebrated for who they are. We wait for a time when God reaches into our physical graves and pulls us out to live among each other in unity, and peace.
And while we wait, we can still find the true Gospel, the one that liberates instead of enslaves. The one that is not coercive, but freeing. The gospel that teaches hope instead of despair. The one that bravely walks alongside a confused young kid and says “I love you. I promise, it gets better.”
The true gospel, the one preached by Christ that says things like “love your enemies and blessed are the poor in spirit”, the one that has stories of Jesus eating with sinners and tax collectors. The one where slaves are healed and women proclaim the resurrection. This gospel is the one that promises to release us from the things that keep us captive right now.
It promises to release us from captivity because we hear stories like Jesus healing a gentile’s slave...showing that the kingdom has no boundaries and All are included. It promises to release us from places of death that keep us in our graves of mourning, our graves of self deprecation, our graves that are not just metaphorical, because Christ not only commanded Lazarus to come out of his tomb after being dead for three days, restoring life to his stiff limbs, but Christ too came out of the tomb after being dead for three days, raised to eternal life and offering that promise of life to everyone and everything.
The gospel we hear from bold people around us who dare to tell the truth of it...who dare to tell you that no matter what keeps you stuck in the grave, God will reach in and pull you out..that Gospel gives us the promise of life. And I believe that nothing can separate us from that promise. Not present realities, not mourning, not bullies, not the grave. Nothing in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Amen.
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