Truth or Consequences (Rock Springs UMC)

Our scripture today is Genesis 31 verses 3 through 5 and 14

Genesis 31:3–5

through 18 selected verses from a larger story.

And I want to give you the context before I read the verses

because the verses will make it make a little more sense.

So Jacob has been working for his father-in-law Laban for for

well over 14 years now. And Laban's wealth has been

decreasing and Jacob's wealth has been increasing.

And Laban is now having a less than happy attitude toward

Jacob. They made a deal that Jacob

takes care of all of the tending of the flocks.

He ever sees all of that and and all of the breeding of the

flocks, he ever sees all of that.

And they made a deal that after an X certain period of time,

Jacob would get to keep all of the goats and sheep that were

speckled, spotted or striped, and Laban would keep all of them

that were solid white colored. And, and suddenly, and Bible

tells us through God's intervention, there's a lot of

speckled, spotted and striped livestock being born.

And so Laban's flocks are shrinking.

Jacob's flocks are increasing. Laban is not happy about this.

And God appears to Jacob in a dream and says, it's time for

you to go home, go back to the land of your father, face your

your past and but it's time to go back.

And so Jacob is concerned at this point that his wives,

Rachel and Leah will not want to leave their home.

And so he goes to talk to them. So that's the context here.

Then the Lord said to Jacob, Go back to the land of your

father's and to your relatives, and I will be with you.

So Jacob sent word to Rachel and Leah to come out to the fields

where his flocks were. He said to them, I see that your

father's attitude toward me is not what it was before, but the

God of my father has been with me.

Then Rachel and Leah replied, Do we still have any share in the

inheritance of our father's estate?

Does he not regard us as foreigners?

Not only has he sold us, but he has used up what was paid for

us. Surely all the wealth that God

took away from our Father belongs to us and our children.

So do whatever God has told you. Then Jacob put his children and

his wives on camels and he drove all his livestock ahead of him,

along with all the goods he had accumulated in Padan Aram to go

to his father Isaac in the land of Canaan.

May the Lord add his blessing to the reading and hearing of his

word, talking about truth or consequences today.

There was one. Once Upon a time there was a a

husband and a wife. They've been married for a

number of years. They were driving down the road

together. The lights flashed in the

rearview mirror. The husband was driving.

He pulled over the the patrolman walked up to the window and

said, Sir, I suppose you know why I pulled you over.

And the husband said, I'm, I'm afraid I don't know why you

pulled me over the officer, the officer said, well, you were

doing 75 in a 55. And the husband said, no, no,

no, no, no, I, I couldn't have been driving more than 65 miles

an hour. And his wife said, no, honey,

you were doing 80. And he looked at her sternly,

need to look back to the office. And the officer said, well, and

since I've pulled you over already, I'm going to need to

give you a citation for your broken taillight.

And the husband said, I have a broken taillight that must have

just happened. I didn't know anything about it.

And his wife said, no, honey, you've been complaining about

that light for weeks. Husband looked at her again, and

this time he shook his finger at her.

And he said, look, woman, you need to shut up or I'm going to

shut you up. The officer said, hey, hey, hey,

hey, hold on. He leaned in and he looked at

the wife and he said, does he always talk to you this way?

His wife said, no, officer, only when he's drunk.

There can be such a thing as too much honesty, right?

That, however, I am convinced is the exception rather than the

rule. Yes, there are those times to

save people's dignity and save people's feelings.

We might tell them that their haircut is better than it really

is or their clothes fit better than they really do.

But those kinds of things that help people help guard people's

dignity. Those are those are you know,

no, we're you know, we're not talking about that today.

We're talking about honest to goodness deception.

Maybe that's not the best way to phrase that lies and dishonesty

and this whole series of events that we've been looking at in

Genesis are are riddled with lies and dishonesty and the

consequences of these lies told for short term game.

The consequences are long term and devastating.

When we look at wrong button, when we look at Jacob and Laban,

they both have a legacy of lies that wreaked havoc in their

lives. Laban Laban, who had two

daughters, Leah, the oldest, Rachel the youngest, has his

relative. Jacob comes to town, falls in

love with Rachel, asked to marry her.

He says, oh sure, just work for me for seven years.

Jacob works for seven years. And on the wedding night, Laban

switches daughters and sends Leah in instead, deceives his

son-in-law and uses his daughters in a deceptive way.

He says, well, you can still marry Rachel.

You just got to work for another seven years.

And so Laban's lie got him seven extra years of free labor from

his son-in-law, Jacob. And now years later, Jacob is

leaving with great wealth. God's told him to go back to

Canaan, and he's concerned that his wives won't want to go.

And so he goes and he invites them all the way.

They notice he didn't go back to where they're, you know, they

were all their tents and everything were set up.

He invites his wives to come out to the field, get them as far

away from Laban as possible and says, hey, God says I need to go

back to Canaan. They're like, fine, What's our

father done for us? He's disowned us.

He's treated us worse than foreigners.

He deceived and he lied and he sold us, and then he squandered

what he got for us. Laban's lies cost him his

relationship with his daughters. Laban's lies was about to cost

him his relationship with his grandchildren.

And by now he had a lot of grandchildren.

All because he wanted to get ahead.

All because he lied. All because he deceived.

Relationships were broken. It's a legacy.

It's a legacy. Let's just read that first

again, Rachel and Leah's response to Jacob's concerns

about whether they would want to leave their father.

Not only has he sold us, but he has used up what he paid for us.

Surely all the wealth that God took away from our Father

belongs to us and our children. So do whatever God has told you

to do. Broken relationships with his

own family. It was Laban's leg.

The legacy of Laban's lies. Jacob had a legacy of lies as

well. He, he, he could be legitimately

upset about Laban lying to him, but he really wasn't in a

position to throw stones because he was definitely living in a

glass house. He had lied.

He had deceived his own father to steal the blessing that his

father meant to give to his older brother, Esau.

Isaac was going to bless Esau. He he wanted Esau to prepare a

very special meal before that and and Esau had to go hunting

to get the meat to do it. And while he was out, Isaac, I'm

sorry. Jacob dressed up like with the

help of his mother, disguised himself as a brother, went into

their father who was blind, pretended to be his brother, and

stole through that deception the blessing that Isaac had intended

to give to Esau. He gave to Jacob instead a

blessing that placed Jacob over Esau and authority and position

and power and the covenant of God.

Now God had already promised that to Jacob, and he told Ray

or told his mother Rebecca about that before he was born.

But rather than trusting God to do what God was going to do,

they lied, they deceived. And it was the same kind of

response. Shattered relationships, a

family torn apart. This was Esau's response.

Esau held a grudge against Jacob because of the blessing his

father had given him. He said to himself, the days of

mourning for my father are near. That is, my dad's going to be

dead soon. Then I will kill my brother

Jacob. And so Jacob fled for his life.

Legacy of lies. A legacy of deception, tearing

apart families, destroying relationships.

Where there should have been love, honesty, peace and

harmony, there was violence. The threats of violence use

using people instead of loving people, deceiving people instead

of being real with people and that broke their families and

very, very tragic ways. One of the things I love about

the Bible is that that even the heroes of the Bible are not

painted as perfect. We see them as flawed, broken

human beings, just like we're flawed, broken human beings.

And God can and does work through that.

And with that, we'll talk about that a little more next week.

But but here we see, you know, these broken people living very

real lives and having the same kind of consequences that lying

and deception have today. Broken relationships, broken

families, this business of deception and dishonesty, it's

an increasing problem in our culture.

I don't think people lie anymore now than they used to.

I think people are people, and people have been people for

since the Garden of Eden. It's just we've got better tools

for lying than we used to. We can do it a lot more

effectively than we used to be able to.

Part of the problem and now and I think probably also in the

past is we sometimes glamorize lying and, and we will, we will

glorify really, really good liars.

You ever you ever hear of Frank Abagnale Junior?

Does that name ring a bell to you?

It was a movie about his life a few years ago called Catch Me If

You Can, starring Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Really good movie. If you haven't seen it, a lot of

fun. It's got Tom Hanks and Leonardo

DiCaprio in it. It's going to be a good movie.

Frank Abagnale Junior, a real guy, a con artist.

He started off passing checks, bad checks and making money that

way. And, and he went on to he, he,

he through deception, got a pilot's uniform from a major

airline, pretended to be a pilot with that airline and got free

passage on airplanes back and forth across the country for

years. He, he, he took the bar exam.

He never became a lawyer. And he took the bar exam in one

of the southern States and practiced law without a license

for years. He pretended to be a doctor and

worked in a hospital for years, actually providing medical and

health care to people. And you can hear him talk about

that. He, he went to prison for a

while. He got out and he became an

agent and worked with the FBI to catch fraudsters and to help

them find people that were committing fraud.

And then he went on the talk show circuit.

There were clips on YouTube of him on The Tonight Show with

Johnny Carson entered Carson interviewing him and telling

about his escapades and he became a folk hero for all of

these things. Now.

Now, here's the irony is Frank Abingdale Junior is a liar and

he lied about his history as a con artist.

He passed some bad checks. He went to jail, but once people

fact checked his book, back when the book came out, people did a

little less fact checking than they do now.

Once they fact checked his book, they discovered that there was 0

evidence he had ever posed as an airline pilot and gotten free

rides across the country. There was 0 evidence they had

ever been posing as a doctor, working in a hospital and giving

healthcare, and there was 0 evidence they did ever.

Not only had he not taken the bar, he'd never pretended to be

a lawyer and to see people that way.

And while he worked as a consultant a little bit for the

FBI, he was never an agent with the FBI.

He lied about his lies, made a lot of money doing it later made

a lot of money doing it. But, but that's not something,

it's a good movie. I can't lie to you.

It's a really good movie, but that's not something that should

be celebrated. Lying to people and conning

people hurts people. Abby Ellen will tell you that

she wrote a book a few years ago called Duped, and she had her

own experience of a con artist, a man who came into her life and

lied about his past. And there was enough truth in

his lies that even though she her career was an investigative

journalist, it took her months and even after she was engaged

to him before she finally unraveled the lives and was

devastated in that relationship. This man whom she had loved,

whom she had shared her life with for a time, had deceived

her so thoroughly. She felt humiliated and

disgraced and ashamed, even though she hadn't done anything

wrong. She just believed someone who

was a really good liar, and she writes about that in her book

and how people's lies and deceptions devastate people that

they're close to. And it's not an uncommon

problem. It's a very common problem.

We see that in the world around us and relationships around us,

people that simply don't tell the truth or they only tell

enough of the truth to to get what they want.

And they use lies and deceptions and half truths to manipulate

and control and gain a temporary advantage at the cost of a long

term relationship of trust and it hurts people.

The challenge now is our tools for lying are so good and so

effective that even now on when when we get information

digitally, it is very, very difficult, sometimes impossible

to tell whether what we are seeing and hearing is real or

fake. Now, sometimes you can,

sometimes there are context clues.

I, I, although I was fooled a few times before, I realized,

yeah, probably there aren't eagles flying into people's.

When, when I saw the video of the eagle grabbing the toddler

and lifting it up in the air while the dog was holding on to

the toddler's pants to keep the And I was like, I don't think

this is real. Was it real?

Those are funny. Those are silly.

At the end of the day, those don't hurt anyone.

Their exercises and video making.

But there was a video out on YouTube now by oh, I should have

checked it. Feynman.

Did anyone know what's the There's a physicist, very famous

physicist. His last name is Feynman.

I can't remember his first name. I blanked out on it this

morning. I'm still anyone know?

That's all right. Feynman.

Richard Richard Feynman. That's it.

Very famous physicist from decades ago.

And there's a video on YouTube that that was him explaining why

lightspeed is the upper limit of speed.

And now it's not really what we think it is and all of that sort

of thing. And I started listening to it

because I'm interested in that kind of stuff.

And, and, and I'd heard of Richard Feynman.

I was listening to it. That sounds a little odd.

And it went down into the description and it was all fake.

It's all fake. His voice had been synthesized

and according to one comment that that at most 85% of the

video were things that Feynman had actually said are written

and the rest was made-up. Within a few years, none of us

will be able to tell the difference and when we when we

watch the news. There was a what MSNBC did that

recently. It was a one of the folks killed

up in Minnesota, I think, and they doctored his picture to

make him better looking so people would be more sympathetic

to him. Now, now that for one hand

leaves me concerned that if I ever get killed, I don't think

that if, if you have to be good looking to have sympathy when

you're killed. I'm in trouble.

I'm in big trouble. But but they and and they almost

got away with it made him look better.

Just changed, changed how we looked just a little bit

doctored those photos. Within a few years we won't be

able to tell. We won't be able to tell.

And that's, that's a, there's a lot to be concerned about with

that as as our lives are increasingly online and

increasingly digital, as the information we received is

increasingly digital, to be able to distinguish truth from

falsehood, lies from reality, it's going to get harder and

harder and harder and more and more important.

But because of the nature of that, because of the reality of

it, and it's there and there's nothing any of us can do about

it. That's just the world we're

living into right now where it's we can lie that effectively that

we won't know. Now.

Now you can get robo calls. I haven't had this, I haven't

experienced this yet, at least as far as I know.

But you can get a call from someone who you know, and their

voice has been perfectly duplicated, but it's all faked,

asking for money, help for this, that and the other.

Anyone experienced those yet? I've heard about them.

I haven't received one of those calls yet.

You've gotten one. OK.

OK. Yeah.

Yeah. It's it's it's nuts.

And this will continue to have an increasingly challenging toll

on our group psychology, our emotions, our relationships, as

it becomes harder and harder to know what's real and what's not.

And this is the world that we're living into.

This is the mission field that we're living into.

And so this is part of Our Calling as a church.

And Jesus, although it was, you know, he lived thousands of

years before deep fakes. Jesus spoke to us and has

already given us vision and direction in this regard.

And there's more at stake here than just don't tell lies.

There's more at stake here than just you know.

Thou shalt not bear false witness.

While that's important, this, this notion of being able to

trust other people in our culture and society, how do we

trust? How do we know what's real?

How can we have a culture if we can't trust and we don't know

what's real? How can we have a society?

How can we have a community that's more than just following

rules? That's how do we do life

together? We don't know where all of this

is going. We don't know what tomorrow

holds. But we know who holds tomorrow.

We know who holds the future. We know who holds our hand and

and Jesus is already there. None of this is surprising.

God and Jesus has a plan. He's got a purpose, He's got a

direction. There's a place that God is

leading all of us in all of this and we don't know what it's

going to be. We don't know what the next, we

don't know what the next five years is going to look like,

much less the next 45 years. But we do know this, that Jesus

is already there and he already knows.

This is the same situation the disciples were in.

Disciples the night before Jesus was going to die and Jesus keeps

telling him he's been telling him for weeks now I'm going to

go to Jerusalem. I'm going to be betrayed.

They're going to kill me on the 3rd day.

I'm going to rise from the dead. And they kept thinking he's

talking in parables, he's talking in riddles.

They had no idea that he was given the literal truth and they

were so confused. And he's telling that and

they're like, I'm going to go into prayer place for you and

that where I am, you may also be.

And Thomas says, how are we going to get there?

We don't know where you're going.

How do we know the way there? And that's the situation we're

in. We don't know where Jesus is

going. We don't know where our

culture's going. We don't know what the church is

going to look like in 10/15/25 years.

We don't know what schools are going to look like.

We don't know what politics is going to look like.

We don't know what entertainment media is going to look like.

We don't know what our jobs are going to look like.

We don't know any of that 152530 years from now, but we have the

same answer now that Jesus gave Thomas.

Then Thomas said Lord we don't know where you're going so how

can we know the way? And Jesus answered, I am the

way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father

except through me. If you really know me, you'll

know my Father as well from now on.

You do know him and you have seen him.

Jesus says I am the way. That's all the GPS we need.

That's all the road map we need to go into an uncertain future.

Jesus is the way and and Jesus is also the truth and that's a

foundational thing for us. Lies and deceptions are the tool

of the devil. Lies and deceptions are the tool

of the enemy. And we cannot do the Father's

work with the devil's tools. And so Our Calling as a church,

as we move into this world where it's harder and harder for

people to trust, is for the church to be the one place and

maybe the only place. But for the church to be a place

that is is a haven of honesty and authenticity where folks can

say, you know what? I don't know where if I'll get

the truth and I'll get what's real anyplace else.

But I know at Rock Springs United Methodist Church, those

folks are real. Those folks are honest.

And when I go there, I know that what I see is what I get.

They're not. They're not out there just

pushing a brand. They're not out there pretending

to be something they're not. They're not out there putting on

a show. They're not out there trying to

be fair. They're just real folks who love

God and who love each other. And they'll love me too.

And I know they'll love me just as I am because they love each

other just as they are. And that's who we are called to

be and how we are called to be honest and authentic.

And that can be so hard. It can be so hard.

The the temptation. There's a song from a few years

back, you know, the group Casting Crowns.

They had a song a number of years ago called Stained Glass

Masquerade about how people put on their Sunday best before

going to church. And they're pretending

everything's OK when it's not. They're pretending their lives

are different than they are. Better, more perfect, perfect,

less flawed, less broken. And and we cannot afford to be

that kind of church. No church could really afford to

be that kind of church, because we'll never be as good at

dishonesty and deception as the world is.

We we just won't. They got more money and better

tools than we do. They just do.

It's like, you know, we'll never have as good a music.

If we if we had Jelly roll maybe as our worship leader, then we

would, you know, but but we're never going to have Jelly roll

as our worship leader. We're never we're there's always

going to be able to. We'll be able to get better

music out in the world. People be able to get better

preaching. There's always better preaching

that's out there. There's always better teaching

that's out there. There's always fancier buildings

with, with, you know, you know, more modern.

All of that's always going to be there.

We're never going to be able to compete.

If we try to turn ourselves into a brand and market ourselves as

a brand and, and, and put on a good show, the world will always

win that battle. But, but the world has already

reached a point where it can't be honest anymore or it has to

be deceptive. They're always covering stuff

up. They're always, and you see it

in in individuals online influencers are not people.

They're a brand and they know that and they present themselves

as a brand. And that's why they have such

fear of truths from their past coming up, because it will

destroy their brand image. And then they lose their

sponsors and they lose their money and they lose their income

and they lose their influence and they lose their money.

And so the brand is what's matters, not the person, not the

reality, not the authenticity. But we in the church, we don't

have to worry about all of that because our God already loves us

just the way we are, flaws and warts and brokenness and all.

Our God already cares about us just the way we are.

So we don't have to put on the front.

We don't have to play the stained glass masquerade.

We can have the courage to be honest.

We can have the courage to be ourselves.

We can have the courage to let others be the same.

And the church can be one of the few, maybe the only place in the

world where people can come and say, I know at least things are

real there. I know at least the people are

real there. And that's what we're called to

be. Now, there is such a thing as

too much honesty. And sometimes we got to say, oh,

the haircut looks great. Even if the haircut doesn't look

great, We got to say that, oh, yes, those clothes fit

perfectly. They're very slimming even when

they're not those. That's guarding people's

dignity. But we need to have the courage

to be honest. I got time for one more story

and I'm I'm was hoping I would have time to get this one in,

too. It was that Once Upon a time

there was a king and a very great and vast Kingdom many

years ago. And the king had no children and

the king was aging and he knew he was not quite as effective as

he used to be. And it was time to name and

train a successor. And he wanted someone young,

someone young who would be able to live and lead the Kingdom for

many, many years. And, and, and so the king

decided that to choose a successor, he would call all of

the young people of the Kingdom, all of the youth of the Kingdom

together. And he would give them all the

same challenge. He gave them a seed.

He said, take the seed home and plant it.

And a year from now, everybody come back and show me what

you've grown. So everyone got their seed.

They went home, they planted them in a pot.

They put in the soil, they watered, they fertilized, they

grew. And there was young, one young

man that just a few weeks before that one year anniversary when

they were all to bring their plants back, he looked at his

mom and his mom. It's not nothing's grown.

It's been almost a year and nothing's grown.

He did everything he was supposed to do.

He watered it. He's fertilized, he kept it in

the sunlight. All of the things he was

supposed to do in the sea didn't grow.

And he's like, I'm I'm not going, mom, this is

embarrassing. I'll be humiliated.

I'm not going to take this to the king in front of all those

people, people I know and people I don't from all over, all over

the Kingdom. And his mom said no, no, you

need to go, you need to go. This is important.

Just explain to the king what happened.

Sometimes seeds don't grow. Just explain what happened.

The king will understand. So the son, much against his own

better judgement and and and desire, he went and he took his

empty pot and we got there into the the, the gathering space at

the palace. His worst nightmares came true

as he looked around and he saw people with these amazing

plants, some of them in pots that had to get big pots and

bring them in on carts. And some of them were were giant

vegetables, other were were small fruit trees that were

already bearing fruit. Some of them were were were

beautiful flowers and these giant, you know, floral things.

It was just incredible. And young person after young

person had these wonderful plants and pots of all different

sizes, and they were lining up to present to the king these

things they had grown. And the king was looking and he

didn't seem particularly pleased or particularly distressed at

anyone. But every once in a while he

would look up and look around the room and finally caught the

eye of the young man and he noticed him carrying an empty

pot. King snapped his fingers and

said Hey you boy come on up here and bring your pot.

Boy was now he was like maybe I can wait till last and no one

will see but he's making me walk up in front of everyone.

And he was humiliated. It was beet red and he was

embarrassed and he walked up to the front of the line and he

held up his empty pot before the king and the king said you

didn't grow anything. The boy said I tried Sir, I put

the seed in, I watered, I fertilized, I kept it in the sun

but nothing grew. I'm very sorry that I failed

you, Your Highness, the King said.

I think I found my successor. I said, see, last year when I

gave away those seeds, I boiled every single seed before I gave

it away. None of them could grow

anything. And you're the only one that had

the courage to be honest and bring me back the seed that I

gave you. This is what Jesus calls us to.

The courage to be honest. The courage to be ourselves.

The courage to let down the masks, put the stained glass

masquerade behind us. The courage to be who we really

are, flaws and warts and brokenness and all successes and

hopes and and achievements as well.

All of it all mixed together. The good, the bad and the ugly.

The courage to be honest. The courage to be authentic

because Jesus loves us as we are and other folks need to see us

doing the same thing, loving ourselves and loving each other

as we are, so that they know they don't have to put on a show

when they come here either. They can be themselves too, and

they'll be loved too. And they'll be received too

honestly and authentically in Jesus name.

Amen. Amen.