Some have said that truth is the first casualty of war. No so. Truth perishes long before the first shots are fired. And lies are needed to sustain every war. Despots count on our docility, our complicity. There are signs today that tyrants and despots and strongmen have met their match in a global citizenry that are saying, “We don’t believe your lies anymore. We are tired of hatred. Something new is stirring among us.”

“Loving Truth When Falsehood Reigns” is a religious interpretation of the forces rising to stop aggression, speak truth to power, and confront falsehood. I’m not naive. People of every age have found themselves again intoxicated by the lure of mis-information, propaganda, and lies. But there can always be an awakening. And when the people awaken, they can end authoritarianism. This sermon is based on Ephesians 4.14-16 and a reading from bel hooks’ book, All About Love: New Visions. It was preached on the First Sunday of Lent, March 6, 2022. Find the video recording here.

When my children were growing up, there were a few key messages I tried to reinforce over and over. There were a lot of things I said and did that I wish I hadn’t said or done—and frankly, they’ll probably require hours and hours of therapy for my kids. But here are a few of the better things I said, things I hope I also modeled:

Respect. Respect is more than kindness; it’s knowing that each person, no matter who they are, is special; it's showing them they're special. So, in this family, we’ll be careful about the way we talk to each other and behave toward each other.

Cooperation. We each have something to contribute and we need each of us to do our part. So we’ll each have chores and jobs to do that help us be a family.

Truth. When we lie or aren’t honest about what’s true for us, it’s hard to trust each other and it’s difficult to respect each other. So in our family, we will do our best to always tell the truth and speak our truth even when it’s scary.

And when I taught my children about the truth, it wasn’t just telling the truth about what we said or did or experienced. I wanted them to know that their truth was vitally important. I wanted them to be able to be very clear about what mattered to them, what they wanted to stand for, what they understood about themselves and their world they didn’t have to give up for anybody.

I like to think that this emphasis on truth may be one of the reasons why my sons found the courage to come out and claim the truth about their sexual identity as teenagers. It couldn’t have been easy to say, “Oh, by the way, I’m gay” as preacher’s kids living in California’s Central Valley. But they both did. I like to believe they’d come to know that their truth mattered and that standing up for what they knew to be true about themselves was about the most important thing they could do.

I also wanted my children to have a vision for what holds all these values together—that respect and cooperation and truth grow from the fertile soil of real love. And when I speak of true love, I’m not merely talking about romance. I’m talking about that ineffable quality, that value, that virtue, that metaphysical reality we have no better word for.

I’m talking about “love”—that divine energy or force of nature that’s so much more than the feelings shared between people who love each other; “love” is the word we use for the power that holds all things together, the power that nourishes the connections between everything in the universe, that power that can bring people together not only to make love, but to make meaning, and to stand side by side in solidarity against cruelty, barbarism, and maniacal delusions of despots.

I think that, despite the awful manifestations of what we ought to call evil in our world right now, the power of love is bringing people together in ways we would not have imagined a few months or even weeks ago.

“Love is from God,” says the New Testament. “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love,” (1 John 4.7-8).

The Bible doesn’t say, “Only Christians who love are born of God and know God.” The Bible says, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” This is the high-water mark of the Bible’s vision of humanity’s common identity. This is the most egalitarian and democratic religious and spiritual vision. Everyone who loves. Born of God. Knows God. Whether they realize this or not.

When we love we are doing God’s work. When we love we bring more love into the world. We bring God into the world. And through love God brings us to a holiness that creates more wholeness for all people and things.

I wanted my children to value and practice respect and cooperation and truthfulness. And I wanted them to know that if we love each other, love will take care of respect and cooperation and truthfulness, and we’ll all thrive. But if we don’t love, then the other three virtues don’t have a chance. And neither do we.

This is why lying can be so harmful. It is an assault on love. And when truth perishes, love flees. This is why the writer of the Letter to the Ephesians urges us to “speak the truth in love.”

Of course there are times when lying may be necessary, when a half-truth or hiding the truth may be a loving thing to do. But I’m talking about a culture of falsehood that’s built on a hatred of truth and an inability to love.

Lying or subverting the truth or misrepresenting the facts or spreading mis-information tears at the soft tissue of human society. Lies shred the soft tissue that supports the connections between friends and family members. Subverting the truth mangles the sinews that hold together companies and congregations. Mis-information maims our relational muscles that, if ignored or injured, cause a society to collapse.

Lies, deception, mis-information, and the lust for power built on “cancelling” those we don’t like or disagree with or want to destroy—all this tears at the soft tissue of human life in community. And without a functional community, war, as we know too well, is not far behind.

We’ve been carpet-bombed for the past six years with lies, deception, mis-information, and a lust for power. Our politicians condemn each other as liars. They shout at each other, ridiculing each other across the aisle. Social media platforms become tools for propaganda. The free press, the backbone of democracy, has been abused, maligned, and “cancelled” by the highest office of our nation. And voting in America has been politicized and discredited so as to become the privilege of the privileged, not the right of the people. People have never been more divided, suspicious of each other, distrusting of our democratic institutions.

People say that truth is the first casualty of war. But the truth is, truth perished years ago. And now we’re paying the bloody price for the loss of truth and a culture that loves the truth.

It feels pretty dire now. It’s a tough time to be alive, to try to stay sane. A tough time to keep from collapsing, giving up. But let’s not. Let’s not collapse. The lies will not win.

For a reminder I turn to the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer, the artist, the truth-teller, whose words struck at the belly of despotism and helped bring it down. Another despotism has arisen. A new monster. And that monster is all around us. It is manifest in certain persons and parties, but we all carry it within us—the uncritical acceptance of lies, the malicious broadcasting of mis-information, the cheapening of truth in the service of power and expediency.

In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But he couldn’t go to Stockholm. He mailed in his acceptance speech because he was unable to leave the Soviet Union.

After cataloging the culture of deception that led to the global violence and atrocities of the twentieth century he said,

“[Falsehood] does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat; more often [falsehood] demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.”

And who among us hasn’t run someone down, talked someone down, wanted to take someone down by participating in some kind of half-truth or lie that supports our agenda?

Solzhenitsyn goes on: “The simple step of a simple courageous [person is this]: not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions!”

And here he’s not betting on the politicians, but on the citizens of the planet, people who feel they are powerless. He appeals to those who have no guns or bombs or tanks or planes or economic sanctions to use. He says that even a writer and artist like himself who never leaves his home but scratches words on a page can help pull down the strongholds of despotism.

“[We] can conquer falsehood! In the struggle with falsehood [ordinary people] always did win and always [do] win! Falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against [ordinary people committed to truth]. That is why, my friends, I believe that we are able to help the world in its white-hot hour. Not by making the excuse of possessing no weapons, but by going to war!”

And then Solzhenitsyn ended his speech with a proverb well-loved in Russia. And in his speech he capitalized the entire sentence to emphasize its truth: “ONE WORD OF TRUTH,” he wrote while sitting at his desk, “SHALL OUTWEIGH THE WHOLE WORLD.”

There are already signs that the lies of these years, the violence that’s grown in the wake of falsehood, and the bullies that have use mis-information for their tyrannical purposes have met their match. It’s not only the underdog Ukrainian population that are proving to be tough to handle by the superior Russian army. But their heroism is inspiring a global uprising against tyranny. And the global uprising is inspiring the Ukrainian people (as well as the Russian citizens who oppose tyranny).

Two weeks ago, we, the people, looked fractured, turned inward upon ourselves, seemed powerless to anything in concert with anyone else.

That’s what Vladimir Putin may have banked on. But maybe people are tired of lies and what they’re doing to us. Maybe we want to love and to love what’s true and good and beautiful again.

“Ukraine’s tenacity and creativity have ignited civil-society energy, corporate strength, and humanitarian assistance. The hacker group Anonymous has declared war on Russia, disrupting state TV and making public the defense ministry’s personnel rosters. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has promised to help keep Ukraine online. The chipmakers Intel and AMD have stopped sending supplies to Russia; BP is divesting from its stake in the Russian energy giant Rosneft; FedEx and UPS have suspended service to Russia. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is cutting all its investments in Russia. YouTube and Meta have demonetized Russian state media. (Even Pornhub is denying Russians access.)” (The Atlantic, Feb 28, 2022).

That’s a crazy global alliance.

And Rebecca Solnit wrote this yesterday:

“In a hyperconnected world, a new equivalent to war has emerged, not as invasion but as exit, blockade, withdrawal and isolation. Russia has been swiftly cut off from everything from sport to technology to material trade to international banking, and the impact is crushing already and will rapidly grow worse (even while Putin fights his retrograde war). No one in Russia is being bombed,” but the truth is, experts widely suspect that Putin’s hubris will be the end of him, “though no one knows how his reign will end.”

Solzhenitsyn was right. There are many ways ordinary people can fight the falsehood of tyranny—from homemade bombs made by Ukrainian mothers and daughters, to Polish women and men crossing the border to fight, to a truck driver in Texas booking an AirBnB in Kyiv (not to stay but to provide cash to the resistance), to a teenager in Dixon donating dollars to Doctors Without Borders, to hackers in India disrupting the Russian supply chain.

In the book that many of us are reading for Lent, bel hooks encourages us to end “the lovelessness that’s so pervasive in our society.” In her book, All About Love: New Visions, she says that “widespread cultural acceptance of lying, [deceit, and tolerance of mis-information] are a primary reason many of us will never know love.” She’s right.

Love cannot flourish where truth is vanquished. And truth perishes where love languishes. We’ve gotta have both and there are signs they are stirring again in our land, in every land.

In the New Testament, Saint Paul taught the early Christians that “we must no longer be tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of [falsity], by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love we must grow up in every way into Christ, from whom the universal body of humanity, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes [humanity’s] growth in building itself up in love.”

We’ve been torn down too long now. The liars and schemers and strongmen of the world have had their day. It’s ours now. It’s time to build humanity up again in love and in the love of truth. It’s time to be counted among the truth-tellers of the world who say to tyrants of every kind who know nothing but their desire for power: “We don’t believe your lies anymore. We don’t want to hate anymore. There’s something in us that needs to love one another again. And we know that if we do—when we love one another—truth and respect and cooperation will follow close behind. And we will all flourish. And violence, decrepit, will vanish. ”

May love and truth walk hand in hand again in every land.