The senior sermon of the Rev. Hunt Priest, Class of 2005 from the Diocese of Atlanta, delivered in Christ Chapel on April 28, 2005

John 14:1-14

The novelist and essayist Walker Percy, the prophet of Covington, Louisiana, had this to say about the sacred call of the writer. In an essay called "Novel Writing in an Apocolyptic Time" he wrote this: "If the novelist's business is, like that of all artists, to tell the truth, even when he is making up a story, he had better tell the truth no matter how odd it is." And further, "the novelist's business is to look and see what is there for everyone to see but is nonetheless not seen." To paraphrase this physician turned novelist, "the role of the writer is to diagnose the culture."

With a little exegetical work from our friend Charlie Cook, this quotation from Walker Percy affirmed an understanding of the priesthood that I had always hoped was there . In Charlie's interlinear, Percy's words read like this:

"If the priest's business is to tell the truth, even when she is making up a story, she had better tell the truth no matter how odd it is." And further, "the priest's business is to look and see what is there for everyone to see but is nonetheless not seen." In a time in our history when the truth is auctioned to the highest bidder, we must come to understand that our task as clergy is to diagnose the culture.

To diagnose the culture. As we all know there is no accurate diagnosis without a commitment to telling the truth. And it's rarely easy. The truth is often hidden beneath the surface of our own pride and denial. And the truth buried within us can be shrouded in the myths we carry around about ourselves. All too often, we begin to believe our own press.

Our myths and our PR become meta-narratives that we use as guides to explain the good, the bad, and the ugly of our individual and collective behavior. You're outgoing because you moved around a lot when you were young. Or Americans love our guns because, by God, we civilized a continent. Sometimes these myths can be helpful, but more often than not, they separate us from the real truth that is aching for the light of day. I have several of these myths that animate my daily life, but the one I'll tell you about today is the now deconstructed meta-narrative of how I came to be a truth-teller.

Here's how my little story begins. I crave the truth because I am the adult child of an alcoholic. To be more specific, the 40 year old son of a charming, disappointed, hilarious, depressed, loving, wreck-less, compassionate man who tragically drank himself to death 10 years ago. A man who resented and resisted his vocation from the minute he passed the bar exam. An unhappy lawyer who used the tricks of his trade to manipulate reality.

A glaring glance to clamp down on family insurrections. Well-placed friends to pull strings and call in favors. Isolation and self-medication that closed him off to his suffering and the suffering of those he truly loved.

As an adolescent and younger teenager, I had no idea what was real and what was a fantasy of his conjuring and our complicity. As my parents argued, as DUIs piled up, as clients went away, as Peter was robbed to pay Paul, our family of four continued to live our lives as we always had: the country club dues were paid, but the mortgage was not.

Eventually I began to question reality. Question it, but also scared to death that any day, my friends, my rivals, my teachers, would find out, discover the sham, know that all was not well at 460 Winchester Road.

My father was the elephant in the middle of the courthouse square. Half the town had drinks with Billy Priest and the other half owed him a favor. And that's how those closed little systems work. His friend the banker rolled the mortgages over, his buddy the judge buried the DUIs and all of his posse ignored my mother's pleas for help. It was a conspiracy of complicity, a web of silence that helped absolutely no one. Not even the conspirators. A legacy of silence and acquiescence that so often creeps up to bite me right on the butt.

Eventually our house of cards collapsed. The local paper finally told the truth about our favorite son. About our favorite son and his dozens of DUIs. The newspaper accomplished what my mother was never able to: forcing the judge to see the truth. He ordered Dad off to a 30-day treatment program. A 30-day program that required the family to come for a week. Dad had a drink on the flight home. And I, at age 21, finally began to learn to tell the truth. To know the necessity of speaking the truth about painful and difficult things.

Without the truth my friends, without an uncompromised commitment to speaking and hearing the truth, we'll never get an accurate diagnosis. Without an ongoing search for truth, we'll never find healing. Without Truth, we simply will … not … get … God.

Over time, and in study for this sermon and in observing all of us as we move through our life together, I realize that the quest for the truth has nothing to do with my Pop-psychology profile as an Adult Child of an Alcoholic. My quest for truth, your quest for truth, has everything to do with our profile as human beings. Our profile as human beings who live in community. All of us, at a gut level, we're yearning for the truth in a culture that denies it, medicates it, hides it under the long-discredited mantra of "Father knows best."

First and foremost, we are human beings dependant on life in community. But soon, very soon, most of us will be leaders of a community like that of the Johannine Christians. A community that needed to tell the story of Jesus in a new and different way. The community that so valued the truth that the word itself appears in the gospel like bright orange trail blazes in a dark and unknown forest. Those late 1st century Christians yearn for the truth and line Jesus up as being truth, not telling the truth, but being the Truth. Truth with a capital T. We get it right there in today's gospel lesson: John 14:6-Jesus said to Thomas, I am the way, the truth, and the life. One of the many "I am" statements that distinguishes John from the synoptics. The "I am" statements that reach out to embrace our most basic needs and longings. Jesus says, "I am the bread of life….light of the world, the true vine, the good shepherd. Images from Hebrew scripture-yes, universal religious symbols--yes. The answer to yearnings of John's community and the answer to the yearnings of our communities--Yes, Yes, Yes.

But….those Johannine followers so wanted the truth, so wanted it to possess it, so wanted to convince others of it, that they were willing to set up their fellow Jews as being Untruth, Untruth with a capital U. Setting up their fellow Jews as the big villian in a story that has only one-the villain of unchecked power. At the very least, this untruth about the Truth flows with the blood of 6 million Jews. And that's just in recent memory.

We inherit some polemical language that does not open the door toward truth but instead slams it shut. Polemical and exclusivist language like that short verse in the middle of today's gospel reading. There it is: teed up like a hole-in-one for Christian conversion through the ages. It says it right there in John 14:6. John 14:6a and 6b -- "Jesus said to Thomas, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except thru me." No one comes to the father except thru me. An exclusivist red herring, a barely concealed explosive in an otherwise inclusive and egalitarian gospel. By focusing on the second part of that verse, we miss the good news, we miss the wideness in God's mercy.

It's how it happens, isn't it? How the truth gets distorted, repackaged, served up like it makes perfect sense. We get so caught up in defending our truth, that we lose sight of what's going on in the larger story. Maybe that's what happened to the writer of John. Some scholars tell us that the "no one gets to the father" language was added by a later redactor. But regardless of how it got in there, we should understand that it's an awkward fit with the rest of the story. It doesn't exactly work with the understanding of salvation in the OT. And it doesn't jibe with the ethos of this egalitarian community of Jesus followers. Exclusivist language like 6b is not part of the inherited tradition of the community and it's not part of the story that's told in the gospel itself, at least not until 14:6, part B.

Or…maybe Jesus even said it. But the blood of 6 million Jews can be pinned on Jesus, or on the text. Or on the redactor who may or may not have added Part B. The howls of the holocaust, the blood of the inquisition, the pain and suffering of ecclesiastical battles both large and small did not begin with the polemical and exclusivist language of verse 6, part B. The tragedies of Christianity began with a church hierarchy intent on centralizing power, of silencing all dissenters, of making sure that citizens of the empire converted to the right kind of Christianity, regardless of the cost. And it's hardly changed at all. An atrophied and ever-narrowing orthodoxy lurks about, choking off the radical work of the spirit whenever it can.

In the end, it seems to me that the work we Christians should be about is the work set forth by the one we profess to follow. We must seek to become the fully realized Body of Christ. And just as John's community felt compelled to become what the world was yearning for in the first century, we must become what the world needs now. And I don't simply mean love, sweet love.

As community, we must be the bread of life…we must be the light of the world, the true vine, the good shepherd. As the Body of Christ, we must be the way and the life. And, to paraphrase the prophet of Covington, La., we the unlikely leaders of this flawed and faltering enterprise, every time we step up into the pulpit, we must ground our work in the most difficult task of all: we must discover ways to tell the truth so that an exhausted and lying and dying world might somehow wake up to smell the death and destruction that's all around us.