SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our adult service here at the Burnathan Cathedral.
SPEAKER_00: My name is Stephen Gunther, and I'm on the pastoral staff here at the Burnathan Church.
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to begin our service this morning with our readings from the Lord's Word, both from the sacred scripture and from the teachings of the new church.
SPEAKER_00: Our first reading comes from the Gospel of Mark, a portion of chapter 14.
SPEAKER_00: And they led Jesus away to the high priest, and with him were assembled all the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes.
SPEAKER_00: But Peter followed him at a distance, right into the courtyard of the high priest, and he sat with the servants and warmed himself at the fire.
SPEAKER_00: Now the chief priests and all the council sought testimony against Jesus to put him to death, but found none.
SPEAKER_00: For many bore false witness against him, but their testimonies did not agree.
SPEAKER_00: Then some rose up and bore false witness against him, saying, We heard him say, I will destroy this temple made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands.
SPEAKER_00: But not even then did their testimony agree.
SPEAKER_00: And the high priest stood up in the midst and asked Jesus, saying, Do you answer nothing?
SPEAKER_00: What is it these men testify against you?
SPEAKER_00: But he kept silent and answered nothing.
SPEAKER_00: Again the high priest asked him, saying to him, Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus said, I am, and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the power and coming with the clouds of heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, What further need do we have of witnesses?
SPEAKER_00: You have heard the blasphemy, what do you think?
SPEAKER_00: And they all condemned him to be deserving of death.
SPEAKER_00: Then some began to spit on him, and to blindfold him, and to beat him, and to say to him, Prophesy, and the officers struck him with the palms of their hands.
SPEAKER_00: Turning now to the teachings of the new church, we read first from the true Christian religion, number three hundred and twenty-one.
SPEAKER_00: To bear false witness against the neighbor, to testify falsely, means in the natural sense, first of all, to bear false witness before a judge, or before others not in a court of justice, against anyone accused on a groundless charge of some crime, and to affirm this by the name of God, or by anything else that is holy, or by oneself, or the honor of one's name.
SPEAKER_00: In a wider natural sense, this commandment forbids all kinds of lies and hypocritical practices in civil life which have an evil purpose in view, and also traducing and defaming the neighbor to the injury of his honor, his name, and his reputation, on which his whole character depends.
SPEAKER_00: In the widest natural sense it forbids treachery, deceit, and premeditated evil against anyone arising from various causes, as enmity, hatred, revenge, envy, rivalry, and the like, for these evils involve the sin of false witness.
SPEAKER_00: And lastly, we read from the Arcana Celestia, a portion of number 1079.
SPEAKER_00: Where charity does not exist, self-love is present, and consequently hatred towards all who do not show favor to self.
SPEAKER_00: As a result, they see in the neighbor nothing except their evil, or if they do see anything good, they either perceive it as nothing, or else place a bad interpretation on it.
SPEAKER_00: It is altogether otherwise with those with whom charity is present, and from such presence or absence of charity, these two kinds of people are distinguished from each other.
SPEAKER_00: Especially when they enter the next life, with those who have no charity, a feeling of hatred is manifest in every single thing.
SPEAKER_00: They wish to try everyone, and indeed to pass judgment on them.
SPEAKER_00: Their one desire is to discover what is evil in them, all the time having it in mind to condemn, punish, and torment.
SPEAKER_00: But those who have charity hardly notice the evil in another person, but instead notice all the goods and truths that are theirs, and on their evils and falsities they place a good interpretation.
SPEAKER_00: Of such a nature are all angels, it being something they have from the Lord, who bends everything evil into good.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Here end our lessons.
SPEAKER_00: Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.
SPEAKER_00: So this morning we are continuing with this series that we've been covering over the course of this year, where we've looked at each one of the Ten Commandments.
SPEAKER_00: And today we are up to the eighth commandment, which is you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
SPEAKER_00: So I'd like to begin by taking a minute and thinking about what does it really mean to bear false witness against our neighbor?
SPEAKER_00: It's not a phrase that we commonly use in our speech.
SPEAKER_00: We don't normally talk about bearing witness against people, do we?
SPEAKER_00: Well, this morning I shared a passage from the true Christian religion which discussed a lot of the different elements that are all contained within this commandment.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot there.
SPEAKER_00: But in the simplest sense, this is a commandment about lying.
SPEAKER_00: And in particular, it's about lying about other people.
SPEAKER_00: And it also calls to mind sort of the idea of bearing witness.
SPEAKER_00: It almost makes us think of being in a courtroom and testifying against someone by saying things that aren't true in a way that will condemn them.
SPEAKER_00: And so there's a lot involved in this commandment and about the way that we hold other people.
SPEAKER_00: And I think really, in you know, in a deeper sense, it really has to do with the way that we see and judge other people in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: And so I want us to think about that this morning as we reflect on this commandment.
SPEAKER_00: And so to think about it, I shared a story from the Gospel of Mark, where this is after Jesus' arrest, and before he goes to his trial before Pilate, where he's sentenced to death, he's taken to this group of high priests to have kind of a religious trial to see if there's anything they can charge him with or condemn him with, so that they can condemn him to death.
SPEAKER_00: And during the course of this trial, it says that there's many people who bore false witness against him.
SPEAKER_00: It uses the phrase in the story that people were bearing false witness, people were making up things that were not true about Jesus to try to condemn him.
SPEAKER_00: But none of their testimonies were able to be used because they didn't agree with each other.
SPEAKER_00: The lies that this person made up about Jesus didn't align with the lies that this person told.
SPEAKER_00: And so they weren't able to use any of that testimony that people had tried to give against him.
SPEAKER_00: And then in the end, the high priest asks Jesus directly, and he says, Are you the Christ?
SPEAKER_00: Are you the Son of God?
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus answers, Yes, I am.
SPEAKER_00: And that's when the high priest tears his clothing and says, We have no more need of witnesses.
SPEAKER_00: What more do we need?
SPEAKER_00: We can see that he's obviously guilty.
SPEAKER_00: He's speaking blasphemy and he deserves death.
SPEAKER_00: And then everyone cheers and they all agree with him.
SPEAKER_00: And so in this story, while there are instances of people bearing false witness in an outward sense that they were making things up to say against Jesus, the reality is those outward lies weren't the things that actually ended up condemning Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: It was the fact that all these people who had taken him and brought him to this trial had already decided long before this, in their minds and in their hearts, that Jesus was guilty, that he was a bad person, and that he was deserving of death.
SPEAKER_00: And so, really, what they did was they bore false witness against him in their own hearts.
SPEAKER_00: They had created a false image of who Jesus was, and that's who they were putting on trial.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have any evidence against the real Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't have any specific charges they could bring against him, and yet they just knew in their minds and hearts that he was, that he needed to be gone.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is, I think, the subtle way that this commandment can show up in our lives, in that we can make up our minds against other people like that.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where the story really becomes about us.
SPEAKER_00: Because we do this too, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: We all have people in our lives that we just don't like.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's people that we know, maybe it's even family members that we just have a hard time getting along with.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's people we work with, maybe it's people we work for, or people we don't even know personally.
SPEAKER_00: Think of public figures, celebrities, politicians.
SPEAKER_00: How many of us have people out there that we have this idea of who they are in our minds that's just negative?
SPEAKER_00: That we look at them and we think, what a terrible person.
SPEAKER_00: And no matter what they do, we just we just see the things that we don't like about them.
SPEAKER_00: And this is and this is where it shows up for us.
SPEAKER_00: But what's hard about it is that these ideas that we have of these other people, these people that we don't like, it usually doesn't come from nowhere, right?
SPEAKER_00: Usually there's reasons why we don't like these people.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they've hurt us before.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe they've even shown us a pattern of doing things that hurt us, or doing things that hurt other people, or doing things that we don't feel are right.
SPEAKER_00: And so, how do we hold this balance?
SPEAKER_00: How can we righteously judge these people?
SPEAKER_00: How can we righteously hold them accountable for their actions without sliding down the slippery slope into then creating this false image of who they are in our minds?
SPEAKER_00: And so for that, I'd like to share another passage from the teachings of the new church.
SPEAKER_00: This comes from the work Married Love, number 523.
SPEAKER_00: And it talks about the ways that we should and should not judge others, or really the way that we can and cannot judge others.
SPEAKER_00: It says, The Lord says, Judge not that you be not condemned.
SPEAKER_00: This cannot in the least mean judging of someone's moral and civil life in the world, but judging of someone's spiritual and heavenly life.
SPEAKER_00: Who does not see that if people were not allowed to judge of the moral life of those dwelling with them in the world, society would collapse?
SPEAKER_00: What would become of society if there were no public courts of law, and if no one was permitted to have his judgment of another?
SPEAKER_00: But to judge what the inner mind or soul is like within, thus what a person's spiritual state is, and so his fate after death.
SPEAKER_00: Of this one is not permitted to judge, because it is known to the Lord alone.
SPEAKER_00: Nor does the Lord reveal it until after death, in order that every one may do what he does in freedom, and that good or evil may consequently be from him and so in him, and the person thus live his own life and be his own person to eternity.
SPEAKER_00: So this passage is talking about, it's making this distinction between these natural kinds of judgments, where we're judging their actions, or we're judging the morality, or whether what they're doing is right and wrong, versus a spiritual judgment where we are judging the spiritual character of a person.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure we're all familiar with this idea that we can make natural judgments, but we can't make spiritual judgments.
SPEAKER_00: And yet I think spiritual judgments oftentimes show up in ways that are so subtle that we may not even notice that we are doing it.
SPEAKER_00: Because I think spiritual judgments show up the moment we cross the line from judging what someone is doing and instead turn towards putting a label on them.
SPEAKER_00: One example of this is if someone lies.
SPEAKER_00: We can say, well, this person told a lie and that's wrong, and they shouldn't do that.
SPEAKER_00: But then, is that the same thing as then giving them a label and saying, this person is a liar?
SPEAKER_00: You see the difference there.
SPEAKER_00: One is judging their actions, saying they did this and this was wrong, versus putting a label on them that then says, This person is a liar.
SPEAKER_00: And then from then on, whenever that person comes to us, we we have this preconceived idea of who they are.
SPEAKER_00: We see them coming and we say, here they come, they're probably going to lie to us again because that's who they are.
SPEAKER_00: And when we do that, really what we are doing is we are bearing false witness against them in our minds, just like these people did with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: We've made up our mind about them already.
SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the simplest ways that spiritual judgments show up in our lives is simply in the belief that someone will not change.
SPEAKER_00: Even if someone has done something wrong, or even if they've shown a pattern of doing things that are wrong, when we allow ourselves to cross that line and say, this is who that person is and this is how they will always be, then we are crossing the line from judging them righteously, judging their actions, and instead now we are judging their spiritual character.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what we have to be careful of.
SPEAKER_00: So, how can we protect ourselves from this?
SPEAKER_00: How can we stop ourselves from sliding down that slippery slope of going from external righteous judgment into spiritual judgment and bearing false witness against others?
SPEAKER_00: Really, the answer comes down to charity.
SPEAKER_00: And charity is a word that we hear thrown around a lot in the new church, and in its simplest sense, charity really is the way that we live our life when we genuinely love our neighbors.
SPEAKER_00: When we love our neighbor and so we treat them with kindness and compassion and respect.
SPEAKER_00: That is what charity is.
SPEAKER_00: And I shared a passage earlier from the Arcana Celestia that talked about charity and explained the difference between how people with charity view others versus people without charity and how they view others.
SPEAKER_00: It said that people without charity look at others and they see only their evils.
SPEAKER_00: They see only what's wrong with other people.
SPEAKER_00: And if they see anything good, they put a bad interpretation on it.
SPEAKER_00: This is like us when we put those labels on someone and we say this person is a liar.
SPEAKER_00: And then all we see are the times that we think that they're that they are lying to us, or that we think that they're doing what they're not supposed to do.
SPEAKER_00: And this is how these people viewed Jesus in the story.
SPEAKER_00: It didn't matter what he did, it didn't matter how many people he helped, how many people he healed, how much goodness he did.
SPEAKER_00: They only saw the things they didn't like about him.
SPEAKER_00: But it says that with people who have charity, it's entirely different.
SPEAKER_00: People who look at others from a place of charity hardly even see the evil that's in them.
SPEAKER_00: But instead they notice all of the goodness that's in them, everything good and everything true that's with them, and that's what they focus on.
SPEAKER_00: And if they see something evil or something out of order, they put a good interpretation on it.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is what we can do.
SPEAKER_00: It also, the um, this passage makes it seem like these are two different kinds of people.
SPEAKER_00: It feels like, well, there's people who have charity and this is how they look at everybody, and there's people who don't have charity and this is how they look at everybody.
SPEAKER_00: But the reality is we all have people in our lives that we look at with charity.
SPEAKER_00: We all have people who we love, who we're willing to give grace to, who when we see them messing up, we say, it's okay, I still love you, and I'm here for you.
SPEAKER_00: And we all have people that we look at without charity, where we just see everything we don't like about them.
SPEAKER_00: We see and we notice everything they do that's wrong.
SPEAKER_00: We all do these things.
SPEAKER_00: But so, how we can protect ourselves from this, how we can protect ourselves from going to that negative place, from building this false idea of other people and letting it live in our minds, the way that we protect about that is by being intentional about our life of charity.
SPEAKER_00: A phrase that I like to use is putting on my charity glasses.
SPEAKER_00: When we catch ourselves thinking negatively about someone, when we find ourselves putting labels on someone, instead we can put on our charity glasses and say, well, what are the good things that this person does?
SPEAKER_00: What are the things that I can love about this person?
SPEAKER_00: What are the things that they're doing right?
SPEAKER_00: And when we do that, it can entirely change not only the way we can relate to those people, but it can actually change the level of peace that we feel in our own lives.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, imagine the scenario where you're driving in your car and you get up to an intersection and someone cuts you off right in the intersection.
SPEAKER_00: We've all been there.
SPEAKER_00: And it's really easy for us to have that happen and think, this guy is such a jerk.
SPEAKER_00: They don't think about anyone other than themselves.
SPEAKER_00: They think they're better than everyone else, and that's why they just cut right in front of me.
SPEAKER_00: But the reality is we have no idea who that person is.
SPEAKER_00: We have no idea why they just did that.
SPEAKER_00: And in that scenario, if we put on our charity glasses and we say, okay, well, why might they have done this?
SPEAKER_00: Why might they, why might they not be a bad person?
SPEAKER_00: Maybe there's someone who's who hasn't driven around here very much, and they didn't realize that they were in a turn lane instead of a straight lane, and so they just had to get over, they weren't being selfish at all.
SPEAKER_00: Or maybe the classic example of maybe it's a husband whose wife is in labor and he's just trying to get her to the hospital.
SPEAKER_00: And we might say, well, you should still drive more carefully, but he's not coming from a place of selfishness or greed or hatred of other people.
SPEAKER_00: And so when we put our charity glasses on and we start to view things from this other light, it brings us more peace and it helps us to see people in a more positive light.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what protects us from bearing false witness against them.
SPEAKER_00: It protects us from allowing ourselves to create this false idea of who these people are.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is my challenge for all of us as we go into this week.
SPEAKER_00: I would invite all of us to notice this week when we have these negative thoughts about anyone, whether it's someone we know, whether it's a political figure or a public figure or someone else, when we find ourselves putting labels on someone, or we find ourselves just thinking about all the negative things about someone else.
SPEAKER_00: I would challenge, I would challenge all of us to then catch ourselves and put on our charity glasses and ask ourselves, what are some things that I like about this person?
SPEAKER_00: What are some things that are good about this person?
SPEAKER_00: What are some ways that I may not be seeing the full picture with this person?
SPEAKER_00: Because when we do that, then we protect ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: When we do that, that's what allows us to love our neighbor as ourselves, the way the Lord commanded us to.
SPEAKER_00: And that's what protects us so that we don't end up bearing false witness against our neighbors in our minds and in our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.