Truth in in order to goodness...or marginal thoughts about Penn State

I shudder to type this.  I don’t want to type or write about this.  But it is everywhere, all around in the headlines so some comment is required whether I want the requirement or not.  There is nothing darker than the suffering of a child.  And the suffering suggested in the indictments around Penn State and a former coach, now indicted as a pedophile, is of the worst kind.  It shatters lives for years.  Shatters institutions, trust, and…well, everything.   It appears as though there are victims whose pain we can hardly fathom.   And it appears that people of stature, standing, power, and influence turned a myopic eye toward the suffering and pain at expense of the victims themselves.  It is a moral failure when (what appears as) incontrovertible evidence is ignored.  It is an inference, but one of the implied requirements of Jesus’s “welcome the children, let them come to me, for to these belongs the kingdom of heaven” is that the children be safe enough to feel welcome.  While we dare not rush to judgment the call to pray for the families traumatized thus far is one we cannot deny.

I was at Davidson last week at an Alumni Association Board meeting, and the new President, Dr. Carol Quillen, was asked about Penn State.  She reported that she was at a meeting of College and University Presidents and Penn State was, understandably, the consuming conversation.  Then she said she had the responsibility to continue to ask whether or not all visitors, and especially children, were safe at Davidson.  More importantly, she talked about creating an environment where people were not afraid to share bad news, or foul news, or even terrible news.  Jesus says that the truth sets us free.  The truth is all that protects us from evil, be it the truth in God, the truth in Christ, the truth in Spirit, or the truth about one another.  No matter how bad the news, we must first share the truth and then do our best to respond accordingly.

As Presbyterians we share an old part of the Book of Order (part of our constitution) which says that “truth is in order to goodness.”  This is a way of saying that there is no goodness without truth.   Ever wonder why we confess our sins near the start of our worship?  Because in telling the truth about ourselves we are able to hear God’s call because our lives, “made clean,” are renewed in self-truth confessed and in God’s truth professed.   When we are not honest we always suffer something.  And usually, when we are not honest, other people suffer too.   We may be powerless to change the suffering or the circumstances, but we can resolve to observe and tell the truth even when it is bad news that we’d rather not heard or known.

At our Session meeting last weekend, we adopted a new Safe Sanctuary policy.  This has long been in the works – long before headlines of recent days.  It is an update of a policy we have had for many years that simplifies the rules to ensure child safety here at our church.  There is nothing we take more seriously.

There is much more I could write and much more that will be written because the headlines from the past few days will be processed and probed from every imaginable angle.  Let us resolve to make our lives and our church safe because we are first committed to the truth, and truth is in order to goodness.