Sermon Text

Keeping Up Appearances & Enron

Exodus 20:16, John 8:32

By John Roy

In 2002 these transcripts were released from Enron’s traders. Traders can be heard manipulating the market, using now-infamous schemes with names like death star, ricochet and fat boy.

One employee is heard asking, "You want to do some fat boys or, or whatever, man, you know, take advantage of it."

In fat boy, Enron traders used fake power sales to hide megawatts, shrinking the supply of energy and driving up prices. They also used the oldest trick in the book: lies.

"It's called lies. It's all how well you can weave these lies together, Shari, alright,” one employee is heard saying to a trainee.

The other employee says, "I feel like I'm being corrupted now."

The first employee adds, "No, this is marketing,"

The trainee, "OK.''

What was once called lies is now referred to as marketing.

Lying has become so commonplace we hardly notice it anymore. The  “headlines” sins get our attention while these “fine print” sins are ignored. Consider the top-level Texaco executives who initially denied making racist comments at board meetings; Susan Smith, the white woman who killed her young boys and blamed a black man for it; and Joe Klein, the Newsweek columnist who adamantly swore for months that he had nothing to do with his anonymously-published novel Primary Colors. Hollywood in recent years has taken notice of our apparent deception obsession: witness films like Quiz Show, True Lies, The Crucible, Secrets & Lies, and Liar, Liar.

Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Virginia, conducted a 1996 study of 147 people between the ages of 18 and 71. They were to keep a diary of all the falsehoods they told over the course of a week. Most people, she found, lie once or twice a day--almost as often as they snack from the refrigerator or brush their teeth. Both men and women lie in approximately a fifth of their social exchanges lasting 10 or more minutes; over the course of a week they deceive about 30 percent of those with whom they interact one-on-one. Furthermore, some types of relationships, such as those between parents and teens, are virtual magnets for deception: "College students lie to their mothers in one out of two conversations," reports DePaulo. (Incidentally, when researchers refer to lying, they don't include the mindless pleasantries or polite equivocations we offer each other in passing, such as "I'm fine, thanks" or "No trouble at all." An "official" lie actually misleads, deliberately conveying a false impression.

Most of us receive conflicting messages about lying. Although we're socialized from the time we can speak to believe that it's always better to tell the truth, in reality society often encourages and even rewards deception. Show up late for an early morning meeting at work and it's best not to admit that you overslept. "You're punished far more than you would be if you lie and say you were stuck in traffic."

Dishonesty also pervades our romantic relationships, as you might expect from the titles of books like 101 Lies Men Tell Women (Harper Collins), by Missouri psychologist Dory Hollander, Ph.D. (Hollander's nomination for the #1 spot: "I'll call you.") Eighty-five percent of the couples interviewed in a study of college students reported that one or both partners had lied about past relationships or recent indiscretions. And DePaulo finds that dating couples lie to each other in about a third of their interactions--perhaps even more often than they deceive other people.

Fortunately, marriage seems to offer some protection against deception: Spouses lie to each other in "only" about 10 percent of their major conversations. The bad news? That 10 percent just refers to the typically minor lies of everyday life. DePaulo recently began looking at the less frequent "big" lies that involve deep betrayals of trust, and she's finding that the vast majority of them occur between people in intimate relationships. "You save your really big lies," she says, "for the person that you're closest to."

Not surprisingly, research also confirms that the closer we are to someone, the more likely it is that the lies we tell them will be unselfish ones. This is particularly true of women: Although the sexes lie with equal frequency, women are especially likely to stretch the truth in order to protect someone else's feelings, DePaulo reports. Men, on the other hand, are more prone to lying about themselves--the typical conversation between two guys contains about eight times as many self-oriented lies as it does falsehoods about other people. Of course we call this bragging.

It is not uncommon to hear us lie to co-workers, friends, and relatives in an effort to deceive. We want to act like we don’t have money, so we “poor mouth” to mislead people to our real worth. We may not be rich but anyone we are talking to can imagine we are doing well enough. We lie about our accomplishments to feel better about ourselves and to deceive others. In Florida it is a criminal offense to lie on a resume, and mislead an employer. In 1999, a minister who claimed he had a doctorate to a church he was interviewing with was later charged with fraud when it was discover he had earned no such degree.

All of this deception in words and lifestyle reminds me of the great BBC comedy, Keeping Up Appearances, which you can see on PBS. In the show, a dowdy woman, Hyacinth, has only one concern in life – to maintain the illusion that she is well-bred and in touch with the upper crusts of British society and the lower layers of England’s nobility. In reality, she’s very much a Commoner like us and all her neighbors. But to strengthen the illusion, she pronounces her last name “Bouquet” when it’s really Bucket – Hyacinth Bucket not Hyacinth “Bouquet.”

That’s why, when her neighbor drives Hyacinth to her sister’s house, she instructs the neighbor to park the car in front of a fine-looking home on one street, and after proclaiming it’s her sister’s home, leaves her neighbor in the car, dashes to the door, but then ducks around to the side, climbs a six-foot brick wall in her dress, heels, flowered hat and all, falls to the ground, brushes herself off and marches to her sister’s actual home — a rundown building the next street over.

Hyacinth is concerned about the outward show. Lies keep us safe and make us feel better. So is there anything wrong with a lie, other than this thorny Bible verse? Situation ethics, which rose to prominence in the sixties, excused lying as a necessary result of our social experiment. The example given to millions of college classrooms was, “if your friend runs into the room and says someone is after me with a gun, please protect me. He goes out our window. Then his pursuer opens our door and we are asked, “Did a guy run in here?” What do we say? The ethicist encouraged the students to say, “I haven’t seen anyone.” Your friend is secure and the pursuer does not commit murder. All is well, no one is hurt. The conclusion from the situational ethicist was lies don’t hurt.

In July of 2002, Allan Greenspan sounded more like Brother Greenspan when he testified on sin and the stock market. His big, heavy words, carefully weighed and measured, seemed barely able to crawl out of his mouth. Still, everyone listened. Brother Greenspan was speaking truth to power. "At root was the rapid enlargement of stock market capitalization’s in the latter part of the 1990s that arguably engendered an outsized increase in opportunities for avarice," Greenspan said.

Hello.

"An infectious greed and willingness to lie and mislead the public seemed to grip much of our business community."  Yet who could be hurt by such, lies?

Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, was giving his semiannual report on the economy to the Senate Banking Committee. He blamed corporate greed for Wall Street's woes.

Greenspan, known more for his substance than his style, was issuing a statement in a hearing room, not delivering a sermon from a pulpit.

Too bad. People do get hurt by the lies and even corporate robber barons go to church.

Ken Lay, former Enron CEO, is a member of First United Methodist Church in Houston. So are other former Enron executives. "Many, if not most, are very solid, churchgoing, community-minded people," Rev. Steve Wende told United Methodist News Service.

Tell that to the thousands of laid-off Enron employees and to all the investors who lost millions of dollars when the company's stock crashed.

Bernie Ebbers, former WorldCom CEO, teaches Sunday school and helped raise $1 million at Easthaven Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Miss. "He's probably the most unassuming member of this congregation," Rev. Bendon Ginn told the Jackson Clarion-Ledger.

Tell that to the 17,000 WorldCom employees who may lose their jobs and to all the investors who lost millions of dollars when the company's stock crashed.

Corporations are failing (such as Anderson-Little, Enron, World Com,).  The executives get “golden parachutes” and the workers get paper umbrellas. It all happened because of lies.

Ben Gillison Jr., a former Enron executive admitted to fraud and is serving a five-year sentence. He invested 5,800 and cashed out at 1 million. The receptionist at Enron, heard how good things were for the company and didn’t worry about removing her investment; after all it was trading at $90. When she did decide to sale she was prohibited for two crucial months and she lost big time. Lies do hurt.

Lies are our response to a world we fear want accept us as we are. We lie about our age because we fear we have crossed a line. We lie about our wealth because we want people to think we have more than we have, or we want to have them feel sorry for us by leading them to believe we are on the breadline. We lie about our accomplishment to make others think we are worth looking up to. Lies are pretentious. Lies are a masquerade. We lie with words but we also lie with our lifestyles and actions. The biggest reason, God forbids lying is it keeps us from being authentic and real. It keeps us from being free, instead of enslaved to an image or role. So take the risk and live the truth and tell the truth, then we will be free.