Loving God Wholeheartedly

Preached June 22, 2002, still seems worth saying

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be God’s person and to love God.  I also wanted to be safe and loved and have friends and power and a lot of other things, too.  I’ve spent my whole life working on the process of getting all these in order, because I know that the most important of them is loving God. Loving God wholeheartedly is a journey for me, and I believe someday it will be a resting place.  

Jesus identified the two great commandments (Matthew 25):  the greatest is loving God with one’s whole heart, mind, strength and the second is loving one’s neighbor. This particular sermon is about loving God.  We’ll approach this through two stories:  Adam and Eve and the rich young ruler, all of whom failed to love God wholeheartedly. 

Genesis 2 and 3 tells the story of the Garden of Eden, a place where God put fruit trees, a river, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God told Adam that he was free to enjoy all things in the garden except one; God warned Adam that in the day he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would die. God made animals as companions for Adam, and Eve as his helper and partner; when Adam saw Eve, he said, “Shazzam!” He recognized that she shared his essential characteristics.  The innocence of Eden is symbolized in the fact of their unashamed nakedness before each other and God, who came to visit them in the garden.

It seems clear that from the beginning what God wanted from humans was—and is—for them to choose to love God.  The Old Testament and New Testament are full of images for the relationship between God and humans that emphasize the personal loving intimacy God wants: Husband and wife, mother and infant, father and son, hen and chicks, friends. Interestingly, however, when God made humans and called them very good, giving them the earth to care for and enjoy, God also gave humans freedom.  One aspect of freedom is the ability to imagine things being different from the way they are and to choose that option over the facts of the present. Another aspect of freedom is to look at all the evidence of surrounding love and choose something else.

In the New Testament, Matthew 19:16-26, we read about the encounter between a rich young man and Jesus.  The young man asked the question we all have:  “What good deed must I do to have eternal life.” Jesus replied to him, “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”  Intelligently, the young man asked another question:  “Which ones?”  Jesus narrowed the various commandments of the Old Testament down to the following:  “Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t say false things; honor your parents, and, last but not least, love your neighbor as yourself.”  These are all quotations from the Jewish law, the last from Leviticus 19:16. The young man said, “I’ve kept all these; what do I still lack?”  Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor; this means you know your treasure is in heaven; then come, follow me.” 

This young man has a life marked by innocence and pleasant circumstances.He has done no harm and has also done active good in his world.  But he feels that something is lacking.  He wants to make sure he has a good life for eternity. Jesus tells him one thing he can do to be perfect (or complete), which will make sure his eternity is happy.

There are some obvious differences between these two situations.  Adam and Eve were in paradise with only one prohibition; the rich young man was in an occupied country with diverse social classes and ethnic groups and had a lot of prohibitions.  Adam and Eve’s test was to keep from doing something; the rich young man’s test was to do something radical. 

What seems similar, however, is important. In both cases, people had so much going for them, so much to be thankful for, so many advantages.  In both cases, people wanted to make sure they had everything they could possibly want. In both cases, the people were willing to risk losing their relationship with God because they wanted something else more than they wanted that relationship.  Adam and Eve decided they wanted to be like God, to be the ones who separate good and evil, even if that separated them from God.  The rich young man wanted to live a good life and the good life, and was willing to do one more good thing to ensure a good future life, but he wasn’t willing to focus his desire on wanting God.  God has seen that for the world to be good, for love to be real, the option must exist for people to choose something else.  Even though God set things up so that humans can be satisfied only by knowing God intimately, God also embedded in the nature of the universe the possibility that humans can choose against relationship. The universe has gaps, dangers, prohibitions, and so on, which make that choice real.

God challenged Adam and Eve to enjoy everything around them including God except one thing.  Adam and Eve chose the knowledge of good and evil over knowing God intimately and left the Garden in sorrow.  Jesus challenged the rich young man to risk everything that made him comfortable and safe on a relationship with Jesus.  The young man went away in sorrow, because he was rich. In some ways the choices are opposite, but at the core all three faced the question of whether they were willing to trust in God’s love for them and love God unconditionally or whether they needed to take matters into their own hands. 

What does it look like to love God wholeheartedly and unconditionally? St. Paul in I Corinthians 13 gives us a picture of love that we can try on here.  If we love God, we are patient with God, kind to God (kindness meaning the sort of generosity and loyalty we feel for family in its root); we aren’t envious of God; we don’t boast to God; we don’t assume we know more than God, and we don’t treat God like an inferior with no feelings. If we love God, we don’t insist on our own way; we aren’t irritable or resentful toward God; we don’t enjoy getting away with doing wrong, but we rejoice when God tells us the truth and helps us live truly. Our love for God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  This love never ends.

All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.  The world is intricate, homey, grand, and improbable—all reasons we might want to love the one who made it and put us here. However, it’s as if the story of Adam and Eve or the rich young man is reenacted in each human being.

Even though so much around us is good, we often do not love God wholeheartedly.  We want something more than we want to love God. We do not trust in God’s goodness and wholehearted love for us, and we are therefore open to the temptation to trust ourselves instead.  “What good deed can we do to have eternal life?”

We tend to think that if we had their chances we’d make better choices, but the evidence is against us.  Think about all that we have that we would put in the category of blessings.  The fact that our bodies and our cars and gravity and the general peacefulness of our state and town have allowed us to be here are things we generally take for granted. When I read in Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about the varieties of ways the brain can malfunction, I began to sense the enormous blessing it is when so much in the brain goes right for such long periods of time.  When I consider how many distracted people are driving cars, I am amazed that so few of them run into each other.  When I think about how much evil humans can do and how often they choose to do good instead, I can see that we are surrounded by evidence of God’s love and can even see its traces in ourselves when we choose kindness over cruelty or forgiveness over resentment.

St. Paul said that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, and that in him all things hold together.  Why don’t we label all the things that go right as evidence of God’s love for us? When so much is good, why do we find it difficult to love God wholeheartedly? Instead, we focus on negatives—what we can’t have, what we can’t get rid of.

I’m not talking primarily to those who don’t love God because they have never wondered, considered, or believed that there is a God.    

Some of us suspect or believe that there is a God, but God is above it all; God doesn’t want or need our love, and God isn’t paying attention to us.  God sees us, if God is looking this way, at best from a distance. It’s hard to get interested in loving a God like that. It’s like loving a force field. I hope that if there is anyone reading this who is like either of these, he or she might be moved to say: “God, if you’re out there somewhere, let me know.”

Even those who believe in a personal God need to realize that there is a sense in which God transcends our whole experience of life, the universe, and everything. We can’t pin God to a board and examine every aspect of the nature of God so that we can predict God’s next move. God remains mysterious, even when we have the Bible and countless records of people who have experiences they attribute to God’s activity in their lives.

We may even prefer to believe that God is distant and uninvolved on a daily basis because we see that sometimes bad people live well and long while good people suffer and die young.  If the universe tells us that God is all powerful, and our experience tells us that bad things happen to good people, it becomes very difficult to want a close relationship with a God who doesn’t act like a superhero, at least not predictably.  It is more difficult to hold together the idea that God is all powerful with the ideas that God is all good and all loving than it is to believe only one of the options.

We may find it hard to love God wholeheartedly because we think God is expecting a lot from us but doesn’t look out for us very well.  We are astonished and feel betrayed when something goes wrong, especially when we’ve tried to be good.  It is little comfort to believe in a personal, involved God who doesn’t use power and love to prevent all sorrow, pain, untimely death, destruction, and evil. 

Another barrier to loving God is that we know we’ve done something God won’t like and therefore God can’t or won’t love us.  When we do something we know in our stomachs is wrong, we become afraid of being found out, we’re ashamed, and we hide.  Sometimes we hide by creating smokescreens of self-justification; sometimes we hide in activities that distract us from thinking.  There are lots of ways to hide from God, and while we’re hiding, we’re not loving God wholeheartedly.

We may find it hard to love God because God allows our own actions and the actions of others combined with the laws of nature to have consequences that are terrible.  Though I think God works hard to distract people from doing wrong by attracting them to good things, when people choose to be abusive, hateful, murderous, or even when they do harm out of ignorance or carelessness, God permits horrors to occur. 

I want to acknowledge all these difficulties, these barriers in the way of loving God wholeheartedly.  We may see God as distant, or unfair, or untrustworthy. In fact, even when our own lives are happy, when we see others suffer, we may doubt that God is both loving and powerful. At one point in my own life, I was angry with God to the point of despair.  A friend said, “You know, sometime you’ll just have to forgive God.”  Despite the preposterous sound of this, I said, “I forgive you, God, for not living up to my expectations.” It was helpful.

I want to point out the ends of the stories we started with to suggest why we can trust in God’s love.

If the Bible is reliable about God, it’s clear that God wants to get personal: for instance, God’s idea of paradise is to visit Adam and Eve in person and give them everything they need, including the freedom to choose something else; Jesus wants nothing more than for that rich young man to come with him. Furthermore, after Adam and Eve choose knowledge over God, the response is not immediate death, though something dies, I think; instead, the evidence of the story is that God continues to love them: God provides clothing and food and occupation for them, promises them children, and continues to be available to them in relationship. In fact, Eve acknowledges this when she has her first child, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” God also brings them into the open and makes them tell what they’ve done. Even though they blame others for their own fall, being partly honest is better than hiding, and those who can be honest and take responsibility will find it easier to believe that God still loves them.  God continues to love them, and that includes allowing them to experience the consequences of their choice to know good and evil.

Similarly, Jesus makes clear that God remains committed to the human, even when the human makes the wrong choice.  The gospel of Mark includes the detail that Jesus loves the rich young man. When the rich young man hangs his head and walks away, Jesus says, “It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, in fact.” The disciples, astounded, ask, “Who then can be saved?”  Jesus replies, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” God still intends to work on or with the rich young man.

The greatest commandment is to love God with our whole selves—heart, strength, mind.  What Jesus said about the rich young man is true for all of us: with mortals it is impossible.  Our main difficulty in loving God is our own dividedness.  Is loving God something we really want to do more than anything else?  If we do want to love God, we can tell we are moving in the right direction when patience, kindness, contentment, humility, courtesy, honesty, and commitment are what we want to share with God. We give evidence of loving God when we act or refrain from action just because we think that’s what God wants from us.  We can choose to move toward loving God, and God will take our choices and make them add up to love. As Jesus concluded, with God all things are possible.

Peace and Justice/Just Us

Preached at Reedwood Friends, Jan. 6, 2013

Genesis 3, 4, 27, 32, 33

When Ken invited me to preach during Peace Month, he laid before me all the options—World Peace, the end of racism or sexism or prejudice of any kind,  or reconciliation between persons.  I actually believe all peace begins in the individual heart, that a heart at peace cannot hate or disparage or belittle or slander or badmouth another person, group of people, or nation.  So I chose the topic I think is most important, and also the one I am always working on.

As a child, like many or most children, I felt unjustly treated, shamed, bullied, and lied to.  As a result, I conceived a huge passion for justice.  My favorite Bible story was the sudden justice delivered to Ananias and Sapphira when they lied to the Holy Spirit and Peter and dropped dead.  But as I grew up and recognized some of my own unjust, shaming, bullying, and deceptive actions, I became more of a fan of mercy.  As GKChesterton wrote, “For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy” (On Household Gods and Goblins, 1922).

As the wise writer Jeremiah wrote, “The human heart—i.e. “the seat of internal processes, including both feeling and thinking, as well as dreading, ruminating, aspiring, and so forth” (Dr. Joel Hoffman, “Five Bible Images You Probably Misunderstand,” Huffpo)—what we might more accurately call the self—is is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9).  Or as Bob Dylan wrote, “Heart of mine, so malicious and so full of guile, Give you an inch and you’ll take a mile.” Or as Jesus pointed out, “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies; these are the things which defile us, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile us” (Matthew 15:19-20).

There are two responses that will make the rest of this sermon hypothetical rather than useful.  One is resisting this point.  My self isn’t desperately wicked, my self isn’t malicious and full of guile, my self is not the seat of all those awful sins. I have some good qualities! But this is a serious problem in the way of a peaceful heart. If we have never noticed that a large part of our internal processes are self-justifying, we will not ever ask ourselves why we need to justify ourselves, and we will not ever see that we might at some time have done something despicable and harmful to another person. St. Paul writes to Timothy about those who speak lies in hypocrisy, having their consciences seared with a hot iron (2 Tim 1:3).  We can for a long time avoid an accurate self-understanding that includes our potential for evil.

Another unhelpful response is yes, I am a terrible person and there is no hope for me.  St. Paul writes to Titus about those whose conscience is defiled, which means it is unhelpful in sorting things out, and that lovable apostle St. John writes, “Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action. And by this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.”  Sometimes our consciences are poorly trained and either let us off the hook too often or keep us on the hook too often.  Neither is helpful.  We need to submit our consciences to the guidance of Jesus, who promises to lead us into all truth, and who can retrain our consciences.

So the first step to a peaceful heart is an accurate self-understanding, which includes submitting our consciences to examination by Jesus and living into the repentance and discipline Jesus prescribes.  Let me encourage you to let down your guard and invite Jesus to examine your selves, your consciences, your hearts.  Then please be obedient to what he prescribes for you to do.

A second step toward peace is laying down our swords.  A vivid bad example of a heart not at peace is provided by the interpersonal conflict between Cain and Abel.  Here is the whole story from Genesis 4: Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground.  Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and bel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions.  And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.  So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell.  The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”

Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.  Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.  When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”

Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

This conflict seems to have existed without Abel knowing about it.  Both brothers offered the fruits of their work to God, and God accepted only Abel’s. God tells Cain, “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” And, as the saying goes, the proof was in the pudding.  The reason why God accepted only Abel’s offering is made clear when Cain throws a fit.  Instead of looking inside himself to see what might have made his offering unacceptable, Cain solves the problem more primitively and eliminates the competition.

A question for us to consider is this:  Is there someone in my life who stands between me and my goals or hopes? Does the person who stands between me and what I want actually represent something inside me? A fear, a shame, an unwillingness to risk?

I recently had to confess to a close friend that I had blamed him for years for an action he took that I believed stood between me and my goals.  I had to admit that what really got in my way was my own ambivalence and fear.  It was much easier to blame someone else.

As a woman in a patriarchal culture, I have wanted to blame men in general and specific men in particular for the fact I have not achieved my dreams.  I was brought up short in this pattern by a young woman who said, “My real barriers are inside me.” 

Another step toward peace is laying down our shields. Another vivid bad example of hearts not at peace comes from Genesis 3.  Just after Adam and Eve ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God comes to visit them as usual.  They are hiding in the trees and have become afraid because they are naked, as Adam says.  When God asks Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat,” Adam answers: “The woman whom you gave me to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”  Adam manages in this statement to admit what he did but blame both Eve and God for his disobedience.  When God asks Eve, “What is this that you have done?”, she replies, “The serpent tricked me, and I ate.” She also admits what she did, but she passes the blame on to the serpent.  The serpent is speechless. 

More questions: Is there someone in my life I blame for the fact I have made mistakes or strayed from the right path? Does the blame I place on another person allow me to avoid confronting my own contribution to the conflict? Does blaming someone else help me to avoid shame?

It is possible to work for years to come to terms with admitting what I contributed to an estrangement—what I did wrong, in other words.  I can pray for justice, work to forgive, apologize for what I can see I did wrong, and still feel that the other person blames me for everything, and this is not fair or just. I have to admit that I am still more interested in being heard than in listening, that I want to explain why it isn’t my fault, or at least isn’t all my fault, and I want the other person to admit his or her errors of judgment and behavior also.  Can I move into actual reconciliation?  Not with my shields up.

I knew a married couple who fought bitterly over their understanding of the grace of God. The first accused the second of believing she was saved by good works and the second accused the first of believing that once he was saved, he could behave any old way.  Underneath this theological argument were two people disappointed in each other and disappointed in their marriage who were fighting each other to avoid admitting any disappointment with themselves. Failing to be a good spouse was too shameful to be looked at squarely. After years, their hearts softened and with the help of a counselor, they could lay down their swords and shields, accept grace from God and each other, and extend grace to each other.  Their essential characters are not changed, but their demeanor toward each other is so vastly different it is like a miracle. 

More questions: Is there someone in my life who has failed to measure up to what he or she should be or believe or do? Is it possible that my disappointment with this person masks some sort of disappointment with myself?

And now, a good example of brothers laying down their swords and shields that starts off, of course, bad.

Genesis 27, 32 and 33 tell the story of twin brothers, Esau and Jacob.  They were nothing alike, and seemed to be struggling for top dog status even in the womb.  Esau is famous for trading his rights as first born to Jacob for a bowl of soup, and Jacob is famous for cheating Esau out of his blessing as first born by deceiving their blind father Isaac.  Add into all this the fact that the dad favored Esau and the mom favored Jacob. And that Esau was a man’s man while Jacob could hardly grow a beard. Trouble everywhere. 

Esau’s original response to Jacob was this, “Soon my father will die and then I will kill my brother Jacob.” Esau felt like Cain, that if he could simply remove the competition, he would regain all he had lost of God’s blessing and his first-born rights.  He blamed Jacob for all he had lost, even though to an outside observer, he seemed pretty careless with his birthright and maybe should have partly blamed himself. 

Their mother heard of Esau’s threat, called Jacob in and warned him.  “Your brother Esau is consoling himself by planning to kill you.  Flee to your uncle’s and stay awhile until your brother’s fury lessens, until his anger turns away and he forgets what you have done to him.”  So Jacob took off.   Jacob’s essential trickster character remained constant through his time with his uncle, and he became rich at his uncle’s expense.  God told him to go home, and he and his wives and children and servants and animals took all his property and started for home. 

As he neared home, he began sending messengers to Esau, announcing his arrival and reporting back to him how Esau took the news.  They told him, “Esau is coming to meet you with four hundred men.”  Jacob was scared. It sounded to him like a fighting force.  He split up his wealth so that at worst he would lose only half.  He sent presents ahead to Esau of herd after herd of livestock with space in between.  He prayed for God to protect him from his brother, and in that prayer he said to God, “I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant.”  This prayer reveals that at long last, Jacob is telling the truth about himself to God, a truth that he may have been avoiding his whole life by clawing his way to wealth and position through hard dealing and deceitfulness.

That night, Jacob wrestled bodily with God.  Symbolically, this is the same wrestling match that he had been engaged in his whole life.  When the Spirit he was wrestling puts his hip out of joint, laming him for life, this was the same limp he had been covering for his whole life.  God blessed him with a change in name, symbolizing a new view of himself, a change from “Cheater” or “Supplanter” to “One who strives with God” –a change from “low-life” to “full human being.”

In the morning, Jacob saw Esau approaching.  He knew he had done Esau wrong, and he approached him as a supplicant, bowing seven times.  And here is the surprise.  Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.   

Who knows what process Esau went through to move from wanting to kill Jacob to welcoming him home like the father welcomes home the prodigal son in the parable told by Jesus.  It is clear that Esau no longer feels himself held down by Jacob’s tricksy manipulations.  The yoke of anger and hatred has been broken off his neck.  He is forgiving, even to the point of allowing Jacob to try to make things right by giving him gifts.  As my daughter Liz pointed out to me, Esau is the first example of an outright forgiveness in the Bible.

More questions:  Is there someone in my life who makes me feel inferior?  Is my conflict with that person standing in for admitting my own sense of worthlessness, my shame at somehow not measuring up? If I just admit the truth about myself to God, what does God say to me?

Here are the signs that my heart is not at peace:  I am competing for attention, blaming others, judging and criticizing others, and cheating to get ahead. 

To have a heart at peace means that I no longer am acting in my own defense. I have wrestled with God, admitted to God my worst stuff, accepted that God values our relationship because God values me, not my innocence, not my perfection, not my achievements, not my rightness, not my religious devotion.  God values you and me, knowing full well how easily we make mistakes, how easily we slip into self-justifying and blaming others, how easily we try to cover up for ourselves.  God values us and loves it when we get honest and open and accept God’s love without trying to earn it.  God loves us because God is love.  And there is enough love for all.

Pray for justice when you are in conflict with another person.  If you pray for justice, God will be help you be just, which involves seeing both the other and yourself more clearly.  And then lean into the help Jesus gives to repent and forgive.  

The Myth of Innocence

Years ago, my Sunday school class read a book by Rebecca Manley Pippert called Out of the Salt Shaker and into the World, in which she referred to the myth of innocence. (Turns out she got this idea from reading The Fall by Albert Camus—a good thing for an English teacher to hear.) This was a very useful concept to me and helped me experience the grace of God, so I want to share it with you.

I’ll start with the story of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. After disobeying God, Adam and Eve covered their shame with fig leaves and went into the woods to hide from God. There is something deeply sad about their wanting to hide from the divine lover. All their previous relationship of trust and dependence dissipates into fear and shame. But who can win a game of hide and seek with omniscience? The first principle to remember is that God already knows.

Second, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. It was not my fault, it was the fault of something else. Specifically, God, it was the fault of something or someone else YOU made. Implicitly, it is God’s fault. He, she, or it, is to blame for what I did; and ultimately You, God, are to blame. God doesn’t argue with any of these, just goes over the consequences. "Here’s what the world is like when you don’t trust God’s love enough to obey." The world becomes inhospitable and painful, and hostility and power mar every relationship. The second principle is that blaming other people poisons our lives.

Now I want to jump to the story in John 4 about Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Embodied love in Jesus meets a woman with a checkered past. Also, she is used to being socially snubbed by the Jews, and expects the same from Jesus. In fact, when Jesus asks her for water, she says, “Why are you even talking to me? You’re a Jew.” Jesus said, “You have no idea who I am because if you did, you’d ask me for living water.” She replies, “Really? You don’t even have a cup to collect water in. You act like you’re greater than our founder Jacob who dug this well.” (Don’t be deceived by the “sir.”) Jesus replies to her, “And will this water satisfy your deepest thirst? No, of course not, it only temporarily satisfies your superficial thirst. But if you, for example, were to drink of the water I offer, you will be satisfied and a source of living water yourself.” She says, “Ok, then, give some of this to me, so I won’t have to come here to the well.”

Put into Eden’s terms, God in human form shows up to a woman hiding in broad daylight. She fences with him until she finally admits she is thirsty. The third principle is to admit that our defences have trapped us and we actually would like some freedom.

Then Jesus challenges her with a form of the question God asked in Eden, “Why are you hiding?” He says, “Go get your husband and bring him back with you.” “I don’t have a husband,” she says, and it’s true. Jesus adds to the truth: “In fact, you’ve had five husbands, and now you are not even married to the man you’re with.” An aside here—one contextual bit of information: divorce was hotly debated at Jesus’s time and widely practiced; in one school of thought, a man who was dissatisfied with a wife for any reason could write her a certificate of divorce and put her out of his house. The other view was that divorce required some conditions, namely neglect, abandonment, abuse, and unfaithfulness, and Moses set it up to protect women as much as men. Though it is comfortable to view her as a victim, it just may be that she was a part of the problem.

She certainly doesn’t cave, just because she’s been slapped with fact. She diverts the discussion onto theology: What about the right place to worship, o prophet.

Jesus tells her, “The place isn’t important; what’s important is worship in spirit and truth.” Ma’am, with all due respect, you need to get more right than the place in order to worship.

Her last gasp: “The Messiah will tell us what is correct.”

And Jesus: “I am Messiah—I’m telling you.”

She went back to her village and said, “Come see this man who told me everything I’ve ever done. Can he be the one we’ve been waiting for?”

She stays in hiding until the gracious person of Jesus helps her face the truth—the truth about herself and the Truth in physical form. Look at me, Jesus says, I am Truth. You can be true, too, you can tell truth and know truth.

Interestingly, it is the exposure of her own personal history that tips her over into belief and evangelistic zeal. She does not confess in any obvious sense, but she admits that Jesus knows everything she has ever done, her shame and her sin. Even if she is a victim, she is not innocent, and she doesn’t say Jesus knows everything people have done to me.

The story of the woman taken in adultery has a similar moment. She certainly has no need to confess, since she was taken in the act, and the preservation of her life depends on Jesus facing her accusers with their own personal truth—they have sinned also, they also are ashamed, and likely their shame fuels their anger at her. And Jesus says to her, “Go and sin no more.” She is both victim and sinner.

The myth of innocence for me went like a Life in Hell (Matt Groening)comic strip: I’m innocent for 11 frames, and then finally, ok, I’m guilty as hell. The protestations of innocence were accurate enough for a particular set of events that victimized me, but I was not without sin myself. Even as a small child, I knew enough to recognize that I was deliberately unkind to someone smaller and weaker than myself. For some reason, admitting my own sin against a weaker person helped set me free from needing to insist on being a victim.

The fourth principle is this: Admit it. Let the consciousness of what you have done against conscience or truth see the light of day—maybe just to God, maybe to a spiritual friend and to God. Let Jesus tell you everything you’ve ever done. It isn’t easy, but it is the way grace breaks through our fence, our defence. And sets us free. The truth sets us free, and the spirit of God guides us into all truth.