Texts on Sunday, March 19, 2006
Jeremiah 2: 9-13, 33-37; John 4: 7-24
This Lent, we are holding our focus on some of the painful, difficult emotions that afflict us on our way. Our purpose is not to teach psychology or do therapy but only to discern the light of the gospel “in our darkest night,” for to see the light of God where we had not is true repentance. I ask you to put away your grudging dislike of the word repentance, which you thought meant to hold yourself guilty of evil, and hang your head low. In the gospels, repent is metanoiete: “Transform your mind!” This is conversion in Christ–to turn from your darkness toward the light of God. Such conversion in Christ may come to you a score–ten score times, or more–but Christ never comes until you have acknowledged how dark and surrounding the shadows are; and the light, how clearly . . . over there it is, in just that direction, where you had not been going. To turn to the Lord in darkness is to know the life eternal and to make the Lenten journey.
Our concern this morning is guilt, the very thing we feared from the judgments of religion. Religious thought about human behavior cannot make you feel guilty, however; it can only bring to consciousness what is already there, or, alas, speak foolishly. Guilt, if you feel it, is in you. It lurks in the depth of the human predicament, wherever our experience of our freedom is crossed in our consciousness by experience of necessity, of being forced.
Necessity bothers us. I am thinking of the unavoidable “have tos” of life, particularly those having to do with our body, its functions, its hungers, its weakness that bears us to the bed, to the surgeon’s blade, to the grave. We are like gods who wished we might forever lightly tread the mountain heights, so anxious when bent to our mortal need. This anxiety is not itself the experience of guilt, however. Guilt entered after our beloved self–our god within–freely chose to do something unnecessary, something history or humanity did not need, something all had better done without. When the judgment comes to our mind that we, who are free and “little less than gods” as Psalm 8 has it, did freely ruin what was good or lovely or innocent–ruined it because we “had to”–for so we said at the time–then our consciousness is electrified with guilt. Guilt is a type of fear that our past act will now forever wound our future. Guilt freezes freedom and the future in an glacier of ignorant necessity. Imprisoned by their own hand, the guilty see they knew too late what freedom is. Guilt hates itself for this fall from grace and freedom.
So sharp is this hatred that the ego’s protective nature finds it easier to deny the whole story than to pass through the death required for true freedom. Denial does not undo the knots of self-hatred; rather, it tries to tar them over and hide them. It seeks to drown out the voices that clamor against any good future by shouting innocence. The Bible records hundreds of inscriptions of such denial. Almost by definition, the ancient prophets’ peculiar task was to name the deeds that the people of God denied, to show them plainly that they trusted not in God at all, and were not free, but slaves of their own desires, anchored in their tragic belief in necessity.
“My people have committed two evils,” Jeremiah proclaimed. “First, they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water.” This oracle against the people is grounded in the experience of freedom and necessity, for water you must have; your being depends on it. That is necessity. But God knows this about you, says this word, and therefore God springs freely forth from the source of all being to serve your true thirst, if you will but use your freedom to go to the source, to God alone, for living waters. But this you have not done, the Lord says to his people through the prophet. You have forsaken me, as a wanton forsakes the beloved. Instead, you have used your freedom “to dig cisterns for yourselves , cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” This is how denial works: But I needed this, here, now, cries the denying, defensive voice. I could not wait for the Lord, or take time apart from my affairs to go in search of higher things. I had to fill my own cup in my own way. I had to–there’s that tragic, guilty word–had to drink, gamble, shop, eat, keep talking shallow all the time, watch TV all night, ignore the news, ignore the poor, ignore the wife, the war, obsess about the car, the boat, my body–I had to.
“How well you direct your course to seek new lovers! So that even to wicked women you have taught your ways,” Jeremiah declaimed. “Also on your skirts is found the lifeblood of the innocent poor. Yet you say, ‘I am innocent.’ Now I am bringing you to judgment for saying, ‘I have not sinned.’ How lightly you gad about, changing your ways! You shall be put to shame . . . You will come away with your hands on your head, for the Lord has rejected those in whom you trust. You will not prosper through them.” This oracle inscribes the trajectory of God’s lance into the flesh of denial–ending with our hands on our head, a sign of being conscious at last in sorrow of what we have done, ashamed, guilty, and afraid.
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Today marks three years since this nation invaded the nation of Iraq. Like all great powers before it, America has taken the path of denial with respect to the violence it uses to get what it feels it must have. Is it any surprise that while arguing the necessity of our violence, the leaders keep parroting freedom, freedom to excuse their determination to do what they say they must? Denial always claims to be free as it denies its guilt. As long as our nation continues on this path, the way in darkness will deepen.
Anniversaries prompt reflections; it’s in all the news. Even as two-thirds of Americans now say this war was a bad idea, most just blame someone else, however. “We” are always innocent in America. Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a prominent neo-conservative and editor of the journal First Things, was interviewed by National Public Radio last Thursday. Asked whether our attack on Iraq is morally defensible given what we now know of how impotent Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was. He answered in the affirmative. “Saddam Hussein was clearly intent upon doing very nasty things . . . to us . . . [Since this] was believed to be the case in 2002 and 2003 . . . then you have a threat that appeared overwhelmingly plausible . . . If Hussein was bluffing, that does not change the moral judgment with regard to the decision made at the time, even if it was based on mistaken perception.”
Denial moves like a snake in the words of this well-spoken theologian, for he has removed into innocence all the crucial decision points. He spoke in the passive voice of “what was believed,” “what appeared plausible,” “the decision that was made.” These are the terms of necessity, based in the claim that we could have done no other. Let it be said that when necessity truly lowers its boom on our lives and we act, there is indeed no cause for guilt. But Neuhaus, with this whole country, it seems, has forgotten that a UN inspector was on the ground in Iraq. Hans Blix was scientifically looking into the facts, seeing what was reasonable to believe, and finding nothing, nothing, week upon week, and asking leave to stay Bush’s bombs that he might lead with facts, not the fictions of fear-mongers. But we would not. Neuhaus, and almost all Americans would not listen to Hans Blix, would not listen to Scott Ritter, who had led the UN teams in Iraq between 1992 and 1998, and who blew up hundreds of weapons facilities all across that land. Clearly and forcefully, Ritter argued that there was no possibility that Iraq in 2003 could have the feared weapons that Colin Powell lied about. The TV news companies would not allow Ritter on their screens, nor anyone else who reported those same details. Why?
Because we wanted to dig out our own cisterns. Forty years from now, this heinous crime of war against Iraq will be seen for what it was, the eager arrogance of men to have a war, to abuse the energies of their nation’s terror in the aftermath of 9/11 in order to dig safe cisterns to hold oil to feed the deadening appetites of America’s countless addictions. Yes, it is that bad, that evil, for the information was available that Iraq would not tumble into bed with us after we beat them severely; that the nation of Iraq was composed of mistrustful, violent tribes cobbled together by Britain in the 1920s in order to draw oil easily from its veins; that the U.S. administration had no intention to plan for a relationship with Iraq after the consummating violence. “Now, on your skirts is found the lifeblood of the innocent poor, though you did not catch them breaking in, and yet in spite of all these things, you say, ‘I am innocent’?” Denial of the kind our leaders preach could draw Jeremiah from the grave.
But there is some hope. In the March 13 issue of Time Magazine, under the title “What I Got Wrong About the War,” the conservative Andrew Sullivan enumerated his errors and concluded, “We have learned a tough lesson, and it has been a lot tougher for those tens of thousands of dead, innocent Iraquis and several thousand killed and injured American soldiers than for a few humiliated pundits. The correct response to that is not more spin [more denial!] but a real sense of shame and sorrow that so many have died because of errors made by their superiors and by writers like me.” Ah, at last! A little light in the darkness. The end of denial.
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When Jesus meets the woman at the well, she has come to this hewn well with a bucket, a little cistern of sorts, to satisfy her daily need. To her query as to why Jesus is ignoring the ancient hatreds which their tribes so bitterly share, he offers . . . living water, a spring of water gushing up to eternal life, for which no bucket is needed to grab a little for oneself each day. This, because she wondered why, in spite of the force of ancient hatreds, he was free to ask her to help him with the necessity of water to drink. “Sir, give me this water,” she says, “for I wish never to have to keep coming here.” See how necessity pushes oppresses her–she does not want to “to have to!” She wants to be free. But there is one thing lacking.
“Go call your husband and return,” says Jesus. It is a test–not to hurt her, but to give her the choice to transform her mind. She has been stuck, as you and I have often been stuck, in guilt. Hers is that she has had five husbands, and now lives with a man by necessity, with no more promises and no more freedom. Her future seems locked up, determined by her choices from the past. To receive the conversion to freedom, to eternal life, which is the living water, she needs to do one thing freely. She needs to say the truth that hurts most in her, her worst compromise of freedom with necessity– “I have no husband”–and to say it in the presence of her Lord. She needs to speak freely this truth about her past. And she needs to let the past be. So do you. So do I. So did Israel, according to the prophets. So does America. But this speaking of truth, no one dares do it really, truly, except in the presence of forgiveness. Not reasoned forgiveness, not the sort you can persuade yourself of with excuses like those of Fr. Neuhaus. No: our mortal soul needs the forgiveness before Whom we can repent in truth, and see light in our darkness; forgiveness we cannot arrange from thought, forgiveness we cannot imagine, forgiveness not like they taught it in religion classes or on the ancient mountains or in the temple and church rituals, but forgiveness arising it seems from the Kosmos itself; forgiveness unmerited; forgiveness absolute, awesome; forgiveness as Spiritual Presence, as life eternal, in spirit and in truth.
To be blessed by such forgiveness is a kind of death. In it there is no more defending the tragic error of perception by which we claimed we “had to– this” or “had to–that.” Instead, we see that though we were free to choose a way welling up to life, we chose to serve our old self, to dig our own cistern, to pour our own oil. And having chosen that way, we died a spiritual death but did not know it. Yet in the mystery of Christ’s forgiveness, we can now accept our death, the death of the one who thought he had to do that evil thing. Someday, perhaps, will come the death of the very idea of a nation thinking its people needed anything more precious than spiritual freedom. Perhaps not. Yet in Christ’s presence, we can accept this death of the false self and its false necessities. Then guilt is converted from the shadows into the joy of seeing new light. Then repentance is real. Freedom emerges genuinely again in our hope and in our will and in our limbs. And the future becomes present to us once more. We are at one with our God.
The leaders of this nation are deep in denial, and therefore they cannot possibly lead where hope directs. You see what this means. You, who are converted from guilt to consciousness, are free. You are leaders. Go and live so.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps 2006
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