Breathing Under Water: Telling the Truth About Ourselves

Psalm 51:16–17; Romans 5:12–21

Through much of high school and all of college, my best friend was Roman Catholic.

She had attended the local parish school in our hometown through eighth grade, we really didn’t meet until high school, and like most teenage girls, we could spend hours talking. On the phone. At one another’s houses. Between classes. After the lights were out in our dorm room, around the table in our apartment.

We talked about family. We talked about classes. We talked about boys. We talked about the future. And we talked about religion.

Specifically, hers.

I had grown up in a house where I went to church every Sunday until I left for college. Mostly because my parents dropped me off. Or, eventually, because they handed me the car keys before they headed out on a motorcycle ride or settled in for a quiet cup of tea on the patio, watching the birds and flowers.

I was churched.

But we did not really talk about church at home.

My dad, the PK — the preacher’s kid — would tell you he had had quite enough church and church talk, thank you very much.

So I knew the rhythms or religion. I knew Sunday school. I knew worship. I knew how to sit in a pew. But I had not done a lot of deep theological conversation outside of my own tradition.

And early on, I discovered that my Catholic friend had to navigate a lot of anxiety about doing the wrong thing.

About sin.

She patiently explained to me the difference between venial sins and mortal sins. She tried to explain other categories I could not quite keep straight. And then there was what I heard as an elaborate accounting system of sin, confession, damnation, purgatory, heaven, and hell.

I do not say that to caricature her tradition. There is deep wisdom in the practice of confession. There is holiness in taking sin – as a separation from God - seriously. There is grace in naming what is broken instead of pretending it is not there.

But as a teenager and then young adult, mostly what I noticed was how stressed she was.

Especially about going to confession.

And did I mention this was high school and college?

We were doing our fair share of exploring the world. There was probably plenty to be confessed.

But what I remember most is her anxiety. The fear that she had missed something. The fear that she had not named it correctly. The fear that God was keeping score more carefully than she could keep track.

And I wonder how many of us, even without the same theology or the same vocabulary, know something about that fear.

The fear of looking too closely at ourselves.

The fear that if we really told the truth, there would be too much.

Too much selfishness. Too much resentment. Too much fear. Too much pride. Too much anger. Too much grief. Too much harm done. Too much left undone.

So we learn to look away. Almost as self-protection.

This week, in our Breathing Under Water series, we come to the fourth step in the 12 steps of the recovery community:

“We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.”

A searching and fearless moral inventory.

That is a serious sentence.

It sounds like the kind of sentence most of us would rather not speak.

But let’s also notice what it does and does not say.

It does not say, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our spouse.”

It does not say, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our parents, our children, our boss, our political enemies, or the people at church who drive us crazy.”

It does not say, “We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of everything wrong with the world.”

 

There may be plenty to name in all those places.

But that is not the work of Step Four.

 

The work this week is not looking outward.

It is looking inward.

 

Not yet confessing aloud to another person. That will come.

Not yet making amends. That will come.

Not yet repairing every relationship or resolving every wound. That will come, as grace makes it possible.

 

This week’s work is simpler.

Not easier.

But simpler.

A willingness to look at our own lives and see what is really there.

 

Where am I afraid?

Where am I defended?

Where am I resentful?

Where have I caused harm?

Where am I living out of fear instead of love?

Where have I confused control with faithfulness?

Where am I out of alignment with God’s desire for my life?

That kind of examination can be terrifying if we believe God is waiting to condemn us…to hold all of that against us.

But it becomes possible when we begin to accept that God already loves us. Just as we are.

That acceptance is hard work. I know.

 

Sometimes it is easier to believe God loves people in general than to believe God loves us in particular. It is easier to say, “God is love,” than to stand honestly before God with the whole truth of who we are and trust that love will still be there for us individually.

But that is perhaps the only reason we are ever able to tell the truth.

Because God’s grace-filled love is stronger than our fear and meets us with forgiveness when we are able to tell the truth.

Psalm 51 says, “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”

That verse can sound harsh if we hear it through shame.

As if God wants us crushed.

As if God delights in our humiliation.

As if the goal of the spiritual life is to feel terrible enough about ourselves that God finally approves.

But I do not think that is what the psalmist intends.

A broken and contrite heart is not a heart God has smashed.

It is a heart that has stopped pretending.

It is a heart that has become honest.

It is a heart that is no longer spending all its energy on self-protection, self-justification, and self-defense.

It is a heart that can say, “God, this is what is true. This is where I have wandered. This is where I have harmed. This is where I am afraid. This is where I need your forgiveness and help.”

 

And the psalmist says God does not despise that heart.

God does not turn away from that heart.

God meets that heart.

That is what makes moral inventory possible.

Not fear.

But God meeting us in the midst of it all.

God’s grace. God’s forgiveness. God’s mercy. This makes a moral inventory palatable. Possible.

The text from Romans gives us a much bigger frame for this same truth.

Paul reaches all the way back to Adam, to the old story of humanity hiding from God.

In Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit, the first thing they do is hide.

 

That is such a human reality.

They hide from God.

They hide from one another.

They cover themselves in their nakedness.

They shift blame.

They do what human beings have been doing ever since.

We hide what we are ashamed of.

We cover what feels exposed.

We blame someone else when the truth gets too close to us.

And if Step Four compels us to make a searching and fearless moral inventory, the story of Adam and Eve reminds us why that is hard.

Because hiding feels safer than honesty.

But hiding does not heal us.

It just leaves us alone with what we are afraid to name.

Paul tells the story differently. He says sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin. But he does not stop there. Romans 5 is not finally a text about Adam. It is a text about Christ – about God reaching out in human flesh that also rose from the dead and lives today.

It is a text about grace.

Paul’s point is not simply, “Look how bad everything is.”

Paul’s point is, “Look how much more powerful grace is.”

However wide the wound, grace is wider.

However deep the trespass, God’s love for us is deeper.

However tangled the human story has become, Christ is not less than the wreckage.

Christ is more.

 

That is the good news for Step Four.

We are not taking inventory in a closed room with only our shame for company.

We are taking inventory in the presence of God.

And God is not fragile.

God is not surprised by the truth.

God does not need us to soften the story to make it easier for him to love us.

God already knows.

And Christ still came and comes among us.

 

So Step Four – our taking an honest inventory of our lives - is not a moral achievement contest.

It is not a spiritual audit where God is looking for reasons to reject us.

It is not an invitation to obsess over every failure until we drown in shame.

It IS a grace-filled practice of telling the truth in the presence of mercy.

That matters because there is a difference between guilt and shame.

Guilt says, “I did something wrong.”

Sometimes guilt is telling the truth.

Sometimes guilt is the Spirit’s nudge that something needs attention, repair, confession, change.

Shame says, “I am wrong. I am beyond love. I am only the worst thing I have done.”

Shame drives us back into hiding.

Grace calls us into the light.

And the light of God is not a bare bulb in an interrogation room.

It is morning light.

Healing, warm light.

The kind of light that helps us see clearly enough to become free.

So this week, maybe the invitation is not to fix everything.

Maybe the invitation is not to make one grand, dramatic accounting of your whole life.

Maybe the invitation is simply to stop hiding from one honest thing.

One resentment.

One fear.

One pattern.

One place where you have been protecting yourself instead of loving freely.

One place where you have been calling something faithfulness when it is really control.

One place where you need to say, at least to God, “This is true.”

Not because God needs new information.

But because we need the awareness and the freedom that comes from speaking the truth about ourselves.

Today, as we come to the water and the table, we come as people known by God.

Known all the way down.

Known beyond the unflawed parts.

Known beyond the polished parts.

Known beyond the parts that know how to behave in worship.

Known in our fear, in our defensiveness, in our longing, in our sin, in our sorrow, in our hope.

And loved.

Still loved.

Already loved.

When we touch the water, I pray it reminds us that before we achieved anything, God claimed us, called us by name. Water can remind us that grace comes first, before we have anything to offer or prove.

The table reminds us that Christ gives himself not for the already whole, but for the hungry, the honest, the weary, the willing. It is where we are fed not because we have earned it, but because we are loved.

So come to the water.

Come to the table.

Come out of hiding.

Not all at once, maybe.

Not perfectly.

But honestly.

Let God meet what is real.

Because God meets us in truth, not performance.

And the truth is not the end of grace.

The truth is where grace begins its healing work.

God, meet us where we are,

and lead us toward wholeness.

Amen.