2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a; Psalm 51; John 6:24-35; Ephesians 4:1-16

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I probably made that miracles inspector less sympathetic than I might have done - sorry, Marion! - but her problem is the same problem that all of us face in life: how can we tell what's true and what's not? It used to be the case that if we didn't know something, we looked it up or asked the experts. That worked when we trusted books and experts to tell the complete, unvarnished truth. Then people realised that every book is written from a particular angle, and every expert comes from a particular background. That's fine when we know what their bias is - I'd not expect to go to Gordon Brown's office and get an objective view of David Cameron - but it does make finding out the truth a lot more complicated than it used to be. And these days, authority figures we can unquestioningly trust to tell the truth are few and far between: MPs are tarnished with the expenses scandals; even young people's leaders have to prove their trustworthiness by regular CRB checks.

It must have been easier in King David's time. The king was appointed by God, through God's prophet, and with prophetic help, as we've heard in our reading from the Hebrew Bible this morning, he ruled the country justly and wisely. Or not. In fact, it seems to me that human nature has changed little between then and now. We need, like God's prophet Nathan, the ability to see clearly beyond our own background and experience, and even our own advantage, to God's truth; and, like God's king David, the ability to admit when it is our own folly God's truth condemns.

Of course, another possibility these days is to take the approach adopted by the inspector of miracles: default disbelief. Convince me this is true! I suspect for us this is a hangover from the last two centuries when scientific experimental truth was the only sort of truth that counted. Happily people - including scientists! - have realised since that while it is reasonable to ask for evidence, defining truth only as what can be proved by repeated physical experiment cuts out a whole lot of reality. How could friendship, for example, be measured or described in such terms? Yet it is one of the enduring realities of life.

Yet the inspector is right, though anachronistic, to warn us against snake-oil merchants. The term describes travelling salesmen in American who used to offer traditional medicines to cure all life's ills, secure in the knowledge that the next day they would be riding out of town before anyone could realise they'd been duped and their money taken by a con-artist. And religious faith can be used in this way, as can any deeply-felt conviction, to benefit those who are whipping it up for their own purposes.

Anyone who has seen footage of the Nuremberg rallies when Hitler addressed the German people, promising the future pride and greatness of Germany in a way calculated to increase his own personality cult, will realise how hard it can be to tell truth from lies when the lies offered reflect what we would dearly love to believe. And yet our own deepest desires are not to be scorned as a way to finding the truth, for God made every part of us, not just our brains or our hands. For a while we can be duped by manufacturers and advertisers into believing this gadget, this holiday will make our lives perfect; but only until we possess it. When our unease remains, we can be sure that though without material things we would perish, they cannot satisfy us either.

What will satisfy our hunger, then? Hearing and telling the truth can help, as David discovered. If we have spent a lifetime thinking ourselves either utterly worthless or totally perfect, and have turned all our energies to supporting that false idea of who we are, maintaining that lie can be draining, endangering our mental or physical health. Hearing and confessing the truth that we are imperfect beings, whom God still loves, may come as an enormous relief. Yet truth can also be used as a weapon of war. Doesn't your heart sink when you hear the phrase: ‘To tell the truth...' or ‘To be honest...' ? So often it seems to signal someone offering us an unpleasant truth as they see it, often about a third party who is not there to hear the accusation against them. If we have hard truths to tell, we need to tell them to the person concerned, as Nathan did to David, not to a sympathetic audience who will pass on our views without any risk of unpleasantness to ourselves. Yet truth without love can be deadly.

Paul has evidently come across conflict in the church at Ephesus, or he would not write as he does. Live together with all humility and gentleness! he tells them. Have patience, bearing with one another in love! Make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace! Tell the truth in love! How can they, how can we keep up this difficult balance between truth and love? Because we Christians are one, but also many. We are one in Christ, because - as we were reminded last week - every Christian life is founded on Christ's life, death and resurrection. We all enter through one baptism. We all worship the one God. But we are also very different from one another. Our backgrounds, our personalities, our experiences are different, which means that we each see truth in a unique way. And this is no mistake on God's part; no, God has given each of us, including you, unique gifts in order to strengthen and build up the whole church, the body of Christ in this place, so that together we can show the world who Jesus is.

For if we are tempted to think these truths, this love is for us alone, we are living the most dangerous lie of all: that God only cares for us. It was David's delusion that God cared so much for him that he should have whosever wife he fancied; but God spoke up for Uriah, the cuckolded husband David put into the front line so he should die and leave Bathsheba free for himself to marry. It might be our delusion that because God cares for our needs, material and spiritual, we need not concern ourselves overly much for the needs of those who live and work beyond our church. But the reverse is true. I hope it is already your experience, for some of you through decades of faithful commitment, that Jesus is the bread, the nourishment of our lives; the water without which our spirits cannot survive. In joy we praise him, in remorse we turn to him for forgiveness, when we are in need, we look to him for help. And when we leave these doors, we will discover neighbours and strangers like the woman in our theme introduction, people who are just as hungry for truth and for love as we ourselves are, who are wondering whether Jesus can satisfy the hunger within them. All we need to do is invite them to come and find out the truth for themselves.