Addiction, Recovery and The Things We Carry by The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Posted on
January 25, 2015
Third Sunday After Epiphany, Year B
Trinity Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62: 7-9
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Our three readings from Scripture this morning all deal with the issue of call, challenge, and change and our tendency to offer resistance to them because they will upset well-established patterns of living and thinking. In many ways this issue continues the lesson from last Sunday on which Don preached regarding Samuel’s call from God, a call which he also initially resisted or at least misunderstood, thinking it was Eli calling him.
At the heart of each story is a call either directly from God, in the case of Jonah, or from Jesus to the fishermen, or through the community Jesus left for us after his resurrection, as presented in Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth.
It takes Jonah two times to respond to God’s command that he warn the people of Nineveh; it took Samuel 3 times to get God’s call right; but the fishermen whom Jesus encounters along the shore of the Sea of Galilee took only an instant to cast their nets aside and followed him “immediately”. We don’t really know how readily the congregation at Corinth followed Paul’s injunction that those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who buy be as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world be as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. The challenge in Paul’s words is extreme but it makes the same point that is made in the other readings, that radical and dramatic change is underway. Jesus also makes this clear in his very first words as he begins his public ministry: repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand.
In one way we don’t need much preparation to get into these stories because we live daily in a world that is undergoing constant change, challenge, and even catastrophe. We know what it is like to live in a world that is not secure or safe as we face the dangers of terrorism and random violence. Many in our minority communities are subject to the challenge of profiling and even brutality that undermines their security and hope of living the American dream so powerfully articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr. We remain awash in the proliferation of guns, on the sale of which some zealots continue to reject background checks as a threat to their freedom, a freedom which apparently trumps the need to keep innocent people, especially children, from being killed.
Internationally we see the refusal of national and ethnic entities to compromise on issues of territory, nuclear weaponry, the purity of their religion, and their autonomous authority to decide their own destinies.
We know change and fear and the challenge of being called to a new way of living and being in the world. But something keeps us back from embracing the challenge, from responding to the call of God to enter into a new way of life. And that something turns out to be the many things we carry through our lives and with which we are loath to part because they give us our identity and meaning in a world of ceaseless changes. The things we carry vary from person to person. But they often stand in the way of our hearing God’s call to us now in the midst of our lives. We carry them, despite their weight, because they promise to help us attain, however transiently, the glittering prizes offered to us by the world as it is, not the world as it might be if we respond to God, and not to the present and dominant ways of the world.
What are some of these things we carry? And which of them are we prepared to lay down and leave behind when God calls us? What are we so tied to that we can’t see God behind it?
What false idols of protection, security, and meaning do we cling to as a substitute for the secure rock which is God? And to what end?
I’ll only mention a few that might be true for many of us, if not all. One has to do with the tenacious hold many of us want to have on the indefinite prolongation of our lives. We have come to believe that the continuation of our biological life is more important in many instances than the quality of that life or how it is lived. We spend a far greater percentage of our medical dollars on the attempt to prolong life another few months or perhaps a year than we do early on in our lives on preventive and health-promoting care and practice. We often refuse to have open and candid discussions with our loved ones, even with ourselves, about how we want to live out the years that remain to us, living with increased dementia, or hooked up to machines or undergoing painful bouts of medical treatments that at best prolong our lives for a short period of time but with no increase in the quality of our lives. If we truly believe that God will never abandon us even at and beyond the moment of our earthly deaths, then why should we bankrupt ourselves and our families to extend for a short period of time a life which promises only decreasing quality and fulfillment? Surely the mere prolongation of biological life no matter what the cost is not the meaning of life which God intends for us. It is something we carry which only bears us down. The call and challenge for many of us is to face end-of-life decisions with courage and with honesty about what is really important to us.
Another weight we bear is the belief that we must be connected with everyone our Google searches and Facebook can deliver to us. But is it really important to the quality of our life that we know everything there is to know and to be friends on Facebook with everyone alive today? Is it just possible that knowing a little less and having fewer but closer real friends might enhance the meaning of our lives? Perhaps we are finding that the larger our Facebook community the fewer meaningful things we have to say and share with it. Less may be more.
These examples reveal something deeper about ourselves and the way we live. The things we carry are often forms of addiction or obsession that tie us too closely and uncritically to the world as it is. These addictions come to define us but also threaten to undo us unless we can confront them. I’m sure many of you have heard of the tragic case of the suffragan bishop in the diocese of Maryland who was supposedly in recovery for her addiction to alcohol. But having already been convicted once of a DUI offense, she was allegedly drinking, driving, and texting when she tragically hit and killed a cyclist after which she drove away. She is someone who carried her addiction and had not yet successfully confronted it and dealt with it. It was one of the things she carried which made it hard to hear God’s call to begin again with newness of life. We don’t know all the details of her case but there are questions being raised about whether her diocese knew of her addiction and the state of her recovery before it authorized her elevation to the episcopate. If so, it colluded in a practice that failed to meet the challenge of her addiction. Was her addiction to alcohol somehow related to an addiction to the power and prestige that came with being made a bishop? How often are our own addictions and obsessions based on a desire to attain the false and fleeting riches the world offers us?
How much are we addicted to desires to be seen as good and useful people occupying respected positions? How much are we addicted to the respect and honor that comes with a title, a position, a hallowed place in the eyes of our community? How much of this addiction can we free ourselves from and still function as contributing members of that community? Can we retire gracefully from the work that has given our life meaning over many years and still find ourselves valued by our community and even by ourselves? Can we stop to enjoy the world without always seeking to improve the world? How much is our addiction to our vocation or reputation a weight we carry unnecessarily and which hinders our entry into the community to which Jesus invites us?
Perhaps we should all be in recovery of a sort. Recovery means acknowledging our powerlessness over our addictions simply by individual will-power. We need to accept our condition and our need for help as we name and confront the things we carry.
In short, we need a faith that endures through the hard times. We need as the Psalm says this morning a rock that will not be broken or eroded away. A rock that if we cling to it will allow us to come out of the rushing water safely on the other side as Jonah came forth from the belly of the beast to do God’s will at last in Nineveh.
We need a faith that those in true recovery have: a faith that their strength is rooted in something beyond themselves and their own efforts. A faith that even in the face of fear is not overcome, a confidence that God will never test us beyond our limits, a firm belief that God will be there for us even when all human efforts seem hopeless. This faith will, if we embrace it, take us beyond the things we carry today, beyond our addictions to them, and into a world where God lives and embraces and surrounds us with true joy and everlasting love.
Let us therefore take the leap of faith and grab hold of the rock of security which is God and let go of our life-quenching addictions.