March 14, 2010
Rev. Susan E. Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church

Texts: Romans 7:14-25, John 3:1-10

“I’m Susan, and I am an addict” – seven days a week, at all hours of the day, in this community and throughout the world, people at 12-step meetings introduce themselves this way, naming their own addiction: alcoholism, gambling, compulsive overeating, shopping, sex, narcotics, co-dependence, workaholism, and many others. I found one list of 32 types of 12-step groups. There are hundreds of thousands of 12-step meetings every week, empowering people to recover from addiction.

What is addiction? Some people only consider the substances that are physically addictive – such as alcohol, cigarettes and narcotics – to be truly addictive. But anyone who has tried to change their own behavior around any number of activities has learned that addiction can come in many forms.

Let me describe my understanding of addiction – Blaise Pascal, the 17th century philosopher, said that “There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator….” Augustine, the early saint wrote in his Confessions: ”You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Augustine knew about that restlessness, and had led a life of some wildness before turning to God and finding the fulfillment and peace that had eluded him previously. Addiction is the process by which we try to satisfy our need for God in other ways – we can do it through alcohol or gambling, we can do it through a drive for success, we can do it through our relationships. While many of these – food, work, relationships – are important to life, in the addicted person, they assume an importance beyond what is appropriate, and the focus for such a person is about meeting their own needs for meaning, for peace, for God through something else. While the substitute fails to adequately meet those needs, the person becomes more and more compulsive, perhaps more controlling in relationships, perhaps more driven in work, perhaps consuming more and more alcohol or food – all without attaining the satisfaction that is sought.

In preparing this sermon, I consulted a number of people and books – one book, that I had read 15 years ago in a small group at the church where I was a member, is called A Hunger for Healing: the 12 steps as a classic model for Christian spiritual growth. The author of this book, J. Keith Miller, describes the 12 step model as capturing the heart of the gospels. He suggests just inserting the word “sin” in the first step, so that it reads, We admitted we were powerless over sin – that our lives had become unmanageable.

I have talked before a little about the discomfort that people feel around the word “sin” – and although I think it is an appropriate word, I think in many cases we could substitute the word “brokenness”. The point however, is that all addicted behavior is behavior that seeks to find satisfaction in substances, relationships or activities that is intended to be found in God.

One of our members said to me not too long ago, “Isn’t there really only one sin – idolatry?” He was describing the way we turn to other things instead of to God, and this is exactly what addiction is. This is why addiction is properly understood as a spiritual disorder, even though there are physical and emotional components. Gerald May, a psychiatrist and renowned spiritual director, wrote in his book Addiction and Grace that “addiction sidetracks and eclipses the energy of our deepest, truest desire for love and goodness.” Medieval convents and monasteries described this as ‘attachment,’ and perhaps more of us would be comfortable with that word. We don’t think we’re addicted to television, or work, or chocolate, or sports – but we might recognize that we’re attached. We use these activities to soothe ourselves, or to provide meaning, and if we are deprived of them, we find ourselves restless, or depressed, or anxious.
One of the classic Lenten disciplines over the ages has been to give up those things to which we have become attached, to free ourselves for God, to relinquish what may have become an unhealthy dependence on something other than God.

Part of why many of us may find the explanation baffling – we fill our need for God with something else – is because we can’t imagine how we would fill that space with God. If we’re a smoker, we wouldn’t necessary talk with God 20 times a day. If we are addicted to sports on TV, we wouldn’t spend all day on Saturday watching movies about God, or reading the Bible. How can it be that we are substituting these things for God? Besides, those of us here are people of faith – God has a place in our lives. We haven’t displaced God with something else. But ministers and church leaders are as susceptible to this as anyone – we become addicted to our own effectiveness, to knowledge, to taking care of people, to being busy in church activities – but we can do all these things without ever depending on God. We can do all these things to satisfy our addiction to ourselves.

People in the 12-step groups find a spiritually-centered way of living that is different than the experience of many church-going folks. I consulted a couple of good folks who are both trained addiction counselors, and they gave me a wonderful explanation of the spiritual nature of addiction. Take one of the inserts from today’s bulletin, draw a large circle, and put inside it a small circle. The large circle can be labeled ‘me’ and the small circle ‘God’. This is the orientation of the addict, and unfortunately, it is also the orientation of many religious folks. God has a place in our lives. We pay attention to God, we believe in God. But the person with disordered life puts themselves in charge of their life, they look to their own decisions and activities to provide satisfaction. Now, if you have space, draw two more similar circles, or just re-label the originals so that this time, the large one is ‘God’ and the small one ‘me’. This is the model for transformative faith and transformed living , this is the Biblical model for faith – in this model, we have a place in God’s life, we know God pays attention to us, and we know God believes in us. Who we are is people living in God.

This is the conversion that Jesus was trying to draw Nicodemus toward – to a new understanding of himself in which the spiritual dimension of life would be the governing reality. And the result isn’t religious obsession or self-righteousness, but a zest and freedom that leads to joy. When Jesus says later in John’s gospel, “I have come that they might have life and have it abundantly” this is what he is describing: a life powered by love, not a life driven by need.

Part of the problem for so many folks is that over the centuries, Christianity became an institution, more concerned with structure, belief, and its own survival – what Richard Rohr describes as “churchianity” in his CD set “How to Breathe Under Water: the Gospel and 12-step Spirituality”. It became a religion of information instead of transformation. We talk about God, we study God, we analyze God – but what Jesus came to show us about is life lived in God. Remember, what brought people to the early church was not the sense that it was a good way to raise your children, or an institution that would take good care of you – it was the observation that the early Christians had experienced the power of the living God. People wanted what they had. Christianity, as it is described in the Gospels, is a life-changing, world-changing relationship with God.

And in the 12-step groups, people are still seeking…and finding... the power of the living God. They are coming to God from a place of powerlessness – a realization that life is not working at the deepest levels – they may have a job, and a marriage, a house or nice apartment. But they know that something is missing (as Pascal might have put it), or that they are restless (as Augustine might have put it).

The person with an attachment to some behavior is like Paul in today’s reading from his letter to the church in Rome: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.”

The person who wants to spend less time on facebook, or who is binging and purging, the one who is anxiously trying to manage their relationships or who can’t think of anything other than their financial condition – they can be as obsessed as the alcoholic who is thinking about when and where they will get the next drink. Our culture may not have a problem with someone who works too hard, relinquishes time with family and friends in order to work longer, and gets kind of lost and depressed on vacation. We kind of admire the person whose concern for being healthy has morphed into an exercise obsession that leaves them anxious if something interferes with a workout. But these are attachments that have come to substitute for understanding ourselves as an accepted and beloved child of God (who might well love their work and exercise regularly). The addictions, the spiritually disordered ways of experiencing ourselves and our lives, aren’t always apparent to others. The addictive quality is within.

Another example is the person who cares about nothing other than relationships – relationships are good, and given by God. But when a person’s sense of self-worth becomes dependent on what others are thinking about them, or how others are meeting their needs, then relationships have taken on a disordered, addictive quality. As one of those I consulted put it, the disordered person turns persons into things in order to meet their own needs. They end up with an addictive, desperate quality to their relationships instead of the free mutuality that God intended where we care for others, others care for us – but we don’t need their approval in order to be complete.

Nicodemus came to Jesus at night – when many of us find ourselves restless and missing something in life. Nicodemus was a success – a Pharisee, a religious authority in the community. But despite his standing as a religious teacher, he had not yet found his way to a life in God, a life led and energized by God. Just as some people learn during illness to rely on God, others come to that point through some other brokenness in our lives, through addiction, attachment, and some, like Nicodemus, simply through the realization that life isn’t working as hoped and we can’t make it work.

The most insidious addiction, I think, is the addiction to control – I’m not talking about the obvious control freak, but the person (like many of us) who needs to have their life under control, who believes that good planning and wise decisions will always produce good results, and who has (perhaps) a little contempt for those who haven’t managed that kind of control. This is an insidious addiction because it’s based on the fiction that we can control life. So that when such a person loses their job, or their health, or their investments, or their spouse, or their faith, when relationships aren’t going as they hoped – they are stunned, and wonder how such a thing could happen. They had done all the right things. They were in charge of their life, and had become quite attached to managing it well. This is the person most of us thought we should be.

But, as Keith Miller points out, “Because we were desperately afraid of failing and needed to come out looking cool and adequate, we expended a enormous amount of energy trying to deny our basic powerlessness, which we would eventually learn is something that all human beings face.” Can recovery from addiction happen without a spiritual awakening? Yes and no – yes, one can become free of an addiction, but it almost always results in substituting another addition – give up workaholism and take up manipulating relationships, give up tobacco and take up overeating.

The person who is experiencing a transformative faith knows that they can’t control life, or others, and that it is only when living through the power of God that they can really control themselves. They rely on God because they have to, because they understand that life is too precarious to manage ourselves. This person is finding a new freedom through God that they could never achieve through relying on themselves.

The 12-step groups have such a powerful understanding of the Gospel – they understand that none of us ever arrives, but are always on the way – that’s why they speak of being “in recovery” rather than “having recovered”. Recovery still takes work. And the 12-step groups understand the vital role of accountability in community, of being part of a group where we can be authentic, where we can say we blew it, where we can confess that for whatever reason we are finding ourselves struggling, where we can offer support to one another without fixing one another. As one of our Frame members pointed out to me this week – the 12 steps are a great model for living, even if you aren’t an addict. And, they are a great model, even when step one is as simple as “We admitted that we were powerless over our need for control – that our lives had become unmanageable.” We become honest with ourselves, and then, as Jesus said, the truth will set us free. The recovery begins…thanks be to God. Amen.