November 23, 2007
Recovery
Note: I do not often have an opportunity to preach these weekly OoN homilies. They are written on the forthcoming Sunday propers mostly as a sort of “firehouse dog” discipline. This one, however, I’ve been asked to preach (keeping with the unintended metaphor) as a “visiting fireman” in another town.
It is supposed to be about the Feast of Christ, the King, and something called “Recovery Sunday,” a keeping new to me that I understand has been around for a while. The sermon is longer than usual, too long to suit me, but I got stuck and couldn’t do much more with it no matter how I tried. Maybe you can. The opening story is a true one and has always meant much to me. If you have room, please keep me in mind and prayer Sunday morning. Thank you. — Lane
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Christ, the King, and Recovery Sunday
Lk 19.29-38
A twelve-step meeting was just concluding when a young woman suddenly blurted out her name, shouted that she was an alcoholic, then burst into tears and rushed out of the room. An older woman followed and saw her seated over in a darkened corner sobbing her heart out. She approached and embraced her and speaking gently, said, “My dear, just let us love you until you can come to love yourself.”
In this simple, yet touching encounter, there is revealed what Twelve-Step programs are surely about. As well, there is witnessed, if not at all consciously, what the Gospel and the Gospel’s church are surely about. It is no coincidence that we celebrate the Recovery programs on the same day we keep the annual Feast of Christ, the King, for these two events are both about the same thing.
They are both about love and, if you will, about justice and inclusion and servanthood, and about finding a safe place where we can practice and learn to risk taking these skills of grace into the world. For that is surely the most winsome and winning kind of evangelism.
There is another way to think about this being Recovery Sunday. These two events conjoined — Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem as servant king and the twelve step entry into spiritual awakening — are about our recovering what it means to be human, what it means to live in the image of God, to reclaim and to live into that being which is the creative gift of God’s imagination. This is where the Great Commandment to love is at work and the Great Commission to make disciples throughout the world is unfurled.
Our prayer book catechism puts it this way. To be human is to be created in the image of God, which means to be free to choose to love, to reason, to create, and to live in harmony with all of creation and with God (BCP p 845), no less than the ministry of Jesus, himself. Addiction — and I’ll talk more about that in a moment — addiction in all its forms cripples the very process of becoming human.
Perhaps the greatest irony of all this majestic Way and Truth and Life is that this One, this Jesus who comes into Jerusalem to be our King, comes not to rule in the manner of empire to which we so often seem to aspire, but rather to lead in the manner of a servant.
This Jesus, this paradox of God, is God’s evangel, the One to whom we as his beloved children and as his commissioned church must look for the Way. Our vocation as Christians is not to become more spiritual, for we are already that by virtue of God’s creating us. Our vocation is to become more human.
But this Recovery Sunday is also about addiction.
If statistics mean anything at all, there’s probably not a family or a friend represented here today that has not known its very fabric severely torn by the intrusion of addiction in one of its many and too often subtle forms. And if we are fortunate, we have also seen the creative healing which can result in the miracle of the process of recovery that so often can be the consequence of one of the many twelve-step programs.
We must broaden our understanding of addiction. Perhaps we have already learned or will soon learn, Satan to the contrary, that addiction’s tentacles extend far beyond the chemicals such as nicotine, alcohol, and those other paralyzing narcotics. For addiction is any compulsive, habitual behavior that limits, that compromises the freedom of human desire, that jeopardizes our God-given vocation to become human. (repeat?) To come to that understanding is essential if we would fulfill our ministry as a church.
That brilliant story teller Madeleine L’Engle writes of a friend who despaired of seeking help for her addiction from the church. She had dropped out and turned to a twelve-step program. Madeleine asked her why and was startled to hear her friend’s tearful reply. “Because this simple twelve-step program knows who is the enemy.”
Addiction is our enemy at all levels of life, whether it be addiction to power or to greed or to war or to orthodoxy or to tradition or to whatever. It affects all our relationships. It is habitual, and it is a behavior, and it lurks. By the power of its subtlety, we may never know it, for denial is not a conscious act until it is thwarted, and even then, we’ll do almost anything to deny that it exists and that we must come to terms with its demands.
When Jesus, the King of Peace, entered into Jerusalem, there was another entry into Jerusalem on that same day, an entry of which we rarely take any notice. Actually, I was not at all aware of it until recently when your associate rector (as he so often does) reminded me that I still need continuing education. It was an entry not about peace, but about war and oppression. It was the entry of Pilate, the lesser Roman satrap, not on the foal of a donkey, but with his legions on the armored stallions of cavalry.
It was an entrance not to celebrate with the Jews, but to guard against and stamp the Roman boot on the possibility of any colonial insurrection at that time. And it was an entrance hurtling toward that confrontation with Jesus we know so well… about the understanding of truth and the very meaning of kingliness. Keeping this Feast today must remind us that we face a choice between defining peace in terms of war and peace in terms of justice, a choice between the servant kingly reign of God and the imperialistic and addictive compromise of our own worst selves.
This Christ, the King, shows us what must be done with the gift of recovery, that this is what God means by the “kingdom relationship.” Servant leadership is the timeless story of the gospel. It is no longer possible and truly has never been possible for leadership to commend itself alone with external credentials, or with “orthodoxy” or with “churchmanship” or even with the Bible apart from the community and the tradition which it inspires for its understanding.
Without an evident depth of integrity, the authority of servant leadership can easily degenerate into mere power and thus become menaced by its ever present temptation not to lead, but to manipulate and to exploit. That this delusion is rampant in today’s church may well be why those many whom the polls tell us cherish a belief in God no longer support or attend a church and become what some cynically call “the alumni association.”
Not altogether to fear, the late Bishop Bennett Sims of Atlanta, in his splendid book on servanthood, is convinced that there resides even now in the church the kind of servant leadership essential for a redemptive ministry to take hold and flourish. And we dare not presume — as so often we do — that it is relegated alone to the clergy, particularly to the episcopate. Lest we forget, our Book of Common Prayer affirms four orders of this ministry — laity, deacons, presbyters, and bishops — all of whom are commissioned in Baptism to the holiest of servant leadership.
Our Lord could not have put it any plainer when he said, “Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” (Jn 18.37).
The church and our congregations cannot expect the world to get the drift of that until we, ourselves, hear that same voice and become deeply committed servant leaders embracing the authority of grace and eschewing the destruction of power, modeling this Jesus ministry for all to see. Then may we dare to recover the vision into the kingdom of God that awaits us and into which Christ, the King, would lead us, into our own Jerusalems.
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Brilliant, Lane. Thank you. You will be in my prayers on Sunday as I struggle to preach my own sermon on the Feast of Christ the King, Addiction Sunday and in anticipation of World AIDS Day, December 1st.
Comment by Elizabeth Kaeton — November 24, 2007 @ 9:03 pm