Sunday Sermon - 5th of July
Rev. Dr. Doug Gay
The United States of America has caused the world many problems, but it has also given the world many gifts. John, Cordy and Carol are among those gifts as are Carys, Levi and Mackenzie – within our congregation. Another of those gifts is a movement which began in Ohio in 1935, founded by Bill W. and Dr Bob S. – when this story is told their second names are not used, because these two men who had serious addictions to alcohol, founded an organisation which we know as Alcoholics Anonymous. We are proud to host an AA meeting here in this church, as well as a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and an OverEaters Anonymous meeting.
Surnames are not used in AA – many of you will be familiar with the formula used by those attending meetings – my name is Joe, or Jane and I am an alcoholic.
Many of you will also know about something called the 12 Steps – which are a summary of the approach to recovery used by AA since 1939. But they may be new to some of us, so I want to read them aloud:
The 12 Steps:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.
We Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
We Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
We Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
We Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
We Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
We Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
We Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
We Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
We Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
We Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Some of us will have friends or family members, who are involved in 12 step recovery programmes – some of us are involved in them ourselves. I speak as an outsider, but I have friends for whom these 12 steps have been life changing and perhaps life saving.
When we hear them read aloud in church, if you are someone who knows a bit about church, I am sure that even if we have never been involved in a 12 step programme, these steps resonate with us. That’s no surprise because their Christian origins are still pretty obvious – they mention God very explicitly and repeatedly. They do however try to open the door widely to people who may not identify as Christians – and that, in fact, may be one of the many things churchfolk can learn from them.
I am talking about them today because of today’s New Testament lesson – Wilma read some very famous words from chapter 7 of Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome –
Before we get to them, let me hold my hand up on behalf of the Church and say that we have sometimes got this stuff wrong – there have been priests and preachers and pastors and church members who have loaded people with guilt, who have been judgmental, who have been obsessed with particular sins, usually to do with sex, who have used sin talk to control and manipulate people – who have used their power to make people feel small, and dirty and unloved and unworthy. Given what we believe, maybe its no surprise that sometimes the church has sinned when it has talked about sin. So this is a subject which needs to be handled with care.
Having said that, I have come across some folk within churches who don’t want to talk about sin at all – one man who was an elder in a congregation I was leading worship in told me in no uncertain terms that he objected strongly to being told he was a sinner. I hope I answered him kindly and sensitively, but I did wonder if he had maybe got the wrong religion.
I say that because I don’t think it’s possible to be a Christian and not talk about sin. We’d have to stop praying the Lord’s prayer for a start. If we listen to what Paul is saying here, we find him setting out very powerfully an insight into what it means to be human – and we should notice that he chooses to do it in the first person. ‘I do not understand myself…’ there is a genuine anguish here in his words – this is first person theology, theology from the heart – the way I experience my own life, Paul says, is that I am not fully in control of myself – even when I know what I want to do, what I should do, what the right thing to do is – often I can’t do it. You can see him wrestling with the very question of his own identity, of who he is – you can hear him lamenting the fact that he’s not free to be the person he knows he should be, the person he wants to be – it’s like there is this other power at work in him, which is him, which is his own desire, his own will, his own mind, his own flesh – but which is also more than him, not him, bigger than him, other than him. There is a struggle between good and evil which runs right through his own soul – and which drives him to despair of himself.
As a Church, we believe that we are made in the image of God, that we are beloved of God, that we are precious to God – we are made by God for freedom and goodness and love and yet, we also believe that none of us can fully or properly live up to what we were made for. The writer Francis Spufford in his book Unapologetic talks about THTTFTU – the human tendency to ‘mess’ things up. Yes I edited that. (We’re in church.)
So if you come to this church regularly, we will always say a prayer of confession, and we will often say a prayer which says: ‘I confess that my life and the life of the world are broken by my sin’.
For those in 12 step programmes, recovery begins with that kind of acknowledgment. But in fact, its an acknowledgment that all of us are called to make, if we want to be baptised, if we want to become a full member of the church community – this comes with the territory. The church is a community of sinners – the only way in is on our knees.
That’s not because we are worthless, but because, as someone once said ‘our lives deserve repentance’ – the way to fullness of life is through an honest reckoning with the ways in which we are a problem to ourselves and to other people.
And the good news is that step one leads to step two – We Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us. This step, like the first one, comes straight out of the ABC of Christianity – Paul in Romans 7 uses language that inspires John Newton in Amazing Grace – ‘wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death’ – thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord – Paul believes that the amazing grace of Jesus can reach him even when he is at his worst and his lowest – and that is what we believe in this Church too.
Jesus calls us to honesty, to a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves – Jesus offers us forgiveness – Jesus assures us that we are loved and forgiven by God – Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit to help us on our journey to recovery, to restoration, to becoming who we were made and meant to be.
In a way that we cannot fully understand, Jesus on the cross bears our sin and the sin of the world and reconciles us to God. This is the faith of the Church and this is our faith.
AA is a lot like Church – and Church is a lot like AA.
The only qualification for joining an AA group is to realise that you need to change and you can’t do it on your own. And that’s pretty much the only qualification for coming to the Lord’s table this morning. In the gospel reading set for today – Jesus says – I know what you say about me – the Son of Man is a friend of sinners – he even eats and drinks with them. It’s one of those lovely ironic reversals where we realise that he’s kind of shrugging his shoulders and saying ‘guilty as charged’.
You see if you are looking for a self-improvement society where a bunch of people gather who have it all figured out, who are fully and freely in control of themselves, who always know the right thing to do and always do it – then God Bless You, but this is not where you belong.
Jesus also says in today’s reading: Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens – and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart – and you will find rest for your souls – for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
I love that. Because my name is Doug and I am often a problem to myself and to others – and that word of Jesus makes me think that this is where I am meant to be this morning – at this table where I remember Christ’s death on the cross, where I am assured of God’s love and mercy, where I taste and see the amazing grace of God, where I join the circle of forgiven sinners, who are learning from Jesus how we can find life in all its fullness. We are learning, but Lord have mercy, many of us are slow learners – and we often screw up – but God is gracious.
So with Paul I say thanks be to God – and I also say thankyou to AA – because your honesty and your courage in facing your own demons helps me to understand the gospel all over again. If you are someone in recovery, thankyou for reminding me that in church we are all in recovery.
And if you have never turned to God in the way the 12 steps call those with an addiction to – then this morning, in the name of Jesus, I invite you to take that step, to call on God – to come to the one who says Come to me. And if you take that step it will be a step into the open arms of God.
Now as we move into communion We’re going to sing those words of Jesus: Come to me.