Sermons

Meditation: "Step 1: We Admitted that we were Powerless and our Lives had become Unmanageable"

When I was 12 years old, my uncle who lived in my house and was like a pseudo father to me killed himself. He shot himself through the head in his bedroom one day and I at 12 discovered his body. Now I remember that a dream in a sense prepared me for this trauma. A dream in a sense prepared me by showing me a shadow that walked up the wall to that bedroom that opened the door and until that moment, I was afraid to go in. At that moment, I had the courage. God gave me that courage to walk into that room and to discover the body. Now as you can imagine, at that moment, I was completely and utterly powerless. And as you can imagine at that moment, my life suddenly became completely and utterly unmanageable. I’m not sharing with you so that you might feel sorry for me, I’m sharing this with you so that you might remember the traumas of your own life and remember what those traumas were like. And in particular what the days after those traumas were like. "We admitted we were powerless and that our lives had become unmanageable." This is the first step of the 12 Step Program, the greatest spiritual healing tool this world has ever seen. And it’s so great a spiritual healing tool that it should not be used only by those who call themselves alcoholics or drug addicts or addicts to sex or food or relationships or anything else, it should be used by all of us. The 12 Steps after all was a Christian system of healing developed by the Oxford Circles, an early Methodist group who gathered men together in circles where they told the honest realities of their lives. They shared what was real even if it was painful and they shared how God worked through that reality to heal them and to bring healing through them to a world that needed it so desperately. So for the next 12 weeks, we’ll start this journey you and I. We’ll start with this one, then the second one and through to the twelfth one and I hope that it brings healing and I hope not just here, but for our world.

You know we live in a completely addicted world. We have just lived through an election. We have lived through a Canada Day. "Happy Canada Day" and an election and it was the kind of election that makes nobody happy. Nobody was happy coming out of that election and yet we have asked these men and women to do something extremely difficult and we should hold them in prayer. We have asked them to govern at a time when the world finds itself in completely unmanageable circumstances, completely addicted. What is our world addicted to? Well, for starters it’s addicted to violence. It’s addicted to war. It can’t even conceive of a life without war and it’s addicted to resources. It can’t even conceive of getting through a day without the fix of oil. Our world finds itself on a brink of sorts completely unmanageable. And if you think that we are the exception in Canada, if you think that we are different because we are not a member of the "coalition of the willing", think again. Each one of us here is dependant upon that ever flowing source of violence that keeps our country going. Did you know that the Canada Pension Plan is invested in 15 military American and European companies? That you and I would suffer immediately upon retirement if we were to divest ourselves of those holdings. Want to hear their names? I’m not making it up – Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Ratheon, BAE Systems, Northrip Rumden, General Dynamics, Fales, EADS, Honeywell, United Technologies, Mitsubishi, General Electric, Rolls Royce, GKN Computer Sciences. Did you know that outside of Britain and Australia, we have provided the most assistance to the Americans in their highly criminal and some would argue illegal war against the sovereign nation of Iraq? Did you know we protect their war ships? Did you know that we refuel their planes? Did you know that CSIS works hand in glove with the CIA? Did you know these things about your country? During this week when we celebrate what we do have going for us as Canadians and we have a lot, we have a lot. We in many ways are the luckiest people in the world, the most blessed. That’s why we’re so called to be so vigilant. You know it’s like the little kid who wakes up and finds themselves an Israeli or a Palestinian. What can we do? We have to look around and even our rulers look around and they have to say to themselves, we are in a sense powerless to stop this. The ramifications of stopping this are so great and so far reaching that not a person in Canada, not a person in the States would not feel it if we stopped our addiction to our oil, our addiction to violence. We would all feel it, we would all suffer withdrawal. We live in an addicted and unmanageable world.

And you know in some ways, this is where the left gets it wrong for blaming "Son of a Bush", George II, whatever we want to call him. In some ways, he’s just as much trapped as we are. He was raised with this he’s Texan after all, why should we expect that he would act any differently. He can be replaced by any 100,000 other white men who could do the same and would do the same job for the same reasons. And our own politicians, how can we, why would we expect any different from them? They could be replaced by another 100,000 or so white men who could do the same and would do the same things.

I remember when I was a kid around 19 or so and back then I was really a leftist, I was a member of the trotkskyist party and we were all sitting around. It was kind of amusing to think about the faces that were sitting around that table because there was Alice Klein, if there ever was it would be a capitalist, Alice who owns Now Magazine. There was Gus Tolentino if there was ever a professional, it was Gus who is now one of Toronto’s most noted psychiatrists. There was Harry Kopyto, if there ever was a lawyer who made a lot of money, it was Harry Kopyto now disbarred. And we were all sitting around, we were just kids after all and we were talking about the revolution and what we would do after the revolution. This is sort of like Christians sitting around talking about what they’d do after the Second Coming. When Heaven arrives on earth, what will we do then? You know what will keep ourselves busy with then? And I remember Harry who was to be a lawyer who said, then I’ll take an interest in God. First we’ve got to feed people, then we’ve got to house them, then we’ve got to have a world that lives in peace and only then will we be free to speak about God, and he had a point.

Just recently I saw a television series on Centenarians, it was a beautiful documentary on what goes into living 100+ years. And it was very telling, it dealt with everybody from a 105 year old African American woman who had something like 45 great grandchildren to a 101 year old MIT former professor who now had to admit that he couldn’t follow his own work, that he did in the 20’s and the 30’s. These people have seen wars and they’ve seen joys. These people have suffered and these people own something that we might call wisdom. And you know that the researchers studied everything about their lives, what they ate, how much exercise they got, what their gene pools look like. The one thing they never asked them about was their faith and yet for a Christian watching that show, nothing came through clearer than that these people all share this astounding faith. They even quoted Psalm 23 at the closing of the documentary and yet no one mentioned faith, that what they had learned through 100+ years was how to trust in a power greater than themselves. They, each one of them, had had the experience of powerlessness, their bodies were frail, they were at the mercy of others. They, each one of them, had seen a world that was almost always unmanageable and yet their faith kept them alive and not just alive, their faith kept them thriving.

In our passage today, Jesus sends out 70 people. I was thinking about it because it’s just about our average worship here. That’s all he sends out, 70 people, not 700, 70. He sends them out into the world that hopelessly unmanageable world, each of them powerless, each of them an addict. You might say to yourself, but I’m not an addict. Let me tell you, that if you are not an addict or see yourself as one, you didn’t really experience yesterday and you will not really today. Gerald May in a wonderful little book called "Addiction and Grace" rants about addiction and he lists them all and there are 300 that he lists including anger, including relationships, including power, including money, including guilt, including images of God, including coffee. You know I am so wired to coffee that I couldn’t come in here today without my necessary two cups. I once went to a convention that had all to do with addiction and all they had to do to make their point was to serve decaf all day long. Do you know that after lunch you’ve never seen such an edgy withdrawal laden crowd in your life. And here’s the good news, that once you see yourself as who you really are dependant on something other than God because that’s what addiction is. It’s really just the first commandment being broken that we worship and need something that we put our faith and trust in something other than God. It’s idol worship is what addiction is and we are all idol worshippers and the gift of seeing ourselves as that and feeling ourselves as powerless and seeing our world as unmanageable is that we get it. We get it. That 12 year old kid you know that I was, I remember being hit by these waves of emotions, anger, guilt, remorse, all those things that hit you when you live through a trauma on death, all those things. And finally, it was so overwhelming that all I could really do was focus on the moment. All I could really do was just make sure I ate, was just make sure that I got enough sleep if I could, was just make sure I looked out for others which I was called to do and God knew and I knew that was enough. We pray for peace, we work for peace, we call our MP’s and command them to work for peace. We ask that our government divest itself of all it’s addiction to violence and yet we know that violence will outlast us and outlast our children’s children and their children’s children, but doing the work and saying the prayers, that’s enough.

You know we attend church in a world that thinks that what we do on Sunday mornings is absolutely ridiculous is absolutely beside the point. We say thank you God for things that the world would say have nothing to do with God and we know by attending church, it will change precious little even in our neighbourhood people will go hungry, people will be homeless, but we do it anyway and God lets us know that because we do it, that that is enough. And you know we love each other, we try not to lie or steal, commit adultery, or worship false idols. We try not to bear false witness, we try to honour our mother and our father and when we fail day by day, we know at least we’ve tried that day and God whispers from that still small place what you’ve done is enough. And there are those days for some of us that we have that drink or that we indulge in that drug and that we do something unconsiousable, but we get up the next day and we vow that this day will be different and we live through one day that is different and God says that too is enough. We feed people, we house people, we love people, and it’s just a drop in a great sea of misery. We know that, but when we do that drop, that is enough.

You Christians as you go out today probably most of you, two by two into this world, remember all those metaphors that Christ used for you. You are the light of the world, it doesn’t take but one light to light up a whole dark caverness room. You are the salt of the world. It only takes a little pinch to add savour to a whole meal. You are the seed of a new forgiveness and compassion. It just takes one mustard seed to start a whole new field of mustard. Yes, you are the two by two and if the place you walk in is welcoming, sit down, eat with them, talk with them, heal them and teach them and tell them about the Kingdom of God and if the place you go is not welcoming, dust your feet off and keep on moving. What you have done is absolutely and in every way what God expects of you. You my brothers and sisters have done enough. You have done enough.

Let us pray together:

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