Sermons

July 25, 2004 Rev. Dr. C. DiNovo

"Step 4:Made a Fearless Moral Inventory of Ourselves"  

If you’re new to the Sanctuary this Sunday and haven’t been following along, you will have missed the first three of the 12 Steps and every Sunday, the meditation has been about one of the 12 Steps in the 12 Step Program. Now you should know that the 12 Step Program is not just for alcoholics, the 12 Step Program is a healing system, a spiritual healing system that is efficacious for everyone. It started in the Christian church in early Methodist reading circles and it has spread around the world. One could say more lives have been saved by this system than by penicillin in the history since its inception. The first three steps were as follows: That we came to understand that we were powerless and that our lives were unmanageable. The second, That we came to believe that a power greater than our own could restore us to sanity and the third, That we were willing to give our lives over to that power, so that power might work through us. "Our Father who art in Heaven". This little prayer. It’s just a little prayer you know, it’s like a child’s prayer. In the original Aramaic, the words are daddy, not father. "Daddy please," one could say. "Daddy please, you’re so powerful, you know everyone, please Daddy, please forgive us. Daddy please provide for us. Please allow us to provide for our neighbour. Please Daddy, because we know Daddy that you are so powerful and that all of this world is in your hands. Please Daddy." That’s how it would have sounded in the original Aramaic. It was a prayer as of a child to a loving and powerful parent.

I was trying to think of where prayer might not work and I think the only prayer, the place that prayer might not work, Billy Graham said it best was on the golf course, the only place prayer does not work. Everywhere else, prayer works and if you doubt that prayer works, might I suggest a prayer and the prayer is this one. "Dear God, I pray that you show me that prayer works. Dear God, I pray that you show me that prayer works." We had a death in this community a couple of weeks back, it’s not the first, it won’t be the last. We had a death like it about a year ago. Every year, we have a death like it, and every week and every day and every moment, there’s a death in Parkdale and High Park like it.

Every minute in this city, there is a death because of addictive behaviour and you know my Mea Culpa, my prayer of confession, my looking at myself and making a fearless moral inventory of my own actions left a big question mark and that was this one. Okay, Cheri, so why haven’t you talked about addiction in this congregation. Why, even though we went to two memorial services, some of us three memorial services for someone we loved, our evening music director did no one, did I not mention that this death was linked to addiction. That Toby, before he died was trying to kick a morphine habit and do it on his own and Toby before she died was doing it using street drugs and of course didn’t gauge the strength of those drugs. And before that, there was Anitra and before that and before that.

And after that, there have been two deaths since in Parkdale because of drug abuse and those are only the drug abuse ones, the kind that make the news. But then there’s all the deaths related to alcohol abuse and there’s all those other deaths that are related to not doing what we should as in eating too much, of working too hard, of being addicted to self-image rather than knowing our priorities, being addicted to what other people think of us rather than looking after our own children because ultimately addiction hurts the children most.

And it’s not just individuals of course, it’s an entire addicted world that we live and breathe and have our being in. This world is addicted. It’s addicted to violence and war, we don’t know how to live without it. Our economies won’t run without it. We’re addicted to churning up resources. We don’t know to get along without destroying the planet, we can’t seem to do it without destroying that which gives us life. The thing about all addiction is this you know, they all lead to death whether they’re national, whether they’re multi-national or whether they’re personal. Father forgive us our sins, Father forgive us our sins.

So this week the step is "To make a fearless and it takes fearlessness in a world that would have us be afraid", it takes fearlessness to look in the mirror and do a moral inventory of our own behaviour of our own lives. Why might that look like? You know they say that you should do this with one other person, that with one other person and, of course, God that you should confess what your life really looks like and let me tell you that if you do, you will discover in that image in the mirror all those little addictions you didn’t know you had. And then when you confess these because all of a sudden the fourth step brings us back to ourselves. Up until then we were looking outward and looking at God, now we’re looking at ourselves. What that will do for you is give you a true picture of your true life.

Dostoevsky once said that the smartest person is the person who admits at least once a month that they are a complete and utter fool. What the fourth step shows us is not what the world shows us, is that instead of having too little self- esteem that all of us have way too much. You know the person who has good self-esteem, perfect self- esteem, there’s a name for a person like that, it’s called a psychopath. This world does not suffer from too much self-esteem, that is not this world’s problem. This world suffers from the way of looking at ourselves as if we were all powerful and as if God is not the power to which we should turn and give our lives, that’s what this whole world suffers from.

There are examples of how to do this in a national sense, I think here of South Africa and the truth and reconciliation process where people get up and they’re still doing this to this day, they get up and say "I’m the one, I’m the one that killed your sister, I’m the one that imprisoned your brother, it was me that did that". How healing is that? Our prayers I know are with the family of Cecilia this week and I think how healing must just begin now when they know who killed her and perhaps might find out how she died. When truth starts, when truth is told, that’s when healing begins. We can do that, we don’t need to be forced to do that. We can tell the truth to one another, we can tell the truth before God of all those things that we have done that we are mortally ashamed of, of all of those people we have harmed, now is the time, today is the day, you can’t do it too quickly to say those things. To make a fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Lead us not into temptation.

And so the Lord’s Prayer this mini 12-Step Program, that’s what it is, the Lord’s Prayer, a kind of condensed version gives us all of the 12 Steps in one. There is a study you know about people of faith and it wasn’t just Christians. Christians, Jews, Muslims took part in the study and they tested everybody in terms of their ethicality and you know what they discovered, there was absolutely no difference between the ethicality of people of faith and the secular world. Now if there’s ever a condemnation of our churches, our mosques and our synagogues, that is it, because after all, by our actions you will know us, it’s how we behave, how we live, what we do, that people will see Christ through us. It is up to us to show the face of Christ to the world and that demands of us everything, not so that we could earn brownie points to get to heaven, but so that we show the world what faith looks like. It looks like, we say with our lives, it looks like this. This is how a life is lived when we are aware that everything we do and everything we say and who we are is seen and witnessed always by a loving, forgiving, compassionate God. This is what the Christian life looks like, it looks like the choices we make on a daily basis. We made a fearless moral inventory of our lives.

I’m tired of doing funerals for those that we love. We are all tired of attending funerals for those we love. We are of tired of reading the newspaper accounts of those we love. We are tired of doing the same things over and over and over again and expecting different results. Now the mandate is ours, now the choice is ours. We cannot do it on our own. We cannot do it on our own. We need to reach out. We need perhaps for the very first time in our lives to get real with ourselves and to get real with our brothers and our sisters, to get real before our God and tell our God and at least one other person just who we are. You know when they stand up at 12-Step meetings and they say, "Hi, I’m Cheri, I’m an alcoholic, gambler, sex and love addict, I’m a relationship addict, I’m a money addict, I’m a power addict, I’m a work addict, I’m a self image addict." When you do that, it’s not some vicarious pleasure that the others take out of that story, what they get out of that story often is the only time someone has told the truth about themselves. There’s nothing more powerful and there is nothing more healing.

So might I suggest to you brothers and sisters before another death happens that you look at your own life, that you look at your own life before our God, an all forgiving, all compassionate God and that you give over what you cannot control and you know, you cannot control much if anything and you give it over to a God who answers all prayers including the Lord’s Prayer and including the prayer, Dearest God, I pray that I might believe in prayer, that God, give over everything to that God and be healed.     Let us pray together: Dearest God,