Hosea 11:1-11; Luke 12:13-21
Addiction Test
James Sledge --- August 1, 2010
My father was a fairly strict disciplinarian, and I have tended to follow him in that regard. I think it is important for children to learn discipline, to hear the word “No” from time to time, to discover that there are consequences for bad choices. But while I think discipline important, some of my biggest regrets as a father grow out of it.
The problem is not discipline itself. My regrets come from those times when I allowed discipline to turn into a power struggle, a test of wills. Too often , I allowed these to become battles that I was going to win no matter the cost. But such victories rarely tasted very good.
Many years ago, I read a book by J. B. Phillips entitled Your God Is Too Small. The book talked about how our images of God often get in the way of truly experiencing or knowing God. The first half of the book contains thirteen unreal or too-small images of God. The first is God as resident policeman, followed by God as parental hangover. And I suppose that many of us occasionally think of God like a policeman looking to catch us doing something wrong, or like a father who is going to straighten us out whatever it may take.
If you pick just the right Bible verses, you can construct just about any God you prefer, but on the whole, I think the prevailing image of God that emerges from the Bible is not God as cosmic cop or an overly strict father, not a God who wants to catch or punish anyone.
Look at the picture of God in today’s reading from the prophet Hosea. The situation is one that seems custom made to provoke an angry-father sort of response. Israel
I will not come in wrath. Yes, there is a need for discipline. Yes, there are consequences for bad choices, but in the end, God does not come in wrath. And nothing embodies that more than Jesus. In Jesus, God responds to human waywardness, human refusal to align our lives with God, our brokenness and sin, with love and mercy beyond imagination.
Still, there are some Christians and some forms of Christianity that take Jesus and plug him into a formula that is still filled with wrath. In this formula an angry God looking to dole out some serious punishment shows up, but if you believe in Jesus you get a pass. You get “saved” from God’s wrath and get to go to heaven.
I’m not quite sure where this comes from. After all, if Jesus is our best glimpse of God, then his love and compassion and willingness to give himself for others must be part of God’s nature. Surely Jesus isn’t one face of a split personality God. So surely being saved isn’t about saving us from a wrathful God.
The Bible says that you and I were created in God’s image, a God the Bible says is love. So wouldn’t it make sense to think Jesus saving us is about healing, about restoring that image of God in us so that God’s kingdom might be seen in us and among us? And while save and heal may sound like very different things to us, the Bible often uses the same word to speak of both.
So if saving us is about healing and restoring us, how does that happen and what does it look like? It happens when Christ dwells in us, when the Spirit fills us. And when that happens it is visible in our lives, visible clearly in our relationship to money and possessions. Jesus says so quite plainly. In fact Jesus talks about possessions and money more than any other topic. And it’s right there in today’s reading. “Be on guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”
Whoa! Hold on! Our culture and economy would beg to differ. Our whole world is built upon convincing people that even though the car they have is fine, they need a new one, even though their closet is full of perfectly good shoes and clothes, they need more. Our consumer driven culture and the advertising industry attached to it preaches non-stop that our happiness depends on having more. And we’re hooked. We’re addicts who have to have more and more. Of course we never quite get enough. No matter how much we get, we need more.
Now I don’t think Jesus expects that none of us should have anything. He obviously owned clothes himself. His band of followers clearly had money to buy food and such. Peter owned a home where Jesus sometimes stayed. Jesus actually seems to have been a pretty fun guy. He obviously drank because he’s accused of being drunkard. And he attended dinner parties in folk’s homes, enjoying the comforts of those homes and the food and drink his hosts served. But still he talks repeatedly about this problem of money and possessions, this addiction that our culture pushes on us so incessantly. So what are we to do?
I wonder if the analogy of an addiction might not help us here. For example, lots of people drink alcohol without it interfering in their lives. But there is a point where the need for alcohol becomes a problem, where it drives a person’s life in ways that are destructive to just about every facet of life from relationships to employment to health and so on. Very often people whose lives are being controlled by this addiction cannot see it. Their longing for alcohol is so consuming, such a burning desire, nothing else seems as good, as wonderful.
Maybe we should think of Jesus as someone doing an intervention for the possession addicted asking, “Don’t you want to be freed from anxiety over never quite having enough? Don’t you want to be freed to truly love others and give yourself fully to others? Don’t you want to discover a sense of self worth and well being that isn’t threatened by every advertisement for some cool new thing you don’t have? Then I’ll help you reorient your life so it’s rich toward God.”
So how do you know if Jesus is speaking to you this way? It’s actually pretty easy. You look at your checkbook and credit card statements. You look around your house, in your closet and garage. You check your calendar. You look around and see where God fits in all this. Is God a priority when it comes to how you spend your money? Or does God get a little something if there’s anything left after you feed your addiction? And when you do give something to God, is it a joyful experience like giving a special present to someone you love, or is it done begrudgingly? When you look at yourself this way, what do you see?
I want to ask you to do something today when we take up the offering. I know that for a lot of people this is one of the most mundane, even profane things we do during the worship service. Thank goodness there’s usually music to distract us. But today I want this time to be a time of spiritual reflection. Regardless of whether you put anything in the plate when it comes by you, regardless of whether or not you are a member of this congregation, I want you to look at that plate and think about what it says about your relationship with God, about how your life is or isn’t rich toward God.
And if it turns out that that you’re addicted, that you’ve relegated God off to some tiny corner of your life, don’t worry. God does not come in wrath. God loves you, and Jesus comes to save you.
Thanks be to God!
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