No One Makes It Alone

The room is hot, the air is close, and the crowd is absolutely silent as they strain to catch every word of the Master. So many people have come in response to the news that Jesus was home in Capernaum, the crowd has spilled out into the street. Inside the house it is wall to wall people listening to Jesus teach. And then, suddenly, those nearest to Jesus feel pieces of ceiling falling on them, showering them with clumps of dirt and twigs and tile. Heads look up in amazement as the crowd watches a ragged hole open up in the ceiling, and then a mat being lowered into the room. The glare of the sunlight at first obscures the four men lowering their paralytic friend on the mat until it stops just in front of Jesus.

It takes the crowd a moment to realize what is happening. But Jesus takes the situation in clearly. These guys wanted their friend to get close to Him so much that they were willing to come through the roof!

Think about the faith that this required in the four friends. Someone had to lead. Someone had to persuade the rest of them that it was doable. You don’t think there was resistance or disagreement to overcome? It’s hard to imagine all four of the men, plus their paralytic friend saying, “Hey, what a great idea! We climb the roof with a paralyzed man, tie his bed to ropes, break through the roof, and drop him in front of a carpenter, and then expect this guy to be so happy that we’ve interrupted his teaching and wrecked his home that he heals our friend on the spot.”

It took planning. First, make sure it’s the right house before we bust through the roof. Second, make sure we don’t land our friend on the top of Jesus’ head. It took perseverance. But when Jesus said , “Son, your sins are forgiven. Get up and walk home.” Well, the group of friends clearly knew their efforts had been worth it.

This story shows us that the healing power of Jesus comes to the community of faith. The story suggests this important truth - no one makes it alone.

We have, however, persistent beliefs in our culture of the rugged individual and the innate talent. We are always on the lookout for “the natural.”

Psychologists for a generation have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that we assume has been settled – is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. There are only a few Sidney Crosby’s, Paul McCartney’s, or Bill Gates in the world. And yet this doesn’t mean what we think it means. For example, Anders Ericsson did a study at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music and divided the violin players into three groups – the stars (who had potential to be world-class soloists)l, the merely good, and the third group of those unlikely to ever play professionally. What made them different? What distinguished each group?

The striking thing they found was that there were no true “naturals.” The potentially world-class musicians were the ones who studied and practiced the most. They not only worked harder than their peers, they worked much, much harder. In fact researchers have found that once someone has enough talent to get to an elite music school or an elite hockey league, what separates them is always the amount of practice logged. Researchers have come up with what they believe to be a magic number of 10,000 hours. If you want to master anything, you have to put in roughly 10,000 hours or about ten years.

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out that “ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough. Most people can only reach 10,000 hours by getting into a special program or having a special opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.

Take Bill Gates for example. You know his story – brilliant young math whiz, starts a little company called Microsoft with his friends. Through sheer brilliance builds it into a giant software company and now has more money in his change jar than I have in my 401k. But what you may not know is the advantages beyond his innate talent that Gates had. First, he had fairly wealthy, intelligent parents who took him out of public school because he was bored and sent him to a private school, where the mothers of the students, as a fundraiser one year, bought computers for the kids and started a computer club. Remember, this was 1968. Most colleges didn’t have computer labs, let alone high schools. Young Gates had all the opportunity he needed to do hours and hours of programming as an eighth grader in 1968. And boy, did he program.

“It was my obsession,” Gates says of his high school years. “I skipped athletics. I went up there (to the computer lab) at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.” By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard in his sophomore year to start his own company, he had basically been programming nonstop for seven years, way beyond 10,000 hours. Was he smart and talented? Of course. But Gates also recognizes, “I was extremely lucky.” Lucky he had wealth and opportunity and people all along the way to help him. No one makes it alone.

Speaking of intelligence – researchers have also found that the relationship between intelligence and success works only up to a point. It’s like success in basketball – the tallest players aren’t always the best players. Michael Jordan, perhaps the greatest of all time, is 6’6” tall. You only have to be tall enough. The same is true with intelligence. You only have to be smart enough. What’s more, researchers have done voluminous studies on children with very high IQ’s and found that the ones who are successful in life are not necessarily at the high end of the scale in intelligence, but they do have one thing that the others don’t have – a good family and a good community to support them.

You may have never heard of Chris Langan. Langan appeared on the quiz show 1 vs. 100 last year and won a lot of money. He was introduced this way:

“The average person has an IQ of one hundred,” the announcer intoned. “Einstein had an IQ of one fifty. Chris Langan has an IQ of one ninety-five.”

By measurement of IQ, Chris Langan is, if not the smartest, one of the smartest people alive in the whole world. Do you want to know what he is doing today? Basically he is an unemployed writer. He went on that quiz show cause he needed the money. His is a long story with the basic plot of line of a young boy who didn’t have the family and the community to help him succeed in the world. Chris Langan always felt alone in the world. He was and is, relationally paralyzed. He has no one to help him get off his mat. You can be the smartest person, the most talented, the most athletic, but no one, and I mean no one, makes it alone.

When Jesus heals people the healing is most often instantaneous, although he does require folks to do something – take up your pallet, go show yourself to a priest, etc. Our healing can be instantaneous, at least of the symptoms. But the work of healing of that ache within, the broken relationship, continues for a lifetime. And that’s work that we cannot accomplish alone. We need grace, we need truth, we need time. All these things become possible in community. None of these things really come in isolation. Isolation kills. It is what happened to Cain when he was banished from his family after murdering his brother. It’s what happened to Chris Langan. Isolation brings decay and death. Community brings life.

“Is there anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is any cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” James 5.13-16

The Church is like those Verizon wireless commercials – wherever you go, whatever challenges you face, you have a team with you, rooting for you, supporting you, keeping you connected.


There are forces in our lives that are trying to pull us away from each and out of community – financial problems, relationship troubles, grief and depression, leisure pursuits, and just plain silly distractions. We need help from community to deal with these forces and yet these are the very things that keep us away from church and each other. It grieves me to see someone drift away into the isolation of their problems when the Lord’s power, revealed in community, could heal them.

No one makes it alone. Everyone needs friends who care for them. Everyone needs community. As the church, this is our vision, it is in our DNA. Its something worth putting our time into – ten thousand hours if need be.

The Road To Salvation

911 Call - “Yeah, my wife was attacked by a wart hog and she’s hurt pretty bad.”

“Sir, can you tell us where you live?”

“1275 Eucalyptus Drive.”

“Sir, can you spell that for me?”

Long pause. “Yeah, maybe I’ll just drag her over to Oak Street and you can pick her up there.”

Some things just seem too hard to do. Like spelling the name of the street where you live. Dragging your wife over a block may be easier. If only spelling was our biggest problem. Among the biggest challenges we face in life, spelling probably falls farther down the list. Breaking the power of sin in our lives and seeing real change in our selves probably comes toward the top of the list.

The first step in real healing is to believe that it is possible. And frankly, some people are deficient in the believing department. Some people have a bent toward skepticism. Sometimes this skepticism serves them well- they gather information; they weigh the evidence; they are not easily fooled. But the skeptic says, “I would rather stand on the sidelines and look like an intelligent observer than risk trusting. I will forgo all that might come with that trust.”

And sometimes this skepticism puts them at a distinct disadvantage. The story is told of three men who lived in the time of the French Revolution, during the “Reign of Terror.” People were being executed right and left. Three men were waiting to be executed. The first one was a priest. As he was brought to the guillotine, he was asked, “Do you have any last words?” He answered, “I believe God is going to save me.” He put his head into place, the blade came down, and it stopped two inches from his neck. The executioners said, “This is a miracle, “ and they let him go.

The next man came up. He, too, was a priest. The executioners asked him, “Do you have any last words?” “I believe God is going to save me, “ he said. They put him in the block, the blade came down, and it stopped two inches from his neck. They said, “This is a miracle, “ and they let him go.

The third man came up. He was a skeptic and an atheist. He did not want to be associated with believers. The executioners asked him, “Do you have any last words?” Looking at the guillotine, he said, “Well, I think I see your problem. There’s something jammed in the gear mechanisms.”

Skeptics would rather, even at their own expense, appear to be right than take the risk of trusting.


The first step on the road to healing and salvation is a step of trust. Our gospel story in John 5 tells about a special pool in Jerusalem called Bethesda. This pool was fairly large, certainly big enough to swim in. There’s a little discrepancy about the exact name in the ancient manuscripts. Some refer to Bethzatha or Bethsaida, which literally means “house of fish.” I like Bethesda – house of mercy – better. It seems to fit. Around the pool of Bethesda are gathering many people who suffer – the lame, the blind, the paralyzed. These people gathered at the pool because at times, the water in the pool would bubble up and swirl. The rumor was that an angel would come and do this. And when that happened the first one into the waters would be healed. This crowd of people waited by the water all day, day after day, waiting for the chance to be healed.


Now, when you think about this, a skeptic would say, well the water is stirred by an underground spring, or by some water authority engineer in Jerusalem, etc. It is certainly not “stirred by an angel.”

Curiously, the skeptic may be right. I say that because this rumor does not really have a biblical ring to it. God heals lots of people in the Bible. But not this way. We don’t hear about angels being agents of healing. When God heals, we know “God healed.” This urban legend does not fit into the Christian way of understanding things. But there is little doubt that the people of Jerusalem believed this urban legend.

Among their number was a man who had been lame for thirty-eight years. Jesus came to the pool one day and he saw the man lying there on his pallet. Jesus approaches the man and asks, “Do you want to be made well?” This may seem to be an odd question, even an insensitive one, like saying, “Hey, you’re in a wheel chair!”

Why wouldn’t the man want to be made well? There are reasons. As debilitating as his condition is for the man, it’s still his life. He’s grown used to it over all the years. He understands it. He knows what tomorrow will bring. He knows how to get by. If he were to be healed, really healed, all this would change. Life would be scary. Who knows what tomorrow might bring? What would he do for a living? What would people expect of him? Now, he knows who he is – he a is a disabled man. But without the disability, who would he be?

William Barclay says that the first requisite for receiving the power of Jesus is to intensely desire it.

So Jesus asks, “Do you want my healing power?” The man begins to explain about the pool and the water and how he can never get in first because no one will help him. . .but Jesus never comments on the pool or the story about the angel. He seems uninterested in that – doesn’t even glance over at the water. He looks intently at the man. The water is calm but the man is agitated, and maybe others around him that overhear the conversation as well. Jesus stirs things up here. He does this to bring this man to a point of crisis.

We think of crisis as always trouble to be avoided. But crisis is also opportunity. Anyone who would break the power of sin in their life must come to this point of crisis and trust that God will put them on the road to healing and salvation.

Newsweek tells the story of Ellin Klor who was saved by a freak accident in which a knitting needle pierced her heart. Klor was on her way to her knitting group one evening, her arms full of books and yarn and needles. She was going up the steps of her friend’s house in Palo Alto, Calif. When she trip on the step and fell down face first on the sack of unfinished knitting. She wasn’t surprised that she had fallen. She always was a bit of klutz. But when she stood up her chest hurt. She looked down at her sweater and lifted it up. She saw a jagged splinter of a wooden knitting needle nearly four inches long jutting from her chest. It had clearly broken in half, piercing her clothing and lodging in the middle of her breastbone. “Oh my God,” she whispered. Her friends urgently tried to weigh the options. Should they pull it out? Klor said no don’t touch it. It was pure instinct. Doctors would later say that this was the first decision that helped saver her life. Plucking the spike would have been like pulling a plug or uncorking a bottle and she might have bled to death in the living room.

Klor instructed her friends to call 911 rather than trying to rush her to the hospital themselves. This would turn out to be another good decision.

The ER team found that the needle had penetrated her sternum and grazed her heart. They had never seen anything like it. It was unprecedented. They needed to operate as soon as possible. They performed the operation and removed the needle. But by chance, or by design, the knitting needle would save her life all over again.

Klor had been home a week, just twelve days after the surgery, when she woke up on a Saturday morning with excruciating pain in her chest and back. They rushed her to the hospital and ran chest scans. The doctors came back puzzled. Everything looked good – her lungs were clear and her heart was healing fine. They explained it away as some kind of fleeting discomfort from surgery, gave her more painkillers, and sent her home.

The next day Klor received a phone call from a radiologist at Stanford who had detected a mass under her armpit during one of the tests done at the ER. Klor had breast cancer. She underwent treatment for a year, supported by family and friends. She is doing well.

The knitting needle through her heart had actually saved her life her doctors said. If she hadn’t gone to the ER and been screened by all those machines, the tumor probably would not have been detected until it had grown and spread. Klor believes she is one of the luckiest people in the world. I didn’t die from the knitting needle, she remembers thinking, so I’m not going to die from cancer.

Crisis can be a good thing. It can be a lucky thing. Or, even a God-given thing – an opportunity.

My father begin to take steps on the road to healing after we had done an intervention with him and a counselor. An intervention is simply a group effort at bringing someone to a crisis point. It’s holding up a mirror to show the reality of the sickness, and then it’s asking the question, “Do you want to be well?”

Crisis is not fun. But it is often necessary. Sometimes we have to be shown that to keep on going the way we are going simply leads to more decay and death. Scott Peck calls alcoholism the “sacred disease” because of how the crisis of alcoholism can shed light on the inner spiritual lostness in a person. Remember the ache within? Is it not the longing of a broken heart that can only be restored by God?

Jesus instructed the lame man to take up his bedding and walk. He didn’t need the bedding anymore. No longer did it carry him through the day; he carried it. The cure, in this case, was immediate. This man had been waiting thirty-eight years for an angel, or a chance, or luck to change his situation. But Jesus ended that with a question and an invitation. We often talk about the answers Jesus gives us. What question is Jesus asking you today?

Lost in Good Behavior

“Do not remove the ancient boundary stones that your ancestors placed.”
Proverbs 22.28

Boundary stones are markers where land is divided. The division of land was very important to an agricultural and nomadic people like the Israelites. Those boundary stones were meant to stay. But beyond the division of land, there is a larger theme in the faith of Israel and boundaries.

For the Hebrews, boundaries are important in all of life. In the law of Moses there was a general prohibition against mixing things together that God intended to be separate – planting two crops in the same field, breeding different kinds of cattle, mixing different kinds of soda together as my sons often do. It’s just not right. You may have wondered why parts of the Old Testament, say Leviticus, seem so concerned with the repetition of trivial details and minutiae. Well, to the faithful follower of the Law, there is no trivial detail. God is very specific about what should be and should not be eaten, worn, seen, recited, ignored, scorned, or venerated. Check out the preparations for eating the Passover, for example.

Or the boundaries for clothing. The boundary or fringe of your cloak was to be trimmed in tassels. These tassels were meant to serve as a reminder of the Lord’s commandments. Jews well into New Testament times continued to wear tassels on the boundaries of their garments.

Some people today have an anti-ritual bias. Their attitude is why sweat the details, we are free to worship God anyway we want. For the ancient Israelite, and for most Jews for most of their history, you sweat the details because God is in the details.

To ignore the details; to go beyond the boundaries God has set, is to court sin. And isn’t this what idolatry and addiction are- to use something in a way or to the extent that was never intended by the Creator?

To break the power of sin and addiction we must restore God-given, time-honored boundaries in our lives.

I say restore, because in the life of an addict, the boundaries have been compromised, cajoled, eroded, or totally wiped out. When you look at an addict, you are looking at a person without respect to boundaries as it concerns their disease. It’s like looking at a spoiled child. Just saying no is really not in the conversation anymore.

Let’s set aside the addict for a moment and just consider our sin. What boundaries have been compromised by you? What boundaries need restored in your life? Boundaries can take different forms: you may need a boundaries for the places you socialize; boundaries for the people you are surrounded by; boundaries for the kinds of entertainment you seek; boundaries for the food and drink that go into your body; boundaries for what comes out of your mouth, boundaries for how you spend your time.

The goal of restoring boundaries is to provide limits to temptation. It’s to help yourself begin to think in right ways about good things again – “restore us to sanity” as the Step says. By setting boundaries we actually make more room in our lives for better things than the sin and addiction. “Better things” can be new friends, a good book, new hobbies, old interests that were once cast aside by the addiction, right-ordered passions.

Anyway and any tools we can find at our disposal to break the cycle of sin are steps in the right direction. Behavioral psychologists call this “coping.” Recovering alcoholics learn to cope by meeting together. They say, “I need a meeting tonight.” One of the reasons that go to meetings often, maybe daily, is the meeting helps them cope with ache within.

Boundaries alone cannot change us. Boundaries cannot do the real work of inner transformation. But they are a start.

“The law (the rules) is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness,” writes Dallas Willard.

Now I want to return to the Parable that we looked at several weeks ago, the parable of the two sons. We find that the younger son, the prodigal, has returned to his father’s house and, to everyone’s surprise, has not only been received back, but has been showered with attention by his father. The father has called for a grand celebration to welcome back his lost son. The finest foods are prepared, guests are invited, the music is struck. Dancing ensues. (Apparently this wasn’t a Methodist household>.) There is true joy in the house.

But outside the house, there is one left in the dark about the party – the elder son. “Why is there music and dancing?” he asks a servant. When he is told why he is furious. Now it is his turn to disgrace his father. He refuses to go in to what is perhaps the biggest feast his father has ever and will ever put on. As Timothy Keller writes, “(the elder son) remains outside the door, publicly casting a vote of no-confidence in his father’s actions.”

The father comes outside and begs his son to come in and join the celebration. But the elder son says no. He reminds his father of all of his hard work and moral living. He demands his rights. He is saying to his father, “You owe me!” He doesn’t address his father with any respect – not “esteemed father” but rather “Look, you!”

How does the story end? It ends with the father once again graciously pleading with his son:

“My son, despite how you’ve insulted me publicly, I still want you in the feast. I am not going to disown your brother, but I don’t want to disown you, either. I challenge you to swallow your pride and come into the feast. The choice is yours. Will you, or will you not?”

It is an unexpectedly gracious and dramatic appeal.

Jesus’ listeners are on the edge of their seats. Will the family be reunited? Will the brothers be reconciled? Will the elder brother be softened by his father’s kind words?

As we think about those questions, the story ends!

Why doesn’t Jesus finish this story and tell us what happened? Because the true audience for this story is the Pharisees, the good religious people. They are the elder brothers. Jesus is pleading with them to forsake their self-righteousness and come in to the Father’s house.

Jesus is telling us that you can be just as lost in your good moral behavior as the prodigal wasting his money on prostitutes. Because both are just ways of saying to the father, “I am independent. I have no need of you.”

His father’s happiness has never been the elder brother’s goal. His goal has always been about himself. He hid behind his outward goodness. Inside he was more sinful, that is, further removed from love, than his younger brother ever was. At least the younger brother knew he had sinned.

Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God himself – in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight in him.

Remember, sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge.

So in a sense, the younger brother is blessed in his recklessness. Standing in the pig slop turned out to be a better place than where his brother stood. Standing in the mud and excrement of the pig sty, whether he knew it yet or not, the younger brother was on his way to salvation. He was on his way to becoming a changed person.

The gospel tells us that everyone is wrong, everyone is loved, and everyone is called to recognize this, and change.

One last example: remember in the gospel, the woman who waded through the crowd to be healed by Jesus? It was so crowded and noisy. But the woman, in desperation and faith, reached out and touched the tassels, the boundary, of Jesus cloak. The scripture says that Jesus became aware that healing power had gone forth from him. Jesus was aware, because, much more than he cares about boundaries and borders, God cares about people who have gotten lost beyond the borders. Jesus still loves and saves lost people.

Telling Secrets

A young monk arrives at a monastery and is assigned the task of helping the other monks in copying the old canons and laws of the church by hand. The young monk notices that all the other monks are copying, not from original manuscripts, but other copies. The young monk points this out to the abbot, and notes that if someone makes a small error in the first copy, that error will continue in all subsequent copies.

The abbot agrees that this is a good point. So the abbot goes down into the dark caves underneath the monastery where the original manuscripts are held as archives in a locked vault that hasn’t been opened for hundreds of years. Hours go by and nobody sees the old abbott. The young monk gets worried and goes down to look for him. He finds the abbot banging his head against a wall and wailing.

“We missed the r!”

“We missed the r!”

“We missed the r!”

The abbot’s forehead is bloody and bruised and he is crying uncontrollably. “What’s wrong?” the young monk asks.

With a choked voice, the abbot replies, “The word was

Celebrate

Occasionally we tell ourselves that we’re not really sure what is sin and what’s okay. We tell ourselves we don’t really know the rules. Or, we don’t know when and if they always apply. I mean, who’s to say?

What is sin? It’s not just breaking rules, though it is that. It’s breaking relationship with God and other human beings. “The rules” are in place so we don’t do the more serious offense of breaking relationship.

John Ortberg writes, “Strictly speaking, I cannot break the rules. They endure, for they reflect the way things are. I can only break myself against them.”

When we sin we hurt God, we hurt others, and we hurt ourselves. We sacrifice our integrity.

What is addiction? Addiction is idolatry – taking a good thing and making it an ultimate thing. Addiction is compulsively trying to fill the void of a broken relationship.


To understand this is to understand the truth behind the addict’s lie – “I’m not hurting anybody but myself.” This is simply not true. Sin always has relational consequences.

Take King David, for example. You know his story of how as king he usually leads his troops in battle, but one spring, he doesn’t. He stays home. Soon he is bored. He sees a beautiful woman named Bathsheba; and he covets her, though she is another man’s wife. David sends for her and commits adultery. He then tries in different ways to have it covered up. But even King David cannot manipulate the situation to his liking at first. Finally, David sends the husband to the front lines of battle and the husband is killed. David is off the hook! He can have his adultery in peace. He thinks that he has gotten away with it. He doesn’t consider how this might have affected Bathsheba and he certainly tries not to think about her dead husband. Bathsheba mourns for her husband, but when her mourning was over, David again sends for her and makes her his wife.

“But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” 2 Samuel 12.1

Remember – sin has relational consequences. David’s sin took a wife from her husband. David’s sin also tested his relationship with God. God sends the prophet Nathan to David to confront the man with his sin. Nathan, being wise, tells David a story about a rich man who steals from a poor shepherd. Even though the rich man has all the sheep he needs, he takes the poor man’s one lamb to feed a guest. What do you think of this David?

“The man who has done this deserves to die!” David cries with outrage. His moral compass is unwavering when it comes to others.

“You are that man, “ the prophet replies.

David is undone. Or rather, David is saved. He is saved by the fact that his friend is willing to tell him the truth. David had thought that if he could just get away with his sin without anyone finding out he would be fine. In reality, someone finding out and telling him the truth was the best thing and perhaps the only thing that could have saved him.

Even if the addict’s lie – I’m not hurting anyone but myself – were true, it would still be sin. Sin is sin against God and against our very selves. St. Paul writes, “Don’t you know that you are a temple of the Holy Spirit?” When we sin, we desecrate the sanctity of our selves, a sacred self made in the image of a holy God.

Frederick Buechner’s father committed suicide when he was ten years old. His father had been an alcoholic though no one talked about that. His mother moved him and his brother immediately across the country. They didn’t stay for the funeral. What’s more, Buechner wasn’t allowed to ask questions about his father’s death. Soon, he wasn’t really allowed to talk about his father. A code of silence surrounded his father’s death just like it had surrounded his drinking in life.

Buechner writes that it is important to keep track of our secrets lest we miss who we are.

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are your secrets.”

1. To break the power of addiction we have to tell the secret. We have to confess the sin.

Just as there is a code of silence in the family of an addict, there is power in confession. Step Five in the twelve steps of AA is “Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” It’s why the IRS maintains what is informally called the “cheater’s account.”

There’s an old story that the IRS received a letter that read, “My conscience is bothering me because of cheating on my taxes, so I’m sending $10,000. If my conscience doesn’t clear up, I’ll send the rest of what I owe.”

What did David do after Nathan confronted him with the truth. Psalm 51 is what he did.
The Psalm is subtitled, Prayer for Cleansing and Pardon – To the leader: A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

The first words of David’s psalm are: Have mercy on me, O God.

Verse three is: For I know my transgressions and my sin is ever before me.

David is finally telling the secret. He is confessing. He is also entering into the next crucial step:

2. Ask God for help. God has the power to save and heal us.

Step Two of AA is “come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”

In Mark’s gospel (1.21-28) we read about a man with an “unclean spirit” who had wandered into the synagogue. When the man sees Jesus he cries out wildly “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE JESUS OF NAZARETH, HOLY ONE OF GOD! Everyone is probably so embarrassed by the man’s shouting they don’t stop to notice the truth he is speaking. Nonetheless, Jesus commands the unclean spirit to come out. Later in Mark’s gospel, Jesus meets a man in the country of the Gerasenes who is possessed by demons. “Legion” they are called because they are so many. Jesus casts out the demons into a herd of swine and leaves the young man calm and in his right mind once again.

Anyone who has seen addiction in full bloom has seen at least a glimpse of the demonic in action. But friends, the good news is that Jesus still has power and authority over unclean spirits – he has the power to “restore us to sanity.”


God is able and willing. When we ask, He gives us grace, truth, and power. We find these things in the sacrament today. More importantly, in the sacrament, we find Him.

Breaking the Power of Addiction – the Ache Within

He eats with sinners. From the perspective of those religious leaders, that’s all that needed to be said. In the ancient Near East, to sit down and eat with someone was the ultimate sign of acceptance. They saw Jesus accepting sinners. They assumed that meant he accepted sin.

So Jesus responds with a story. It’s a story about a Father and his two sons. The younger of the two sons demands his inheritance and goes and wastes it in wild living. We know this parable by the title, The Parable of the Prodigal Son, but Jesus doesn’t call it that. It is a parable about two sons. We almost exclusively teach that his parable is about the younger son coming back home and his Father forgiving him and how God forgives wayward sinners. It is about that. But it’s about more than that. It’s about the nature of being lost.

You can be lost in more than one way. In fact, look at this section of the Gospel – this parable comes with a whole bunch of parables about “lost things.” Jesus wants us to get a message: God finds lost things; and there is more than one way to be lost.

In our parable, the younger son is lost in one way, but his older brother is lost in another way. We’ll say much more about the elder brother in few weeks. Focus now for a moment on the younger son. He’s what we expect being lost to look like. He’s rude. Demanding your inheritance from your Father in that culture was just not done. It was the ultimate sign of disrespect. This division of the estate didn’t happen until the father died. To ask for it while your father still lived was the same as to wish him dead.

“The younger son was saying that he wants his father’s things, but not his father, “ Timothy Keller notes. “His relationship to the father has been a means to an end of enjoying his wealth, and now he is weary of that relationship. He wants out. Now. Give me what is mine he says.”


By custom, the younger son wasn’t entitled to anything anyway. Every thing usually went to the eldest son. So the younger son is rude and he breaks the rules. He continues to break the rules of family and good conduct by leaving his responsibilities to his father. He breaks the rules with how he lives. Basically, he goes to Vegas. He shows no good sense. He shows no moral fiber. He burns through his inheritance in a short period of time. The word prodigal means recklessly extravagant. He has become the prodigal son without regard to what rule he breaks or who he hurts, even himself.

But here’s the thing: sin is not just breaking rules, it is breaking relationship. It is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as the son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

This parable is not about addictive behavior per se – although one might rightly see an addictive personality or two at work here. This parable is about the true nature of sin. And it is crucial, if we would break the power of addiction in our lives that we understand what sin really is.

If you want to look back even further, it’s Adam and Eve after that bite of the apple. They didn’t just break a rule, they turned away from the One who loved them. Though God would not forget about them and they would not forget about God, nothing was the same. The relationship was broken. The rest of their lives, they would wonder what went wrong and how could it be fixed.

This is the curse of the Fall – this ache within that is our separation from the One who loves us. It has been described as a God-shaped hole in every person. That hole is not just an idea or a belief, it’s an ache. It hurts. It’s as real a pain as if someone cut you with a knife or broke your leg. The pain is keen and it doesn’t seem to ever go away on its own.

An addict is a person who compulsively tries to dull that ache within – by any means necessary. Addiction is simply self-medication. Medicate that ache away with alcohohol, drugs, sex, greed, food – the Church used to call these addictions the Seven Deadly Sins. They are deadly because what we hope is medicine for a broken heart will in the end stop our hearts. Take good things – food, sex, wine – and make them ultimate things, which they are not. An addict is an idolater.

“All things are permitted for me,” St. Paul writes, “but not all things are beneficial to me. All things are permitted, but I will not be dominated by anything.” 1 Corinthians 6.12

Paul then uses the examples of food and sex. He says he won’t let good things become idols in his life. If they had the word addiction then, surely Paul would have used it here.

If you talked to the family of an addict they would of course talk about how large the method of addiction loomed in their lives. But it’s important to emphasize that at its heart, addiction is not about the thing. It’s about an understanding of self. It’s about a broken relationship with God.

I have spoken many times before about my father’s alcoholism. With only a little self-pity I will say it’s hard to grow up as a teenager with an alcoholic father. It’s like you’re living with two different people and you are never quite sure which one is showing up. My father was a gentle man with a sense of humor, when he wasn’t drinking. I admired him - I genuinely enjoyed being around him, when he wasn’t drinking. When he was drinking, someone else showed up, someone mean and surly who seemed to be angry at the whole world. I can’t point to one episode as particularly heinous or descriptive- it was cumulative, like a mold growing in a dank basement.

It was easy to say then that the alcohol was the problem. And yes, if I could have taken it away I would have. I would have preferred to have my dad at my baseball games rather than at the bar. But I also know that in his sober best, my quiet, gentle father had an ache within. He had a broken heart. In fact, in the eulogy that I gave at his funeral some fourteen years ago, I said I hoped he found what he missed, what his heart was really yearning for.

Unless and until we know we are loved, we have no sense of self.


In the movie Toy Story, Woody knows he is special because he is his owner, Andy, ‘s favorite toy. Yet his sense of self is threatened when Andy seems to have a new favorite in the form of Buzz Lightyear. Woody tries to take Buzz down a notch. He tells Buzz he isn’t real. “You are a child’s play thing!” But Buzz is real because he is loved. The response Buzz gives to Woody is both comical and trenchant – “You are a sad, strange little man. You have my pity.” Woody is to be pitied because he doubts he is loved. Buzz is the opposite – he is sure of himself because he has no doubt he is loved.

Love shows us our true selves. No addiction can replace that.

Folks, there is hope for the broken-hearted. There is hope for addicts and sinners of every description – which is to say, there is hope for you and me. Over the next month we will continue to look at God’s word of healing and salvation for that ache within.