Last week I was texting with a friend of mine while in the midst of working on the sermon to be preached Sunday. Many years ago she was in love with a woman who was an alcoholic and the woman eventually died from the disease of alcoholism. My mother was also an alcoholic so it’s a familiar story for me. We were texting about why people choose to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol. In my experience with alcoholics, part of what seems to be a common denominator is that the alcoholic will do almost anything to keep themselves from getting real. For whatever reason, the painful aspects of life are too much and they would rather not deal with or feel those aspects. Often there seems to be a deep sense of guilt or shame as well that is one of the underlying contributers to the pain. In my text to my friend when she said there was nothing she could do that would make it better, I texted back and said that for some people facing the true causes of one’s pain is just more than that person thinks she or he can bear.
In the sermon I ended up preaching, I suggested that at the heart of the word repentance is the notion of getting real with ourselves, with God, with those we love. It’s peeling away the layers of the onion until we can see ourselves more clearly, faults and all. I went on to say that repentance is akin to the 4th step in the 12 step programs, the step of “making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Do you know how difficult that step is for those who are addicted? Do you know how difficult that step is for all of us? The step requires that we no longer pretend, we no longer hide behind reasons or excuses or justifications. The step requires getting honest about motivations, feelings, experiences, and the ways in which we have hurt people. None of us want to think about those things and yet in order to be people who are growing and open to the movement of God in us and around us, we need to get real. Jesus made it a point to combine repenting and believing the Good News. The Good News (liberation, love, justice) is only Good News when we have been willing and able to get real.
Honestly, part of the reason why the 4th step is so excruciating is that eventually we get to the 8th step which is “making a list of all persons we have harmed and being willing to make amends to them all.” Yikes. It’s one thing to be real with ourselves about our lives and it’s quite another to have to make amends with those whom we’ve hurt. Is it any wonder that that millions of people have turned to 12 steps programs as the primary path on their spiritual journeys? While I am biased and believe that faith communities have much more to offer than 12 step programs, I am also humbly appreciative of all that the 12 step programs have to offer faith communities. One of the ways in which faith communities get stuck over time is in the ability to get real, be real and keep it real. People get involved in faith communities for so many different reasons and at times it feels impossible to identify and manage all of those reasons. At least with the 12 step programs, their is one common purpose and that is sobriety.
Imagine how church would be if the common purpose was to get real, if getting real included “making a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself” and “making a list of all persons we have harmed and being willing to make amends with them all.” My guess is that a great deal of church conflict would be resolved without having to watch splits and factions and professional mediators intervening. Maybe in the coming years faith communities will be more open to how much we have to learn from the 12 step programs and how they enhance and deepen one’s spiritual journey.