thirst

Eighth Sunday After Pentecost ● July 14, 2024

Pastor Jeff Wells © 2024

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/1MGCkjEuJ7A?si=5MLT1-ZUHpLZpOwC

Scripture Readings: 

Psalm 42:1-2 (NRSVUE) and quotes from Richard Rohr, Gerald G. May, and James B. Nelson

The reading text is provided at the end of this sermon.

I was addicted to nicotine and to the act of smoking cigarettes for ten years. I knew they were bad for me. My father had developed lung cancer in his sixties and had a third of his right lung removed. He lived with diminished breathing capacity and ultimately Congestive-Obstructive Pulmonary Disease until his death at age 88 years old. My spouse at the time did not smoke and did not like the fact that I smoked. I had wanted to quit for a long time before I finally tried. What impelled me, in the late 1980s, was that I worked for a few years as a carpenter and was exposed to asbestos. That, combined with smoking, significantly increased my risk of developing the lung disease, mesothelioma. The first time I tried to quit, in 1990, my effort failed after three months. I experienced the many ways my mind invented excuses for continuing to smoke, while my body’s cravings overrode my best impulses. I tried again the next year and, that time, succeeded. I believe my fear of dying the horrible death of lung failure was a powerful motivator. So, I boasted that I had successfully “kicked the habit.” I attributed it all to my own resolve and determination.

I know better now. I recognize that being in the grip of a substance or behavioral addiction or compulsion is to be living in chains from which you are unable to break free by your own strength and will. That inability causes us to experience shame or to make excuses to justify our behavior. As the apostle Paul wrote, “I don’t understand what I do – for I don’t do the things I want to do, but rather the things I hate.”[1] It don’t think Paul was talking specifically about our addictions, but his statement is certainly applicable to them.

In hindsight, I am convinced that I could not have done it without God’s powerful inspiration and encouragement, even though I was an atheist and not conscious of it at the time. Today, I view my ongoing recovery with a lot more humility and gratitude.

Addictions – whether to substances or behaviors – have varied and complicated aspects and sources. There are physiological, neurological, mental, and spiritual aspects of addictions. So I am not trying to simply the reality and intractability of addiction, but I am going to focus today only on the spiritual aspect of addictions – in particular, our thirst for connection with God (or whatever name you use for the Divine) and the role of God in helping us to limit or end our addictive behaviors.

I am not going to speak directly about 12-Step programs, either, except to say they nearly always include an encouragement to connect to a higher power. In that sense, I am speaking of 12-Step spirituality in the broadest sense.

If any of us went more than three days without water, we would become weak, lethargic, much less alert, and mentally incoherent, and before long, we would die. Water is not just something we need to stay alive. When we are very thirsty, taking a big drink of cool, clean water can suddenly make us feel more alive.

Our need and desire for water is a powerful metaphor for our thirst for deep connection, especially with God, but also with ourselves, other humans, other creatures, and the Earth. Our experience of a deep and ongoing relationship with God can move us from merely surviving to feeling truly alive – or as Jesus spoke about it, to experiencing abundant life. A grace-filled, mutual relationship with God is just as important for our mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being as good, clean water is for our bodies. We may survive without such a connection, but we are not likely to thrive.

God is in us and we are in God. God knows us better than we know ourselves, but we can know God only in part. So, we never experience a full and transparent connection with God in the way God experiences that with us. Whether consciously or not, at some level we feel that lack, that incompleteness and it causes us to continually thirst for God. This is at the very core of our spirituality, whether we are formally “religious” or not. We long to quench our spiritual thirst. Yet, our beautiful and life-giving desire for God often gets diverted toward substances and behaviors that are more or less destructive of our own well-being and toward those around us. In addition to the biological and mental aspects of addiction, it is not a stretch to say that every addiction also has its fundamental source in our thirst for the Divine – for the ultimate source of love, compassion, and guidance for our lives.

I don’t intend to diminish anyone’s long and challenging struggle with addiction. Yet, I believe we are all in recovery or need to be in recovery from addiction to some substance or behavior – and often several. Only then, can we fully direct our desires toward the true objects of our deepest yearnings. In his book, Addiction & Grace, psychiatrist Gerald May includes a partial list of 106 attraction addictions and 80 aversion addictions. He includes ones you would easily guess, such as alcohol, drugs, gambling, entertainment, caffeine, eating, sex, money, and power. He also lists many we might not at first think of as addictions like, anger, approval, competition, envy, revenge, and work. And, in my opinion, he missed at least a few others, like resentment, hatred, judgmentalism, privilege, and certainty.

We are each born as a unique creature, beloved by God. We each start out with the ability and the desire to choose freely to love God in return, to love all other creatures, and to love the Earth. This desire resides at the core of our being. Addiction works against our freedom and our desire to love and be loved. As May writes, “Psychologically, addiction uses up desire. It is like a psychic malignancy, sucking our life energy into specific obsessions and compulsions, leaving less and less energy available for other people and other pursuits…. The objects of our addictions become our false gods. These are what we worship, what we attend to, where we give our time and energy, instead of love. Addiction…displaces and supplants God’s love as the source and object of our deepest true desire.”[2]

As I already said, we humans are incapable of avoiding or conquering our addictions on our own. We need God’s constant beckoning, leading, encouragement, and offering of possibilities – what Christians often refer to as grace – even if we do not consciously recognize those impulses as arising from God’s unconditional love for us. On the other hand, God cannot singlehandedly end our addictions. God works through uncontrolling, persuasive love to beckon us and the whole of creation toward goodness, well-being, and flourishing. God does not – cannot – coerce us into stopping our addictive behaviors. We must want them to end, even as we simultaneously struggle with a powerful desire within us to continue them. God uses their loving, persuasive power along with all the vehicles, programs, therapeutic and medical professionals, caring relationships and communities, and other available means to help us find within and beyond ourselves the resolve, determination, and support we need.

My too brief attempt is so inadequate to convey a very complicated and lifelong process of physical and spiritual growth and transformation. Escaping an addiction and addressing the consequences for the people around us is challenging, painful, and even involves a sense of loss. Even with God’s ongoing grace, being able to break the hold of an addiction is not guaranteed.

The temptation to attach, in unhealthy ways, our yearning for God and for deep, loving, connection to substances and behaviors that will not satisfy is part of our human condition. Yet, no matter how oppressed we are by addictions, people, social systems, or circumstances of life, we never complete lose our ability to freely choose love. That is the kernel within each of us that God uses to try to rescue us and that we can grab onto as God lowers a lifeline to us in the pit.

Our hope lies in the truth that God loves us, never gives up on us, and is always with us, seeking to move each of us toward the greatest possible freedom, flourishing, goodness, and love. Even at the darkest moments of our enslavement to an addiction, God is present and our own yearning for God is there too. If we can find our way to open ourselves up, even just a little, to God’s loving grace, we may begin to break the hold of the substances and behaviors that are keeping us from the true and life-giving objects of our yearning and desire. 12-Step groups have proved to be an effective vehicle for this difficult journey. So, too, are communities of faith that recognize and Then, as John Wesley taught us, we have the chance to grow, continually, toward perfection in love.

Psalm 42:1-2 (NRSVUE)

 “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

When shall I come and behold the face of God?”

Excerpts from Breathing Under Water by Richard Rohr

As Richard Rohr has written, “[A]ddiction is…a disease of the soul, an illness resulting from longing, frustrated desire, and deep inner dissatisfaction and emptiness. Ironically, this is the necessary beginning of any spiritual path, much more than a moral failure. I have met so many people in recovery who are spiritually mature, sometimes more than those who are regular church-goers.”

 “A.A. says, in its own inspired way, that addicts are souls searching for love in all the wrong places, but still searching for love. The Twelve Step program has learned over time that addiction emerges out of a lack of inner experience of intimacy with oneself, with God, with life, and with the moment. I would drink myself into oblivion, too, or look for some way to connect with solid reality, if I felt bereft of love, esteem, joy, or communion.”[1]

Excerpt from Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions by Gerald G. May

 For Christians, grace is the dynamic outpouring of God’s loving nature that flows into and through creation in an endless self-offering of healing, love, illumination, and reconciliation. It is a gift that we are free to ignore, reject, ask for, or simply accept. And it is a gift that is often given in spite of our intentions and errors….

 [G]grace seeks us but will not control us. Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.

Excerpt from Thirst: God and the Alcoholic Experience (2004) by James B. Nelson

 We have originated from God and our spiritual DNA is stamped with the traces of the divine. Deep calls to deep, like calls to like, and we feel the pull of our primordial connection with the holy source and sacred Ground of our being. That sense of lack, this yearning to be filled can lead either to God or to a frustrated and destructive sense of inadequacy. Addiction is a clear example of the latter.”

[1] Romans 7:15

[2] Gerald G. May, Addiction & Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions (HarperCollins, New York, 1988), 13.

[3]Adapted from Dale and Juanita Ryan, Rooted in God’s Love: Meditations on Biblical Texts for People in Recovery (Brea, California: Christian Recovery International, 2007), 17.