John 3: 11-21

Living the Light

March 26, 2006

Elizabeth Macaulay

I speak this morning about the subject of alcohol and drugs and their abuse.

You need to know that I do this speaking not from the place of observer.

You need to know that I speak this morning from the place of participant.

And I speak this morning to all of you knowing the same is true for you. Because alcohol and drug use and abuse is something we all participate in. Even if a drop of alcohol has never crossed our lips. Even if we have never taken into the sacred space of our bodies any substance meant to take us from life and into oblivion, we are, each one of us, participants in this issue of drugs and alcohol and their abuse.

Our culture is drowning in it. Witness the increased rates of crime. Violence committed in order to support demanding addictions. A man was shot on the street in Uptown last week. The odds are good that his shooter had a habit to support.

Witness the pain from generation to generation to generation of families whose gatherings for special events and for every day events are awash in alcohol. How many mornings have you awakened with the conviction that the drinking had to stop?

Witness the fact that our children are experimenting with drugs and alcohol in elementary school. Kids come to school high. How can they learn, and how can we teach them that their minds are, as the ads say, a terrible thing to waste?

Witness the way we are taught by our culture that this life is so very hard that we need a ticket out. And across the ages, we know that many practice the belief that that ticket goes by the name of Jack Daniels or whatever other sort of concoction you like to cozy up to?

What is the thirst, the longing, the desire that drives us to drinking and to using?

Carl Jung spoke it clearly. In communicating with Bill Wilson, the founder of the 12 step program, Jung said it this way:

…the craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness…the union with God… you see the Latin is spiritus and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison.

In its fundamental dynamic, alcoholism is longing for the Spirit.” (Thirst, James Nelson, pg 28)

We drink and we swallow and we seek a changed perception because we are thirsty for God, for the sacred, for the wholeness and the something more that we know in the core of our being is calling to us.

We are thirsty for the holy. Like a deer that longs for the flowing water. Our souls long for God.

And the church, the church has stepped back from its role as watering hole. We don’t talk about our thirst, because it is somehow unseemly, left to those evangelicals who wave their hands in worship and are outright vocal about their longing for God and we’re not like them, don’t want to be lumped in with that sort

And so we sit in the desert of our thirst and we self medicate with legal drugs and we wonder why we are so lonely and why our drinking leaves us yet thirsty.

I mentioned that I am no mere observer of this thirst.

I know it well.

I am a recovering alcoholic. I have been dealing with my thirst issues without turning to alcohol for 13 years.

I began my romance with alcohol at 18. I broke it off each time I became pregnant. I could stop drinking to protect the health of my babies. I just couldn’t seem to stop drinking to protect my own health.

I wasn’t often a public drunk. My way of abusing was at home at night, after the babies had been tucked in and I had some time to myself. I celebrated by drinking because it seemed to expand my sense of my self and my access to emotions I often kept hidden from myself.

I was no stranger to the sick of drink. A grandparent on both sides of my family was active in AA. My father crashed in a most spectacular slosh into drunkenness and came out the other side a glorious and healed man. He went on to be a counselor for families experiencing the challenge of learning how to be whole without the prop of alcohol. My younger sister had been through treatment.

Sound like a soap opera script? Well, it’s common. Nice people. Publicly successful people. People adept at wearing masks and looking good who behind the closed door of their homes drink themselves into numbness.

I knew for years that I was owned by my relationship with alcohol. I prayed about it every morning when I woke up full of remorse and I prayed about it every Sunday at church and I prayed about it and promised myself that I could control the thirst that compelled me.

And of course, I was telling myself what I wanted to hear and it was a lie.

At around age 33 I got involved in a church based organization that sought to bring the teachings of Jesus about justice and healing into public policy. I became a leader in the group. Scared and sure they were crazy to see that I had anything to offer, I said “yes”.

At a week long training event in Chicago, I came to realize that if I wanted to be a leader, I needed to be someone who was worthy of people’s trust. And I came to realized that I could not become a leader until I dealt with a very core issue:

I didn’t trust myself. Because of the way I abused myself with my drinking, I couldn’t trust myself.

And I came to know that if I was to put into the world the things that I felt passionate about - justice and the teachings of Jesus and the way that God loves us and is longing for us to live that love with ourselves and others. If I wanted to share fully with the world the stuffs of myself, I was going to have to face my drinking.

And so I did. Along with my private prayers, I shared my sick with my father. With my sister. With a sponsor who knew the ways of AA. And they took me into the community of the imperfect.

And one Sunday, sitting in the choir loft during worship at First United Methodist Church in Duluth, with the sun shining down on my head, I felt a shift.

I gave my disease, my sickness, my longing, over to God. I acknowledged that I was powerless over the disease that had come to contort my life.

And God took my ache and illness and held me and has walked with me these many years since.

And the gratitude for being given the chance to live free of the shame and loneliness of my illness?

That gratitude lives with me every day of my life. I am free. I trust myself. And I am humbled beyond the telling by the power of God’s grace and the gifting of God’s love and the growing of compassion that my struggle with alcohol has given me.

Listen. If you are turning to alcohol to quench your thirst for God, to release you from the resentments and fears that bind you, I commend to you a different way.

Give it over. There are people who can hear your story and know the pain of your story and who can help you to heal. There are AA groups around this city that meet day and night. There are people here in this church who know your struggle and are here for you. Don’t let a chemical dim the light and glory that is yours to give the world.

And if your family is awash in alcohol and its effects, there are Al-Anon groups that meet here, in your church, and across the city. There are others who know the terror of living with someone intent on slowly killing themselves with alcohol. It’s a family disease. And it keeps on keeping on unless healing is sought. You can’t change the drinker. But you can learn to tend your soul.

And for each of us, as we live in this time when escape from reality seems to be the ultimate good. Jesus offers another way. Turn toward the light of love in Christ. Take your thirst to the living waters of the Christ who knew, as you do, the ways of loneliness and fear.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

I know that my redeemer liveth. I who was once dead, am now fully alive. And I give thanks every day of my sober life.

Amen