| A Very Accomplished Victim or Get Over It |
November 12, 2000
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Lip balm.
Apparently addictive to some.
Are you constantly licking your lips?
Do you look for an excuse to buy a bundle of balm?
Do you need a Carmex fix?
If so, you may be addicted to lip balm.
Time to consider joining "Lip Balm Anonymous" and join
thousands of others in a protest to "Ban the Balm!"
Perhaps your addiction is more conventional: nicotine, drugs,
food, sex, videos, gambling.
Perhaps you're a confessed chocoholic.
Perhaps it's shopping.
Perhaps - you're one of an estimated 6 million with a virtual
addiction.
Your relationships with your spouse, your employer, your friends
have broken down because your addictive personality has driven you
into chat rooms and all manner of cyber-deviancy.
In an addiction afflicted society, there is no shortage of
possibilities.
New addictions are popping up every day, each with its own weekly
church-basement support group and "Anonymous"
organization.
Addiction has even visited MTV when its hit show, Real
World, stumbled onto a case of addiction last year.
The show presents what happens when you put seven young strangers
under one roof for four months.
What occurs is real, and what recently happened, to everyone's
surprise -
pushing the ratings to an all-time high -
was the alcohol addiction of one of the students, Ruthie Alcaide.
In one episode she falls down drunk in a disco, throws up
half-naked in the shower, and has her stomach pumped in an
ambulance.
Other scenes show her drinking at home,
then at a club
and later
being carried by a bouncer.
A promotional spot for the program shows her lashing out at cast
members who urged her to check into rehab.
No way you're going to confuse this with a rerun of Happy
Days.
MTV producers say the show offers valuable lessons on the dark
side of alcohol, and one executive observed that
"if you saw what was happening to Ruthie, it would be very
hard to think that alcoholism or excessive drinking is
glorious."
Addiction.
It's a crippling affliction.
In our text, Jesus sees it in a rich man who is looking to
inherit eternal life.
Although the man is obsessed with the law -
and confident that he has kept the commandments against murder,
adultery, stealing and fraud -
he has an even stronger obsession that Jesus tries to diagnose and
treat with his challenge:
"Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the
poor, and you will have treasure in heaven;
then come, follow
me"
(Mark 10:21).
He can't do it.
But just exactly what is his addiction?
We're likely to conclude that he's hooked on wealth.
He can't let it go.
It controls him.
It is his master.
And if we say this, we are wrong.
The man's a model citizen, a promise keeper and a truth
seeker.
He doesn't use his wealth to oppress the poor.
He doesn't go on a phony TV show and pick a wife out of a lineup of
golddiggers.
He doesn't squander his money on worldly trinkets or immoral
pursuits.
It's hard to see how money is his addiction, because let's face
it:
Addictions are usually destructive.
On a certain level they are irrational, they make no sense,
and there is no good reason to have them.
But money, in and of itself, is not necessarily
destructive, irrational or insane -
in fact, a steady cash flow can help to irrigate good fruits
throughout the world.
In the first century, it was assumed that wealth actually made
possible the performance of religious duties -
that is why the disciples are "perplexed" at Jesus'
words
(v. 24).
When we find ourselves powerless over drugs or alcohol, it is in
our best interest to get rid of the addiction.
When showing self-destructive behaviors and impulse-control
problems, it is a rational course of action to seek out treatment
and support.
But for the rich man to sell everything he owns and give to the
poor - that's irrational.
Totally irrational.
And foolish.
How would you respond if called upon to give up
your material possessions?
You'd balk, as any of us would - and for good reason.
After all, is it wrong to have money to feed and shelter
our families, to put our children or grandchildren through
college, to pay our tithes and offerings to the church?
Don't think so.
Having resources doesn't necessarily mean that our possessions
are our masters or that we suffer from a consumerist addiction
affliction.
So it's hard to pinpoint money as a necessarily
dangerous addictive substance.
But if it isn't money, what is it?
Clearly, there's something here that has the rich man
hooked.
In this case, Jesus finds the hot button.
The call is clear:
Give up what defines your life, and follow me.
Sometimes our goals are right, but our motivation is wrong
because it's tied to ladder climbing.
We develop busy, complicated, over-committed lives.
Then along comes Jesus.
We like him, we believe in him, we come to church and sing about
him, but nothing really changes in us.
We tend to put Jesus in our pocket as another weapon in our
arsenal to help us reach our standards of success and
achievement.
We ask Jesus to help us, but we're merely bringing Jesus along with
us on our quest to help us reach our goals, our dreams and our wish
list.
Let's be clear on this.
Jesus never said, "Invite me into your dreams and
ambitions so I can bless you real good."
Jesus did say, "Drop yours and go with me into my dreams and
ambitions."
If we are following Jesus, we have to exchange our wish list
for
his.
In this case, it clearly was the man's toys and playthings,
the possessions he had managed to scrape together.
Jesus challenges the man to make an exchange:
drop what limits him in exchange for what frees him -
opens him up to a wider and more meaningful life.
The rich guy can't do that.
But Ruthie Alcaide of Real World could.
The addiction in her case was clearly destructive.
When she was asked how she felt about going into rehab, she
said:
"I did it for one reason and one reason only:
to find out from the 'experts' if I was an alcoholic or not.
After laying it all down on the table and all is said and done, they
said I had a 'potential' to be one, but they also said, 'most
college students have a potential.'
I don't crave alcohol.
I enjoy it."
And that's precisely the danger of addictions.
They're so enjoyable.
It's a struggle to be rid of them.
Perhaps you're addiction-free.
You don't struggle as a Christian with the hard-core
addictions of alcohol, food, tobacco, sex, drugs or the Internet.
I'd invite you to ponder the possibility of clinging to
addictions less visible but just as insidious?
Pride, ambition and work can be home-wreckers and life-destroyers,
too.
And they can all keep you from enjoying being part of God's
blessing.
In any case, Jesus' advice is the same:
Break away from what defines and limits you outside of your
relationship to me as my disciple.
Only then will you be free.
If there is such a dependency, Jesus advises that we give it
up.
"Dump it, drop it, ditch it,"
Jesus says, "and follow me."
Some stories I found in preparing for this Soul Talk
One thing I discovered before going to Asia was that I am
rich.
We are "the rich" that the Bible speaks about.
One thing I learnt from going, is how rich I really am.
There are many frustrating things about India.
But what I hated is the way it makes me feel about myself -
I feel opulent.
I feel rich and I feel like a foreigner.
India doesn't let you forget that you're different and that you're
rich.
This is evident in every little thing you do.
From walking down the street, to trying to buy train tickets.
When you're shopping, they hike the prices because they count either
on your ignorance or your laziness to just give up, because it's
probably only a matter of a dollar anyway.
You have to struggle and fight every time to be treated like
everyone else, because you cannot hide the fact that you're a
foreigner.
You can wear their dress and even speak their language, but they
never let you forget that you're different.
The thing I hate most about all this is the fact that India is
right.
I am different, and I am rich ....
The things we own are God's; we are only looking after them.
This is a difficult concept to learn.
It's hard, but I believe so necessary, to systematically give
everything we have back to God.
From our clothes, to our beds, to our cars, to our health and our
relationships.
We need to give up the belief that we have a right to have these
things.
We don't have the rights to anything.
Even our next breath is a gift from God.
When we choose to follow Jesus, we must give up our rights.
Christine Scott, "Challenged by our Wealth," Worldscope
Electronic Magazine, www.churchlink.com.
In our quest for comfortable Christianity, too many of us are
happy with cheap grace - a discipleship which costs us precisely
nothing.
But how is this imitating Christ?
In no way at all!
We talk about our dependence on God -
"Lord above, we depend on you," we sing.
But we make damn sure that we don't need to.
Christianity isn't about feeling good about ourselves; it isn't
about having our little psychological misalignments adjusted.
These things are there, but we have mistaken what should be a side
effect with the thing itself.
We are supposed to be full and running over, free of concern
about our material goods, ready, pleased even, to lay them down.
But we are too involved in our little spiritual games, where we say
that we don't care about our possessions, nodding wisely when Paul
says they are "dross."
We may even think we mean it.
But how many of us give up even a few of our pleasures because the
money we would have spent on it we have given away?
How our spiritual fire is damped by things.
How weighed down we are!
I buy things I don't want to impress people I don't like.
How good it would be to be able to let go of so many of these
belongings!
"Belongings" is a telling word:
it is not the things which belong to us, but rather, it is we who
belong to the things.
-Alister Pate, "Comfortable Christianity," Ship of Fools
Online Magazine, December 1999.
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