June 13, 2004
Addiction Leads to Idolatry
Riley E. Jensen

When I was growing up, I do not recall the words “addict” or “addiction” to have been in common usage.  Perhaps it was because I grew up in a middle class enclave in the Pacific Northwest which did not have the dens of iniquity that inhabited other major cities.  I thought of an addict as a mysteriously pathetic figure or one who led a very shadowy existence far removed from the crossroads of normalcy.  In my mind an addict was a mutation of the human spirit barely connected to the human race.

Gerald D. May M.D. goes to the other extreme in his book Addiction and Grace when he contends that all of us are addicted -- to be alive is to be addicted.  He speaks of addiction as idolatry; “We are called to grow toward that point at which nothing other than God will be our God.  Addiction makes idolaters of us all because it makes us worship those objects of attachment; thereby, preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another.”

I believe Gerald May is much closer to the truth about this aspect of the human condition than those of us who want to limit addiction to a rare aberration on the continuum of human conduct. 

I.         We Are An Addictive Society

The first point to be made is that we are an addictive society.  I have said before that the hardest part of the worship service for good Presbyterian folk is the prayer of confession.  It is not easy for us to identify with all of this corporate guilt.  Some of you can’t spit it out at all; others of you do it with your fingers crossed.  However, I would submit that it is much easier for good Presbyterians to accept that they are sinners than addicts.

I first began to suspect that addiction had escaped the ghetto and was making inroads into polite society during the 70s.  We know that in the late 60s and early 70s the drug culture spread to the middle class.  In 1969, the high school in the upper middle class suburb where I served, had 36 certified heroin addicts in a senior class of 300.  We were frightened by a drug culture that was invading our homes and communities.

Then -- in the early and mid 70s -- we in the church encountered a bizarre phenomenon called the “Jesus freaks”.

I do not know the degree to which you experienced that here, or perhaps you called it something different.  But it became a movement in reaction to the drug culture which elevated Jesus to a cult hero.  The “Jesus freaks” had no time for rituals or institutional religion.  They had no time for the church.  They rediscovered Jesus and elevated him to the popularity of the latest fad.  Whatever Jesus had done, they wanted to do.  They would find a river and conduct mass baptisms without benefit of clergy.  Their communion services were more like orgies than anything we would recognize as being faintly traditional.

But Jesus was their hero and that kept clergy like me in contact with them.  For while we might not agree on the theological subtleties, how can you dismiss someone who wants to follow Jesus.  So I spoke in their coffee houses and tried to tap my feet to their music -- all in an effort to maintain a bridge of shared faith.

And it worked with a few.  But after a while I realized that there was a dynamic at work which I had not fully appreciated at the outset.  These people were addicts.  Their enthusiastic embracing of Jesus as their hero was but another form of addiction.  Jesus was not someone to be worshiped, obeyed, and followed.  He was someone who could be used in order to experience a religious high.  The “Jesus freaks” had traded getting high on drugs for getting high on Jesus.

What is wrong with that you say?  It is certainly a whole lot better than mainlining heroin.  And I would agree as long as we understand that trading one addiction for another does not help us become the free persons Christ intends us to be.

When those people made Jesus their cult hero, they were trying to use him rather than obey him.  They were trying to get high on him rather than follow him.  It was not Christianity they wanted but another drug without the side effects.

We can point a derisive finger at those who seem so pathetically enslaved to one form of addiction or another.  But I am submitting to you this morning that whatever your addiction of choice, we are an addictive society.  That’s right -- we can no longer divide the world between us and them.  As Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Dr. John Bradshaw sees addiction as being at the heart of the malaise of our culture when he says, “Addiction has become our national lifestyle -- or rather, death style.  It is a death style based upon relinquishment of the self as a worthwhile being to a self who must achieve and perform or use something outside of the self in order to be lovable and happy.  Addictions are painkilling substitutes for legitimate suffering.” 

II.     Addiction Leads to Idolatry

When we understand addiction as Bradshaw does, it is a little easier to shift over to the theological vocabulary of idolatry.  I believe that one of the reasons why it is so hard for us to admit that we are part of an addictive society is that addiction has become the religion of our culture.  It shouldn’t surprise us to know that we are no longer a Christian society; nor are we in a broader sense a religious society; we are an addictive society.

Those of you who have looked up the word in your trusty Webster’s unabridged have discovered that originally the concept of addiction was rooted in formal law meaning “to formally give over to or be bound to as a sentence of court”.  Often this meant a servant being given over to a master.

Of course this is just a hop-skip-and-a-jump away from the concept of idolatry which is condemned so strongly throughout the Bible and particularly by the prophets.  We know that one of the functions of the prophet was to intercede with God for the people.  However in our scripture lesson we have one of the rare instances in the Bible where a prophet is being prevented by God from doing what he was called to do.  In Verse 16, Jeremiah is forbidden to intercede on behalf of the people because the people are so sinful that God will not hear him.

What has happened is that the people have tested the patience of their God once too often.  Here we find them making offerings to the queen of heaven, the Babylonian goddess, Ishtar.  It was like an addiction.  They were part of a culture where everyone was touting his or her own God or Goddess.  And they would continually fall off the wagon believing that this new experience would offer them something they did not have already.

Time-after-time they would do this always finding the idols to be empty and yet the people would continue to deliver themselves into that emptiness.

Here in our scripture lesson a harsh verdict is rendered.  Jeremiah is kept from interceding on behalf of the people.  He knew what was happening.  He warned them but they kept doing it anyway.  Like so many of us who just cannot stand to see our loved ones suffer, Jeremiah kept jumping in to try to lessen the pain.

But this time God says, “No more.”

It is easy to read this as the verdict of harsh judgment:  “Let them go to Hell in a hand basket if that is what they want.”  A more accurate understanding of what is happening here is that a measure of mercy is being offered.

Many of us understand this principle all too well.  We are rescuers; we are saviors.  When someone is hurting or doing the wrong thing, our natural inclination is to rush in and save them from themselves.  But sometimes the best help is not to help.  Sometimes the best help is to allow a person to make bad choices and to deal with the consequences of those choices.

Jeremiah is kept from interceding on their behalf because they need to be able to see the consequences of their own behavior before they can see where the truth lies.

This is not an easy thing for the loving parent or the caring friend to do.  But sometimes we need to allow the addiction to develop into full-fledged idolatry before a person can see the emptiness of a course of action.

III.    A Transformation, Not Reformation, Is the Cure

I am a minister of the gospel, not a prophet of doom.  And as such I take no pleasure in opening the wounds of the human condition to proclaim that we are an addictive society.  But I also believe that before we can truly hear the good news we must face the bad news.

To say that we are addictive people is to say that we have made attachments in this world that we will not let go.  We will not let them go even if they are destroying us.  We will not let them go even if we have made those attachments more important than God.  You may call it addiction; you may call it idolatry; but if you have become so attached to something that you will not let it go, you have become a slave and you are not free.

We can become idolaters of many things which though they are not bad in themselves, when they become the compulsive object of our devotion, they can be destructive.

We can become idolaters of work, of a marital partner, of a significant other, of a child, of the inheritance we hope we will receive, and of an institution that is the “be-all and end-all” of our lives.  These and countless other attachments are proximate concerns that become ultimate concerns taking the place of God in the center of our concentration.

What then is the way out?  The way out has to do with transformation rather than reformation.  Even if we reform and break the habit of addiction to sex, drugs, or alcohol; we are prone to substitute another addiction as our idol -- perhaps caffeine or a form of evangelism that insists that everyone have a religious experience exactly like our own.  Reformation often is followed by a substituted addiction.  Jeremiah was kept from interceding on behalf of the people because reform was not the answer.  Reform had to do with promises, resolutions, and gradual changes.

Transformation is something entirely different.  Transformation has to do with abolishing the idols -- letting go of them, destroying them, and walking away from them.  Transformation knows nothing about a system’s approach to change which is gradual and incremental.  In Jeremiah, Chapter 31, the prophet offers the transformation solution when he says, “A new heart I will put within you.”  Jeremiah was prevented from interceding on behalf of the people because there comes a time when no one can do it for us and we cannot even do it for ourselves.  Our friends with alcoholics anonymous have known for a long time that it takes a higher power to free us from the cycle of addiction.

Mary Higgins who drove her car into a tree on the Boston Commons said, “I saw the tree but I didn’t realize it.”  We are not stupid people.  We see the trees; we see the danger signals, but somehow we are started down the long road of addiction before we realize it.

The way out is the way of transformation -- the way of realizing where our ultimate allegiance belongs.  This is why Jesus summed up the law and the prophets when he tells us the first commandment is, “Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

When that commandment is obeyed, we have affirmed the ultimate allegiance which allows no room for the clinging to old Gods and the following of the old paths of addictive behavior.  It is a transforming commandment.  Jeremiah taught that where God is concerned gradualism never works.  Our God cannot be one among many.  We are talking cold turkey here and it is called transformation because only God can give us that new heart and new spirit.

Amen.