22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Well, that’s simple. Either you are on the side of God, or the side of man. You can either gain the world and lose your life or you can lose the world and gain your life. Do not be conformed to this world but rather be transformed by the renewal of your mind. God’s word makes me a laughingstock - but I cannot cease speaking it. All who swear by him will glory; but the mouths of all liars will be stopped. 

So far, so Enid Blyton. I believe we have the apostle Paul to thank - if thank is the word - for this passionate moral binarism. Post-baptismal sin simply baffled Paul, like an academic who doesn’t understand why people don’t just learn Syriac. And if this strikes us as immature, well, he says it himself. As to one untimely born the Lord appeared. Before he had developed as a Christian, he was expelled, straight into the world, an apostle. Oh he knows sin - but that is all Before Christ, BC, ancient history. After Christ, well, there are no more choices to be made. His old identity - a Hebrew of Hebrews, circumcised on the eighth day - gone. Excrement, compared with knowing Christ. The love of Christ COMPELS me, he says. A NECESSITY is laid upon me, he says. Woe to me if I do NOT preach the gospel, he says. There is a monkey on Paul’s back, and that monkey is the love of the Lord Jesus. Like Jeremiah in today’s reading. He burns with God’s truth, irrepressible, enslaving him. He is seduced by God, he says, intoxicated, consumed. 

I am no expert on addiction. I know what any Ted-talk will tell you - about dopamine and pathway formation, about the suppression of the activity of cortex and the stimulation of the sub-cortex. And I know that it leads people to do things they would never choose to do, and to suffer things that no one would choose to suffer. The good I will, I don’t do. The evil I don’t will? That I do. Is it addiction, or just the fallen state Paul describes? All of us trapped some repetitive destructive pattern, its causes hidden far in the past, its effects stretching far into the future. And so familiar that, as Bishop Ryle says, our sins become like children to us. We cherish them. 

Addiction is a good metaphor for sin. And addiction is a good seven-eighths of sin. Not just figure, fact. Our brains so susceptible, and some brains more than others, and young brains most of all. Paul can speak of throwing off one’s sins. There was no methamphetamine when he was writing, no phones either, no tiktokification. There were spectacles though: Augustine writes of a friend hooked on the horrible violence of the arena. Our addictions to praise, power status, the buzz of success, may be more seemly than gambling, sugar, shopping, porn. But the structure is the same. Our physiological inability to stop. 

A theologian I know works on and with female sufferers of addiction. She wants them to know - that they are free, and precious, that they can change. Desperate women, trying to save their lives, and so losing them. Be transformed by the renewal of their minds! But their bodies don’t make it so easy. Will some be Jeremiahs, Pauls, Augustines, so overcome by God’s truth that the lies of the prince of lies are driven out? Maybe, a few. 

But for many, grace is a tune played in a more subdued key. Shame, and regret, and loss, a persistent counterpoint. Because between freedom and bondage, between gospel and world, between truth and lies - is not a fair fight. Look at Jesus’ earthly life. Love does not win every skirmish, every battle, every war. Love’s way is to outlast, outwait, outendure its opposites. Like the USS pension scheme, or growing asparagus. What you see now won’t always be success and victory. It will often be failure and defeat.

At present I am waiting for my father to die. I assume that by now the only drugs left in his body were those administered in hospital. But I don’t know what drugs he had been using - prescribed, illicitly procured, illegal - I don’t know their names or effects or their half-lives. His half-life I observe from a distance: a whole life being more than a long-term addict can hope for; proximity being too difficult to sustain. Only when I saw my brother’s words “it looks like the end”, did I realise - I had forgiven him. And if he has not yet forgiven me, he will. Love’s way is not to win every skirmish, battle, war. Love’s way is to outlast, out-wait, out-endure its opposites. 

We hear in this morning’s gospel that the Lord will repay every man according to his deeds. And which deeds will those be? The good we willed, and didn’t do? Or the evil we never willed, but did anyway? Willpower, by the way, is a defunct term in medical circles, a concept so inflected by culture, genetics, physiology, circumstance as to be meaningless. It is the sick who have need of physicians, precisely because we cannot just will our sickness away. The old man Adam still hangs about. Paul knows that. Even as he urges on us the new man Christ. Paul didn’t know how long the old Adam would hang about. Paul’s urgency a very first generation perspective. But then, generation after generation, and no eschaton. Just time, for more addicts, the children of addicts, the parents of addicts. 

Does this sound like a counsel of despair? By no means! Christ already has the victory, still and always. And we have a share in it. And so I appeal to you, brethren, if in any way you can resist being conformed to the world - resist it! Any blow you can strike for Christ, strike it! As the old revivalist song has it, each victory will help you some other to win. And: if you can’t win them all, do not despond. We sing the Lord’s song in captivity, for now. And: the signs of his victory may be quieter than Paul allows. Perhaps an old addict, who when his daughter, a priest, asks him if he still prays, answers: “That is a constant.” The great 19th century pastor John Keble, in a letter to a disappointed old man, wrote this: "Those who have gone on trying in earnest to love and to cling to [Christ], in spite of all discouragement, inward and outward, in spite of low spirits, and the bitter sense of uselessness and unworthiness, they of all others may be said to walk by Faith. How can they fail to receive the blessing of Faith?” 

May the Lord repay you with the blessing of faith. And may you entrust your salvation wholly to Him, the only God, who knows how hard it is to be human.