I heard the other day that there are two types of people in
the world, those who are in recovery and those who know they are. The truth is that all of us have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God. As a
result we are not perfect, far from it, in fact. We all have hang-ups, shortcomings, weaknesses,
and brokenness, even those of us who dare say that God lives in us and that in
Jesus we are forgiven. It's true. God
does, and we are. However, not one of us
has arrived, and in the words of Robert Frost we have "Miles to go before
we sleep" (Robert Frost,
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”).
A few weeks ago I felt led to get more involved in our Celebrate Recovery ministry at Montrose
Church-Pasadena campus. I've been around
church for a lot of years now, and everywhere I have turned in my life and
everywhere I find myself now, I see people, Christian people, people who are
madly in love with Jesus Christ, who need to make Celebrate Recovery a part of
their journey in Christ.
CR is for everybody.
People who think they don't need accountability to others need CR. CR isn't just for recovering alcoholics and
people with chemical dependency. CR is
for people serious about their walk with Jesus, people who aren't afraid to
look deep inside themselves and see the places of their wounded-ness, low
self-esteem, food disorders, anger, bitterness, impatience, passive-aggressive
need to control, negative self-talk, need for approval, the inner voice that
says you're never enough, pride. Name
it. People who have sinned and fall
short of the glory of God need to be in safe communities of honest and
recovering people.
In her book, Pastrix,
Nadia bolz-weber speaks of Mary's encounter with a man whom she thought was the
gardener at the empty tomb on that first Easter morning. She write,
Perhaps Mary Magdalene thought the resurrected Christ was a gardener because Jesus still had the dirt from his own tomb under his nails. Of course, the depictions in churches of the risen Christ never show dirt under his nails; they make him look more like a wingless angel than a gardener. It's as if he needed to be cleaned up for Easter visitors so he looked more impressive and so no one would be offended by the truth. But then what we all end up with is a perverted idea of what resurrection looks like. My experience, however, is that the God of Easter is a God with dirt under his nails.
Resurrection never feels like being made clean and nice and pious like in those Easter pictures. I would have never agreed to work for God if I had believed God was interested in trying to make me nice or even good. Instead, what I subconsciously knew…was that God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.
New doesn't always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don't actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I'm right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn't live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming—never even hoped for—but ends up being what we needed all along.
It happens to all of us. God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over (Pastrix, Jericho Books: New York, 2013, 173-174).
Let me leave it here for now and simply invite you to a safe
place called, "Celebrate Recover" where you will discover that God
just keeps on coming to us over and over.
Rich or poor, male or female, young or old, educated or uneducated, you
are invited. There is a place for you
at the table of Jesus.
See you down the road,
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