Step One: We admitted we were powerless over ourselves- Hitting Bottom

Two biblical incidents, two different scenarios, two different sets of characters, separated by two thousand years:

The first comes from the beginnings of the story of the Exodus. God is speaking to Moses, getting Moses ready for the role he will play:

Exodus 3: 7-12: Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, ⁸and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey…⁹The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ ¹¹But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ ¹²He said, ‘I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.’

The second incident is from the New Testament. Matthew 8: 5-13: When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him, appealing to him ⁶and saying, ‘Lord, my servant is lying at home paralysed, in terrible distress.’ ⁷And Jesus said to him, ‘I will come and cure him.’ ⁸The centurion answered, ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my servant will be healed. ⁹For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, “Go”, and he goes, and to another, “Come”, and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this”, and the slave does it.’ ¹⁰When Jesus heard him, he was amazed and said to those who followed him, ‘Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith.

As Christians, these are two of our sacred stories. These are two of the stories that we’ve allowed to speak to us across the centuries. A sacred story is not sacred just because it comes from the Bible, but a story is sacred because it speaks to us at our deepest core; it sounds a chord within us. A sacred story can set to life a melody within our beings that allows us to dance in the steps of the Creator.

What do these stories have in common? In both cases, someone had come to end of their personal capacity to cope. They no longer had it in themselves to fix what was wrong in their lives. They had run out of all human resources. They had hit bottom. After many years of slavery, the Israelites in Egypt had lost hope. The Roman centurion was helpless in the face of his beloved servant’s illness. The Israelites cried out to a god they knew very little about after generations of living in Egypt. The Roman centurion went to a wandering Jewish teacher, about whom he had heard, but about whom he knew very little else.

Both the Israelites and the centurion were desperate. But desperation alone has never fixed anything. Both took the next step, the first step, the most difficult step of all and said, in effect, “I need your help.” Both had to reach outside of themselves and admit to another their own lack of resources. They had to drop their pride, their fears of what others would think about them; they had to admit their weakness, their impotency. They had to admit, because there was no further place to fall, that they were at the bottom of their lives and their hopes; they had nowhere else to go.

The words, “I need help” are the most difficult words that most people can say. Pride blocks those words in our throats; none of us wants to admit our dependency on others. Or our personal failures. The first human story in the Bible, the story of Adam and Eve, is a story about each blaming the other, each refusing to take personal responsibility for the misbehavior in which they had been caught. Both refused to say, “I screwed up. I failed. I’m a mess.”

Pride is the cancer at the center of almost every human problem. Because of pride, we strap masks of competency and strength over our faces so we think that the people around us will think that we’re OK, we’re fine, we’re cool, “couldn’t be better!”

Which makes Step One of the Twelve Steps the most difficult one. Here’s how it was originally written by the alcoholics were getting sober:

“We admitted to ourselves that we were powerless over alcohol- that our lives had become unmanageable.”

One of those drunks that formulated that statement- because he lived that Step- was a successful surgeon, Dr. Bob. The other was a successful insurance salesman- Bill W. For years, both beginning in college, their lives had been defined by alcohol. It had been a problem, many, many, many times for each of them in different ways. But they would choose, on their own, to not drink for a day or two, even a week or two on occasion. Thus, for years, they fooled themselves; they were able to believe, to convince themselves, that they chose to drink, and they, of their own volition and strength, could choose not to drink.

But Dr. Bob came to a point where he could o longer operate without a nurse giving him drinks of beer to calm his shaking hands. Bill W. came to a point where he was, he knew, going to lose Mrs. W and his family. They met each other at Akron General Hospital, coincidentally some might say, and they began a conversation that continues around the world in hundreds of cities and thousands of meeting rooms, to this very day.

And it was a conversation based on helplessness. They had each tried and tried and tried on their own to stop drinking, but were unable, by themselves, to stop. The Egyptian’s slaves- the Israelites- had lived for generations with the hope that things would somehow get better, but there was always another pyramid to be built, and finally, they gave up that foolish hope. The centurion could command his soldiers and slaves with a single word, but he had no authority, no command whatsoever over the disease of his servant.

The cries heard by Dr. Bob and Bill W., each to the other; the cries heard by God of the Israelites; and the cries heard by Jesus of the centurion, all of these cries were born from the forlorn, lonely, and brutal bottom of these peoples’ lives. And that’s the lesson today, and it’s two-fold: one of those lessons is about helping others to reach the bottom of their lives and the other is about calling out for help ourselves, when we need it.

First, why would we ever want to help another hit the bottom of their existence? Why would we want to see such a terrible thing happen? Here we must discuss what has come to be known as tough love. Unfortunately, more and more people, even here in this town, are being forced to confront it, know about, and act on it. Methamphetamines have made this formerly unknown part of acting love more and more necessary to more and more people. Addiction to any substance will eventually lead to this point, but meth has sped the whole process up exponentially, so the moment a problem is suspected is the moment tough love must be begun. And it will be the second most difficult thing loved ones and friends of the addicted will ever have to go through. The worst thing, of course, is what happens if nothing is done, and that is death.

As long as the meth user, and eventually the alcoholic, the pain-killer addict, or other substance abuser, has access to a warm bed at your house, your checking account, your car, and your enablement, he/she hasn’t hit bottom. And until he/she does hit bottom- that’s the way it works and has worked for 4000 years now- until they hit that bottom where there are no more of their or your resources to draw on, then they have not hit the bottom they must hit in order to cry out for help. As long as there is an illusion existing in their minds that there is a place to sleep, 25 bucks to be gotten, or something they can steal and sell, they are maintaining an illusion of control. And it’s that illusion which will, in the case of meth, kill them. Unless we can help them find whatever there bottom is, they will die.

Tough love is risky, because all we’re doing is increasing the chances that they will live; there are no guarantees. And it will almost always get worse before it gets better. For some parents, and I’ve talked about I right here in town, the goal must be rehab. But if the kid is over 18, that’s not an easy option. That’s when we do what is necessary, and this sounds horribly heartless I know, but when rehab is not possible, then county jail is the next best place. County jails have saved countless lives in the last ten years of the methamphetamine plague, because for many middle class people, that is about as bad as they could ever imagine it getting. County jail at least gives persons the opportunity to sober up, learn a little bit about addiction, and, hopefully- and this is the point- cry out. For the meth addict, there are only two other opportunities to stop- state prison and the funeral home.

I will say this again, if you know of a family facing this kind of crisis, there are people here in town, available anytime, to encourage, care for, and walk them through this tough love process. My number, for one, is on the back of every bulletin, and I’ll help make those kinds of arrangements. And there are others.

Alcohol, even heroin, does not always need that kind of drastic action, but often it does. Those addictions, too, will always end in the early deaths of those addicted or of others. The only saving grace of those problems is that the bottom is often, not always but often, a few steps up from county jail. The unmanageability of one’s life, the inability to take control over something one wants to have control over, is the realized bottom which a person must come to. That can happen in the gutter, in jail, in a rehab center, or even in the living room of one’s own home. Thank God, it can happen in the living room of one’s own home. Confrontation may be enough to start the addict down the road to recovery. Maybe, hopefully. Confrontation takes courage too, of course, lots of it, maybe even a couple years of it. But confrontation is often the very best way possible of saying, “I love you.”

The other lesson to be learned from Dr. Bob and Bill W, from the Israelite slaves, and from the Roman centurion, is about our own need for help. Not just help with addictions. And I want to emphasize again, that’s not what this series on the Twelve Steps is only about. This is about addictions and about becoming better disciples, better followers of Jesus Christ, and more joy-filled, happy humans.

Our own need for help, from God, from others, also involves dropping the mask of invulnerability. It also, to a greater or lesser extent, but no less difficult ways, involves admitting, out loud, to ourselves, that we need help. Just a couple weeks ago, my car stopped running out at the dam one night where we’d taken the dogs to walk. Stick the key in, turn the ignition and that sickening sound of…click, click, nothing. Well, maybe if I turn it this way, or this way, it’s not like there are a lot of options. Maybe if I speak to the key gently, or to the battery harshly. Maybe if I put up the hood, wiggle the wires, look real hard at it in the dark. Maybe. Nope, still nothing.

So, in a mini-process of admitting to myself that I was powerless over my car, and that my life, and that the lives of my wife and the two dogs, for these moments, had become unmanageable, we called friends to help us. They had something we needed- a vehicle that ran to get us out of there. And we were pretty sure that that they had the willingness to help us in our powerlessness.

Not a big deal now, in retrospect. The car got towed the next day, fixed, and got me here this morning. The key to its not being a big deal though, is that we gave up, made the call for help and most importantly, were responded to by people willing, even anxious to help.

Now, as I think back, and I invite you to think back, too, about circumstances you have faced, whenever I’ve been in trouble and asked for help, I’ve gotten it. Maybe not on the first cry, but soon thereafter. “Mommy!” we learn early on to cry out easily when we’ve fallen off our bike, and we knew she’d come running. Later on, after years and layers of pride have settled on our thick hides and thickening hearts, it’s not so easy. I saw a lady get hit by a car in downtown Dallas years ago. Right in front of me. I ran out to her, and she immediately started apologizing for being a bother. 30 seconds earlier she was spinning in the air, and now she was apologizing for needing help. That’s pride. But it’s exactly the same kind of pride- a misbegotten, kind of silly self-love- that has stopped me about ten thousand times from asking for help when I needed it. Or feeling badly when I was forced to.

It’s easier to cry out when we are hurting physically. 9-1-1: that’s what it’s there for. But emotionally and spiritually I’ve needed help many times, too, and tried to suck it up, go it alone, be a man..and accomplished nothing more than strapping the mask of “Nothing Wrong” around myself even more tightly than it had been. And that mask- like meth, or alcohol, or any other destructive fix, can kill us, too. It suffocates us slowly, our own pride asphyxiates us over years. Our fears of needing help, of admitting our weakness, or of expressing needs which we can no longer conjure up solutions for, can choke the happiness from life. It can take the gifts of God’s grace in our lives and turn them mundane. Our pride can make the sacred into something profane, our blessings into joyless desires for more of them.

It’s been said that the three hardest words to say to another person are, “I, love, you.” But the three hardest words we have to say to ourselves are “I, need, help.”

They are hard words to say, but remember the Israelites in the mud pits of Egypt. When they finally said “Help!” they were heard. Remember the Roman centurion, he was heard, too. Think even of some poor slob in his living room one day, 23 years ago, who’d hit that bottom- and would hit bottom again a few more times. Every time he’s hollered help, he’s gotten it.

Psalm 46:1: "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in times of trouble." As are the people of God. But that help begins here, for each of us, by taking off the mask, and admitting to ourselves that we need that help.

Next week, Step Two: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” All of the Steps are liberating, but not all of them are fun. This one can be fun.

Be here, bring a friend.

Amen.