A recovery story

Jesus said, "it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick." Mark 2:17 One of the most meaningful things in my pastoral ministry so far has been learning from people who have addiction in their story. When they give me permission to walk with them through the darkness, I gain an understanding of how they got there that I never had before. I see how alike we really are. As I learn what is all behind the addiction, I find that I am flawed in similar ways. Tears come to my eyes when I see Jesus come between us, take both of our hands and lead us to the light of his forgiveness and a new life of healing and service. I am beyond thankful to have permission to share one such story with you from someone who continues to teach me so much through their faith-filled struggles.

-Pastor Aaron Schulz

I’ve kept the job, my family loved and supported me, I even had a church family. I struggled in isolation surrounded by many. I cannot pinpoint exactly how, why, or when things became unbearable, unacceptable, and desperate.

In my journey I had been given the suggestion to go into detox, because the person feared, in my situation, I had been drinking far too much to quit on my own, that it could possibly turn fatal. Rare for an alcoholic, I took the advice. After a long month of wanting to get on with the next phase of my life, which was terrifying, on December 26th, 2015 I was admitted to a treatment center. From there I was given choices, suggestions,  and a direction. 

I learned that in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous that I could have a stronger connection with God. I was blessed with the opportunity to contrast a Sunday morning church service that I regularly attended with what I had just heard shared at the meeting. Almost always there was a God connection and a solution to any thoughts I may have been struggling with.

A few months after I became sober my family relocated across the state. God had removed the obsession to drink. The community in which we were transplanted offered a variety of meetings to go to. Again surrounded by a church community and with the help of AA, my sobriety was on a well maintained path. I met with my pastor, my sponsor, and a therapist. All three expressed the importance of each of their roles and also the others to my early recovery. 

The problem with addiction is not the substance, but the thinking. Attitudes need to be shifted and our brains need to be retrained into focusing on a solution and not on what is unacceptable to us as addicts. It is cunning, baffling, and powerful when alcohol or any substance enters an alcoholic or addict, all goodness and light is clouded by the darkness of the disease. 

About a year after settling, I was approached by the pastor, he told me that there was a need for recovery in our church and wasn’t sure how to get a group started. I offered to start a group or two, one in the evening and one in the morning. I gave the pastor all the literature I could to educate him on the way an AA meeting is run. The success of the program is based in christian values and principles. Traditionally the meetings close with the Lord’s prayer. By using Alcoholics Anonymous our church has reached a greater part of our community. A wide variety of the attendees do not attend church at St Paul’s, however we are opening the doors and offering a safe place for recovery. I have many inquiries about our church from questions about our organ to how to register for our school, or even about services and times. Some of the attendees were raised in the church and at some point in their life and were treated badly by church leadership at the time. The meeting offered those individuals an anonymous way to reconnect to the church, and to receive some healing. 

My experience has allowed me to be of service and connect the suffering to a solution, if they will listen. The stars aligned in a way I can only attribute to God. The meetings are held at St Paul’s are not only vital to my recovery but help so many others, from the addict to their families. I am grateful for the opportunity to share my experience, strength, and hope.  

Stand firm: in God's covenant of forgiveness

The time has come. God has made a new space for us to stand in. A homey space. A space where
each of us belong. Familiar enough, but new. All the creature comforts of old, but extraordinary.
Nothing stale, drafty, or drabby about it. It’s new. It’s clean. He’s done all the work with his own two
nail pierced hands. Paid for all the renovations with his own sweat and blood. Welcome to the new
covenant.

But wait a minute. If God has made a new space for us to stand in, a new covenant, was there
something wrong with the old space, the old covenant? Is it like when we get sick of a friend and stop
responding to their texts and invites to get together? Like when we get sick of a job and leave it for
another? Or get sick of a room in our house and renovate it? Or get sick of our car and buy a new
one? No, it’s not like this at all.

Nothing was wrong with the old covenant. Nothing was wrong with the space God gave to Adam
and Eve, the covenant he made with them that he was their God and they were made in his image.
They were to live in harmony with him and one another, which would satisfy their needs for safety
and belonging. They were care for the garden and the world he placed them in, which would give
them enough goals to agree upon and to work at together. They would have collaboration in their
work and fulfillment as they watched the work of their hands blossom and produce fruit. They were
to enjoy God’s presence, care for each other and care for the world he entrusted to them. Enough
purpose to go around for eternity. God would be like a faithful husband to them. They would be like
a faithful wife. Mutual admiration and respect. Their bond would only deepen and become more and
more rich as time went on. Until they broke the covenant.

Nothing was wrong with the covenant. It was beautiful AND it made all the sense in the world. 
Nothing was wrong with the people God made either. Until we broke his covenant. Until we had an
affair on our God. An affair with what? We replaced his good covenant with our own forged papers
of what our lives should be like. We thought we could create a better space for ourselves. A better
life. A space where we could do WHAT we wanted HOW we wanted. And by doing so, we put
ourselves into a scary space. We not only broke the covenant, had an affair on our God, but then
kept our distance. Served God the divorce papers. Either we were too ashamed to look at God again
because of what we had done OR we felt a high with this newfound “freedom” living in our new space,
under a covenant we had made with ourselves. Two people in a covenant...too much work. We’d rather
do it on our own, right?

Now travel through time with me to the time of the Exodus, when God, the faithful husband,
brought his enslaved, traumatized people out of 400 years of slavery. You remember how he led them
to Mt. Sinai after drowning their abusers, the Egyptians, in the Red Sea. He wants to bring the bride
that he’s freed back into a safe space. Back into a covenantal relationship with him. 

Let me briefly define covenant…”an agreement between two parties.” 

So, his people are beneath the awesome and terrifying glory of God on the top of Mt. Sinai. It didn’t
used to be this way before his people left the safety of his covenant with them. But now God’s glory
was inaccessible. An adulterous sinner could not see God and live. Let me clarify, anyone is an
adulterer in God’s sight who has fallen in love with anything, anyone else than God. Including
ourselves. So Moses came to the top. Not even Moses could look at the face of God. God had to
hide him in the crack in the rock, pass by and let Moses see his back. Why did God bring him into
this terrifying, glorious space? To establish the covenant, the two sided agreement, with his people
again.

How did God arrange this covenant? How did he let the people know what the agreement would be?
What would be best for their relationship? How they would live under his blessing and protection?
How they would remain in a safe space with plenty of land to go around, plenty to eat and peace all
around? You know this. He gave them the 10 commandments. The 10 commandments are the
epitome of the old covenant. It’s where we see the old, good, covenant spelled out most clearly. In
essence, God says through those commandments, “Be in awe of me, I am the LORD. Love me, I
have always loved you. Trust in me, I have been faithful to you. Remember the special descendant
I promised to Adam and Eve. Remember how I rescued you from your abusers in Egypt. And here is
how, these 10 points will make it clear for you how to obey me with awe, love, and total trust.

And what do you hear as Moses comes down the mountain with this covenant? He opens the door
on the most revolting of scenes...the people are partying, celebrating, worshiping...a golden calf.
Horror of horrors! Betrayal! Another affair! As though their faithful God brought them out of Egypt to..
to what? To sin? To break his covenant once again? How much more of this could God take?

SMASH! The 10 commandments crumble as Moses picks them up over his head and breaks them
upon the face of the mountain. It’s over! The people have broken the agreement again. In the most
hideous of ways. Even though God would soon give him another set of tablets with the same old
agreement on them, the people would continue to gripe against their faithful God and his appointed
leader, Moses. And we would join them in breaking this covenant from conception onwards…

Now our last stop for today. The time of the prophet, Jeremiah. More trauma. Three world powers,
Assyria, Babylon and Egypt fighting for world domination. Babylon overtakes Assyria and then takes
it out on God’s people in and around Jerusalem. Hmmm...The news hasn’t changed much, has it.
But not so fast...Jeremiah wasn’t a prophet sent to speak against the nations AROUND God’s people.
God sent him against his will to tell Jerusalem they would fall. Why? They had again had an affair on
their God! They trusted too much in the power of man, both in their own might and in alliances God
didn’t want them to make. More adultery. More unfaithfulness. 

Their lack of awe, love and trust in God was the source of their mess. They began to offer child
sacrifices, just like the nations around them. Hmmm..don’t just point fingers at those who end life
in the womb, what about the tempers and mixed up priorities and bad examples of marriage,
relationships, the love of money, and abuse of substances that we pass on to our children? This
church and Dunn County is not much different than the people at Jeremiah’s time. We have
collectively committed adultery against our God. Hold on with me, hold on.

Scholars even go so far as to claim that the length of Jeremiah’s book and the scatterbrained writing
without a timeline and the way the book repeats itself is a sign of how traumatized Jeremiah and his
scribe, Baruk and the people who the Babylonians carried away were by all this.

And it is into this broken covenant, this broken agreement, this horrible space, this space of betrayal,
adultery, unfaithfulness that God speaks the words we have in front of us today from Jeremiah 31:31-34. 

“The time is coming,” declares the LORD, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of
Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant,
though I was a husband to them,” declares the LORD. This is the covenant I will make with the
house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD. “I will put my law in their minds and write it
on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his
neighbor, or a man his brother saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ because they will all know me, from
the least of them to the greatest,” declares the LORD. “For I will forgive their wickedness and
will remember their sins no more.”

Welcome to the new covenant. Take a step into it and look around. What do you notice? He makes the
covenant. Well he did that with the old one too, you say. But wait a second, he makes this covenant a
ONE-SIDED covenant! God did not tell you to do anything. He does everything in this new covenant!
What does God do as a faithful husband to his people? He says he will write his law on our minds and
hearts. The law that we have broken, he writes on our minds and hearts. On our stone cold, dead,
stubborn, rebellious, adulterous heads and hearts. He writes his laws on their as if we have kept them!
Every law with awe and trust and love for our God. How is this possible? Well, he says. “They will know
me, from the least of them to the greatest.”

How can we know God? How can we have his law written on our minds and hearts as if we’ve kept our
side of the covenant with him? Go with me to another dark mountain. There is darkness and fear just
like Mt. Sinai, but something is different. We can see his face, the face of Jesus, who lived in awe of his
Father’s goodness and greatness, who trusted that his Father would somehow bring him back from this
traumatic death he was going through, who loved his Father by keeping every law we had not. We see
his face, pierced with a crown of thorns, blood and sweat rolling down, agony as suffocation sets in.
But he is not only gasping for air, he is gasping for his Father, the breath of life. The Father who always
went after his people like a faithful husband has left Jesus alone. Abandoned. He never left his
unfaithful people. But he leaves the faithful one as if he was the one who had all those affairs.

And because of what Jesus did for you on that mountain, you now hear your God’s gentle,
trustworthy voice speak of you, “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”
Even the sins you remember and can’t get out of your head, God does not! Even the sins others remember,
God does not. Even the wickedness that makes you hate yourself, that makes you sick to think of, God has
forgiven. 

Stand in this covenant of forgiveness! Stand in this safe space! Brother and brother, husband and wife,
daughter and mother-in-law, Christian employee and employee who don’t get along, go stand together
in God’s new covenant of forgiveness! You and I have all broken the covenant with God. We were all
adulterers in his sight. But now, he has erased that from our history and has written his covenant of
forgiveness on our minds and hearts. His new covenant of forgiveness is for each of us! Stand with
your awe-inspiring, faithful, loving God. Let this covenant sink into your minds and hearts. Even you,
even I, have been forgiven. As if you never sinned. This new covenant has nothing to do with your
performance, with your past, with what good or bad you’ll do in the future. This new covenant has
everything to do with who God is. The time has come to stand with both feet, with heart and mind,
each one of us, in this new covenant of forgiveness. Amen.