Almost Everyone is Drunk on Something

The heart of Jesus for damaged and demoralized people

I love how Jesus related to damaged and demoralized people. Don’t you?

A woman is caught in the act of adultery. In committing the act, she wrecks a home. She brings shame upon herself and her community. Then, pious men decide to publicize her shame to make an example of her. The man with whom she committed the act is not exposed, but that's another issue for another time.

Concerning the woman, “Immoral lawbreakers like her must not be tolerated,” they think. “She must be condemned for her behavior, cast out for her infidelities, shamed for her shameful act. She must be made into an example.”

This is what happens in a group of people who pride themselves on things like Sabbath keeping, personal piety, and sound doctrine but are lacking in love.

A coliseum culture develops.

Everyone rallies around a common enemy – the sinner. Robbers, evildoers, tax collectors, adulterers and adulteresses. And then the pouncing and the piling on and the mobbing. The shaming and the scolding and the disapproving. The calling out and the canceling.

What’s wrong with the world?

“Other people,” says the mob surrounding the adulteress. “What’s wrong with the world is other people…those people who aren’t our people.”

But Jesus does not participate in this. Instead, left alone with the adulterous woman, he simply says to her two things:

1. I do not condemn you.

2. Go and sin no more.

The sequence of these two sentences is everything.

Reverse the sequence and you’ll lose Christianity.

Reverse the sequence and you'll lose Jesus as well.

With Jesus, preemptive affirmations of grace, love, and no-condemnation set the stage for conversations about truth, morality, and ethics. According to Jesus, there is no other way.

With more than three decades of pastoral ministry behind me, I have never met a person who became an enthusiastic follower of Jesus because a Christian or group of Christians scolded them about their morality and ethics.

Have you?

Once we were having a small prayer gathering with some friends. Before we started to pray, in came a married couple who had been invited by someone in the group. The man, who I will call Matthew, was very drunk, and his wife had this I'VE BEEN THROUGH A WAR, CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME, I'M DYING INSIDE look written all over her.

As we prayed together, the intoxicated Matthew decided to chime in. He slobbered his words, eeking out an incoherent rambling prayer that went on for over ten minutes. He petitioned God Almighty for some of the strangest things:

God, protect us from the Klingons. God, I really want a Jolly Rancher right now, will you bring us some Jolly Ranchers? God, will you please move all the bananas into the doghouse? And bless the grass seed, Lord. And the fertilizer! Amen.

After the last person prayed and we all said “Amen,” everyone looked at me.

What will the pastor do?

Thankfully, I didn’t need to do anything because a woman from the group, full of grace and love and no-condemnation, offered Matthew a cookie. As the woman fed him sugar and engaged in conversation about Klingons and grass seed and such, others approached his wife, begging for insight on how they could help.

This little interaction, this way of responding with grace and love and no-condemnation AS THE FIRST ACT IN A SEQUENCE, became one of the most transformative experiences I have ever witnessed.

To make a long story short, the kindhearted offer of a cookie led to a tribe of people wrapping around the couple and their two young children, which led to a month of addiction rehab in Arizona – including flights and personal visits to and prayers and support offered at the rehab center by our little prayer group – which led to Matthew getting sober, which led to a restored home and marriage, which led to Matthew becoming a follower of Jesus, which led to him also becoming an elder in the church where I was pastor at the time.

To this day, Matthew may be the best and most impactful church elder I have ever worked alongside.

Anne Lamott says that it’s okay to realize that you’re crazy and very damaged, because all the best people are. Few things could be more true than this.

Matthew and countless others are proof of this.

Grace and love must precede ethics. No-condemnation must precede the morality discussion. It is God’s kindness that leads to repentance, not our repentance that leads God to be kind. Love – the broad embrace of the narrow path – will trigger some of the most life-giving experiences we’ll ever be part of.

After all is said and done, the more conservative we are in our beliefs about the Bible – the more we truly believe and seek to embody every single word of it – the more liberal our loving will be.

The narrow path of Jesus always results in an ever-widening embrace.

How can we begin to live in such a way that Matthew stories become the norm versus the exception?

How can we create environments in which this kind of properly-sequenced love flourishes?

Here’s how. We must first realize that LOVE is the environment that we ourselves are already benefitting from. LOVE has to be a Person to us before it can become a verb. And the One who is LOVE Incarnate – Jesus – doesn’t just love us when we’re at our best.

Jesus also, and especially, loves us when we are at our worst.

He loves us when we are caught in the act. When we fall asleep on him instead of watching and praying with him. When we deny him three times. When we become his prosecutors and his persecutors. When we lie through our teeth. When we speak slanderously about the person or persons who are not in the room. When we enter the Lord’s prayer meetings drunk – drunk on a self-medicating substance like Matthew was, or something more subtle but no less destructive.

Drunk on our ambition.

Drunk on our greed.

Drunk on our gossip.

Drunk on our grudges.

Drunk on our reputations.

Drunk on our pornographic imaginations.

Drunk on our religion and our virtue and our self-righteousness.

All of us, the lot of us, drunk.

Drunk as a skunk drunk.

In our drunken places, Jesus draws near and asks, “Do you like cookies? May I get you one? Will you sit with me? And how about some rehab and recovery…may I accompany you there? May I pay the fee? May I come alongside you toward sobriety, then a new life, then a seat at my Table, then a job in my Kingdom? I went to the battlefield, I loved from the battlefield, to launch this love trajectory for your life. Protection from the Klingons. Sweeter than the Jolly Ranchers. All you need is nothing. All you need is need.”

These words from one of my favorite hymns says it all:

Come ye sinners, poor and needy
Weak and wounded, sick and sore.
Jesus, ready, stands to save you,
Full of pity, joined with power…
Let not conscience make you linger,
Nor of fitness fondly dream.
All the fitness he requires
Is to feel your need of him.

How do we love like Jesus?

It starts with resting and receiving. It starts by stopping.

Perhaps we should stop trying to love like Jesus and instead, first learn what it means to be with him.

Because the more we are with Jesus, the more we will become like him. Love works like a virus. It is caught, not achieved. Get close to LOVE, and love will surround you.

Let’s pursue this path, the grace and love and no-condemnation path…shall we? Only then will we gain credibility to speak with authority about things like truth, morality, and ethics.

But maybe in the end we won't have to, because being treated with grace, love, and no-condemnation makes people want to change without being told to do so.