August 10, 2025
Ninth Sunday After Pentecost
Here’s the beginning of our reflection passage for this season, from Richard Rohr:
“The Crucified and Risen Christ uses the mistakes of the past to create a positive future, a future of redemption instead of retribution. He does not eliminate or punish the mistakes. He uses them for transformative purposes.”
This reflection illustrates the very interesting theme of “Divine Recycling.”
As many of you know, Google now pretends to be an artificial intelligence when you do a search. Disturbing as this might be, it is handy if you’re just looking for something simple like a definition. So here’s what I got when I typed “recycling plant” into the search box:
“A recycling plant, also known as a material recovery facility, is a facility where recyclable materials are processed into new products or raw materials. The main goal of a recycling plant is to divert materials from landfills and transform them into reusable resources, thus reducing waste and conserving natural resources.”
I would like to talk about two recycling plants that have performed this function in my life: Alcoholics Anonymous and Seekers Church.
Couple of reflections:
I’m not sure if I’ve been processed into a new product or just raw materials. Sometimes, when things are going well and I know the Holy Spirit is guiding my life, I do feel like new product. Certainly that’s a big part of our traditional Christian language – being born again, becoming a new person in Christ. Other times, though, when I’m confused or depressed or experiencing the consequences of my various character defects, I feel lucky just to manage to be raw materials. I can always tell that the good stuff is in there – nothing can make me not a child of God – but yeah, it’s pretty raw, and the materials don’t seem mixed together into anything much. Still, there’s always hope.
I like the idea of being diverted from the landfill too. I’m sure we all have our special nightmare visions, and the landfill is right near the top for me. Just look at photos of landfills, or even worse, go visit one. For me, it really is hell on earth. Acres and acres of stuff, which we once made for our own purposes and now have decided we can no longer use. So it sits there, like a judgment on all the bad decisions we’ve made as a species. And it stinks.
I can imagine my unredeemed or unrecycled life in the landfill, very well. It would just sort of sit there. I would be unconnected with anything alive, anything useful to others. My neighbors would be other pieces of stuff, or at least that is how I would treat them. I would see them as objects, just as they would see me. And there would be a pervading grief that all of us have no place in some wider world where there is beauty, love, and community. We are the throwaways. We are trash. And our destiny is not eternal life but eternal decay.
This is a terrible way to see yourself, and of course a terrible way to treat others. Jesus showed up to teach us that every single piece of so-called trash in the landfill is precious, and has a destiny in the Kindom of Heaven. We know that the world’s poor do use what they find in landfills, and so do many non-human animals. The first shall be last, and the last shall be first, even if you live in a landfill. These are beautiful and encouraging words, but how do you get recycled? How can I be “transformed into reusable resources”? Let me read Richard Rohr’s words again:
“Christ uses the mistakes of the past to create a positive future, a future of redemption instead of retribution. He does not eliminate or punish the mistakes. He uses them for transformative purposes.”
“Transformed into reusable resources” . . .
Transformation is pretty big word, and I find it interesting that both the Google chat program and an eminent theologian are using it here. In the Greek New Testament, we know it as metanoia, which means “changing the mind and heart”. Jesus urges us to do just that, and follows this by assuring us that “the Kindom of Heaven is at hand.” Many of us have had such moments in our lives.
So here’s me at the age of 27, a full-blown alcoholic. It’s one the few things I ever really did well from the start. I always seemed to be one jump ahead of my friends and colleagues in this area – but even so, I was surprised to find out that a mere 10 years of my kind of drinking and drugging could turn me into a candidate for Alcoholics Anonymous at such a young age. I thought alcoholics were old bums in raincoats. But when I finally tried an AA meeting, I found out that a lot of them looked just like me, some older, some younger, some with less devastating consequences to their drinking, and some with stories that were so horrifying that I really, really, didn’t want to have that stuff happen to me. So, one day at a time, I stopped using alcohol and drugs.
Is this the metanoia part? Not exactly. I wanted to not drink and use drugs anymore, and I thought I would probably be a better person if I didn’t, but I really wasn’t in the market for recycling. One of the results of living in a landfill – or of being in the grip of an addiction — is that you have no perspective on anything. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t realize how much of me had been crushed down and failed to develop, as a result of my illness. So at first I didn’t take the Twelve Steps of recovery too seriously. All this talk about character defects and a higher power and the idea that I was supposed to turn my life over to it, seemed pretty radical. I didn’t want to be recycled into a reusable resource! I just wanted to be the same person I was before I started drinking. Another way to say this is, I wanted to be 16 years old again, forever.
This doesn’t work. A person in recovery has to grow up, emotionally and spiritually. And there are many stories I could tell you about how that can happen, if you stay with it. But sticking to the recycling theme, I’ll focus on this idea of being a resource, something that is no longer wasted, but instead repurposed for the common good.
One of the key ideas of Twelve Step recovery is that our “drunkalogue” can be useful to others who are still sick. My story about being such a bad drunk is no longer a poor-me story about myself. It’s a way of presenting my credentials, so to speak. It’s a way of recycling my experience into a reusable resource.
This is valuable to someone who’s still struggling. When I started attending AA meetings, for the first time in my life I heard people talking plainly about the life of alcoholism and addiction. It was obvious they knew what they were talking about – I recognized myself in a dozen different ways. They weren’t ashamed, or asking for pity. They just wanted to show they were qualified to speak about drinking – they’d been there. And the amazing part was that they were no longer drinking. It could be done.
This recycling of experience is not a one-way street. It is also beneficial to the one who is doing the recycling. It’s common for someone who’s new in recovery to feel a sense of waste, of shame, of bitter regret. All those years when I could have been . . . should have been . . . would have been . . . How do I redeem that? And the answer is, when I started telling my own story to people who were even newer in sobriety than I was, I discovered I had something they wanted. I could help them by being honest about what happened to me. All those humiliating experiences as a drunk were not wasted – I was not living in a landfill anymore. I was connected to others, and that connection was forged in a way I could not have anticipated – by my flaws, my illness, my mistakes. This is what I could own in common with others, and use it for, as Richard Rohr says, “transformative purposes.”
The so-called Promises of AA, which first appeared in the “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, include these words:
“We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. We will comprehend the word serenity and we will know peace. No matter how far down the scale we have gone, we will see how our experience can benefit others. That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.”
So it’s not just not drinking that allows the possibility of metanoia, of transformation, of recycling. There is a spiritual path – not necessarily a religious one – that needs to be taken, one that involves connection with others. And now we come to Seekers Church.
Here’s another quote from Richard Rohr:
“What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering.”
I believe this too, and the main thing I ask of a church is that it help me do this. All too often, redemption theology, which discusses the death of Jesus in very abstract and dogmatic terms, can make us blind and deaf to his suffering, and the suffering of all sentient creatures. It can make us feel that suffering with, being compassionate, is not as important as getting saved through the sacrifice of God’s son. Also, we’ve become so used to the artistic representations of the crucifixion that some of the horror is drained out of it.
What I find at Seekers is a community that widens the circle of compassion. Not only that, but our community does not rest on its Christian laurels, so to speak. We agonize over the daily choices we may need to make that will make us better citizens, better allies to the marginalized, better servants. We are open to hearing prophetic words from those among us who believe we aren’t doing all we could do. For instance, our Racial and Ethnic Justice Ministry Team has brought before us the question of reparations for stolen wealth, and urged us to examine our connections with the land we now claim to own, and with the indigenous peoples who give the lie to the so-called Doctrine of Discovery.
I myself think Seekers could do much more to widen our circle of compassion when it comes to the lives of other animals. Not everyone here sees it this way. But I truly believe that we at Seekers recognize the words of Jesus as uncomfortable, challenging, and so we don’t expect to be praised for being such wonderful Christians, but instead provoked to ask, Am I doing and being all that I could be? Am I seeing Christ everywhere he is present? When it comes to compassion for animals, I have watched Seekers ask these questions, and respond with a number of significant changes over the years.
I hear the collective wisdom of Seekers speaking about a life of service for me, a life that, if lived with heart and discipline, can keep me permanently out of the landfill of isolation and selfishness. I’m supposed to recycle my life for others, to suffer with them, and the extent to which I do not do that, is the exact measure of my falling short as a Christian – at least that’s how I see it.
In conclusion, a word from Scripture:
“We are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed.”
What does that mean to you?
It speaks to me of a living death, life in the landfill. And it tells me that in Christ I can be changed, repurposed, recycled. I’m seventy-one and I still don’t know who I’m going to turn out to be! I’m still raw materials! But this is the “assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” that Paul speaks of. So I keep showing up, one day at a time, to find out.