“Do not get drunk with
wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit….” (Ephesians 5:18)
This is not an anti-drinking message today—it is a pro-Spirit one.
That’s the thing we have to be clear about from the beginning, here, or
else we are going to miss Paul’s point and just make him out to be a
tee-totaling wet blanket who can’t even appreciate a good glass of Cabernet or a
nice amber lager. Paul is neither—the same apostolic authority is invoked elsewhere in the New Testament to advise Paul's protégé Timothy to take some wine for his stomach. Paul isn’t
sweepingly opposed to all alcohol, not even for Christians, necessarily. But he is always in favor of the
Spirit. And he will always be more “pro-Spirit”
than he is “anti-alcohol.”
So the question is not, “Is it sinful to drink wine?” At least not from Paul’s perspective. The right question is, “How can you be more
and more filled with the Spirit—and is there anything in your life that is in
competition for the Spirit’s place in your life?”
It’s a question of what—or whom—we allow to drive us, to guide us, to
comfort us, and to fill our days. And
because of that, you could put virtually any other addiction, any substance, any distraction, any other stuff we use to cope, in the place of “wine,”
too, in this verse, and still have Paul nodding approvingly. For the followers of Jesus, we are now made
to be filled with the Spirit of God as the One who guides our will, who
comforts us in loneliness, who molds us into the likeness of Jesus, and who
gives us wisdom for choices and actions.
Putting anything or anyone else in the driver’s seat of our lives is
like putting sugar in your gas tank—it is not only an inadequate substitute for
the power of gasoline, but could actively harm your car’s fuel injectors by
putting it in there. So we have to hear
today’s verse as two halves that are set together in contrast: DON’T do this (be drunk with wine), but
INSTEAD DO that (be filled with the Spirit).
Paul isn’t just saying “Don’t drink” like someone might say, “Don’t eat
junk food” or “Don’t hold back overdue library books” or “Don’t forget to brush
after every meal like good little boys and girls.” He is telling us what we ought to do,
not just giving us a list of no-nos.
And actually, it’s not even really what WE are supposed to do—it’s
about letting GOD do what God intends to do with us, namely, filling us with
the Spirit. And that means that, either
way, we will give up control. That’s something we have to face: it’s not that
giving into abuse of alcohol is surrender while the Christian life leaves you
in control of your own destiny. BOTH are
forms of surrender—the question is simply who is safe to entrust your life to
when you do surrender. The trouble with
turning to a bottle (or a needle, or prescription drugs, or the slightly more
socially acceptable addictions like status, attention, social media, money, casual sex, food,
or prestige) is that it lies to you by making you think that you are in
control. How many times has the old
chestnut, “I can quit any time I want to” been heard on the lips of addicts in
denial, right? But you’re still
surrendering to its power—you’re just fooling yourself in the mean-time while
you do it.
Paul doesn’t pretend that the Spirit-filled life isn’t a life of
surrender. He is just convinced that
there’s no one better, or more trustworthy, for surrendering your life to,
than the very Spirit of God. The Spirit
will still insist we let go of control over our plans, our priorities, and our
personal comfort zones. But the Spirit actually knows what he’s doing, unlike
any of a million substances out there that can lie to you, if you will believe
them, and try to convince you that they can run your life better for you than
God can guide you into.
So ultimately, what is Paul’s problem with “getting drunk with
wine”? Not that alcohol is, in itself,
always inherently evil, but rather that it is just never enough. Look, I get it--life can be terribly difficult to bear sometimes. Like Westley says to Buttercup in The Princess Bride, "Life is pain, your highness--anyone who says differently is selling something." And the question in front of us today, and every day, is whether our strategy in the midst of all the heartache, all the brokenness, all the hurt, all the injustice, and all the pain of the world will be to numb ourselves to it by finding something to dull our senses to it, or whether we dare to be vulnerable enough and courageous enough to face it head on and steer into the skid, so to speak. It is awfully easy to pick the easy way out in life and to choose something to help us ignore or anesthetize ourselves to the hurts of life--to drink until we've forgotten the hurt for today, to numb ourselves to the sadness with pills, to distract ourselves from the emptiness with tiny screens and tallies of Facebook friends or Instagram followers, to avoid having to deal with the latest news reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria by turning up the volume on our on-demand streaming movie channels. It's not that any one of those things, from beer to prescription drugs to technology to entertainment, is sinful by itself. But it is the choice we make to surrender ourselves to those things--and surrender can happen without us even perceiving what we have done--that prevents us from being available, to be present, with the world in its suffering, rather than numb and withdrawn from it.
And that's the thing--if we dare to surrender to the Spirit of the living Christ, we will be sent where Christ went, too: to share sorrows with the heartbroken, to defend those who stand accused, to speak up for those who are forgotten and on the margins, to welcome those who had been told they were unacceptable. All of that is to say, we will be sent straight into the pain of the world, rather than being able to avoid or ignore or remain numb to it. Whatever our distractions or addictions of choice, the trouble comes when we give control over our lives and then have to
mount a rebellion/resistance movement to try and take control back—addictions
never want to give up the control they get over us, and they never go
willingly, after all.
Today, maybe the take-home for each of us is to remember that the first
half of today’s verse is followed by the second half. If abuse of alcohol—or any other
substance—isn’t an issue for you or your loved ones immediately right now (and
be thankful if it isn’t), remember that Paul’s goal is not just to keep us from
having a beer or a good time. There are times to raise a glass--sometimes in joyful celebration, and sometimes to share misery. The point here is to be honest about how--and to what, or to whom, we surrender. The goal
is for us not to settle for anything less than the very presence of God filling
and directing us.
It's not about keeping ourselves independent as some mythical (and imaginary) captains of our own souls and masters of our own fate--it's about the right way to lose control. Don’t settle for anything less than the Spirit of God as the directing voice of your life today.
O Lord our God, let us
be filled with your Spirit, and give us the courage to mean those words as we
pray them.
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