Faith in the Face of Terrorism

March 27, 2016  Easter,  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   “Faith in the face of terrorism”

In the parlance of religion, we talk about redemptive suffering. The beatings that Martin Luther King, Jr. took at the hands of the police in Alabama, his times in jail, and his eventual murder were redemptive in the sense that the suffering he endured helped to birth the Civil Rights movement that changed the fate of the world. The beatings, imprisonment, and finally the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, were not meaningless. His willingness to suffer on behalf of the poor of El Salvador helped to alleviate the oppression of the poor in Central America.

Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa, chose to live in abject poverty in order to suffering meaningfully to lift the plight of the suffering of the poor in New York and in Calcutta. Gandhi’s hunger strikes, the salt march, his many beatings and imprisonments at the hands of the British military and finally his martyrdom helped to liberate the entire subcontinent of India.

Today, on Easter, if we are able to draw back the curtain of centuries of manipulative mythology and wishful thinking, we can see the arrest, torture, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, as having been similarly redemptive.  Not because he paid some theological price to a demonic God that demanded blood, but that he stood up to the power of an empire on behalf of an impoverished and occupied nation. I think that the event of the cross was a historical fact although almost everything that has been said to us about that event in our lives in Sunday School and church has been not simply false and misleading, but possibly dangerous to our well-being.

As dated as many people would think that the lyrics to the rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, may be, the writers had a more clear grasp on the theology of the Jesus story than most pastors and even most seminary professors do today.

The torture and execution of Jesus of Nazareth was sad, it was wrong, it was an example of state sponsored terrorism but thankfully his death was also redemptive in the inspiration that his martyrdom was to millions who have stood up to repressive governments, corporations, employers, slave owners, and, if I may say, repressive religions, ever since.

Unfortunately, redemptive suffering is only the thinnest slice of the over all horizon of human suffering.  Earlier this week, 34 people were killed in Brussels in three Isis coordinated bombings that left another 200 people injured. This was senseless. These were not people who were challenging oppression, they were not marching in a civil rights protest… they were on their way to work, or school… they were people on vacation, visiting family or just going to the grocery store.  This was not martyrdom. This was murder.

It has been a year since Graeme Wood’s much-heralded article, “What Isis Really Wants?” was published in the Atlantic Monthly. In light of this recent terrorist attack in Europe, I think we might want to review some of the myths that Wood’s article exposed. Terrorists are not angry, unemployed, thrill seekers. They are not greedy materialists who are simply hijacking a religion to mask their thievery.

Isis is led by people who are sincerely religious and who are devoted to a very specific form of Islam that has accepted a lethal “them and us” world view. The are seeking to reverse the world order from a western dominated world with either secularism, or Judaism and Christianity in charge to a Muslim Caliphate that would put an extremist version of Islam at the top of the world’s power pyramid.

When they attack western targets, they are seeking to ignite a war between the west and Islam. They want to provoke isolationist responses from Americans and Europeans that would make them turn on Muslim immigrants, closing our borders and deporting Muslims in our midst, or, as Ted Cruz has suggested, add policing and monitoring to their houses of prayer and ethnic neighborhoods to send the message that you are not one of us… you are they.

I have to say that Wednesday morning, watching the news, it looked to me like Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were on the Isis payroll. They were promoting the kind of fear that Isis wants to provoke. They were giving Isis credit for power and influence that they clearly do not have but that they want to trick the West into believing that they have. In short, if Isis had written a script for them to read, it couldn’t have been more effective in supporting the terrorist goals than what Joe and Mika did say. MSNBC executives, if you are watching, consider this to be my last warning.

What they didn’t report on March 22^nd when Isis killed 34 people in Brussels was that the week before Isis had killed 35 people in Ankara.

And the week before that, they had killed 47 in Bagdad, and in January there were 50 killed in Libya. And there was another lethal suicide bombing in Iraq after the horror in Brussels.

The majority of the victims of Isis are not western Christians but rather they are Middle Eastern Muslims who are peace loving, hard working people who are just trying to go about the business of their lives in the same way that the victims in Brussels were.

The hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming out of Syria are not bringing jihad with them, they are running from the same people that we are worried about. They are victims, just like the people in Paris and in Belgium.

And, to be honest, Isis has a point. We do not make Muslims a part of our society the way we do immigrants from Europe. When 130 people were killed in Paris last fall, we flew French flags and “Je suis Paris” was on all our lips but when 137 were killed in Yemen earlier in the year, no one was saying, “anna Yemeni.”

They are not wrong in their belief that we have not accepted them as equals among the peoples of the world.  Our news reporting leaves no doubt that we value the lives of white northern Europeans a thousand times more than we value to the lives of the dark skinned people of the Middle East and Africa. I wish that it wasn’t so indisputably true, but there is no other way to see it.

But if the reaction of the corporate media was wrong… and if, if I may quickly add, the manipulation of our Homeland Security Agency that always uses terrorism to tell us that we have to give up more and more of our privacy, more and more of our civil rights, so that Big Brother can protect us from the scary scary brown people, if that is wrong, what is right? Oh, and Tim Cook, if you are watching from your office at Apple, don’t you dare create a backdoor for the CIA into our phones. The government overreach is manipulative and fear based and don’t you dare give up my privacy to them.

If you want to see what the right reaction to terrorism is, I think that the people of Brussels and the people of Paris have shown us a lot.  They are holding marches against fear. They are refusing to change their daily lives, they are refusing to surrender the pluralistic society, their free Europe, their joy, to the fear of murderous criminals. 

And let me throw some roses at our president, since I rarely seem to get to praise our elected officials.  President Obama was in Cuba trying to peacefully and mercifully bring an end to a cold war that has made no sense for at least 30 years and has caused the suffering of millions of people in Cuba.

He was right to not change his itinerary, to refuse to run back to Washington and act scared because some misguided lunatics had blown themselves up in Brussels.  I was glad that he went to a baseball game and showed the world that we are made of sterner stuff than his critics who were at least verbally soiling their pants.

However, the staff member that allowed him to be led to the dance floor to tango in Argentina, I would like to have the honor of firing that person myself…. That was a bridge too far.

And President Obama, if you are listening, we really don’t want to see that again.

You have heard me say this before but on this Easter Sunday, in the wake of these recent terrorist acts, it deserves to be said again:  The word “faith” does not mean assassinating your brains to believe in childish myths that are clearly false. Faith, in Greek, pistis, means courage.

In the early decades of the church, the tradition was that when a person was being baptized, they were lowered under the water and when they were brought up, they shouted, “pistis”, that is that they had made a courageous decision not to be afraid of the power of the Roman empire or the threats of their indigenous organized religion. They had the courage to embrace a way of living a resurrected life that lived without fear. 

If I could give you anything on earth in the face of the them-and-us violently divided world we live in, it would be that you could stop being afraid. Sure, be smart about border security. Use the best of intelligence technology and information sharing. Stop every bad guy that you can but what will ultimately stop the bad guys is if their technique of trying to incite wars, divisions, and suspicion simply fails. 

If we have the courage to not hate, even when we are hated. To not try to bomb the Middle East until they decide to like us better.  If we can learn to include rather than exclude, to love rather than hate, and to embrace rather than fear then, my friends, the whole world gets to experience an Easter resurrection.

The Secret to Reconciliation….

March 20, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   “The Secret to Reconciliation. . . And Why It Almost Never Happens”              

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1937  "Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross . . ."

When we started this church in 2008 it was the first time in my 30 year long career in ministry when I got to become the pastor of a church that had not just fired their previous pastor.  I think it is safe to borrow Henry Kissenger’s famous comment about politics on a college campus and apply it to churches:  The politics in “church” is so ferocious because the stakes are so small.

People are complicated and a whole of what we do, what we say, how we act, arises in us in entirely unconscious ways. People don’t set out to be irrational, mean, or cruel in most cases and yet it does happen altogether too often.

What is often very perplexing is that people are able to be good spouses, or good friends, or good employees in other settings but they show their darker side in just certain settings. 

When I came to Springfield in 1991, I was offered the chance to completely rebuild a church that had been though such a rough political blow up that not only had the senior minister been forced to resign, but the ugliness of the process had caused the associate pastor, the secretary, the office manager, and even the janitor to leave at the same time. 

There were three or four families that had been at the center of the dysfunction though none of them wanted to own their role in the unraveling of the church.  In fact, they all rushed to take my family out to dinner and make every conceivable gesture of support and friendship.

The wise old board chairman said something to me that I have never forgotten. He said, “A snake doesn’t have to bite you to be a snake.” It is a sobering thing to think about but it stands up to scrutiny.  The comedian, Dave Berry, once said, “If the person you are with is nice to you but mean to the waiter, the person you are with is a mean person.”

People are complicated. Good people do bad things. It is certainly true that no one is perfect and everyone has blind spots in their personal ethics but still, not to make these absolutes, but to be aware that situational ethics is approximately the same thing as no ethics. If a friend of yours is irrationally hostile towards a mutual friend, you should assume that the snake is just as likely to bite you, even if they have always been friendly up to that point.

A female friend of mine is a professional who has earned a Phd in counseling and is a person of some considerable responsibility in the hospital where she works. She comes from a third world country where she endured many horrors in her early life and these early traumas often come out very hostile, sometimes even violent, irrational conflicts in her marriage, in her relationships with her children, and with family and friends.

However, these outbursts never happen at work because, if they did, she would become immediately unemployed. I have given her a lot of extra grace because the things she has endured would make anyone more than a bubble off plumb but the fact remains that she knows when she can let her id show and when she cannot.

Though her condition is extreme, to some extent, we all do this. We know when it is safe to let out id out and when we have to be more restrained. Tenured professors who have no fear of losing their jobs but who often have tons and tons of unmet recognition needs, will engage in ego battles in college committee work that makes me very glad to have never been more than an adjunct professor in the colleges where I have taught.

But casual relationships and voluntary organizations, whether it is the Kidney Foundation, the Girl Scouts, or a church, are places where people often, albeit frequently unconsciously, allow themselves to express their power through very irrational ways.

We lost a member from our church a few years ago who had joined and quickly became very involved but then had an illness in her family that kept her away for several months.  She went to a hospital two hundred miles away, most weekends, to sit with her dying father.

I called. I sent emails. I texted messages of concern and support. I made several offers to go and visit her father myself. Sometime after her father had died, I reached out again and told her that we still missed her. She replied that she would not be coming back to church because her father had died and I never contacted her.  I reminded her of the many phone calls, texts, and emails and she said, “Well, yeah, you did that but you didn’t mean it.”

In popular psychological parlance, this is called “gas-lighting.” It is a form of intimidation or psychological abuse in which you twist facts to favor the abuser and to make the victim doubt his or her memory, sanity, or character.

Was she aware that she was gas-lighting? If I had to guess, I would say “no.” The operative emotion for her at the time was grief, which is often complicated by feelings of anger, powerlessness, regret, and pain. She was in pain and lashing out… now, she had the presence of mind to tell me not to show her emails to anyone else, at some level, she knew how inappropriate and irrational she was being, but at a conscious level,  she was hurt and wanted to hurt someone else in much the same way that a wounded animal will bite anyone who comes near them, even someone who is trying to help.

In more extreme cases, as with sociopaths or borderline personalities, they will sometimes have such an aversion to personal responsibility that they will actually convince themselves that they did not do what they had done but rather, someone else did it.

In this year’s political campaign, we are seeing people let their collective id out a bit as they surround Donald Trump with approving cheers. I had the chance to meet my first Donald Trump supporter in the flesh about a week ago and I asked him why he was supporting someone who has been demeaning of women, who has pledged to deport millions of Latinos, to stop immigration of all Muslims, to resume and ratchet up our military torture of prisoners and has even pledged to murder the family members of suspected terrorists… in short, I asked this man, “Why would you support a racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobe?” His reply was, “I respectfully disagree.” That is, presented with the fact of indisputable racist, misogynist, homophobic, and xenophobic statements, he simply chooses to deny the facts. 

Men and women, 2 + 2 = 4 no matter how much you may choose to respectfully disagree with math.  A madman cannot blot out the sun by writing the word “darkness” on his cell wall. Facts are not liberal or conservative. Reality is not Republican or Democrat.  Reality may be, as Einstein said, and illusion but it is a persistent one.  Facts can be very persistent though I’ll warrant that very few of Trumps supporters would want to self identify as racists or misogynists or xenophobes but the facts are in. You don’t have to wear a swastika to be a fascist.

Now, I don’t say that to label Donald Trump as a sociopath. In very real terms, Donald Trump is not my problem. My concern is with the collective social id that he is revealing. My concern is that as the United States has become much more diverse and white northern European descendants will no longer be a majority in the United States, we are seeing a resurgence of something we had hoped was long dead and buried but is, sadly, still very much a part of the fabric of our nation.

During my graduate school work, I was the chaplain in a VA drug and alcohol rehab unit and I learned more about psychology in those days of working with addicts than I ever did in my classroom lectures on counseling. One of the things that the A.A. program is emphatic about is unvarnished honesty.

The Al Anon program stresses to the family members of addicts that they are not doing the addict any favors by pretending to believe their lies or in allowing them to twist reality to make others responsible for their addiction.

It is a very basic tenet of either parenting or, if you can make an adjective out of any noun, adulting, is that you reward the behaviors you want to encourage and you never reward behaviors that you don’t want to encourage. The politics of exaggerated curtsey will some times make you feel like you should pretend to believe the lie, or reward someone for their petty and irrational ego demands. Sometimes it is easier just to cave into the expectations of a borderline or a sociopath, just to keep the peace.

But when you do that, you are encouraging people to just go deeper into their pathology, their addiction, their delusions and unhappiness.

Our wisdom lesson today is probably the singular quote for which Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the most famous. In sum, he insists, that forgiveness without confession is cheap grace.  This is the point where I often have to part company with many of my liberal peers in ministry.

Because we have dismissed neurotic religious guilt and fear, we have jettisoned any belief in a harsh, judgmental Sky Father, we often fall prey to the popular pop psychology of a previous generation that tells everyone that they are OK.  We progressives often tend to engage in both amnesia and denial, pretending that harmful or even irrational behavior is not what it clearly is…. Harmful and irrational. It makes us ethically irrelevant and morally either ineffectual or, sometimes much worse, literally encouraging evil behavior.

This is why, in spite of all that we have rejected from our traditional Christian roots, that we still have a prayer of confession in our liturgy. They are not traditional, and, in fact, I have to write them myself every week because what you find in books of liturgy are all of the “mia culpa” sort, asking the Sky Father not to give you the punishment that you so richly deserve.

Ours are attempts at an orientation to reality, befitting a fact based faith community. If you are watching this sermon on line, you can write to me and I’ll send you a sampling of these prayers.  Sean and Barry have talked about setting some of them to music but having heard the prayers of Kierkegaard set to music, I might ask that you not do that.

We have kept prayers of confession because we are trying to make our spirituality real, relevant, and honest.  It is one thing to say that you are spiritual but not religious but, to be fair, if you are not sincerely trying to live in harmony with other people, to be reconciled to the earth, to future generations, to other nations and races… then it might be more accurate to say that you are neither religious nor spiritual. To be spiritual needs to mean that you are seeking a spiritual life, trying to be different, better than we might otherwise be.

I often think of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission used in South Africa after the end of Apartheid. After years of a violently oppressive white minority government that abused and impoverished the black majority in South Africa, it was reasonable to fear that the collective anger of the black population might erupt in violent revenge.

The creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission gave people a chance to publicly confess their sins against their victims and in exchange for their honest confession; they were forgiven rather than punished. Those who refused to confess were still held criminally responsible for their offenses.

Now, you might think that this wouldn’t work but in most cases, the victims were willing to forgive their abusers… all they wanted to hear was a sincere confession, and acknowledgment of what they had been through.

Bonheoffer’s point is that when forgiveness precedes confession… when you try to exercise reconciliation through amnesia or denial, the reconciliation is rarely real.  We don’t want to just look spiritual or talk as if we were spiritual… we’re digging in to get at the real thing.

Men and women, let me say this in my most authoritative pastoral voice… if liberals will allow me such a moment:  Always be willing to forgive. Never let anything become so big in your mind or in your heart that reconciliation is not possible.  Don’t dispose of family members or friends, but as far as it lies with you, seek peace and sincere love. But do not deny reality. People don’t have to agree with you, but you don’t have to pretend to believe in lies, or fairy tales, to be subjected to other people’s twisted imagination of the villain they want for you to be.

Be honest, but be yourself. Engage in reality, but choose to infuse reality with love. That’s my opinion anyway, I hope that you agree.

Community of Prophets

March 13, 2016    Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor        “The Community of Prophets”                   

-Phil Berrigan        "The poor tell us who we are,
the prophets tell us who we could be,
So we hide the poor and kill the prophets."

 John Kennedy    "The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life."

 Colin Powell     "The US cannot win the war on terrorism unless we confront the social and political roots of poverty."

It will not likely come as much of a surprise to many of you but still, beyond our instinctive sense that the more wealthy people become the less empathetic they seem to be, researchers at Berkley and the University of Illinois have actually put numbers to it.

( Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.)        

When you feel some food insecurity yourself, you can easily be more understanding of hunger. When you have had a house repossessed or had to move back home with Mom and Dad after college, you can feel the imposing threat of homelessness more clearly.

But comfort and security can lull us into indifference. I always meant to do it during my years as a denominational pastor but I always seemed too busy but when we started this church, I made it a part of my personal spiritual and professional discipline to spend time every week with the most poor and vulnerable people I could find. Our weekly trips to Bill’s Place where we serve lunch on Thursdays keeps me in touch with people that none of us should ever forget.

Sometimes, when one of our regulars reappears after a few months of absence, I’ll ask where they have been. Often the answer is something like, “I have been a guest of Greene Co. government.” Which means, of course, that they have been in jail.

Through my contact with the homeless population, I know a lot of people who have been at least short term guests in the Greene Co. jail but there are two prisoners there who have a connection to our church. One is child molester and the other is there on the charge of murder. The child molester is the most recently incarcerated.

I sat in the courtroom last month, next to his victim and the victim’s mother, as her former step-father pled guilty to the several charges against him. It took over three years to bring this case to court and so, our friends and church members with whom I sat in court, were forced to move 3000 miles away to escape his constant stalking and threats which our local judicial system seemed powerless to stop in spite of the felony charges and the restraining order against him.  He will be in the county jail for several more months until he is brought up for sentencing this summer at which time he will likely be sent to a state prison for, in my opinion, not nearly long enough.

The other prisoner has been there for three and a half years since she was charged with murder. She had just turned 18 years old at that time, a couple of years since she had run away from home and was living on the streets, turning tricks to pay for a drug addiction. She evidently shot a middle aged John with his own gun while sitting in his car.

She was too high to remember what happened and there were no other witnesses. Why her case has not been brought to trial in over three years and why she is still a resident in the Greene Co. jail defies any legal or logical explanation.

A county jail is supposed to be a holding facility where people who are charged with crimes are held for a few days pending their court hearing. No one was supposed to be there for a month, or six months, certainly not a year, and three years is nothing short of crazy. County jails are not set up with rehab, counseling, education or the kinds of resources for long term residents.  A jail is not a prison.

However, due to long backlogs in our court system, not enough judges, public defenders or prosecutors, our jail has become a prison. A facility that was built to house 500 prisoners has been over capacity for the past three years. A recent newspaper article talking about David Adam’s granddaughter, Marya, now in her 3^rd year in the jail, described the overcrowding conditions. There are two beds in Marya’s cell but there are often four women in the cell. They take turns sleeping on the floor where one has to prop her head up on their shared toilet.

I don’t know how this is legal… in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not legal though as I have researched the topic, I have found that this kind of overcrowding exists in jails all over our country. The ACLU is aware of it, documents it and writes about it but I cannot find that they are filing any suits about it.

Many of you know that I am a news junkie. I listen to news podcasts while I exercise and I wake up and go to sleep to news programs. I know that I shouldn’t and no one else needs to take it upon themselves to explain to me why that I shouldn’t… I know several things that I should do that I have not yet decided to do and this is one of them…. I leave the news on all night. I sleep to the company of MSNBC news anchors every night except on the weekends.

On weekend nights, MSNBC runs repeats of hours and hours of reporting on prisons, federal prisons, state prisons, foreign prisons… it is sort of like a “real housewives” program for serious felons. I can’t stand it, so I have to search for documentaries and other news sources to lull me to sleep on the weekends. I can’t stand watching and hearing about the scary people and the frightening conditions in these jails and yet, I know, conditions are much worse, just three miles from here, in the Greene Co. Jail.

In the Academy Award Winning film, “Spot Light,” the four reporters working on the Catholic Priest sex abuse story in Boston repeatedly find themselves asking one another how such a large scale series of crimes could have been repeatedly covered up and ignored for so long. So many parents, church officials, police, and prosecutors knew of dozens, what some estimated to be nearly a hundred pedophile priests, and what was eventually discovered to be more than 300 pedophile priests in the Boston diocese. How did it go on for so long? Why wasn’t it stopped?

The sobering, in fact, the morally indicting realization that dawned on reporters, lawyers, priests, and parishioners is that, in all honesty, they had all known about it, at least suspected it, there were signs, there was evidence, for years. It’s just that no one wanted to think about it. No one wanted to look at something so ugly, so unholy, so disgusting.

I remember reading satire materials in the National Lampoon when I was in high school, forty years ago, about pedophile priests. We’ve all sort of known about it for most of our lives but it wasn’t until these four reporters put it in print in a paper so prominent that it couldn’t be ignored that it began to be addressed.

And these were crimes committed against innocent, vulnerable, gullible children. We were able to accept that this is a horrible thing that happens and nearly every one of us knew someone who had kids in vulnerable positions in parochial schools, choirs, and altar guilds who were in positions of risk but we didn’t talk about it.

And if we can diminish these children to the point that we can live comfortably with the knowledge that this huge system of abuse went on interminably for centuries, how much easier is it for us to dismiss the plight of those who are incarcerated, most of whom are likely incarcerated for very good reasons.

And yet, men and women, even prisoners of war are not kept bunched up in tiny cells. And yes, everything that you imagine might happen in those overcrowded conditions, all of the violence, rape, abuse… it all happens. I have talked with guards to admit that it happens and who insist that they cannot do anything to stop it.

Putting a lot of offenders in overcrowded conditions makes them harder to manage so it is not the guards fault that there are rapes and beatings and no opportunities to exercise or move around an outdoor enclosure.  It is not the guards fault.  The sheriff is in charge of the jail and he is frustrated and angry about the situation but he can’t either expand the jail nor turn away arrested criminals. It is not the sheriff’s fault.

The overcrowding largely comes from the longer stays of prisoners waiting for their day in court but the prosecutor’s office and the public defender’s offices are under-staffed and over worked… it is not their fault.

The legislature could approve the appointment of more judges, prosecutors, and defenders but the state budget is already too tight and the people don’t want to pay more taxes so it is not the legislature’s fault.

So I ask you, my sisters and brothers, we are treating human beings, some bad people, some innocent people, some people who are guilty of nothing more complicated that being addicted to drugs or unlucky enough not to have a family that was wealthy enough to hire a better lawyer…. We, not they, we are treating them in a way that if the Humane Shelter housed cats and dogs that way… well, this is awfully ironic to say, but someone would go to jail.

We know it is happening. We know it is wrong. We know it is unacceptable. Now what?

When we started this church we said that we wanted to be a prophetic church. Do you remember? We said that being prophetic happens in two different ways. One is in giving direct aid to the people who are in need…. We distribute groceries through Crosslines, we take meals to Bill’s Place every week, we send shoes to Nicaragua and distribute tents, sleeping bags, coats and gloves to the homeless every winter.

But the other way of being a prophetic church is to speak truth to power. In this case, to tell our county commissioners, our sheriff, our mayor, our city council, our legislators, our prosecutor’s office, our judges, that no matter what their budget is, no matter what their work load is, no matter what bureaucratic hurdles they have that gives them a reason to not fix this problem, that it is not okay.

I’m saying, if you can’t put them in jail and treat them like human beings, then you can’t put them in jail. There are some people in there whose crimes are disgusting to me but that doesn’t justify our county government committing disgusting crimes against these people. 

We need to speak the truth to power but there have been stories about our jail overcrowding in the paper for the past several years. It is going to take more than pointing out the inhumanity of the conditions. Our officials know how bad it is. They know how wrong it is. But until today, they have been comfortable in the knowledge that the citizens do not care. And maybe they are right, maybe no one cares…. But I’m prepared to bet that they are wrong. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to show them.

A Man Had Two Sons (One Was Addicted to Heroin)

Lent 4   March 6, 2016  Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, Pastor    “A Man Had Two Sons (One Was Addicted to Heroin)”  

 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. ²And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’

3 So he told them this parable:

11 Then Jesus said, ‘There was a man who had two sons. ¹²The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them. ¹³A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. ¹⁴When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. ¹⁶He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything. ¹⁷But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! ¹⁸I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; ¹⁹I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’ ” ²⁰So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him. ²¹Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” ²²But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe—the best one—and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; ²⁴for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” And they began to celebrate.

25 ‘Now his elder son was in the field; and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶He called one of the slaves and asked what was going on. ²⁷He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf, because he has got him back safe and sound.” ²⁸Then he became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. ²⁹But he answered his father, “Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that I might celebrate with my friends.³⁰But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” ³¹Then the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. ³²But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” ’

I’ll not read it but the story of the Prodigal Son is printed in your liturgy this morning. If you are joining us through the internet, you will find the story in the 15^th chapter of Luke.  It is one of the parables that is unique to Luke.

You could stand up in almost any church in the nation and solemnly say, “There was a man who had two sons. . .” an nearly everyone in the congregation would begin to finish the story in their own minds. One son is obedient and disciplined but his brother has appetites that demand attention.

We receive it in the form of a first century Jewish family narrative so the son who wanders away does things that a Jewish father doesn’t want his son to do.  He leaves the land and, by implication, leaves the faith. He is unproductive, wanton… what the Irish call a “wild rover.” He consorted with people who were not his people. He indulged, at least according to his righteous brother, in drinking and sex with Gentiles, and ended up tending to pigs… the ultimate of non-kosher jobs.

The surprise twist in the story is that the son who has blown it so badly, returns to his father’s house and there, where he might have expected to have been rejected if not, in fact, stoned to death in an honor killing, he was fully restored to his status as a son, welcomed back into the family and made whole.

The story holds little surprise for those of us who have grown up hearing it. It needs a fresh setting, something more modern, more contemporary.

If you were writing the story today, what elements would you use to describe a son who had separated himself from the family as far as he could go?

We might talk about a teenaged girl, reared in the Methodist Church of the Midwest who becomes radicalized by watching Isis recruitment videos who slips away to Syria to become the bride of an Islamic terrorist.

Certainly, the most common experience in the first twenty years that I was in the ministry, was when a son or daughter tried to tell his or her parents that he or she was gay. 

I have literally had grown sons brought to me by his parents to ask me to cast out the demon of homosexuality from their beloved son. It was not until the late 1990’s that I ever got to meet a married couple that openly loved their openly gay son or daughter. It was a long time coming and the nightmare is not over for many people mired in the prejudice of traditional Christianity.

But, if you will forgive me for being shockingly personal, I can actually give you an example from my own family life.  My brother and I had a friend in high school that was arrested on a drug charge. His arrest was unusual enough in our small Kentucky town that there was a story about it in the Glasgow Daily Times. 

My father read the story aloud in the living room and then folded the paper, looked at my brother and at me and said, “If either of you are ever arrested for having drugs I will come down to the jail, not to bail you out, but I will bring my revolver and I will shoot you right then and there.”

My father was a deacon at the First Christian Church. My mother was the church secretary. They had attended Bible studies and Sunday School all of their lives. They knew the story of the Prodigal Son very well but my father had no intentions of showing mercy to any child of his who used drugs.

My mother might have added beer or wine to that list but thankfully she didn’t get a vote on that fine distinction.

I don’t want you to think that my parents were monsters. They did a lot of good things.  They were hard working, honest, disciplined people…. They were both the son who stayed home and obeyed their father and they had nothing but contempt for any prodigal who might bring shame on the family.

When I hear of mercy killings in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip, I am never surprised. I understand that world. I get it. I knew that I too could mess up badly enough to have been killed by my own father.

It is in the Quran and it is in the Hebrew Bible as well. Not simply as a threat or a concept. Jesus had likely seen it done. Jesus tells this story to people who might have expected, albeit sadly, but still fully expected, that the prodigal son would be taken outside the city and stoned to death. His brother might well have thrown the first stone.

It has not been shown here but one of the Oscar winning documentaries this year is Girl in the River about honor killings in Pakistan where now between 700 and a 1000 honor killings take place every year, nearly 3/4^th of which are young girls, many who have been the victims of rape. It is a real thing.

In America, we don’t do honor killings. That’s too messy for us and, besides, we’re Americans, there has got to be a way to turn a tidy profit off someone going off the rails, and indeed, there is.

Drug use is the distant land our prodigals wander into. In the 1960’s, President Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty. The concept actually had merit and not a few serious markers of success but by 1971, President Nixon turned the war on poverty into a war on the poor.  He called it a “War on Drugs.”

I have no idea whether he actually believed his own propaganda or if Nancy Regan actually believe that it was a matter of “just saying ‘no’,” but tremendous resources were brought to bear in policing, international drug interdiction and of course a massive build of prisons where we could punish the addicted for being addicted.

Just say “no.” Just say “no.” I heard one expert in the field compare telling an addict to “just say ‘no’” is about like telling a room full of coffee drinking church members that they have to hold their pee for the next 48 hours.  Just don’t go…. Just don’t. It is your decision. You are in control. Just don’t go for a couple of days.

And you thought you were uncomfortable when I told you about my father threatening to shoot me. . . I’ve got about ten more minutes to this sermon before you might be able to slip out of here and go to the restroom unnoticed.

There are about 23 million people with addiction problems in the United States.  23 million who can’t go to sleep while there is still a beer in the refrigerator. Who can’t even use the restroom in a friend’s house without looking through the medicine cabinet to see if there are any narcotics there just waiting to be secreted away.

We have estimated that there are about ten thousand people in our immediate area who are using meth though even that scourge has lately seen itself being edged out of the market by a resurgence of heroin use. Americans have an incredible appetite for drugs. We are 5% of the world’s population but we consume 40% of the world’s drugs….and that after 45 years of a war on drugs that has cost billions of dollars.

Over the years, the hunger for more strict punishments has raised the bar. You can be charged with a felony for possessing no more than one tablet of Adderol or one Zanax that you don’t have a prescription for. The cocaine dust left on a mirror used to snort coke, just the dust on the mirror, is enough to earn you a felony charge.

2 million Americans, either in jail or on parole, most of whom were caught somewhere in the web of drug use, distribution, or manufacture. This is our honor killing. Addiction is a problem but we have insisted that it is a crime. We insist upon treating addicts as criminals and by putting them through our prison system, we get to prove our own point by turning them into criminals who cannot get a job, an education, public housing nor do we allow them to vote.  They are cast off and sent into the distant country where they will do menial jobs for the rest of their miserable lives…unless they come from a rich family, a different set of rules are applied in those cases but I don’t have time to chase that bunny into the bushes.

In Michael Moore’s most recent documentary, Where to Invade Next, Moore stages tongue-in-cheek one-man invasions of several Western European democracies to steal their best ideas. . . many of which actually originated in the USA.  I believe that this is Moore’s best film yet and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

In one section, he invades Portugal, where the government used to conduct a war on drugs very similar to our own.  However, once they realized that after a generation of punishment and incarceration that the problem was just getting worse, they reversed their tactics.

In Portugal, it was not simply a matter of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs they way certain parts of the USA are now trying.  If you just legalize drugs and that is all you do, then, sure, you get tax revenue and you will get an increase in crime, a decrease in productivity, and a lot more addiction… even in the case of marijuana. 

Portugal did not simply shrug their shoulders and give up on drug users, they just took the more loving, kind, and realistic approach of acknowledging that addiction is a problem that calls for treatment, not a crime that demands punishment. In the 15 years since Portugal decriminalized drug use, actual drug use has gone down by nearly half and their jails are nearly empty.

It has not turned Portugal into a drug free world as ours is not. Their drug czar observed, even he is not free of addiction…. He drinks coffee, alcohol, uses the internet, watches TV…. You see, we are all users, we just have to try to confine the use to something short of a problem.

I’ll confess that though I did my masters thesis on the treatment of alcoholism and I worked as a chaplain in a VA treatment program, I don’t really like working with addicts. The failure rate is too high. About half of addicts will go back to abusing drugs within a year of treatment and while have a 50% success rate is great, the failures have often ended up dead and I have lost my taste for that kind of risk.

Still, I trace the birth of my own substantive spiritual life to the recovery movement. I became interested in AA when I offered to take a church member to meetings to get him to go. 

He decided that all of the old drunks at the AA meeting were just a bunch of hypocrites and so he quit going. Jim returned to drinking and a few months later was found dead in his home having literally starved to death in isolation and intoxication.

But I kept going to the meetings because what I saw there was what I thought church was supposed to be…. People who were being honest about their own problems who were reaching out to one another to find the strength, support, and guidance to not end up like Jim did.

After all of these years I can’t really tell you how much confidence that I put in the actual content of the 12 step program of AA or AlAnon.  I’m not sure that they wouldn’t have similar success if they all just got together and read the phone book to each other because… and this is just my opinion, I believe that the healing comes from the relationships, the friendships, the community, the connection with other people who, like them, are broken and willing to admit it.

Our emphasis on community is not an accident. It is a core spiritual value. Jung suggested that a part of the reason we called alcoholic beverages “spirits” is because addiction is, at some level, a spiritual thirst, a hunger, a need.  Not a need for religion… goodness knows, religion can make you need a drink…. A spiritual need…. A need to be connected, supported, cared for, loved, sometimes protected and sometimes challenged, and sometimes being aware that someone needs us too… that’s community and that, I believe, is where all healing happens.