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.