Who Did it This Time? (A response to the mass shooting in Orlando)

Who Did It This Time?

In this video I am reading an article that I wrote in immediate response to the shootings at Pulse in Orlando. You can read the text on the Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/12/1537676/-Who-Did-it-This-Time-Maybe-a-Little-Bit-it-Was-All-of-Us?_=2016-06-12T07%3A22%3A00.749-07%3A00

Addiction: A Spiritual Disease

June 5, 2016        Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor    “Addiction: A Spiritual Disease”

“The Truth may be puzzling, it may be counter-intuitive, it may contradict deeply held prejudices, it may not be consistent with what we desperately want to be true, but our preferences do not determine what's true.”

Carl Sagan

Our topic today is addiction and I want to approach this topic in reverse order, that is, I want to start with my conclusions. Before anyone on YouTube gets distracted by sidebar ads or anyone sitting here starts to think that you have heard all of this before, let me make these three points:

1)   The war on drugs has been a terrible failure. Its inevitable failure would have been obvious to anyone who ever spent five minutes studying our previous experiment with Prohibition. The war on drugs has cost trillions of dollars, it has ruined millions of lives through incarceration, giving young people permanent criminal records, and it has fueled organized crime with endless resources of cash, guns, and political power.

2)   My second point is that addiction is not a crime. It is a problem. A.A. insists that it is an illness and that may be true in some cases. There are people, I’m convinced, who have a physiological addiction to drugs or alcohol but in most cases it is a psychological issue in much the same way that many people are addicted to sex, TV, the internet, smoking, or shopping. Because it is either an illness or a mental health problem, incarceration only makes it worse. We don’t lock people up for having cancer or for being depressed. You treat a disease or a mental illness; you cannot punish it out of existence.

Therefore resources being ineffectively spent on incarceration and law enforcement should be immediately transferred into proven, successful treatment programs.

And, if you are listening President Obama, you have about six months left in which you could pardon about a million people are currently in prison for non-violent drug offenses and wipe the slate clean of another ten million who have criminal records related to non-violent drug offenses. Nothing would help to stimulate our economy more, show greater leadership and compassion, and you wouldn’t even have to ask a recalcitrant congress to go along with you. In fact, damn you if you don’t do it because you are the only person who can and we both know that it should be done.

3) My third point is a restated agreement with something Carl Jung said at the dawn of the 20^th century… that is that root of addiction is a spiritual thirst and because it is a spiritual disease, the cure must also be a spiritual cure.

If you are a member of the very elite group of literate people who read my 1999 book,  Christian Wisdom for Today, you already know what an important role that the 12 step movement in AA has played in my life. Not because I was an alcoholic or an addict but because there was a spirituality that I discovered when attending meetings with church members who were seeking sobriety that I had not found in church.

I was a graduate student, serving a student church, and I was already getting very disheartened by the shallowness of church life.  I had gone to seminary thinking that faith was a matter of great urgency, of insurmountable importance, but I was finding that church was, by and large, a life enhancing exercise of such little meaning that people would leave over matters so small that it would embarrass Charles Darwin.

But when I persuaded an alcoholic church member to go to AA by promising that I would go with him, I discovered that the spirituality of AA was a matter of life or death. The mostly men and some women who met in a smoke filled room in the basement of the Methodist Church on the outskirts of Russellville, KY generally looked much older than they were. They had lived hard lives, most of which none of them could even remember.

They had lost marriages, family, jobs, and their health along with their youth and their self-respect, but in this little cluster of 20 to 30 recovering addicts, they had found the strength to return to sanity.

The 12 step movement was founding in the 1930’s and has been historically more successful than any other treatment program. And, what I say now, I want to say very carefully. I don’t want to be critical in a way that would give anyone permission to stop going to meetings or to be dismissive of a program that has worked for millions of people.

I want to talk about why it works but I don’t want to do an autopsy on a program that we still host here in our building every Thursday evening and that is still the best option for very many people.

The literature in the Big Book and the 24 Hour Book is astonishingly open minded and progressive in its religious assertions for a book written by people who were not theologians in the first half of the 20^th century. They insist that everyone pray to the God of their own understanding and they at least attempt to avoid making it a specifically Christian program though Christian religion is clearly the common language of those early founders.

I loved the aspect of the 12 steps that required of the sincere person seeking sobriety that they be willing to become completely honest with themselves about themselves. I liked the confessional aspect of the steps that made it necessary that you confess your failings to another person and that you literally partner with that person in accountability for how you want to change your life.

And I liked the community aspect of the final steps that insist that you not just come to meetings long enough to restore your own life, to find your own sobriety and then run along your merry way. The program implores those who are successful to remain active in AA groups, helping other addicts to find their way into a meaningful life.

And if you are listening to this sermon and you are currently active in an AA group and you are getting your first taste of sober living, you might want to pause this message and come back to it a few months from now because I want to take a look under the hood of this old beauty of a recovery program and when you are just starting, you really don’t want to over think the program, you just want to work the program.

But now, four generations later, we are being buried in a new wave of addiction in the United States. Not that the numbers anywhere near rival alcohol abuse but the severity of opiod addictions, both to prescription pain killers and to heroin has brought addiction to the front burner of social concerns once again.

Twenty years ago Dr. Thomlinson and I were involved in a research project funded by the Burrell Mental Health Fund to investigate the rise of methamphetamine addiction in the Ozarks. I learned a lot in the process of working on that project about the physiological aspects of how drugs affect the neuro-receptors in the brain and how a person’s will to stop using the drug can be destroyed in a very short period of use.

The people we interviewed in our research were all people who were either still incarcerated or were still on parole. We did not interview anyone who had managed to be an occasional meth user nor did we interview anyone who had managed to change their life and stop using without a long period of time in either treatment or incarceration.

So, it is easy to conclude from that kind of study that meth is bad, and we can say heroin is bad, cocaine is bad, oxycodone is bad, and whatever they invent next month or next year will likely be bad too.

What we didn’t know 20 years ago is that there were thousands of people all around us who had been occasional users and had managed to quit. There were people who were users in certain circumstances and they were able to change those circumstances before they ended up in jail.

A recent lab experiment with mice uncovered an important insight into the cure for addiction. The old format for conducting addiction experiments involved giving a lab rats or mice two water sources, one was just water and the other one had either cocaine or heroin in it.

In virtually every case, the caged rat would go repeatedly to the drugged water until it finally died of an overdose.  But recently a very clever fellow thought, of course an isolated animal with nothing to live for seek a mood altering drug but what if we created a kind of lab rat heaven, a place with lots of good food, friends, sex, exercise, interactions, and little rat families.

In that experiment, there were no overdoses, there were no addictive behaviors and almost all of the animals virtually ignored the drugged water source. It appears that social connection and meaningful living is the best cure for addiction.

As much as I don’t want to criticize the popular 12 step movements, it may just be that their actual program, especially in its dogmatic insistence upon absolute abstinence over learning to live a life of moderation may not be what made them successful in the first place. The real cure that has come out of the AA movement may just be the fact that they create community.

They tell new comers that they need to attend 90 meetings in 90 days…. They need to deeply invest time and energy into getting to know people in the meetings, get a sponsor, be in conversation with other people in recovery. Forgive me for saying it, but a lot of the meeting content may be bologna, but the meeting itself is the cure.

And before you dismiss that idea too quickly, let me remind you that it was estimated that some 70% of our battlefield American soldiers in Vietnam were using heroin while they were in Southeast Asia but only a fraction of them came back to the USA and continued their drug abuse… because they came back to family, jobs, college, a life that they wanted rather than the life they did not want.

I can tell you from my years of experience with working with addicts, none of them set out to become addicts and almost all of them were basically self-medicating…. In my line of work, they were mostly self-medicating for depression, by-polar disorder, or chronic pain.

There is no way to come up with a percentage but I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that most addiction begins as a desperate need to altar either a physical sensation of pain, or an emotional sensation of pain.  And therefore, neither outlawing the drug nor treating the addiction itself will ever make any sense if we cannot treat the actual causes of either physical pain or emotional distress.

And there is nothing that amplifies physical pain or emotional distress more than being cut off from meaningful, loving, supportive connection to others. Which, if I may put that into our present context…. Is why churches need to get their theology and their heads out of the clouds and start dealing with reality. Church needs to stop being a religious institution and start being spiritual communities where people can find meaningful connection, where they can expect compassion and understanding.

It can be said that the church has been the only army in history that ever made it a policy to shoot their own wounded. It is high time that the church becomes better at loving than we are at judging, better at creating community than creating division, and better at healing than we are at wounding.

God v God

These progressive sermons are available as podcasts at:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/progressive-faith-sermons/id419225485

Proper 4 -    May 29, 2016   Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor   “God vs God”

1 Kings 18:20-21, 30-39

²⁰So Ahab sent to all the Israelites, and assembled the prophets at Mount Carmel.

²¹Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” The people did not answer him a word. ³⁰Then Elijah said to all the people, “Come closer to me”; and all the people came closer to him. First he repaired the altar of the Lord that had been thrown down; ³¹Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, to whom the word of the Lord came, saying, “Israel shall be your name”; ³²with the stones he built an altar in the name of the Lord. Then he made a trench around the altar, large enough to contain two measures of seed. ³³Next he put the wood in order, cut the bull in pieces, and laid it on the wood. He said, “Fill four jars with water and pour it on the burnt offering and on the wood.” ³⁴Then he said, “Do it a second time”; and they did it a second time. Again he said, “Do it a third time”; and they did it a third time, ³⁵so that the water ran all around the altar, and filled the trench also with water. ³⁶At the time of the offering of the oblation, the prophet Elijah came near and said, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your bidding. ³⁷Answer me, O Lord, answer me, so that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” ³⁸Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the dust, and even licked up the water that was in the trench. ³⁹When all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, “The Lord indeed is God; the Lord indeed is God.”

Shortly after the war in Iraq was launched, Lt. General William Boykin was tasked with finding and either killing or capturing Osama Bin Laden. Perhaps because his previous assignments to fly helicopters into Iran in 1980 to rescue hostages in our embassy or his 1992 assignment to arrest Pablo Escobar in Columbia had been so successful. Boykin is a very religious man, so religious that a military psychiatrist had once said that he was not fit for duty, but he was given this task of finding Osama Bin Laden and he took it on as if it were a religious crusade. 

In fact, in a speech he delivered to an evangelical Christian event in 2003, he actually said:  "I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol."

He encouraged his Christian audience saying, "We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this.” That same year he told another religious audience that his boss, President George W. Bush was, “in the White House because God put him there." And see, all this time cynics like us thought he was put in the White House by five partisan Supreme Court Justices! It is indeed true that the Lord works in mysterious ways!

Though Bush tried to distance himself from Boykin’s anti-Muslim statements he was not fired. He retired from the military in 2006, leaving Osama Bin Laden for another administration to find. However, Boykin was recently fired from the teaching position he took in Virginia in retirement, reportedly for refusing to allow transgender students to use the restroom of their choice.  Bigotry against Muslims never seemed to hurt his career but the transgender community is well organized. Legislators in Texas, North Carolina, and South Dakota, well… and Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, …. As well as Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin… it appears that stupid bigotry is not regionally contained.

Now, it is obvious that General Boykin is one of the most shocking un-self-aware people ever to be in a position of leadership but I didn’t tell you about him simply to mock him for his ignorant prejudice. I mention him today to tell us something about ourselves.

It is like what Melissa Harris-Perry recently said about Donald Trump, the mere fact that Donald Trump is a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and violent man it is that his candidacy, in his popularity, is hold up a polished mirror to America.

Trump is irrelevant but what he is telling us about ourselves is that we an “id” a dark side of ourselves, that is still very racist, very anti-immigrant, very intolerant of other religions, still quite sexist, and still longing for authoritarian rule by a wealthy elite. If our nation did not harbor those horrible qualities, Trump would not be so poplar among voters. Trump is like a presidential dipstick and it is increasingly evident that America is a couple of quarts low on intelligence, morality, and civility.

Our lectionary reading today is from that well-known contest recorded in I Kings of the Hebrew Bible. In the 8^th century, not long after civil war had divided the Jewish state into the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, came a king, Ahab, who married the daughter of a neighboring king in Tyre. Ahab’s foreign-born wife, Jezebel, persuaded Ahab to abandon the Hebrew’s religion and to worship the Assyrian god, Baal.

History is always written by the victors and religious history is written from the perspective of what eventually became the orthodox view of history. So the Bible tells us that Ahab was even and his wife, Jezebel was even more evil, because they were straying from the Hebrew’s faith.

Of course, you must see, that if they had been successful in this religious reform and these ancient religious texts had been written by the priests of Baal, then Ahab and Jezebel would have been portrayed in stained glass windows in churches all over the world and they would be remembered as the Abraham and Moses of our religion.

There is more at work here than meets the eye. These texts were all redacted in the temple cult in the southern kingdom of Judah so their rivals in the north always get to play the bad guys. If it is possible to have less journalistic integrity than modern newspapers, the people who wrote the Bible had an agenda that trumped any concern about accurately recording history.

So they tell a story about how a wicked king and his horribly evil wife tried to lead the people astray but God’s superhero, Elijah, managed to kill the bad guys and restore the true faith. This narrative is just the gravy that covers the meat of the politics that was playing out beneath the religious language.

The tiny kingdoms of the ancient world had shifting loyalties and alliances that helped them to survive. Ahab didn’t meet Jezebel on Match.com, theirs was an arranged marriage to bring these two weak kingdoms together in an alliance, primarily against their stronger southern neighbor, Judah.

In the ancient world, the gods were conceived as living in heaven just above the temple where they were worshipped. Yahweh wasn’t just the God of Judah; Yahweh lived in Judah, just above the clouds above Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem.

When the Jews were taken into captivity in Babylon, they literally believed that they were too far away from God for their God to hear their prayers. The Gods of the ancient world were associated with a nation, with a place.

In almost every case, the God of any given nation was a war god. The Ark of the Covenant, described in Exodus, was probably originally a large throne that warriors carried into battle to symbolize the presence of God on the battle field.

The graphic battle between Elijah and the prophets of Baal represented a clash of nations…. Asking which culture would survive.  The battle of the United States against the nation of Iraq was portrayed by General Boykin as a battle between the Christian God and the Muslim God and Boykin was willing to say that our God is greater than their God…. A sadly sophomoric yet theological way of saying “My dad can beat up your dad.” And, in this case, he was right because his dad is armed with sophisticated artillery, and is backed up by a navy and an airforce, and their dad had none of that.

A great deal of the hostility between the Muslim world and the west is articulated in religious language but the real fear is cultural domination. If their cars, electronics, clothes, and even their foods fall to western influence… if their TV shows, movies, and music all come from Hollywood and New York then, they feel, what it means to be who they are is being destroyed.

France and Spain have long had laws that mandate that their TV and Radio stations play at least 40% of their content from France or Spain and at least 60% from Europe, to keep the USA from destroying their culture but now with satellite providing most of the TV and music, national governments are losing control.

The USA dominates the world, our culture, fashion, and fast food are pervasive the world over and yet we all know people who get scared out of their minds if they see a woman at the mall wearing a Hijab, or if they see Spanish signs at Home Depot.

And somehow, extremists on both sides, somehow want to us to believe that the real issue is that Allah and Yahweh are locked into a death match in a heavenly arena.

The story of Elijah is told in I Kings to encourage the kind of xenophobia that Gen. Boykin articulated, that the Iraq war wasn’t about controlling the oil fields of the Middle East, it was to prove that Christianity is superior to Islam. No one wants to send their sons and daughters to fight and possibly die defending low gasoline prices but they may be willing to sacrifice their own children to preserve, not simply our brand of religion, but to defend country music, NASCAR, Levis, Coke, McDonalds, Jack Daniels, and bacon.

You know that if Muslims ever run our grocery stores that bacon will become a black market product just like heroin and crack cocaine!? When politicians talk about fighting for our way of life, they are talking about bacon! They are talking about our consumer culture and our specific tastes. Fanatics may focus on the tenets of one faith against another faith but governments, whether they are western or eastern, are concerned with economics and power.

Jews and Muslims fight in the Middle East. Hindus and Muslims fight on the Indian subcontinent. Muslims and Buddhists fight in Indonesia. The largely secular or Christian west is willing to fight anyone and everyone all over the globe but I will say this and as soon as I say everyone in the sound of my voice will know instinctively that what I am saying is true:

Scrape away the hocus pocus from all of the world’s religions and underneath all of the rituals, creeds, and holy books, we’re all just trying to figure out how to be better people.  We have nothing to fight about.

We are all just trying to figure out how to make our lives a little better, to make the world a little better for our children and our grandchildren. And at the heart of what it takes to make us better people and to make the world better for our kids is to flatly refuse to be manipulated into another war that sends the poor of America to fight and kill the poor of another nation. Let the people say: