Scriptures: Isaiah 55:1-9 Psalm
63:1-8
I Corinthians 10:1-6, 9-13 Luke 13:1-9
In the 1980’s, the Partnership for a Drug Free America ran an
ad showing a rat in a metal cage . The rat hits a lever, and down drops a white
pellet. With increasingly alarming music playing in the background, the rat
begins to chew on it, and as the rat chews on the pellet, the rat becomes
clumsy, stumbling around the cage. The
rat chews on it some more, becoming clumsier still, to the point where it can
barely move. But the rat continues to
return to the pellet, chewing off more…..eventually dying. The voiceover for the ad says, “There’s one
drug that is so addicting that 9 out of 10 lab rats will keep using…and
using….and using…. Until death. It’s called cocaine, and it can do the same
thing to you.” [1]
Experiments were done with rats alone in cages, some equipped with plain water,
some with water spiked with cocaine. The
rats with the spiked water returned to it over and over, until they were addicted,
eventually until they died.[2]
This morning’s Old Testament reading comes from the portion
of Isaiah that Biblical scholars call “the Book of Comfort” – this section runs
from Isaiah 40 roughly to Isaiah 55. The
early chapters of Isaiah, chapters 1 through 39, were written to warn the Jews
that God was greatly displeased with them, and that if they continued on their
course, they would meet with destruction – as happened when Babylon overran
Jerusalem, destroying the city and temple.
But starting with Isaiah chapter 40, the tone shifts. This
section was written at the end of the Jew’s exile in Babylon, when Cyrus the
Persian had conquered Babylon, and issued his famous decree allowing the Jews to return home to
Jerusalem. The people had been in exile
in a foreign land for decades, with the institutions that supported their
culture long destroyed. Few of the Jews
who had been exiled all those decades ago were still living, and their children
had no memory of what Jerusalem and its temple had been, only stories passed
down from their parents. Would those
hand-me-down stories be enough to motivate people to return home?
Isaiah is urging his listeners to trust God and return to
Jerusalem, and so what does he offer them?
A sermon, warning that God will punish them again if they mess up as
they had in the past? A lecture, with an
accusatory finger pointed at them, reminding them of the sins that had led to
their exile? No, Isaiah offers them – a
banquet invitation! ‘Ho, come to the
water! You with no money come, buy and eat. Buy wine and milk, without money
and without price! Why spend hard-earned
money on that which is not food and does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me at
eat what is nourishing. Come and eat
fine food!” Isaiah’s invitation is like
food and drink to starving people – and not just any food, not blue plate
special food, not baked goods and vegetables that are past their sell-by date,
but fine wine and top-drawer food. For
us, halfway through Lent, when many people fast or give up favorite food items,
it may be jarring to hear this passage in which God through Isaiah is not just
inviting but commanding his people to chow down on filet mignon and wash it
down with their finest beverage of choice.
What’s more, Isaiah promises that they will be living so high that the
surrounding nations will come running to them.
At this point, the Tom Petty fans among us may remember the words
“You don’t have to live like a refugee.”
And that’s basically Isaiah’ message to those who were refugees in
Babylon – you don’t have to live like this.
God’s got something better for you. Of course, Isaiah warns that the
invitation will not be extended indefinitely, as he cries, “Seek the Lord while
he may be found, call unto him while he is near. Let the wicked turn from their ways and the
unrighteous from their evil thoughts.”
But even Isaiah’s warning is given, not to condemn, but to invite them
to end self-destructive behavior so that their own lives can be lived more
fully.
Isaiah’s words of hope were written to a people in
exile. We have an example of what exile
looks like in our own congregation. Our
member Isaac came here as a refugee from Liberia. He lives here in exile. Even though he has put down roots here, he
has not forgotten his homeland; he is active with groups of exiled Liberians to
influence policy in Liberia, so that life will be better, if not for him, at
least for his children. But there are
other ways to be in exile, with barriers other than distance standing between
us and the lives we would like to live.
Our homeless members and near-homeless members are in a kind of economic
exile in their own country, unable because of poverty to live with a sense of
security, unsure even where their next meal is coming from, without a safe
place to lay their head. Others may have more economic security, but
because of social policies live with the knowledge that all that can be taken
away at an instant. For example, there
are no federal laws protecting LGBTQ persons against discrimination in housing
and employment, and protection against discrimination in Pennsylvania is spotty
at best, with Philadelphia and some other large cities offering robust
protections while more rural communities offer little or nothing. In August
2018, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission has interpreted existing law
to afford more protection against discrimination, but what one administration
enacts the next may strike down. LGBT persons live with the knowledge in the
back of their minds of the grim reality that no matter how much security and
comfort they may have at any present, the carpet could be pulled out from under
them at any moment, that everything can be taken from them at the stroke of a
pen.
Beyond these specific examples, many of us live with
barriers between us and the lives we would like to be living. Our employment and housing opportunities may
be limited by bad references and bad credit ratings, by convictions and
criminal records; our activities may be limited by health challenges; our sense
of connectedness to others may be limited by broken relationships. The pain caused by such barriers, such limitations,
may lead us to make unhealthy choices – if not drugs or alcohol, we may turn to
other pacifiers such as overeating or other forms of excessive consumption, or smoking,
or gambling, or overwork – all substances or behaviors that we know are
unhealthy, but that may distract us from the pain, at least in the moment. Isaiah
called his listeners to turn from spending their money on that which is not
food, on that which does not satisfy. He
told his listeners , “You don’t have to live like a refugee.” Our reading from Isaiah reminds us that against
all these limitations, God offers us, not a lecture, but an invitation to a
better life, an invitation to turn away from isolation and turn toward life among
God’s people, among the beloved community, where from the community’s resources
we can feed and clothe and shelter, and educate and embrace and protect – and
give our members a firm enough foundation, a place to stand on, so that they
can turn away from unhealthy pacifiers and self-destructive behavior.
Earlier, I mentioned the experiments around rats and
addiction, that a rat in a cage with access to cocaine will use it repeatedly
and become addicted. Bruce Alexander had
done research in the 1970’s with rats and cocaine, but took his research in a
different direction. He realized that
existing experiments involved rats – which are social animals - isolated in cold
metal cages, with nothing but the addictive substance as a diversion. He constructed what he called “rat park”,
with everything a rat could want, with plentiful food, places to hide, and
places to run, and places to gather, and put small groups of lab rats in his
rat park. Among other options for food
and water, Alexander made water spiked with cocaine available to the lab rats…..but,
he found, the rats just weren’t that interested. Rat park offered enough other forms of
stimulation and community that the spiked water just wasn’t all that
enticing. He then introduced addicted lab
rats from earlier experiments into “rat park”…..and while they went through
withdrawal, afterward they were able to join with the other rats, without
recourse to the cocaine-spiked water.
Alexander’s conclusion was that addiction among his rats wasn’t an
inevitable result of consuming cocaine, but a response to being isolated in a
cage with no other forms of stimulation….more broadly, to isolation and
miserable living conditions, with cocaine-spiked water as the only respite. In looking back on those Rat Park experiments
40 years later, Alexander writes, “The view of addiction from Rat Park is that
today’s flood of addiction is occurring because our hyperindividualistic,
hypercompetitive, frantic, crisis-ridden society makes most people feel
social[ly] and culturally isolated. Chronic isolation causes people to look for
relief. They find temporary relief in addiction to drugs or any of a thousand
other habits and pursuits because addiction allows them to escape from their
feelings, to deaden their senses, and to experience an addictive lifestyle as a
substitute for a full life.” .[3] Of course, Alexander’s suggestion runs
counter to US policy; after a 40 year war on drugs and 40 years of tough on crime policies, under
administrations of both major political parties, we have more people isolated
from society by means of incarceration - over 2 million – than any other
country In the world, more than China whose population is roughly four times
our population, far more than Russia.[4] We have the highest rate of incarceration – roughly
650 per 100,000 population , or put another way roughly 2/3 of 1% of the population
in prison at any given time – more than any other country – and after all that,
we have an epidemic of opioid abuse; our
country is so overflowing with drugs
it’s practically dripping out of our eyeballs. The so-called war on drugs has
left our country swamped with drugs. [Maybe we should declare a war on
chocolate instead, so that we can be floating on a sea of chocolate instead of drowning
in an ocean of opioids?] While turning a
blind eye to crime is no solution either, is it possible that rehabilitation
with community support could more successfully bring healing both on an
individual and a societal level?
In our Gospel reading, Jesus is discussing the events of the
day with his listeners. Pilate had some
worshipers executed, and the crowd wanted to know if this was punishment from
God because they had been especially sinful.
Jesus came back with an example of his own – a tower fell on some
people, killing them – and asked the crowd if they were worse sinners than
anyone else. Jesus said no in both
cases, that those executed by Pilate and those crushed by the tower were not
worse sinners than anyone else – but that the crowd shouldn’t feel smug because
they had been spared these calamities, that it was only by God’s grace that
they were still standing, and that if they didn’t turn their lives around,
death in one form or another awaited them as well.
He then told a story that we might call “the parable of the
impatient landowner.” The owner of a
plot of land walked up to his gardener, pointed out a three-year-old fig tree
that had borne no fruit, and demanded that it be cut down to make the ground
available for other use. The gardener
pleaded with the landowner to give the tree one more year. In preparing this sermon I learned that while
many fig trees bear fruit after two years, some may take as long as six years
to produce figs – it’s a matter of the fig tree’s own maturing process as well
as the quality of the soil. The gardener
asked for one more year, and said that he’d give the tree some extra TLC –
turning the soil, adding fertilizer in the form of manure. The gardener wanted the tree to have the most
favorable conditions possible to be productive.
And, he told the landowner, if that doesn’t work, next year you can cut
the tree down.
In response to an unproductive tree, the gardener offered,
not punishment in the form of cutting down the tree, but grace, in the form of
additional time and care. This is
actually what reminded me of what I had read some time ago about the Rat Park
experiment, that isolation seemed to feed addiction, while the grace that the lab
rats experienced in Rat Park seemed to lead them away from addiction. Now, we can respond to grace either with
gratitude or with entitlement, and Jesus recognized this when he told his
listeners that the fact that they hadn’t experienced calamity wasn’t necessarily
a reward for good behavior, but grace from God to which they should respond by
repenting and changing the course of their lives. In the same way, while proponents of the
prosperity gospel tell us that good fortune is God’s reward for our faithfulness,
Jesus is telling us that our good fortune may just be God’s grace given to us
in hopes that our behavior will change.
At the same time, perhaps grace – not turning a blind eye to bad
behavior, but engagement, education and rehabilitation - rather than punishment
should be our response to disappointing behavior from others.
“Ho, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters,” Isaiah
invited the Jewish exiles in Babylon….and invites all who are in exile from
living life to the full. “Why spend your
money on that which does not satisfy?”, Isaiah asked the exiles – and asks us. “You
don’t have to live like a refugee!” is the
message of our readings today. May we turn from our addictions and pacifiers,
and turn toward Jesus, who offers us living water and the bread of life. And may we invite others to come to the
waters, invite others to eat the bread of heaven, and feed until they want no
more. Amen.
[1] This
can be seen on the Youtube video “Cocaine Rat – Drug Free America”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kS72J5Nlm8
[2] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html
[3] http://brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarceration_rate
