September 23, 2009 — 7:51 PM
Walking a fine line
Theme intro:
This evening we continue with the third sermon in our series based on A Social Creed for the 21st Century. The topic that we will explore tonight is “Those Affected by Drugs.” This issue is one that necessarily comments on society’s understanding of what drugs are and policies that have been put into place to stop the use of illegal drugs. These are conversations that don’t often take place within the walls of religious places (much like my last sermon topic). But shouldn’t they? We will talk more about that in a moment.
Sermon:
Okay. So. Drugs.
Like I said earlier, there’s no way to hold a discussion about this topic without in some way addressing policies about drugs. And when we go there, we bring politics inside the church building. That makes many people uncomfortable. So before we go any further I think we need to have a brief discussion about the First Amendment to the Constitution and the whole idea of the Separation of Church and State.
The First Amendment reads: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
The idea of the separation of Church and State came up at the same time as the Constitution was being drawn up. The Founding Fathers worked to find a peaceful solution for how the religious views of those in all the different states coming together in the new union could be maintained and respected. This idea has come to mean two things: the secularity of government (so that no one religion has a say in how it is run) and the freedom of religious exercise.
I’m wondering how these historical ideas influence you? How do you understand the role of faith in politics? How does what you hear within these walls affect your understanding of how our world should be run? Or does it? Should faith and politics mix?
[get comments from the congregation]
I firmly believe that the national government should be secular. I believe this because if faith becomes a part of our public policy making, then first we have decide which faith that will be. Will it be the Roman Catholic faith that gets the voice? Or how about the Southern Baptist? Or maybe the Buddhists should take the debate. Or Muslims. Or Scientologists. How would we decide that? Majority vote? But then, within each religion you have different factions that hold stricter to some beliefs than to others. Which of those would hold sway over our way of thinking.
Okay. So I think I’ve made my point here. A decision was made way back at the making of our union as the United States of America to allow many different religions to be honored on our shores. And there is no going back from that (nor should there be). So that necessarily means we need to have a non-biased, a.k.a. a secular, government.
But, having said that, I don’t think that that is entirely possible. Because we each make our decisions based on whatever overarching principles guide our lives. For those of us who are Christians, our understanding of who God is and how God wants us to live shapes how we think about the world. And, in turn, that shapes the policies we fight to enact to allow us to live into what we believe God is calling us to be as individuals and as a society.
People of faith don’t, and shouldn’t, check that faith at the door when they walk into the political arena. People of faith do need to tread lightly, making sure not to push their own religious beliefs onto those who do not share them.
I have props. (I used to teach elementary and middle school – some habits die hard!)
Here we have the two parts of the Constitution of the PC(USA) of which we are a part. Part I is the Book of Confessions – a collection of ten creeds and confessions taken from different periods of the Christian church. Each one offers a snapshot of essential beliefs of the time in which it was written. We believe that gathering all of these together in one book offers a richer, more complete, understanding of who God is, how God works in the world, and who God wants us to be. This is the first part of the Constitution because we have to know answers to those questions before we can get to Part II, the Book of Order, that offer suggestions of how we are to be in community together.
Belief grounds action. Not action then belief.
Now, granted, the Book of Order offers guidelines for a Christian community seeking to regulate its life together. But this way of being offers us a model for how we should regulate our life in general. Our faith should ground us. It should influence our every action. It should affect the decisions we make.
So with that in mind, let’s get back to our topic for the evening – drugs. Well, really it’s “those affected by drugs.”
When you hear that phrase, “those affected by drugs,” who do you think of?
[get responses from the congregation]
How many of you have watched some or all of the HBO series “The Wire?” It was a series all about drugs and politics in the fine city of Baltimore, MD. Every person in that show was affected by drugs. Many of the characters never took drugs, but their lives were intricately involved with those who moved, sold, used, and benefited from the illegal drug trade. I think that show did a great deal to help us understand what a huge problem drugs are for our society.
Did you know that the War on Drugs began officially back in 1969? It’s as old as I am! Then President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs hoping that in doing so he would be able to rally forces and resources to rein in the ever-growing problem of the use of illegal substances.
That’s a long time to be at war. Forty years. And yet, here we are, no closer to winning that war than when it first began.
And that is why on May 13th of this year, President Obama’s administration declared they would no longer use that term because it is counter-productive and is contrary to the policy favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce drug use.
All I can say to that is “Hallelujah!”
According to Wikipedia (as always, my go to source for information – so take it with a grain of salt), the number of arrests for drug offenses in the 1980s rose 126%! The number of arrests for all other crimes at that time only rose by 28%. A high number, to be sure. But nothing compared with the rise in the number of drug-related arrests.
And then there’s a report from the U.S. Dept. of Justice that states that from 1990 through 2000, “the increasing number of drug offenses accounted for 27% of the total growth among black inmates, 7% of the total growth among Hispanic inmates, and 15% of the growth among white inmates.” And the numbers in California are even higher since the approval of the Three-strikes law fifteen years ago.
Is arresting people who have any involvement whatsoever with illegal drugs the answer to the problem? There has been much, often heated, debate about that. Statistics and reports have been cited by both proponents and opponents to this method of dealing with the drug problem.
But we as Christians need to stop and ask ourselves that all too clichéd question: What would Jesus do?
I believe our passage from Mark for this evening gives us one glimpse into how Jesus would and did respond to someone who was seen as a danger to the public. Someone who had repeatedly been chained and restrained, but who had always managed to break free.
Now the text doesn’t say that this man that Jesus encounters is on drugs. It says the man is “with an evil spirit.” But I would dare to say that a fair number of people who have tried to quit drugs (even the legal drugs tobacco and alcohol) would say that the desire for those drugs was like an evil spirit that would not let them go.
Again, to draw from the show “The Wire,” Bubbles tried many times to get off of drugs but he kept finding himself drawn back into using. I know some of you have not seen the end of the series yet so I won’t say how it all ends for him. But throughout the show we see the crazy lengths he would do to get enough money for another hit. He humanized the drug user for me in a way I had never seen before. He truly wanted to stop, but his addiction was so much larger than him. I found myself pulling for him each time, hoping that this time would be the one that he would finally break free.
In the show, Bubbles didn’t get jail time because he was an informant for the police and because the police were concentrating on getting the dealers. But in real life, our jails and prisons are filled to overflowing with people who have been caught possessing and/or using drugs.
But Jesus didn’t try to bind this man again as the local people had. He didn’t order that the man be thrown into jail. And he didn’t continue to isolate the man – leaving him to run wild among the tombs on the outskirts of the town. No, Jesus spoke to that demon within and told it to get out. Jesus addressed the problem directly. Jesus gave the man treatment not judgment.
Unfortunately for the pigs nearby, Jesus also listened to the wishes of that demon named Legion and allowed it to go into the pigs sending them running into the water to drown. That didn’t work out so well for the pigs or their owners who came charging after Jesus. But that’s another story.
Jesus was calm in the face of this crazed man who had sent everyone else scrambling for chains and bonds to hold him.
Jesus spoke words of healing. Addressing the man’s problem not the problems the man was causing.
Jesus accepted this man whom society had shunned as a beloved child of God and did not give up on him.
I chose to read the lines from A Brief Statement of Faith from the PC(USA) this evening because they draw together all of these aspects of who we believe Jesus is and what Jesus came to do. Listen to them again:
Jesus proclaimed the reign of God:
preaching good news to the poor
and release to the captives,
teaching by word and deed
and blessing the children,
healing the sick
and binding up the brokenhearted,
eating with outcasts,
forgiving sinners,
and calling all to repent and believe the gospel.
That sounds very different to me from what has been our policy with regards to drug offenders.
So what do we do?
Well, I think a very large first step has already been taken. Backing off from the War on Drug language enables the focus to be more on treatment and reducing drug use. With this simple, yet monumental, change we de-escalate the rhetoric and that will allow us to be more calm and levelheaded in the debate about how to best move forward.
I will leave you with some suggestions from the book that we are using as a basis for this series, Social Creed for the 21st Century: Jesus and the Social Gospel. In it, the author argues for decriminalization of drugs.
At the mere mention of that concept many people’s suspicions are raised. Doesn’t decriminalizing drugs mean making them legal? Wouldn’t this just be making our country like the area of Baltimore that came to be known as Hamsterdam in the show “The Wire”?
“No,” this author argues. His idea for what decriminalization includes two important steps.
First, we must “remove the artificial surplus value of drugs making [that] surplus … unavailable to organized crime.” By making drugs illegal, we force them underground and encourage trafficking and abuse.
And, second, we need to admit that there will still be a demand for drugs. So the author argues that the government should regulate those drugs now deemed illegal in the same way that it regulates the legal drug tobacco. His argument is this:
If our government controlled the distribution of extremely dangerous drugs, we would know where the drug users are and where their drugs came from, and they, the addicts, would have a chance to receive the treatment they need to kick their habit.
Is this idealistic? Probably. Could it actually work? The author argues “yes. Look at Denmark and Holland!”
But author acknowledges that we Christians have to figure out how to walk the fine line between “the private policy we have…to keep our bodies as unpolluted temples provided by God and available for use solely for God’s purposes” and instituting “public policy that helps the addicted to set themselves free.”
How do we reconcile our belief that drug abuse is a sin because it dishonors God’s good gift to us with creating a public policy that allows people to use drugs legally? How do we let our faith inform our politics without condemning others to a life of addiction?
I think the answer lies in where we place the emphasis. Will we value God’s call to treat our bodies as temples for God over God’s example of healing love shown in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ?
God, in Jesus, works to set the captive free and to bring about wholeness and healing for all of creation. God calls us to join in that endeavor. How will we respond to that call?
