A Sermon on Rats and CRT

Scripture: Philemon, Luke 14:25-33

ENTRY
In August we were selling our house and our family spent a wonderful week 
on a lake deep in the Adirondacks.
On the last day a real estate agent called to tell us 
that a Man had entered our home while we were away.
We were frightened.

We spoke with the state police and learned that it was a young man 
I will call Jesse who lives around the corner - 
We were told that he has used and sold drugs since elementary school.
His parents threw him out of their home because he was using meth.
He looks for empty houses like ours was and enters; well known to police.
He doesn't know what's going on; out of touch with reality.

The Police sent Jesse to a mental health facility, but he was soon released.
Jesse returned, entered our porch, left his bag of clothes.
Again we were afraid. I installed a new lockset on the porch door.

Local police said they can arrest him but he will be out on the street again.
They implied that New York's "bail reform" prevented judges from keeping him in jail. 
I have thought about this and do not see this as the true problem.
Bail reform prevents those accused of non-violent crimes 
from incarceration for long periods awaiting trial.
We wanted him to get help, but the deep problem is that our towns 
don't have the needed resources that might help someone like Jesse.
I needed to understand more about meth.

METH
Methamphetamine releases high levels of dopamine in the brain
making the user want more of it.
Meth use alters judgment and decision-making 
leading to risky behaviors because it interferes 
with thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering.
Long-term methamphetamine use leads to 
extreme weight loss, severe dental problems, intense itching leading to skin sores, 

            anxiety, confusion, memory loss, sleep problems, and sometimes violent behavior.

ADDICTION
When we encountered Jesse and the police, 
I stumbled on an article by Johann Hari about morphine addiction, 
and about something called "rat park" and "rat heaven."
The article described an experiment was done in the '60s 
with a rat in a cage, given two water bottles. 
One was just water, and one was water laced with morphine. 
The rat would almost always prefer the drugged water, 
and almost always kill itself very quickly, within a couple of weeks. 

Other experimenters in the ‘70s said, “Well, wait a minute. 
We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. 
Let’s try this a little bit differently.” 
So they built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. 
Everything your rat could want: Great food. It’s got loads of other rats for fun and sex.
And they’ve got both the water bottles, one regular and one drugged. 
But in Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. 
They hardly use any of it. 
None of them ever overdose. 
None of them ever use it in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. 

CAGES
So the experimenters concluded that something was wrong 
with our ideas about addiction. 
It’s not a moral failing as conservatives argued, 
and the drug doesn't take over your brain as liberals said. 
Addiction is about your cage. 

Addiction is an adaptation we make in response to our environment. 
It's the environment in which we live, specifically the systems we create 
which lead us to want and do certain things.
It's where we live and the conditions in which we live.

To think about addiction in humans and not rats,
we can see that we have created a society 
where significant numbers of our fellow citizens 
cannot bear to live their lives without being drugged. 
We’ve created a world in which individuals are on their own, 
isolated from each other, rather than engaged in social interactions.
More of us live alone than ever before, and too many of us

        binge eat chips and cookies and candy, or drink alcohol,
and binge watch Netflix and other TV outlets.
Too many of us are more like the rat in the first cage with limited choices, 
than like the bonded, connected rats 
in the cages that fulfill our social needs. 

So, the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. 
The opposite of addiction is connection. 
Our whole society, is geared towards making us connect with things
when what we need is to be more connected with people. 

This is a reason AA works; it connects people.
Here I was, reading about rats and cages, and I found the scripture for today, 
that includes Paul's letter to Philemon, about a slave he met in prison.

In first century Palestine 10-15% of the population were slaves 
and Slavery was considered normal.
Because the rich had slaves, most people who were not slaves 
had little access to employment, 
and were pushed into crushing poverty.
The SYSTEM of slavery caused poverty for everyone else (except the 1%).
These were the people Jesus came from, lived with, and taught.

Paul was much better off, but was jailed for preaching, 
which was "rabble rousing" to the Romans, 
inciting people to "foreign and subversive" ideas and customs.
Paul was jailed more than once, and once for two years, 
where he met Onesimus, a household slave, 
owned by a wealthy Jesus follower.
Slavery to Onesimus was like living in a cage, 
and he may have run away several times to be free.

Most of us cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to be a slave, 
but there are those among us who can.
Most Black Americans come from families with history in slavery.
Even when slavery as an institution was ended, 
the essence of slavery did not end.

One of my favorite singers is Nina Simone, 
made a Civil Rights song famous, 
"I wish I knew how it would feel to be free."
Little is known of the lyricist, Dick Dallas, there isn't even a picture of him. 
He wrote and she sang:
I wish I could break all the chains holding me.
I wish I could say all the things I should say
Say 'em loud, say 'em clear For the whole round world to hear.

I wish I could share all the love that's in my heart
Remove all the bars that keep us apart.
I wish you could know what it means to be me
Then you'd see and agree That every one should be free.

I wish I could give all I'm longing to give
I wish I could live like I'm longing to live
I wish I could do all the things I can do

Though I'm way overdue, I'd be starting anew
I wish I could be like a bird in the sky
How sweet it would be if I found I could fly

Oh, I'd soar to the sun and look down at the sea

And then I'd sing 'cause I'd know how it feels to be free....

CRITICAL THEORIES

When I learned about the Rat Park experiment,
I thought "Hey, this is CRITICAL ADDICTION THEORY."
That would describe how the experimenters looked deeply 
into the nature of addiction, learned new ways of seeing, 
thinking about, and understanding what causes addiction, 
how people become addicted, and how addiction behaviors can be changed.

Of course my labeling of this addiction problem echoes something in the news the past year:
CRITICAL RACE THEORY, which few people understand clearly. 
Basically, some lawyers wondered why all the new Civil Rights laws
in the 60's had so little effect on American society, specifically 

        why desegregating schools led Whites to withdraw their children 

from public schools and enroll them in private academies, 
leaving Black children in underfunded schools like where they began. 
This explained why Blacks continue to experience much of life in America as a kind of cage.

Our problem first of all is that we misunderstand the words "CRITIC" and "CRITICAL."
We commonly use those words to mean "making judgments," 
saying that something is wrong, and then blaming someone for it.
Ironically, that is what is being done to studies such as CRT
when CRT is blamed for imagined reverse racism.
Partly because of these attacks on CRT, there are now only 11 states 

        that do NOT restrict teaching about race in some way. 

But another meaning of "critical" is "to analyze and to think deeply about"
an issue or problem in order to uncover solutions to problems 
and deeper understandings of life.
Interestingly, in the churches about 150 years ago we had a similar issue 

                called "HIGHER CRITICISM" OF THE BIBLE" 

        which arose when scholars asked questions like:
    "Why are there two creation stories and different names for God in the Hebrew scriptures?"
    "Why are the first 3 gospels so similar to each other and so different from the 4th?'
Such Bible studies caused great anxiety among Christians 
who had been taught that the Bible was somehow perfect as it was
         and didn't need to be interpreted,
when actually the churches had kept the Bible in a cage 
                which prevented it from telling us the fullness of what was there.

And about the same time as I read about addiction, 
I read an article about how feminist writers are asking 
"Why is it that after 50 years of the struggle 
for women's equality, so little has been achieved?"
They described the cages women inhabit, but didn't use the phrase or name.
But I thought immediately, "This is CRITICAL FEMINIST THEORY."

This week (8-26) David Brooks in the NYTimes wrote about 
"Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be," and the answer is
that the internet and our phones have become cages for us.
Brooks did not label it "CRITICAL SOCIAL THEORY" but I do.

We don't think we have slavery any more, 
but we are slaves to our old habits, our prejudices, and our phones, 
and any addiction that afflicts us.
We are prisoners no less than Onesimus, we are in cages no less than lab rats.
There are systems of law, banking, property taxes, technology, and education,
and probably some government and private systems I can't think of.
But we can list the institutions; the elements of society, 
that used to connect us with each other:
Schools, churches, clubs and organizations, performance places, 
and dare I say it? Bowling alleys (now "family entertainment centers") and pool halls. 
Many of these are shrinking or have disappeared,

        but there will always be bars and pubs.

We in the churches are on the front lines of the terrible disruptions of our times, 
which have separated us, driven us apart, and devastated these institutions.
I have few solutions to the problems of the churches, 
but we must know more about all of these things and think on these things
so that we can work ourselves out of these social problems.
We need to be critics in the best sense of the word
to see more clearly and understand more deeply what is wrong, 
and find the clues and the possible changes that we can implement 
that will bring us out of our separations.

We are gathered today, in social meeting with each other, 
in the formal ritual act we call "communion," 
        to celebrate the many ways Jesus sets us free, 
                to be more profoundly connected, and therefore more human.
This makes us, in a sense, "prisoners for Christ," as Paul described himself,
perhaps more able to give up all our possessions, as Jesus urges us in Luke,
because they imprison us. May it be so.