The parable of the __________.

The Rev. Alissa Newton

Fourth Sunday of Lent

text: Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32

“The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, And It's Not What You Think.” – this article kept coming up in my social media feed, posted and re-posted by my friends and contacts. Finally I clicked on it, and read the whole thing. The writer, a man named Johann Hari, spent three years researching addiction. He was interested in our culture’s approach including the so-called “war on drugs,” as well as alternative approaches to the treatment of addiction. What he learned, or at least the position he takes in his book and the article, is that addiction isn’t simply the way a brain reacts to certain chemicals. Addiction also isn’t just something that happens to people who make bad choices or who fail morally in one way or another. There’s another component – a reason why some people who use drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex get addicted and others don’t. Hari describes it as an environmental issue, or an isolation and bonding issue. Simply put, he says, some people bond to drugs or whatever their addiction is, because for one reason or another they can’t bond to people. He cites tests done on rats as one example of this – when scientists were first trying to understand drugs they would put rats alone in a cage with two bottles of water. One bottle would have heroin in it, and one wouldn’t. The rats would invariably choose the drugged water and use it until it killed them. These experiments were used as proof that drugs were evil, that they killed people. Later someone noticed that in addition to the option to use drugs, all the rats were isolated. They were alone. So they recreated the experiment, except this time after the isolated rats were hooked on drugs, they returned them from their isolated cage to a “happy” cage – a cage with other rats, and things to do, and comfortable places to sleep and so forth, and still the option to use the drugged water. Almost all the rats stopped using the drugs on their own, and went back to regular water. This happens with people, too, Hari notes. Lots of people are given high grade opiates for pain when recovering from surgery, or dealing with medical issues. The vast majority, when the medical issue is resolved, stop using the drugs. Johan wonders whether drugs are really to blame for the rising problems with addiction in our society. Maybe, he says, “the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.” What if, Hari, suggests, what addicts really need isn’t prison, or punishment, or “tough love.” What if what they need are treatment programs that help them reconnect with themselves and their world, and a society that is interested in welcoming them and being connected to them. What if addiction is a symptom of isolation and loneliness and the cure is community?

If I am being honest, I feel a lot of resistance to this idea. I’ve seen firsthand in both my professional and personal life the damage that addiction does to families, how it can suck the life out of parents, children, anyone who pours themselves out for the love of a person struggling with addiction. I want there to be reasonable consequences for that damage, and I want someone to be held responsible for it. In this way, I suppose, I have some things in common with the elder son in this morning’s gospel lesson. Whenever I encounter this parable I find myself feeling the most empathy for him – out there in the field fuming and feeling lost while his father celebrates the son who has done so much damage. It is not fair. If I could give this parable a name I might call it “The parable of the resentful son.” But really, I feel bad for everyone in this family – the younger son who comes crawling back home, the father whose response toward one child is felt as a rejection by the other one, the elder son who does everything right and still doesn’t get a party. It could be the story of almost any family touched by addiction, mental illness, estrangement, competition, or loss. Heck, it could be the story of almost any family.

In our culture the most common reading of this parable focuses on the son who come home. By far the most well-known title for this story is “The parable of the prodigal son.”. Alongside this dominant label comes some fairly well worn readings – with God as the father, “sinners” as the younger son and those who are “righteous” as the estranged elder child, prone to be resentful and upset. We are supposed to ask ourselves how we can also welcome home the ones who have been estranged from us, how we can return to the God who loves us unconditionally, how we can be more like the father. But this is not the only way to read this parable.

In some cultural settings, in other parts of the world, Christians read this parable as an indictment against the distant country the traveling son visited. Those people failed to feed him, they allowed him to starve among the pigs. How, this reading asks, could anyone treat another person this way? This reading might label the story “the parable of the cruel and distant country.” If we read it this way we might ask ourselves whether or not we see favored sons and daughters in the faces of those who come to us from other places struggling to survive. We might wonder how we could receive strangers better, with the knowledge that God loves them just as much as this father loves his child.

Still another exegesis claims that the father is not just risking his relationship with his elder son by accepting the younger back, but is endangering his relationship with his entire village. By celebrating his son, the father is bringing the son’s irresponsible behavior into relationship with the father’s whole village, and risking the health of the entire community. This interpretation might call the story “The parable of the foolish father.” If we read the parable in this way we might ask ourselves whether or not we are willing to risk alienation from our communities in order to love human beings who are isolated from our society. We might ask ourselves if we are the sort of community that would understand and support a father like this, or if we would judge him. Would we choose to risk the health of our life together to support the reconnection of a father and son, or to welcome home a lost and wayward child of God? The father’s behavior feels so very risky – what would happen to us if instead of punishing people who don’t fit in, or can’t connect with society, people who are alienated by addiction, mental illness, poverty, or other struggles, what would happen to us if instead we threw them parties, and welcomed them home? What if we tried to make belonging possible for them, instead of holding it as a privilege that is outside their reach?

I don’t have good answers to these questions. But I think they are questions worth asking, worth wrestling with. I suspect that we have all been every person in this story – the estranged child, the hopeful and torn parent, the resentful son who feels in his bones that this is not fair. If I were to give this story a name today I might call it “The parable of the invisible community,” because as I read it I have to wonder: where is the community of faith that supports and surrounds this family? How could their society and their world come alongside them to bear them up, to help the younger son re-integrate into the family he has blown up with his poor decisions and desertion? How could their community do what the father cannot, and gently woo the elder son out of his isolation and back to the feast? Who will be there for this father if his child relapses and leaves again, who will mourn with him, and encourage him to never give up hope?

You see, church, we are not just the people in this story, although I imagine that each of us can identify strongly with one or more of them. We are also the community that surrounds the people in this story. At our best we can come alongside the prodigal children who haven’t made it back home yet, and see that they do not starve, feeding pigs. At our best, we can advocate for the welcome of the younger son, and offer love to the older one. At our best, we can be joyful with the father as he welcomes his child home, and hold him in love for whatever comes after the party, when reality sets in. This Eucharist we celebrate is a table, a feast, for every member of that family, because there isn’t a person alive who hasn’t lived one or more parts of this parable. No one person, or family, can handle estrangement, addiction, competition, or resentment in isolation, and no one should have to. There is a special, unwritten place in this parable for church, for the grace that only community with others can offer. This morning as we experience the love and welcome of God in this feast, and in the community we share with each other, let’s open our hearts to becoming our best, to becoming the community that surrounds others with that love and welcome – no matter what part of this parable we, or they, are living.