Lost and Found - Again
By Charles Rush
October 22, 2000
Luke 15: 11-31
taught at Rutgers University for 8 years. My field was ethics. I loved teaching
19 year-olds. They are still in the process of formation, wrestling with problems.
And ethics means a lot to them at 19. But it was hard work because the good
citizens of New Jersey are biblically illiterate. When it comes to religion, my
students “didn't knows nutin.” I was constantly amazed that people could attend
Mass, week in and week out, all their lives and couldn't tell Noah from
Abraham. It was, and is, embarrassing.
One
time, I was teaching on forgiveness and this passage came to mind. I started to
tell the story. My students had this look on their face. I could tell the vast
majority of them had never heard the story before. I stopped telling the story
when the Prodigal Son is in the far country, a good Jewish boy reduced to
feeding the not so Jewish pigs for a Gentile. He had forfeited his inheritance
and his heritage too and he decides to go back home. I stopped and looked at
the class and said, what should the Father do?
Gloria,
from Elizabeth, said “under no circumstances should the Father let him come
home. “Let me tell you about my brother Renaldo. He got into cocaine went
through all his money doin' blow. My parents kept bailing him out, getting him
out of jail, paying off his debts. You know what happened? It just got worse.
He even stole money from my mother. It got so bad my parents told him not to
come around anymore, for any reason until he got cleaned up. Let me tell you,
until you get in some rehab program, you just throwing good money after bad.”
Michael
from Red Bank disagreed. The father should let him come home. “Family is always
family. But the kid disrespected the father already, asking for his
inheritance. The father should take that. He should let him come home but under
strict conditions. Tough love. The son has got to work for everything from now
on. No loans or bail outs. He owes the family some time.”
Stephanie
from Woodbridge didn't know what the Father should do but she predicted that
this would not work out. “This is a lot of money this kid spent. This is a big
pain in his Father's heart. The Father may try to get over this but I'm telling
you, it is not easy to forget these kind of things. Really what needs to happen
here is some extended therapy. This family has dysfunction written all over it.
They gotta work this thing through to some of the root issues or else, it is
just going to keep blowing up again and again.
Many
other comments were made but Vincent from Hamilton Square closed it out. Said
he, “You wanna know how this is? My brother borrowed my Father's brand new
Acura when he was 17, wrapped it around a tree. My father went ballistic. For
years, every time my brother says something stupid or does something stupid, my
fathers takes out his keys and says, “What? You wanna borrow my car too?”
The
more I thought about my students answers, the more it occurred to me that
almost all of us come from pretty nutty families. But they were some very
realistic answers. One of them finally said, “so what does the Father do?”
I
opened the book and read “While still a long way off, the father caught sight
of the returning child and was deeply moved. The father ran out to meet him,
threw his arms around him and kissed him and said… Let's celebrate. This son of
mine was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and now he is found.”
There was a deep silence that fell over the room. No one said a thing. No one
moved. I closed my book, picked up my lecture and my brief case and walked out
of the room. It is moments like that that make teaching worthwhile.
Over
the years, I've had many occasions to remember that day in mirth. My students
were ignorant, no question about that. But they were also insightful. Real
redemption is no easy feat. It is interesting that our parables in Luke 15 move
in the direction they do. From a lost coin (or item), to a lost sheep (pet or
livestock) to a lost child (family). How do you redeem the tragic loss of a
profound relationship? How do you do it?
Think
of Jerusalem for a moment. It was disturbing to see Ariel Sharon stroll the
Temple Mount on September 28th, the
eve of Yom Kippur. Though the Israeli's have been in control of that area for
decades, they have also generally avoided setting foot there, since there are
two mosques that are Holy Islamic Shrines. There was an air of provocation in
his gesture, given his long role in the Likud Party and as Minister of Defense.
It
could not help but evoke a grim memory of the Yom Kippur War that broke out in
1973. I wondered this year, what was going through the minds of our Jewish
brothers and sisters around the world at the beginning of the Yom Kippur
service, when they repeated together “All the congregation of the people of
Israel shall be forgiven, as well as the stranger who dwells among them”. And
then at the end of the celebration 25 hours later when they all link their fate
to the fate of Jerusalem around the world with the prayer, “Rejoice with
Jerusalem. Celebrate with her, all who love her, and all who once mourned…”
Already,
the Temple of Joseph had been desecrated, while the Palestinian police looked
on. Stones had been thrown at worshippers at the Western Wall. Dozens of
Palestinian protesters had been shot. 2 Israeli soldiers had been beaten to
death. Rockets had been fired from Israeli helicopters on the police station in
Ramallah.
The Palestinian riots were
far from spontaneous. Deborah Sontag noted in the New York Times recently “many
believe that spasms of violence, historically, have led to peace breakthroughs…
[and] during the 15-day Camp David summit meeting last summer, several regional
experts were skeptical about the chances of a final peace agreement because,
they said, another round or two of bloodshed was needed.”
As
the New Republic pointed out last week (October 16, 2000, p. 15) the
riot that ensued had as its objective to “ruin the chances for a reconciliation
between the Palestinians and the Israeli's when it looked as if reconciliation
might be in the making, and to diminish the authority of Yasir Arafat and his
policy of negotiation…
“This
was not only strategic violence. This was also sacralized violence. Looking at
the faces of the Palestinian fighters in the streets, one saw also a twisted
kind of ecstasy. The parents of murdered youngsters mingled their grief with a
dark religious joy. The martyrological spirit was everywhere. ‘My son didn't
die in vain', exclaimed the mother of Muhammad al-Durrah, the poor Gazan boy
who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers before a French TV camera and promptly
became the symbol of this killing season. ‘This was his sacrifice for our
homeland, for Palestine.'” (The New York Times reporter on the scene
permitted himself the mordant remark that ‘there is no indication that [the
boy] Muhammad had any intention of making this sacrifice'.) And in Ramallah,
the bereaved uncle of a 16-year-old victim of the Israeli retaliation regarded
his nephew's corpse with pride. ‘This is his third time injured in a
demonstration,' he said, ‘and his last. All the time, he says saying, ‘I want
to be a martyr, I want to be a martyr'. He believe it was his destiny.' This,
too, is a horror. The murder of a child is not a lucky break. The murder of a
child is senseless. Beware the individual and the group for whom the murder of
a child makes sense. But it is the purpose of the martyrological mentality to
confer sense upon it; and more generally to make war seem like fate, and defeat
seem like victory.”
This
was the first time in a generation when you heard dozens of ordinary
Palestinians interviewed saying that “You cannot make peace with the Jews” and
calling for an intafada until all of Palestine was liberated. Those are the
fighting words that mean the Jews have had no right to a state since it's
inception in 1948.
Those
cries for martyr's from the religiously misguided met a deafening silence from
the Israeli left. Ehud Barak is the leader of a left-wing government. The
offers for a peace agreement at Oslo were far greater than any previous Israeli
offer. Indeed they were what peace activists had advocated for 30 years.
Finally, they were offered and the unraveling began.
Usually
you can count on the left-wing activists to demonstrate prominently, calling
for the restart of the peace talks. This time there was no demonstration.
Nachum Barnea, Israel's preeminent news columnist and veteran peace advocate
had only this to say, “It seems that the circle of Arab enmity around the state
hasn't been breached at all. To the sense of siege is added the realization
that [our partner isn't a partner, an understanding isn't an understanding, and
every withdrawal only increases the appetite of the other side.”
To
be fair, the Palestinians are segregated in “noncontiguous, economically
unviable enclaves, surrounded by Israeli-controlled borders, with settlements
and settlement roads punctuating and essentially violating the territories'
integrity.” There have been two decades of expropriations of land in the West
Bank for Jewish settlements.” To listen to the Palestinians is to hear the
lament of a people that deeply believe they are refugees in their own land,
bitterly disappointed at their inability to govern themselves. [Arafat's
government is widely criticized as corrupt by Arabs themselves- even they admit
they misplaced $400 million in 1997].
What
you are looking at is the slow swirling vortex, the downward spin into
spiritual conditions of war. We have not yet militarized for war but that is
only because the Palestinians are not armed and even if they were they would
think twice before directly attacking probably the best guerilla army in the
world.
As
these situations degrade the powerful desire for revenge grows wider, deeper.
People in groups will do things, they won't do alone. Blood lust feeds on
itself. Something gets released in riots where the sum is greater than the
total of the parts. In the ancient world, they called it the forces of the
demonic. You can almost see people getting swept away by the wave.
This
is the way things break down. We were told that President Clinton manned the
phones all night last week, trying to cobble together a compromise, but it was
ineffectual. In some ways, it almost appeared naively American, failing to
understand the depth of hatred that is generated by centuries of animosity,
betrayal, and retribution.
And
when you start attacking each other's houses of Worship, each other's holy sites,
each other at worship- that is when all civility is left off and you go for the
jugular. It is like an enraged husband that all of the jewelry he has ever
given to his wife or a child that intentionally destroys their parents precious
collection that they know is dearest to their heart. There is no other purpose
to these attacks but to provoke the deepest wellspring of hurt.
It
is effective. The prodigal son blew his inheritance on prostitutes, wine,
drugs. He ran away. The scripture says he ended up a Jewish boy feeding the
pigs for a Gentile. That means, he had totally lost his heritage of what it
meant to be a Jew. Whatever his parents had tried to teach him, he had blown it
off. And it is bad enough to lose the money but as a parent what a horrible
thing to lose a child. What a horrible thing to invest so much only to be
rejected. What a guilt trip to wonder what you did that went wrong.
How
hard it is for the kids to go back home. You are embarrassed, ashamed, stupid,
self-loathing. It is easier to stay in the far country than to go home. A man
once told me that he hadn't talked to his brother in 40 years. I asked him,
“why not?” “Just can't” was all he said. “Just can't”. There is no human
stubbornness than the stubborn that won't be reconciled. “Just can't”.
It
takes something from outside the situation. It takes a miraculous movement of
the Spirit to sweep over us, quite in spite of the evidence at hand, quite in
spite of what we know to be the most effective strategies, quite in spite of
justice even. But it is important to remember that it can happen, as our
parable says, God is getting off the porch and running down the road to
encourage it. There are spiritual resources for change.
Last
month in Louisville, Kentucky an elderly black man was beaten up in a random
attack. The police arrested a teenager, a skinhead, who was defiant and surly.
The town was up in arms. The mayor was up in arms. The ministers, Rabbi's and
Imam's met in a special meeting to coordinate a response. They talked about a
march. They talked about a petition.
One
of the ministers asked a simple question. “Has anyone gone to talk with this
boy?” Silence. These moments always point up, what a colleague calls, the
functional atheism of the clergy. We don't believe in change much either.
As
so often happens, the council appointed the guy who raised the question to go
visit the kid in jail and he did. He gets to the jail, is led down to the
basement holding cell. This kid is all of 18, hardly an inch of skin that
doesn't have a tattoo. Multiple body piercings, one of which was so novel that
he spent a few minutes secretly wondering ‘how did he do that'.
The
kid asked him why he was there. He told him that he was a minister visiting the
imprisoned like Jesus told him to do in the bible. The kid was sarcastic, rude,
hostile. The visit was going no where fast. The minister was a seasoned social
activist and now that he is older, he did something novel. He stopped talking
and prayed silently for the kid. The kid asked what he was doing. He just said,
“I'm sending you the love of God you so desperately need.”
They
had a couple more visits the next couple days. The kid started sharing some
about his childhood. It was not pretty. His father emulated Bobby Knight on his
good days and drank the rest of the time. Lots of dysfunction, emotional
distance, lack of understanding, no acceptance.
At
the end of one of these conversations, the Minister asked if he could lay hands
on him and pray that God would fill him with acceptance and love. The kid
agreed. The minister prayed. The kid wept. The minister is done, ready to
leave. The kid reaches through the bars, grabs his arm and says, “I don't
want to hate anymore.”
Doesn't
mean that he won't do time, like my students at Rutgers remind us. Doesn't mean
he won't need counseling or to learn to change behaviors. But, there is a
spiritual power that can fundamentally reorient us and you have to have that to
break the cycle. “While the boy was yet a long way off, the father caught sight
of the returning child and was deeply moved. The father ran out to meet him,
threw his arms around him and kissed him.
Amen.
