Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Exorcising Demons

Mark 9:38-50
September 27, 2009


[Note: Thank you to Brian Blount for his outstanding sermon on this passage at Duke Divinity School. He greatly informed and influenced some of my thinking this week.]

Wow! This is a hard passage to read. I mean, how gruesome. Surely Jesus, our loving compassionate savior, would not advocate such extreme judgments and violent punishments when we sin. You sinned? You have a choice. Chopping Block or Hell.

But, let’s dispense with one thing right away. It is quite gruesome if read literally, but we are not literalists; this is metaphor and hyperbole. Jesus was exaggerating and using strong images to make a point. His statements about cutting off one’s foot, hand, and eye can be compared to some of our modern day metaphors and attempts at hyperbole. How many times have we heard someone say, after they have been utterly humiliated: “Oh, I just want to die!” Or someone might say, either in jest or out of anger, “I could kill you!” Yet in neither case is someone actually supposed to end up dead. How about, “He stabbed me in the back” when we’re betrayed. Or when we think someone has wronged us or others, “she should be tarred and feathered.” Anyway, you get the point. We use strong images as metaphors to indicate strong feelings, not to talk about the literal punishment.

And does Jesus really believe we should go to hell when we sin? Again, this is metaphor. The word for “hell” here is “Gehenna”. Gehenna was a valley near Jerusalem that was used as a garbage dump. It became a symbol for a place of future destruction. Basically it’s the same as us metaphorically sentencing someone to Timbuktu. It’s an actual place in West African Mali, the point is we wish they would go away as far as possible, even though we know they probably won’t. All the talk of mutilation and hell is metaphorical, and to read it otherwise will distract us, we’ll get bogged down in trying to deal with what would be an incredibly disturbing passage if we took it literally.

Of course, even though this is all metaphor, it’s still a very hard passage. These are still very strong images, indicating a level of emotion in Jesus we aren’t always comfortable with. He is talking to his disciples, and I think he’s doing a little “tough love” thing. In short, Jesus is not happy, and whenever Jesus is unhappy with the disciples, we realize he might just be talking to us as well.

So, why was Jesus so unhappy? For the author of the gospel of Mark, demons were real and prevalent. Demons caused all sorts of problems in Mark’s world. They caused people to be blind, they kept people from family and community, they maimed, they made you mean and destructive. In short, they destroyed people, physically spiritually, and psychologically. And people who could exorcise those demons were saviors of a sort. Exorcists were in high demand in Jesus’ day. It is one reason why Jesus was so popular. Exorcism dealt with real problems of real people, and it was one of the most compassionate things you could do for someone.

And here come the disciples complaining that someone who is not “one of them” is exorcising demons in Jesus’ name. And Jesus’ response is, “Are you kidding? Don’t stop them! Whoever is not against us is for us.” This last part – whoever is not against us is for us – is a beautifully inclusive statement, and one we all would do well to embrace as a life philosophy. But, Jesus doesn’t stop there, with that easy to hear, nice to contemplate platitude.

Jesus goes on to compare the disciples to this pagan exorcist, or non-Christian. And the disciples do not come out well. And to give fair warning, Christians today might not fair so well either. Just four verses earlier the disciples had been arguing about who was the greatest among them. And now, they are taking it upon themselves to guard Jesus’ name as if it were protected by copyright laws. Most likely the exorcist they were complaining about was using Jesus name in a derogatory way – they were mocking him. And the disciples figured Jesus would appreciate them standing up for his name and Jesus’ integrity. “You can’t use that name – you aren’t a part of this company – that name is proprietary.”

But while they are busy managing the details of their community and company logo, what is the pagan doing? She’s out there doing the most compassionate work there is. She was exorcising demons. She was giving out cups of water – that life giving, life sustaining, sacred liquid.

The disciples were more concerned with who was following Jesus than with who was doing the work of Jesus. They were concerned with image and reputation. They were concerned with how their group should be organized – who should be ordained, who should be on the church council, who should be “in” and who should be “outside” the community. And Jesus will have none of it.

After the disciples denounce this outsider, Jesus starts his litany of powerful and indicting metaphors. We need to remember that this section is not addressed to everyone. This isn’t about sinning in general. This certainly isn’t about Jesus condemning people for not following a moral code. This section is addressed to the disciples in this specific situation. “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believes in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” The term “little ones” here means the Gentiles – non Christians. They are the unbelievers and the unimportant.

Basically Jesus is saying, “Listen up! I’m talking to you, Peter, James, John and the rest. Even though these people are not Christian, and even though they haven’t said the right things or followed any of the Jewish laws, and even if they are using my name mockingly, if any of you get in the way of this compassionate work, I’ll send you to Timbuktu, where you can just curl up and die for all I care.” Are these metaphors?….of course. Is it an easy message?…nope.

Jesus makes it painfully clear that the disciples are not to be praised because they have followed Jesus around. That is a gross misunderstanding of what it means to be a disciple. They should be exorcists – like the one they are complaining about. But they aren’t out there healing people. Now to be fair to the disciples, its possible they tried and just weren’t successful. Maybe the reason they were complaining about this rouge exorcist was jealousy. They couldn’t do what she was doing.

Or maybe, they were afraid of having that kind of power. Jesus clearly gave it to them. Mark 3:14 says, “He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach, and to have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons.” It’s scary to have that kind of power. We’re not talking about having power over someone, or the power to control. That’s not really so scary. Instead, it’s the power to free someone and give someone back control over their lives. And we don’t want this power because it means we should be using it. Most of us really want to live under the radar – but in Jesus’ day, exorcists didn’t live under the radar. They attracted more and more people the more they healed. You see, with this kind of power comes responsibility.

There is a quote that is usually attributed to Nelson Mandela – but I actually think it comes from Marianne Williamson. Regardless, I think it hits the nail on the head for most of us: “Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we have power beyond measure.” If we are inadequate or not capable, it makes sense to not even try. It means we can just sit back and let demons do what they will to people because there’s nothing we can do anyway. If we are powerful beyond measure, sitting back while demons run amok is cruel.

Jesus gives all Christians the power to exorcise demons. But how many people who call themselves Christian are out there exorcising demons? We like to say that demons were something they believed in in Jesus’ day, but that we know demons aren’t “real”. But, that’s not the truth, is it? We might not be comfortable with the word demon and the occupation of exorcist, but we know people are being destroyed by all sorts of things. And when I really look at the world, and see what is happening to some people, I’m not sure “demon” isn’t a pretty good description of what besieges people. It may be demons of natural of human origin, but the reality of pain and suffering is as real today as it was in Mark’s day. And it is certainly something followers of Jesus should be concerned about.

It can be a bit painful to step back and look at the Christian Church today and ask the question: Are we out there freeing people, or are Christians so busy arguing and controlling each other than we don’t even see the realities facing so many people today. The Church is pretty fascinated with the question of who is “in” and who is “out”. People in churches work hard, but sometimes only to perfect a creed or to define the boundaries of the community. The denominations certainly work hard deciding who is to be the greatest – the ordained ones, and who is to be the least – the ones condemned as “sinners”. All of this while demons are having their way with people.

Is this true of us here at First Pres? Of course the answer is both “yes” and “no”. I see you time and time again turning your gaze away from this building and out into the world, seeking out those in need of compassion and care. I see you feel people’s pain almost as if it were your own. You work very hard to muster your courage to use the power you have been given to exorcise the demons of oppressive structures, consumerism, poverty. When faced with the demons of mental illness, chronic pain, addiction, loneliness, you know that the ones imprisoned by these demons is your brother or sister. You are remarkably successful at remembering that the institution should serve the ministry and not the other way around. And you don’t get bogged down in internal conflicts over carpets and creeds.

At the same time, we all know that it’s scary to be out there exorcising demons. We know that Jesus was eventually killed, and probably his work as an exorcist was a big part of that. Because the truth is, sometimes the demons fight back.

For example, we confront the demon of mental illness in a family member or friend, knowing if the person were free from that demon, they would be less hurtful, less dangerous, less desperate. But mental illness is one of those demons that fights back. And we wonder, do we really have the power to do something there? And what is it, exactly, that we are supposed to do?

Or we might confront the demon of consumerism, knowing – knowing – that if we and others consumed less, the benefits to our fellow human beings and our beautiful planet would be immeasurable. But that is a demon each of us struggles with and often the demon wins. Not because we’re bad people, but because it’s scary to battle such a powerful system. People would notice and would resist. So many people depend on that demon staying alive. And more people depend on not seeing it as a demon at all.

And yes, at times we too are jealous. How many of us want to admit that the radical fundamentalist, bible beating, fire and brimstone breathing congregation is far more active at reaching out to the lonely and giving to the poor? How many of us are reluctant to join them in their work because we are afraid of being associated with “them”? And don’t our churches, in all their deliberations about ordination, standards, discipline and moral codes attempt to stop people from claiming their power to heal and exorcise demons because we don’t think they are Christian enough?

Healing is healing. Compassion is compassion. And when these things are happening, shouldn’t our response to everything else be “who cares?” Who cares if they are sinners? Who cares if they look different from us? Who cares is they don’t meet our standards? Who cares if they’re not Christian? Who cares if they are in prison for murder? Who cares if they are mocking us while they do it? What matters in that moment is one more demon has left one more person. Why on earth would we want to stop that?

The world needs exorcists. The world needs people to go out in droves and give cups of water to those dying of thirst. The world needs people who recognize a demon when they see it. We need people who really understand what demons do to people – the toll they take, the communities they destroy, the lives they claim. And perhaps the difficult truth we need to face is there are people out there – lots of non Christians – exorcising demons every chance they have. And maybe they have an advantage because they are not a part of the Christian club. They don’t have pews to fill, meetings to attend, membership to manage. They don’t spend time deciding who should be ordained, who is authorized to do God’s work. They don’t worry about which church has the right theology, about who is greatest among Christians. They aren’t concerned about who is going to heaven and who is going to hell. They see a demon, and do whatever they can to get rid of it. Perhaps we Christians need to claim our power and join them. Amen.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Justice and Peace Shall Embrace

Psalm 85; Mark 8:27-38
September 13, 2009: Peacemaking Sunday

We don’t know exactly what the lives of the Jews were like at the time of Jesus. We can make guesses because of their religion, professions and geographical location as well as the political realities of the day. But, that only takes us so far. How poor they were, how oppressed, how bad or good their lives were can’t really be known completely.

But for me it doesn’t really matter. They were human beings living in a world of human suffering – if not theirs then the people around them. That’s all it takes for me to relate to them. Our world is different, the problems are not the same, and we are more like Roman citizens than we are like the disciples in terms of social location. But we too are humans living in a world of human suffering, and if we are paying attention at all it is impossible not to want that suffering to cease immediately and for good. And we call Jesus our savior, so if he were to come now, I certainly would be tempted to believe he would help us bring about that end to suffering – he would bring reversals of poverty and oppression. Faced with our world today, part of me wishes Jesus would come and use his power to fix things right, no matter what it would take.

Likewise in Jesus’ day, many Jews had great Messianic hopes. Supported by their scriptures and God’s promise for a new world order, they were waiting for the messiah to come and fix things right – the messiah that Elijah talked about and that the prophets wrote so eloquently about. And after generations of waiting, John the Baptist comes along and tells the people that the Messiah had come! Jesus was the one. Jesus was a culmination of history. Hope was high and people were anxious to be saved from their present situation by this messiah.

But Jesus disappointed many of these hopeful people – including, it seems, Peter. “Who do people say that I am?” he asks. And the disciples say people believe he is another great messianic thinker: he’s the new Elijah, a new prophet, and the next John the Baptist. And then Peter, when he was asked directly who he thinks Jesus is, thought he knew where this was all going: he called Jesus the Messiah. Peter knew Jesus was not just another messianic prophet – he was the one they all pointed to. But we see in Jesus’ rebuke of Peter that he didn’t quite get it right. He misunderstood what the Messiah would be.

Elijah, some of the prophets and John the Baptist envisioned a day of judgment, when God would send the messiah to inaugurate the “divine cleanup of the world” as one theologian put it. They saw God coming to wipe out the unfaithful and corrupt, leaving a pure, restored nation of Israelites, ruled by this Messiah, who would be like King David. Those who would escape judgment were the ones who suffered most and the ones who followed God’s laws, caring for the poor and the stranger, healing the sick, and working for justice for the oppressed.

And Jesus certainly fit this last part. This was exactly what Jesus was doing: caring for the poor, healing the sick. But it turned out he completely rejected the first part, the part where he would bring God’s judgment and destruction of the peoples’ oppressors. And that was disappointing – to say the least – for people who had rested their hopes on such a Messiah. They would not be saved – not by this Jesus. Not in the way they imagined…not in the way they wanted.

Instead Jesus came as the enactor of God’s justice, but it was a justice that embraces peace. What does this kind of justice look like? This is a question that many people have wrestled with throughout history, and certainly we see the authors of our scriptures wrestling with this question as well. For some, the only possibility for justice was vindication – a very short step away from vengeance. They expected punishment for those who had for so long gone unpunished for their actions and violations of God’s laws. In fact, at times it seemed the oppressors were rewarded for their behavior. Justice would be served when these people got what they deserved.

Some of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible use graphic language and paint violent scenes to describe how they think God will deal with these people. There were, however, prophets that challenged this vision; we can see one such prophet in the early chapters of the book of Isaiah. This prophet saw the messiah coming in peace to bring a reversal of the social order – not through violent judgment, but through service and lowliness. Isaiah talks of the “suffering servant”. It was counter-intuitive, and it probably didn’t really “catch on”. Truth be told, we still have great difficulty trusting that the world could be changed by that kind of messiah – a suffering servant.

But it is exactly that messiah that we have all chosen to follow in Jesus. And he was the Messiah who believed redemption, salvation, healing came when justice and peace embraced.

And when justice and peace embrace it precludes the idea that a violent coming of justice is necessary before peace is possible. Instead, peace and justice are one and the same thing; we can’t have peace without justice, and we can’t have justice without peace.

In how he lived Jesus showed us we cannot have peace without justice. Compare his life with the empire into which he was born. Rome kept the peace for a long, long time: Pax Romana. But, despite this term, one of the ways Rome kept the peace was to quickly and decisively quell any rebellions or movements that threatened Roman rule. They kept the masses, most of who were living right at the edge of poverty, in their place with local rulers who collected taxes, took over the people’s land, and watched for any deviation from what was expected. In short, Rome kept peace by oppressing the people. This is peace without justice. Pax Romana worked for many. But the folks at the bottom, the ones who paid for the armies through exorbitant taxes and slave labor, they suffered injustices of the worst kind. And some, like Jesus, were killed for the sake of Pax Romana. Peace gained while some suffer is not peace.

In contrast with this, Jesus came to bring peace by addressing these basic injustices. He brought good news to the oppressed and poor, the ones who were sick and left to suffer on their own, the ones imprisoned by the Roman system. This was the path to the peaceful kingdom that Jesus took. And there was no place for injustice even if it was expedient in securing some kind of short-term peace for some people.

Just as we can’t have peace without justice, so there can be no justice without peace. Of course people must be held accountable to the law. As Christians, we submit to God’s laws – which at times coincide nicely with our civil laws, and at other times do not. Jesus summed up these laws in the commandments to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, to love your neighbor as yourself, and to love your enemies. When laws are violated so is God’s creation and intention. If people aren’t held accountable and justice is not done, the same vulnerable people, the victims of injustice, will be hurt again and again and again. The laws are meant to protect the vulnerable, the minority, the outcast. Violating them creates injustice and justice is a key element in the Realm of God.

But how do we hold people accountable? We cannot hold people accountable without embracing peace along with justice. If the path to justice does not follow the principles of peace, the justice may well balance the scales in some civil sense, but greater injustices will emerge.

I think, when I look at the world, this one is a bit harder to understand and live out. Justice can only come embraced by peace. It was hard for many of our faith ancestors, and it is hard for us. Jesus lived this principle, and in doing so he disappointed many, many people and messianic hopes. Peter was deeply disappointed when Jesus explained what the messiah would do, or rather wouldn’t do. The messiah would not fight Rome with the tactics of Rome. The messiah would not use violence to assume the throne as a just king ordained by God in order to finally liberate the victims of injutices. Violence and peace are diametrically opposed. The messiah would not clean up the world in one fell swoop, punishing those who had oppressed the Jews for so long. Instead, Jesus tells Peter that the messiah would be the one to undergo suffering and die.

That choice, to always couple his work of justice with peace, would mean he would sacrifice his own life instead of prying justice and peace apart in order to avenge the centuries of oppression of his people. When Peter expresses his disappointment in what Jesus says, Jesus rebukes him; “Get behind me Satan!” These are extremely strong words. It was that serious. The difference between the messianic expectations that included violence and the kind of messiah Jesus would be was that important.

As you know, today we take our peacemaking offering. The Presbyterian Church is committed to projects where peace and justice embrace. One such project the peace offering has supported is in Amman, Jordan. An interfaith group from Indianapolis went to Amman to build a house. Members of this interfaith community had learned by participating in Habitat projects here in the United States that coming together to build a house with a neighbor can be a wonderful way to find common bonds and celebrate differences at the same time.

This group dreamed of building a house in the Middle East, an area of the world where so many have been made homeless through war and occupation through injustices. So in the summer of 2008 a group of seventeen Jews, Muslims, and Christians, including an imam, a rabbi, a high school student, three college students and other adults, traveled from Indianapolis to Amman. There they helped build the first interfaith Habitat house in the Middle East. “We were there building walls to tear down walls,” said one of the participants from the Presbyterian church in Indianapolis.

Compare this to the prevailing wisdom in that region. Injustice is not in short supply. Yet the way people seek to balance the scales invariably includes violence – it is as if justice can be forced. That is not the justice of our Psalm. The word is tsdeq – which is also often translated righteousness. Or, I think even better, deep rightness. It has to do with relationships between people – righteousness means our relationships reflect God’s relationship to us. Right relationship is the goal, and we can’t be in right relationship with people we are killing and displacing and dehumanizing. Look at the figures on our new banner: They are embracing each other and embracing God’s creation. They are a vision of this righteousness – a deep rightness in all our relationships. That’s tsdeq – that’s justice.

Yet there are some in Israel that believe they can only ever be safe if they keep the Palestinians in check through occupation and the threat and use of violence. And there are some in Palestine that claim justice will come through, quote, “wiping the Israelis off the face of the earth.” But they’ve got it wrong and the small interfaith group from Indiana has it right.

For justice to be restored it must embrace peace: Houses must be rebuilt not demolished; land must be redistributed not hoarded; people must be held accountable for the deaths and suffering of others they have caused yet vengeance cannot be the means to that end. If justice is sought through more violence, more occupation, more encroachment, more oppression, and more war then true justice will never come, because peace will always be absent.

Another way we support justice and peace embracing as a congregation as to give 25% of the peacemaking offering to a local Grinnell ministry. The session voted this year that the money would go to the Mid Iowa Community Action Center – or MICA. I have spent time over the last few years with people at MICA, both staff and clients. In my experience these are all people who understand the relationship between peace and justice. They see and experience the violence of poverty and recognize the injustices that often make and keep people poor. If you work to address the injustices, lives become more peaceful and so they address these injustices with food, help with housing, help with emergencies and they walk with people as they overcome the challenges in their lives. At the same time, the people who work at MICA have persistent compassion for the chaotic nature of some people’s lives, and that compassion can offer a moment of peace – but it will slip away if there is no attempt to address the injustices.

There is a promise – that God will indeed come and “clean up” this world. And the end result will be the visions and images of the prophets and Jesus. But for Jesus, this time is not just some distant, dramatic future event. This promise is always at hand, and it comes in bits and pieces. It comes in those moments where justice and peace embrace. The Psalmist sees this embrace in the future; Jesus, knowing it is the intended future of God, lived this embrace with his life. We are called to do likewise. Amen.

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The Value of Work

James 2:1-10, 14-17; Mark 7:24-30
September 6, 2009


As a child it always confused me a little that the day we were celebrating work, Labor Day, people stopped working. Of course now I know, it isn’t about just celebrating work, or giving workers a break. Nor is it about mourning the end of summer. It’s about celebrating what labor unions do when they are at their best.

When labor unions are at their best they’re striving for justice for all workers. They are helping us recognize that we sometimes undervalue the work of people who are contributing much to their employers and our society. We under pay and under insure people who work hard every day. And we don’t take care of those who can’t find work at all. We do this for all sorts of reasons – and it is complicated. It’s not just greed. Sometimes it is racism or classism, sometimes it is ignorance, sometimes it is convenience, and yes, sometimes it is greed. But mostly, I think we have a fairy tale notion of work in this country and so we don’t even see the realities of work for so many people in our world.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, most of us believe that hard work pays off. If you work hard, you move up the ladder. If you work hard, you get rewarded with salary increases. If you work hard you get health insurance, and you can pay your bills. If you work hard, you will have dignity. That’s what we believe – that’s what we hear – that’s what we teach our kids.

All of this is exposed as a lie as soon as you spend any time with day laborers, or in a sweat shop, or working a job that pays nowhere near living wage. The truth is how hard you work in some jobs has absolutely nothing to do with how much you get paid, or job security, much less promotion. And no matter how much internal dignity one might feel, there are some jobs that just are humiliating.

I have seen what life is like for strawberry pickers. I spent time with them and listened to them talk about their lives. I promise you they work harder than I do – a lot harder. And they don’t have a bathroom across the hall that they can use any time they want. They can’t leave to take their child to the doctor. They can’t sit in the coffee shop while they write their sermon. And they get paid pretty much ½ of what I get paid. ¼ if you count all the benefits.

The truth is, I got this job because of privilege. Yes, there are other reasons, but if I had been born in El Salvador to a family that had no land and lived day to day not knowing where food would come from, I think it is safe to say I would not be the pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Grinnell. Much more likely, I would be working in the strawberry fields in California. I would be working harder, and my life would be harder, and I wouldn’t have most of the luxuries I now enjoy.

Labor unions – at their best – expose these arbitrary inequalities and show us that people should be valued – no matter what their job is. And Labor Day is meant to celebrate any progress we make on valuing people not based on their job, or even how hard they work, but because they are people. Labor Day is more about the value of human beings than about work. And so it is with our passage from James.

Just as we often think Labor Day is just about “work”, so we think this passage from James is about how hard we are supposed to work. And that’s understandable. “Faith without works is dead,” James declares. To be a good Christian, you have to work hard. You have to give lots of money, you have to work in a soup kitchen three times a week – you have to start an after school program. And the more you work, the more you contribute, the better Christian you are. It seems like this is what James is saying.

But, that’s how we see it from our context where we believe the more you work the more you get and the better you are. James is talking about something else. James’ letter, like the work of unions, is about exposing and correcting inequities and calling us to task when we value some people more than others.

When you look at the beginning of our passage, you see what James means when he talks about our “works”. His concern is favoritism, exclusionary thinking, and all the consequences that follow. “My brothers and sisters,” James writes, “do you, with your acts of favoritism, really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?” It is valuing some more than others that James thinks is a sign of dead faith. But here’s is where the focus of James’ letter differs a bit from the focus of Labor Day. When he tells us that faith without works is dead, he’s not talking about the work we do in our jobs or at the church or on a committee; he’s talking about the work of abolishing the practice of treating some people better than others.

Our gospel story makes this same point. I have to tell you, though; it’s a bit more jarring than James’ letter because it seems Jesus is the one with the dead faith, at least by James’ standards. And that’s a hard sell for most of us – that Jesus would ever have anything but a strong faith. Yet, here’s the reality:

When our story begins, we’re told that Jesus had left one region for another, leaving his friends and the crowds behind. And when we got to Tyre of Sidon, he “entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” He hid. I’m sure he was tired. He had just spent time with the Pharisees arguing about the law, and that’s tiring work that doesn’t get you very far. So, he hid. But then, when our compassionate, kind, gentle Jesus was approached by someone in need, he tried to avoid her and worse, in an almost teenager fashion, he called her a name: He called her a “dog”. There is no Greek exegesis that can get us out of the fact that Jesus was not offering a compliment – he was calling her scum. And of course he then refused to help her. As blasphemous as it might seem, I think James would pronounce Jesus’ faith as dead – at least at first. And I think we would have to agree with him.

This woman was an outsider – a Gentile. Jews simply did not have anything to do with or say to Gentiles. And Jesus was a Jew. At this point in the gospel of Mark, Jesus believed he was called to minister only to the Jews. “Let the children be fed first,” Jesus says, “for it is not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs.” The children he is talking about are the Jews – the Israelites. They are the favored ones. They are the important ones. They are the ones he was called to heal, liberate, free and save. The Gentiles are not his concern.

I’m sure Jesus was tired that day. That’s probably why he was hiding. And that’s understandable. We all need times of rest. Without rest, we will become useless in whatever we try to do. The problem was not that Jesus took a rest from his work – that was not the sign of a dead faith. The problem was that when he was met by a woman he could help, he wouldn’t do it because she wasn’t one of his own. Jesus was showing favoritism – the exact kind James believed was a sign of dead faith.

So Jesus illuminates the problem James is addressing. At the same time, with a great deal of help from the Syrophoenician woman, he also shows us the way to break through this favoritism. We know there’s no clever way to excuse away Jesus’ initial behavior in this passage. As much as we wish it weren’t true, he hid, he avoided, he derided. It’s there and we can’t change that. But that’s not the end of the story. Jesus changed. His worldview changed. And consequently, his behavior changed. And it happened for two reasons:

First, the Syrophoenician woman, for the sake of her child, crossed every boundary possible to risk relating to Jesus: ethnic, gender, class, religion. She made the first move and that opened up an opportunity for both of them to be changed. Then, Jesus let her into his life. Jesus allowed this foreigner to change his world view. Basically, she preached to him – a brilliant, one sentence, put every pastor to shame sermon. And hearing this sermon changed Jesus. His faith was given life again, just as the woman’s courageous actions and insistence on equality gave new life to her daughter.

Ultimately we change because of relationship – especially relationships with the ones who we think differ from us, are less than us, or are better than us. We need to listen to the strawberry workers when they say they are working too hard, under too harsh of conditions and still not making it because they have no power to advocate for themselves. We need to hear a sermon from the person we think is lazy and won’t just get a job, work hard, and get off the welfare rolls. We need to listen to the woman from Mexico, here illegally, whose child is sick and is demanding that she is as worthy of care as the son of the CEO of Goldman Sachs. None of this says we have to do more, be more, serve more, give more, work, work, work, work, no matter how tired we are, how little we have to give, how limited we are by life’s circumstance. It’s not about achievement, it’s about change. And that change comes when we erase any lines we have drawn to define our circle of concern.

These lines – like the line between the Syrophoenicians and the Jews are really just imaginary. Why do we care about Americans more than Mexicans…it’s because of an imaginary line called a border. Why do we care more when “middle class” people are hurt by the economic crisis than when the “working poor” lose their jobs? Why is the life of a friend more valuable than the life of a stranger?

These aren’t exactly rhetorical questions. There are actually reasons we draw these lines that are understandable. One is that we draw lines in order to manage the unmanageable. We have to choose because there is no way to take on the life of each and every human being. And in choosing, we have natural inclinations that kick in – we choose those who most resemble us. But the Syrophoenician woman challenges us just as she challenged Jesus. We have to at least ask the question: Where are our borders of concern…and why are they there? Put more bluntly, why do we value some people more than others?

Last year, when I was driving with my family to Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, we stopped for dinner at a roadside restaurant in the middle of nowhere. It was a sit down restaurant much like a Village Inn. In our little traveling band, we had six adults and four children, ages 7, 5, 2 and 1, and we had been in the car for hours. I’m sure I don’t have to go into much detail for you to appreciate that we were hungry and just a tad bit grumpy by the time we stopped.

I don’t remember all the details of the meal. But what I do know for sure is that our waitress was not good at her job. Orders were lost, the food we did get was very slow to come, it seemed like hours passed between visits to our table, and her table side manner…well let’s just say she fit in well with our grumpy little band.

When it came time to pay the bill, and thus time to tip, I know what was going on in all of our heads: the tip is meant to reflect how good the service was. And so people were wondering, calculating, what tip would reflect the quality of service we received that night. But for some reason, in that moment, I realized how crazy that is. Why is that woman, who is likely in a job she is not good at simply because she needs to be in a job less worthy of pay than I am?

I couldn’t stop thinking about her as we drove on that night. I tried to imagine her life – the good things and bad things. I tried to imagine what I would be like as a waitress if that was the only job available to me. Not a pretty picture, I guarantee you. Finally, I tried to imagine being her friend; what she would say to me after she got off work. What I would know about her life and how I would likely respond. I hope and pray my tip that night had absolutely nothing to do with how well I thought she did or didn’t do her job.

Tomorrow is Labor Day. It’s an opportunity to think about the lines we draw, the judgments we make about how worthy someone is of good pay, good benefits, and a job they enjoy. We can celebrate the successes of the unions throughout history in addressing inequalities and injustices in the work place. At the same time, as Christians, let’s also think about how these same inequalities affect our own actions toward others. Where do we show favoritism? How alive is our faith when we meet an outsider in need of help? How good are we at putting ourselves in another’s shoes, joining in relationship with them in order to have our worldview changed?

That’s our work. Seeing people…really seeing them and understanding what their lives are like. That’s the work of faith. James is right: without that work, our faith will wither and we will be hiding and avoiding and deriding and denying people the things they need to truly live. But if we, like Jesus, are open to change and are ready to listen to people who are “outsiders” to us, then we will grow in faith. Our faith will be alive, just as Christ is alive in us and in the world. Have a blessed Labor Day. Amen.

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Healthcare is not a scarce resource

Luke 7:1-10
August 23, 2009

We are all certainly aware of the debate taking place in our country right now over health care reform. I’m sure you, like me, are concerned about this issue and have opinions and ideas about what we should be doing – or not doing. But I have to say I have been disgusted by the nature of the debate. I know that’s a strong word: disgusted. But if I am completely honest, that is indeed what I’m feeling.

I think the problem with the current debate – at least the debate we see most often in the media – is that it starts with a wrong question, and then all of our energy is poured into answering that question. The fact is, there can be no good answer if you start from the wrong question.

The debate about health care reform is answering the question: “How should we allocate resources?” Of course that is a question that needs to be decided at some point. But it should not be the starting point. It is not the question that should draw our energy. The question that deserves our energy and thought is “How should we be healing people?” The decision about how to allocate resources should emerge naturally as the logical conclusion to the answer of how we should be healing people.

The problem is that the first question, how should we allocate resources, is based on the assumption that healthcare is a zero sum proposition. When you give here, you have to take from there. Winners always create losers. And so everyone fights like crazy to be on the winning side. But we know the truth is much larger than that. In God’s realm, healthcare is not a scarce resource, not when it flows from compassion. There is more than enough compassion to go around. And helping one person doesn’t hurt another person, it helps everyone else.

So, if we ask “How should we be healing?”, we might do well to look at how Jesus healed, and we have many stories in the bible about that. Luke in particular writes a lot about Jesus healing folks. In this story, Jesus heals the slave of a Roman soldier.

The slave isn’t given any lines, but we can guess what he is feeling based on our own experiences. We have all been in situations where we need healing and cannot heal ourselves. Broken bones, cancer, loneliness, addiction, mental illness, despair. When we find ourselves in such situations, we realize that we become dependent on others. We can do a lot, but ultimately it’s someone else who has the power to heal us and this more often than not makes us feel scared, helpless, and frustrated. We are dependent on doctors, we are dependent on having insurance or the ability to pay, we are dependent on having a network of support – communities that uphold us when we cannot hold ourselves up.

In this case, the man was close to death, and he could do nothing to change that. He had no money, no access to healers and no one obligated to help him. He was, in short, completely powerless.

The centurion soldier is the one with the power – the power to do everything except the healing itself. I think we can also relate to the Centurion soldier. Most of us have been in the situation of seeing someone suffering and nothing we are doing seems to help. We hurt for the one who needs healing, but sometimes there are just too many constraints or the problem is just too big. Think of a doctor constrained by a hospital’s financial realities, or those without the skill to address a physical ailment even if they had the chance, or the one who sees the inevitability and imminence of death for a friend and doesn’t know what healing even looks like in that situation. Even if we are generally powerful people in some areas of our lives, there are some things we just can’t change.

But it was enough for the centurion to have compassion. That was the key…someone who had power had compassion. Moreover, he was compassionate toward someone that was not typically within his circle of concern. The slave was Jewish, and may have even been a prisoner of war, taken into to slavery during battle. He could have – in fact many people in such power would have – just let the slave die. Instead, he took a risk – putting himself on the line for the far-fetched idea that a Jewish rabbi rumored to heal might come and help a Roman solider.

And Jesus does. He responds to someone in need, regardless of the consequences. What he did was risky. Rome was persecuting and oppressing the Jews. The centurions were there to protect the empire. They feared the lower classes rising up in armed revolt – a rational fear it turns out given the Jewish uprising in 70 AD. It’s in this context that Jesus set off for Capernaum, a very Roman city, simply because he had been called there by the enemy. Like the centurion soldier, Jesus’ compassion was not just for his own community. It extended across one of the most impenetrable borders of his time.

But going into the enemy’s camp, radically expanding the community of care, wasn’t the only risk Jesus took. Often in our day when someone is trying to understand why systems and people behave the way they do, you hear the advice, “follow the money, follow the power”. This advice is appropriate to apply to Jesus’ day as well. Healing people is one of the most provocative things Jesus did – it made both the Jewish and Roman authorities really mad. And if people get really mad when another human being is restored to health, they must be losing a lot of something.

The Jewish authorities were in charge of the health of the Jews – and they controlled this through the temple. If you were sick, they believed the way to heal was through prayer and fasting, and making sacrifices at the temple; sacrifices, by the way, that required buying an animal from the temple market and paying the temple tax. It was against Jewish law to get help from healers outside of the temple hierarchy. The priests had complete power over the people’s access to health care. At the same time, the roman government allowed healers to operate all over the kingdom, but of course these people paid high taxes to Rome on everything they made. Good business for the healers was good news for Rome.

Being in control of how people are healed and by who means that when someone is sick, the ones who can heal can ask for a lot in exchange for their services. It’s a monopoly. Think back about a month ago, when you heard the story of the hemorrhaging woman from the gospel of Mark. Mark writes, “she had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better.” When Jesus healed her, successfully, he removed revenue and power from the existing system. Of course the authorities were angry; Jesus wasn’t killed for being nice. If someone else was successful at healing and denied no one and charged nothing, it was all but guaranteed that the flow of money to the existing systems would completely stop; unless, that is, you put an end to the new source of healing.

Obviously we cannot look to the bible for a blueprint of what our modern health care system should look like. We will not get a direct answer to the question: “Should we support Obama’s or Grassley’s health care plan?” The health care industries between the two contexts are just plain too different. But if we learn from how Jesus healed people in the bible, we might find a way in our own context to faithfully navigate the debate and evaluate the different proposals.

While we are Christians and called to heal, we are not Jesus, or the Centurion, or the slave for that matter. How we heal looks very different in our own context. Healing happens in many ways, but certainly a lot of healing happens within a complicated system of care facilities, insurance companies, technology and costs. And that system is governed by a mix of healers, legislation and the private market system. And so those are the areas we must be active in if we want to be a part of healing. As Christians we must influence the people involved, the legislation and the private industry.

Looking at how Jesus heals, we can see some very concrete things we can do in the midst of this critical debate. First, like Jesus and the centurion soldier, we can expand our community of care. Christians are always called to care for the ones no one else does. Even when there is no earthly reason we should – even when there are numerous reasons not to – we have compassion for every person God has created, regardless of who they are, where they find themselves in life, or how they got there.

Second, we need to acknowledge that power plays a crucial roll in our system and debate. Some people truly are powerless to help themselves get well or get the help they need. Our power to help undoubtedly varies and differs depending on who we are; maybe our power is like the centurion soldier’s in that if we choose compassion, we can fight for someone in need…get them access to healing. Maybe we have the power to heal directly even if it is risky to do so. Maybe we have the resources to give so the person can heal themselves. Whatever it is, we have to be honest about power and then ensure that power is being used to provide healing, not deny it.

Third, we must abandon the rhetoric that divides people. How we talk makes a difference. And we could help out our brothers and sisters across this country if we started by paying attention to how we talk about those on the other side of the political aisle.

In our rhetoric, we need to stop simplifying complex ideas and arguments into sound bites that completely betray the original point. For example, I have heard people say that all Republicans oppose reform of any kind. If we stopped to think about this at all, we know quite well that statement does not, in fact, reflect reality. Some people on TV seem to be like this. But most of your friends and neighbors and fellow church members don’t fit this bill. Out of a place of compassion, it is quite reasonable to believe that some of the proposals being put forth will lead to a system much, much worse that what we have now…just adding to the problem, not solving it at all.

I have heard people say that all Democrats want socialized medicine. Again, most of your friends, church family and neighbors are intelligent, thinking people who do not want every one who is doing well to be cut off at the knees and forced into poverty themselves, in need of government assistance. Out of a place of compassion, it is reasonable to believe a government system for health care can exist within a democratic society and free market economy.

The church can stop this rhetoric, even if it seems inevitable in the larger world. We can and we must. If we don’t, not only will the system not get fixed and suffering continue, our communities will fracture, we will move further and further from what unity in Christ looks like. Unity in Christ is unity in diversity, not distinct groups united in their singularity.

Fourth, we can put our energy in places where compassion is already present. Remember that Jesus was drawn to helping the slave not only because of his compassion for him, but also because the Centurion had compassion. Jesus expended energy not in fighting those invested in the status quo through endless debates not based on facts; he just jumped into an environment of compassion and started living another kind of health care system.

There are many places of compassion today, places that could use our support. There are those who see and give voice to people without insurance or good care for any reason, yet they often feel like they are never heard. There are many doctors who want more than anything to do their absolute best for patients, but find themselves constrained by the senseless rules of both the government and private companies. There are people who work in the insurance companies and truly want to help people, but often come up against a system that is profit driven. We should find those people, put our energy there, support them, listen to them and trust their wisdom because it is wisdom born of experience and compassion.

Fifth, there is no way around it: we need to take risks. We need to help those others view as the enemy, we need to undermine the system that hurts the most vulnerable by insisting on healing for all. We will anger people – even very powerful people. And we will each undoubtedly have to make sacrifices ourselves. But health care can’t only be about money – it can’t only be about scarce resources. The role of money should be to serve the principle of compassion, the goal of healing others. When that is the way it works, the money will likely be distributed in ways that make some of us squirm in discomfort or make us nervous about our own security. But healing is for everyone, and it can never be a zero sum reality.

Finally, none of this is possible unless we are educated. We must know what is really being proposed, and we have to be able to ask the hard questions. We have to get past the rhetoric that obscures the facts and have honest conversations with experts and each other and with those who have honest disagreements. We have to know what we don’t know, and be open to correction through honest conversations. There is no short cut.

If you need a place to start, you can stop by the table in fellowship hall after worship and get some information from some reliable sources. But, it can’t stop there. And our information cannot come from the sound bites on TV. We will have to find good sources of information – I’m not talking about Fox or CNN here. Organizations like Sojourners are committed to providing people with independent, non partisan information. Heck, we might even try reading the proposed bill itself – although we wouldn’t want to get ourselves too far ahead of most of the members of Congress.

There is no quick fix, and the forces of politics, ideology and fear are incredibly powerful. But we are not outmatched. Ultimately, there is nothing more powerful than love and compassion. And no matter what people say, healthcare is not a scarce resource. Amen.