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.
