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Sermons at Saint Mary's

The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost:
9/6/2009
The Rev. Steve Smith

A Right and a Reponsibility

Folks, I am going throw caution to the wind today, and wade into the turbulent waters of our nation’s health care debate. For this crisis teeters now on becoming a catastrophe. And the facts are inescapable:

• 47 million of our fellow citizens do not have health insurance
• we are the only wealthy, industrialized country that does not have a universal care system
• over 15% of our GNP goes toward health expenses
• the US spends twice as much on health care per capita as any other country and spending continues to increase
• from 2000 to 2006, overall inflation increased 3.5%, wages increased 3.8%, and health care premiums increased 87%
• On the other hand, the US ranks 43rd in infant mortality, 47th in life expectancy, and half of the bankruptcy filings in the US are due to medical expenses.

We know all of this, we know it is outrageous.  But the only people who seem to be outraged are those who want to keep everything just the way it is.  And the rest of us choose to keep our heads in the sand, even though this threatens us and the generations to come.

So, I venture into these turbulent waters not to review what we already know.  I do so because our lessons today present us, I believe, with a provocative counterpoint to the way in which this issue has been framed thus far. If not for us as Americans, then certainly for us as Christians.  And in case you are worried that you are going to get a partisan opinion from the pulpit, I want to assure you there is in our Epistle and Gospel today both a liberal and conservative view.

First the liberal viewpoint.  The Letter of James has had a long history of provoking people.  Martin Luther himself called it an Epistle of Straw because it suggested that works or actions are as important as faith.  James, you see, insists that Christians have to practice what they preach.  If they are simply talking the talk and not walking the walk, he says, their faith is as good as dead.  Today, in our lesson, James does not shy away from the class conflict that was afflicting the early church.  And he speaks of the human tendency to show partiality to those who are rich, and well heeled, and powerful in this world.  Yet to do so, to favor the rich over the poor, the powerful over the weak, in the eyes of God, James says, is to transgress, it is to sin.  For God chooses the poor in the world to be rich in faith.  And to dishonor the poor is to blaspheme the name of God.

In this light, for us to see a brother or sister who naked, or who lacks food, and to say to them: Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill, and yet do not supply their bodily needs, this is an affront to God and a sin against humanity.  But this is precisely what we are doing by maintaining the status quo of health care in this country.  We are saying to those who cannot afford health care or who are disenfranchised: Go in peace, be healthy and well, without supplying a system to meet their bodily needs.  We are saying to them be well, but do this without access to medical care.  Be healthy, but do this without the kind of medical coverage we ourselves enjoy.  And in doing this, our Epistle claims, we are sinning against God and our neighbor.   

Our lesson from the Gospel of Mark is equally provocative but in a far different way.  And here is the conservative viewpoint.  In our Gospel, we see Jesus venturing way out of his territory, and far from his comfort zone.  Mark tells us he leaves his homeland to find some respite in the region of Tyre, which is in present day Lebanon.  He goes there to get away from the crowds, but word gets out that Jesus, the great miracle worker, was in town.

Jesus was not the only miracle worker in that day.  There were many then who had these healing powers, and their powers it seems had as much to do with the faith of those who came to them for healing that they would be made whole again.  This, indeed, was the case with the Syrophonecian woman who came to Jesus that day.  She believed that Jesus could heal her little girl who was oppressed by a demon.  There was just one problem.  She was a Gentile, one who was considered unclean by the Jews.  Thus approaching this Jewish rabbi in and of itself would have required extraordinary faith, and an extraordinary sense of personal responsibility.

But approach him, she did.  And in doing so, she left record for all of time the most disturbing account in the Gospels.  In petitioning Jesus for help, Jesus turns his back on her.  He recognizes she is a Gentile, and worse still, he calls her a dog.   Undeterred, she says these famous words: Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.

What happens next cannot be overstated.  Jesus changes his mind.  Jesus has a change of heart.  It is the only time we hear this happening in the entirety of the Gospels.

There are two things to glean, I believe in this story to help us out of the health care quandary we are in.  The first is this woman’s faith and her sense of personal responsibility.  It has been said often in the current debate that health care should be a right for all people.  How could we not affirm such a claim in a nation that embraces a constitution that sees to the life, liberty, happiness of all its citizens?  But the claim that health should be a right does not go far enough.  Health care should not only be a right, it should be a responsibility.  This means that all of us, the insured and uninsured, rich and poor, the healthy and the diseased must in good faith become vigilant about our own self care. We must face the fact that what is driving up much of the cost of health care, in spiraling increases in diabetes and obesity and heart disease and substance abuse, is due to our wanton and unsustainable lifestyles.  We must attend to healthy lifestyles and nutrition in all the ways we care for our bodies, our minds, and our spirits.  In short, we must embrace the conservative value of personal responsibility in how we approach our health as individuals and as a country.

There is also in our Gospel the record of Jesus collaborating with this woman seeking the healing of her daughter.  I have a strong sense this should guide our own actions on this issue.  For our health care crisis will not be solved until we have a similar change of heart.  We know healing and health is a national priority.  Now wherever we are on this issue, whether we are liberal or conservative, rich or poor, insured or uninsured, it is time to join together to see that the health of all our citizens is both a right and a responsibility.