Toward A Faith Perspective On Health Care Reform

Riotous town hall meetings on the reforming of health care are finally ebbing, and Congressional debate on the subject can gear up again aided by the usual and quieter back alley lobbying and back room dealing. Right now, I am wondering whether faith communities across this country will glean enough from their own traditions to make a significant difference, and quickly, to a discussion that cannot be allowed to fail. From the standpoint of Christianity, the gleaning process may prove to be harder than we might expect.

If we think about health care reform the way we believe we ought to think about every other moral and social issue, by looking first to Jesus, we must face from the outset some major difficulties with translating his own orientation to life under God into terms that can be meaningful in our own. Remember, by way of example, that he never married. (I am singularly unimpressed with feminist theologies and popular recent novels to the contrary). And so, he never settled down with children of his own that he had to worry about. Further, he appears not to have shown much concern for the physical or emotional well-being of his own aging parents --- early in his ministry he got pretty testy with his mother, and his earthly father got dropped out of the picture altogether. He never struggled with finding and keeping a paying job, with meeting a payroll, or with covering employee benefits. He owned no property, left no estate, and eventually fobbed off on others even the expense of burying him.

The Gospels are pretty clear --- or at least the first three of them are --- about why his life took this shape: Jesus felt called to devote himself to announcing the imminent breaking in of a Kingdom not of this world. To the consternation of liberation theologians of all stripes, Jesus' sense of his calling forces us to consider the possibility that long-term planning for an earthly future may have no real importance at all in the Divine scheme of things, except perhaps to distract us from connecting with our true home in the Beyond. In the light of these considerations, can it still be said that by keeping our eye on Jesus we can find our way to a healthful solution to the problem of ensuring adequate health care in our society?

I think so. Consider, for example, a very early Christological hymn which impressed St. Paul enough to include it in his letter to the congregation at Philippi: "...he humbled himself, and was obedient, even to the point of death, death on a cross..." (Philippians 2:8) What really gets to me in this passage is its reference to Jesus' refusing to lay claim to his equality with God, for the purpose of making himself a servant of others. (The Greek word actually translates as "slave.")

There is hardly any of this spirit of humility to be found in most of what now passes for serious discussion about health care across, in Rush Limbaugh's pompous blathering, "the fruited plain." Instead, a snarky spirit of self-serving sinks most of the discussions, an I-have-to-get-mine attitude accompanied by a mean-spirited suspiciousness that some undeserving soul will somehow manage to sneak into an ER somewhere and siphon off resources for which he or she will not be required to pay. Caring for the strangers in our midst? Forget about it. Health care is a pay as you go proposition for the legally ensconced, guys and gals, and if you shouldn't be here in the first place and you can't come up with your fair share of its cost, no one else should ever feel obligated to do it for you. Isn't this just the kind of sinful attitude for which Jesus committed himself to die?

One of the most important things I have learned over the course of my life in the church is that early Christian communities made the inroads they did not just because of the Roman roads that turned the Empire's urban centers into mission fields, and not just because of the power of the earliest apostles' preaching and teaching to overcome pagan mythology. What also counted was the overwhelming compassion that flowed from the hearts of those who fully grasped the significance of a loving God's sending his beloved son to show the way toward a new life of mutual love by and for all, especially to those in need, and especially by the sacrifices of people willing to meeting those needs in his son's name. Caring especially for the widows and orphans, for whom no one else then cared, was a good place to start. Just as caring for the "aliens" among us would be today.

Guns and Nukes

On the face of it, it seems reasonable to insist on having the first at our personal disposal and the second at our government’s. The argument goes like this: There are bad people on our streets and untrustworthy foreign powers beyond our borders who want to do us harm and who have at their disposal, respectively, both means of doing it. And so, it is our personal and societal right and obligation to protect ourselves and other non-aggressive people and nations by possessing weapons in sufficient number and magnitude to prevail in any conceivable showdown with the forces of evil anywhere.

The facts presumed in this line of reasoning are hard to dispute. As are the normative claims about protecting ourselves and the innocent. What murks up the thinking, though, is our tendency to believe ourselves always to be truly innocent, and to assume that more equates with better when it comes to accumulating weapons for the purpose of keeping ourselves safe. From the standpoint of the Christian faith, the first belief is highly dubious: remember all that we once learned about the universality of sin? From the standpoint of theories about self-defense, the second belief is highly dangerous as well: remember all that we have learned lately about terrorism?

Typically accompanying the rationalization of seeking and acquiring more and more weapons, ostensibly for self-protection and never from aggressive intent, is the interdiction of any analysis of how human beings keep getting themselves into the situations that call for them (answer: from self-centeredness), and of with whom the blame most truly rests (answer: us as much as them). Admittedly, there is more to be said for this interdiction with respect to gun control than to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agreements.

For all practical purposes, reigning in restrictions on the purchase of guns for personal use is now a lost cause in this country. Too many manufacturers have created too many of them. Too many criminals have more of them than any democratic system of laws and law enforcement can control. And too many people oppose even the barest tinkering with their freedom to buy and use any piece they want.

Whatever we may discover, therefore, by continuing to search out the whys of our addiction to guns will not help very much to vanquish it. Basically, our society has decided to live with the dangers of giving just about everyone an opportunity to get a hand on a gun (or both hands on more than one). And though it is difficult to understand why some folks think they need so many of them, violence on our streets is very real and a gun-toting citizenry might yet prove to be an important adjunct to a well-armed police force.

Nuclear proliferation, however, is a different story. Efforts to reduce the present number of nuclear weapons across the globe, to stop further production of them, and to keep tabs on existing arsenals make every bit of sense, no matter how many obstacles to their success must be faced and overcome at every step of the way. The major world powers have made huge progress on all this in recent decades and the progress is likely to continue, at least if so-called rogue nations can be prevented from getting in the way.

Nevertheless, it is still terrifying to contemplate the consequences of firing off even a few of the estimated 10,000 nuclear warheads that are currently operational around the globe. Maybe the predictions of nuclear winter are unfounded; they most certainly are more difficult to defend than I once thought they were. But from any mutual setting off of nukes we would still be dealing with an aftermath far more destructive than that of fights between even armed to the teeth street gang members in our cities.

The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court on the right to bear arms pretty well cinches it for gun lovers in this country. We have that right, the Court said, as individuals and not just as militia members. (For the life of me, however, I cannot see this implied in the language of the Second Amendment.) With respect to guns, then, we may no longer be able to press the question of how many is too many. But nothing prevents the international community from working for a nuclear weapons-free world. Indeed, we have the right and the responsibility to proclaim in the name of the Prince of Peace that very, very few are still far too many. Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that once and for all. It is disturbing testimony to the depth of human sinfulness that we still have as many of them around as we do.

The God Particle

There is a passage in The Book of Colossians that in my mind nicely links the Christology of early church teaching with the cosmology of recent scientific speculation: “In (Christ) everything in heaven and on earth was created, not only things visible but also the invisible order of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers: the whole universe has been created through him and for him. And he exists before everything, and all things are held together in him.” (1:16-17, NEB). Right now, it is the cosmology rather than the Christology of this passage that intrigues me. What has re-ignited my interest in the idea of a substance holding everything in the universe together is what I am learning about the Higgs boson—named for the scientist who first dreamed it up—and why some people cannot seem to avoid the temptation to call it the “God particle.”

The physics of bosons eludes my comprehension about as much as does the physics of leptons and quarks, all teenier by many orders of magnitude than the electrons, protons, and neutrons into which they come together and around which I can still get a small part of my rapidly aging mind. However, I do think I still have enough functioning neurons and synapses to grasp why particle physicists are positing the existence of at least one kind of boson to account for other particles in the universe having mass and coming together to form every-thing else. And why we expend time, money, and effort to build particle accelerators that will crash enough protons and anti-protons into one another with enough speed to set off enough fireworks to enable our seeing this elusive particle in all its glory. Or to determine once and for all that there is no such particle.

I only wish I could have gotten closer to this research myself than the fates allowed. In the early 1990’s I was doing some work for the Provost of Southern Methodist University that included helping coordinate the development of a new physics department with the world-class people who at the time were building a supercollider in, of all places, Waxahachee, Texas. Just when things were moving along impressively enough to guarantee US supremacy in particle physics research for a generation, Congress got cold feet and killed the whole project. As a result, the axis of the research shifted to Switzerland, and our country ended up helping to subsidize the building of the Large Hadron Collider just outside Geneva. Ironically, in the time it will take to repair a recent break-down with the LHC, physicists at the much smaller but no less venerable Fermilab near Chicago just may complete the search for the Higgs boson all on their own.

It is fascinating to contemplate the greatest particle physicists of our time repeatedly colliding with one another in a frantic effort to be the first to explain how, as one scientist friend found a way of putting it to me, atoms “congeal” into matter after the Big Bang. When I first began struggling to grasp the nature of elements, molecules, and atoms, the notion of a “Big Bang” was still generating more big yawns—and even big laughs—than big ideas. The prevailing wisdom was that things were made up of atoms and whatever sub-atomic particles there were, and that all of them had been here together, forever. Religious types like me were struggling against getting closed out of the cosmological action altogether, but about all we had to draw on was the very difficult to grasp idea that all the stuff of the universe was created out of—are you ready for this?—nothing, absolutely nothing at all. In short, we were trying to squeeze in a place for God the Creator.

But now comes the God particle discussion, grounded in the certitude that atoms and their components have not in fact been around forever, and focusing intently not on what happened before the Big Bang and how, but on what’s keeping the furniture of the universe now in place from disintegrating before our very eyes (if, indeed the process saves our eyes for last so that we can view the final collapse). The God particle is not a that- from- which- everything- else- material- comes, but rather a that- which- holds- together- everything- which- has- already- come. The writer of Colossians could not leave it at that with respect to Christ; he had to bring in the the idea of Him as agent of the universe’s creation as well. But what the writer also left us is a very present God in times of chaos, whose nature may be less to originate and more to bind, hold, and sustain.

If the search for the Higgs boson is any indication, people are now taking such an idea to their comfort just as much in science as they always have in religion.