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.