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Sunday, September 06, 2009

Are We Acting Like a Community

By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

I Corinthians 11: 17-22 New Revised Standard Version

¹⁷ Now in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together it is not for the better but for the worse. ¹⁸ For, to begin with, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you; and to some extent I believe it. ¹⁹ Indeed, there have to be factions among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are genuine. ²⁰ When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord's supper. ²¹ For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. ²² What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What should I say to you? Should I commend you? In this matter I do not commend you!

The words we heard from Paul’s first letter to the congregation that he established in Corinth are the first account of how Holy Communion began. We repeat Paul’s words every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper here. But we are looking at what Paul says right before he recalls those words and actions of Jesus. Paul is writing to the group of 40 or so new Christians whom he has baptized and is forming into one of the first congregations of followers of Christ. He is writing when Holy Communion was a full meal and not just the sharing of bread and wine.

What does he say? When you come together to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, you are failing to do it! You are showing contempt for the church/community! You are humiliating those who have nothing!

How is this occurring? It is because some people are coming early and eating all the food and drinking all the wine, and then people who are not able to come early, probably because they have been working all day, are getting there later and are going hungry. Paul says to celebrate a communion meal when some people are overindulging and others get nothing, is not what God wants. God wants you to look out for each other.

It is a good reminder of what kind of community a congregation of Christians is supposed to be. We are to care as much for each other’s needs as we do for our own.

What I wonder about today is whether Paul’s expectation, that we are to be an egalitarian fellowship where people are valued equally, might also shed some light on what has become the most controversial discussion in our country since the advent of the social security system in the 1930’s and the Medicare system in the 1960’s.

We are in a highly emotional debate in our country over healthcare and how we provide it and who should have it and what is wrong with our current system and what is good about our current system. There is a lot of money at stake, but people’s lives are also at stake and some people are starting from a moral perspective. Rev. Brian McClaren says, “those of us who have good health care who are Christians cannot, as Paul said in Phillippians 2, only be concerned with our personal interests: we must be as concerned about our neighbors who lack health care as we would want them to be for us if the tables were turned. Health care reform, as I see it, is about seeking better laws for the common good of all of our neighbors.” And, the Rev. Jim Wallis, who was with us at St. Andrew Church about a year ago and spoke to a full sanctuary, is also passionate about this issue. You can read Rev. Wallis arguments on the Sojourners Website, Sojo.net.

The imperative for people of faith to care for the weak and the ill and the vulnerable is a strong theme throughout Christian history. We read in the gospels that Jesus went about teaching, preaching, and healing. We read in the book of James that the elders of the church were to visit the sick and anoint them with prayer and healing oil.

We see over the centuries of church history that orders and groups of brothers and nuns were devoted to caring for the ill. We see in our own country, in the past two hundred years, that some of the first hospitals were begun and sponsored by church groups, thus the origin of Lutheran Hospitals and Methodist hospitals and Catholic hospitals. Health and well being, caring for the sick, have been high on the agenda of those who follow Christ!

Caring for the sick and weak and vulnerable was a major theme of the group of pastors of large churches in the gathering I attended last week. St. Andrew church of Plano, Texas is working with one member to establish medical clinics in Latin American countries for people who have almost no health care.  And the clinic in Colorado Springs, that was begun four years ago for the working poor and low income persons in the inner city, was started by a team of persons from Sunrise United Methodist Church because one of those members had a passion and felt called by her faith to care for the weak and vulnerable.

The discussion we are in as a country has taken some bad turns in my opinion and has become far too partisan and too focused on whether one political party can prevail over another instead of focusing on how we reform a system that is working for some and not others, a system in which the costs have been increasing several fold over the rate of inflation in many years, a system in which the physicians and medical providers feel changes need to occur and where hospital administrators and other health care executives feel so much is broken as well.

I offered in a recent email one panel discussion that was held in the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City that included the CFO of United Health Care for the Midwest US, as well as a physician and the director of a clinic serving low income families. I enthusiastically commend that resource to you because they start with the Rev. Adam Hamilton stating his belief that for Christians, how we provide care for all persons is a moral and ethical issue, and they start with all those panelists addressing the two central questions:

• What is wrong with the current health care system in the U S?
• How do we fix what is wrong? 

Those two issues ought to be part of our personal and national discussion along with the very hard question of how we pay for the corrections we make to our current program.  I encourage each of us to be well informed and get w

hat is factual and not what is false.  In the past months, I have seen much false information. The panel discussion at Church of the Resurrection can be found on their Website at COR.org.

We are still working to sponsor an evening of discussion and information in our own church with some of our specialists here and will let you know when that happens. For now, let me say that I also believe that how we care for the least and last and left out is a moral issue for Christians, and I offer some questions for us to ponder. Some of these questions will be controversial and make some of us uncomfortable:

0. Who should benefit the most from any changes in health care in the U S?
0. Should health care and health insurance just be tied to our place of employment or is there a better way?
0. Why should physicians who are the closest to the patients be forced to justify their decisions to people who have less training than they do?
0. How do we keep health care from becoming such a bitter partisan issue?
0. Do people have a moral right to health care in the same way that some believe we have a moral right to education or fire protection or police protection? Should health care be a right or a privilege? Should we allow citizens to die if they cannot afford health care?
0. How do we deal with waste in the current system, and what can we learn from cities who provide good health care at much less cost that other communities? See the study by Dr. Atul Gawande in the June 1, 2009 New Yorker Magazine comparing McAllen, Texas to Grand Junction, Colorado where health care costs are one half of the average cost in the Texas town.
0. What do we believe will happen if we do nothing and let the current pattern of increasing costs continue?
0. What role, if any, should our government have in health care? What is the track record of the two government sponsored health care systems right now, the VA system and the Medicare system? Do you know how the satisfaction rate in each of those compares to private insurance systems? See Nicholas Kristoff’s article in the New York Times September 3, 2009-Health Care That Works.
0. Do you believe that it is acceptable or that it is wrong for persons in our country to have to go bankrupt because they are unable to pay for medical costs not covered by the health insurance they have?
0. Do you agree or disagree with the 66% of Americans who said, in a poll five years ago, that it is the responsibility of our government to care for people who cannot care for themselves; those who are mentally ill or disabled. See the survey at http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=753)
0. How important do you think the image is of a “common good,” a notion of what is best for all our country instead of what is best for one or two special interest groups, and how does your faith inform your answer to that question?

We are in a time in American history where there is much at stake, not only billions of dollars, but more importantly, many, many lives. I pray that we can put those persons’ health and lives foremost and see the issues first from an ethical point of view. Perhaps it is wrong to take St. Paul’s image of people at communion just looking out for themselves and neglecting the needs of others, to take that and ask if it applies to our community as a nation, or perhaps, that can help us have a better beginning point than just thinking about what is best only for me.

What do you think?