Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Today in Washington, sometime after 1 p.m., there is supposed to be a vote on Health Care Reform. It has caused a partisan furor in both houses of Congress, and given new meaning to the old cliché: “If you like bologna or the law, don’t go see how either is made!”

And as a part of the nationwide effort being made to shift opinion one way or the other, when I went into my primary care physician’s office last week, there was a document in the waiting room, placed and provided for patient reading. It was even highlighted, and with copies of a letter that we were asked to consider FAXing to our congresspersons, whose FAX numbers were also provided.

The letterhead was from the Association of Physicians and Surgeons: A Voice for Private Physicians Since 1943. It was written by one Lawrence Huntoon, who holds both an M.D. and Ph.D., plus, he is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons and a board certified neurologist. With such impressive sounding credentials he had to know what he was writing about: Wrong!

When I began to read it, I had to re-examine the credentials again, because it sounded like it came fresh out of the right-wing-Rush-Limbaugh-nut-bin of the Fox News Tea Party. As I read it, and thought about my sermon for today, it was like Dr. Huntoon had written part of my sermon for me. To wit…the first line of the letter reads thusly:

Of course I like my health insurance coverage. Who wouldn’t? I ran up a hospital bill six years ago of more than $100,000 and I had to pay only peanuts. Since then, I’ve added supplemental coverage and for my last five hospital visits, I’ve paid nothing…Nada!

But do I like the fact that because I’m part of a privileged elite in America with Social Security and Medicare, plus, I can afford to pay $200 a month for a great supplemental policy, that it doesn’t bother me that 31 million Americans don’t have any coverage whatsoever! That this week I had a woman call crying; that they had been on their way through town to a new job in Texas for her husband and son; her daughter-in-law is four months pregnant, and the mother on the phone had to go to the Emergency Room at Lee Memorial, followed by an overnight hospital stay. The family had spent two nights in a nearby motel. They only had money enough to pay for one of the nights and still have enough for gasoline to get to Texas. The last time they had eaten was the day before on the dollar burger at McDonalds. And the mother was feeling heavy duty nausea and was afraid she might have to return to the Emergency Room.

When I called the Motel Front Desk, the manager confirmed their presence and situation and said, “They seem like nice people.” And I thought of the question that had been in the letter in the waiting room of my primary care physician. She not only saw me, but all I had to do was sign a sheet of paper and I didn’t have to pay one red cent:

So do I like my health insurance coverage? If I’m only concerned about me and mine, us four and no more…if I’m totally selfish, with no feeling of responsibility for my fellow citizens, yes. But if we’re decent…if we make claim to faith of any kind…if we care about our fellow citizens, then no, we don’t like what’s happening in America, No, a thousand times no.

It’s a matter of justice. It’s a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of this nation having lost its credentials as a people who recognize that to be American is more than greed-gone-to-seed. We’ve succumbed to the nauseous garbage on the airwaves that has made multi-multi millionaires out of right wing reactionaries such as Rush Limbaugh who spew sedition and treasonous poison parading as patriotism. And as I read what’s happening in Congress, the primary concern of those opposed to the bill is re-election and the power of the majority, not the welfare of the nation. They’re not interested in reaching across the aisle; they’ve committed to causing this president to fail, regardless of what it does to the nation.

But I digress. That was only the first sentence in the letter. The very next sentence read:

If you believe patients should be allowed to make their own decisions about their medical care and insurance coverage….

I don’t know about you, but I’ve made some of the worst decisions about medical care that can possibly be made. Six years ago, when I was having a heart attack, I thought it was indigestion, so I decided that if I increased the speed on the treadmill I could run it off. When that didn’t work, I sat in the sauna for 15 minutes. Then I staggered into the showers, passed out, and hit my head and started bleeding; when I came to, I was sure it had been an accident unrelated to anything serious happening other than indigestion. I finally was convinced by another guy in the gym that I ought to go see the doctor, which I finally did. He gave me an EKG and said he was calling an ambulance and sending me to the Emergency Room. I tried to persuade him not to and that I could drive my car. Once there they diagnosed a heart attack, and I had a triple bypass. And the letter asks, do I want to protect the right to make my own decisions about medical care…!

And in that same sentence he adds not only “make my own decisions about medical care…but also insurance coverage?

Do you know that insurance companies hire and train people to serve as “denial specialists?” In other words, they specialize in saying “no” for health care coverage you paid for that you thought would guarantee they would say “yes” when the need arose. They say no when they know they should say yes. And yet they want you to somehow believe that they have your best interest at heart, and that it’s not a cold-hearted-push-you-into-the-cold, and stomp-on-your-outstretched-hand-profit-motive-at-work!

Now, I’m going to stop there with the letter. There is much, much more. But believe it or not, it leads in to my sermon of today on liberation theology and how it understands the message of Jesus relating to the poor and the oppressed.

One of the most significant theological developments of the past 40+ years in Christian theology has been the development originating in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America called, “Liberation Theology.” It began when a Roman Catholic priest, Gustavo Gutierrez, after completing graduate theological studies in Rome, was sent back by the church to minister in his native Peru, specifically, the capital city of Lima.

Once there, this is what he discovered: Some half of the population was Native American or Indian: They were desperately poor and poverty stricken. Another third of the population was Mestizo (which is mixed White and Indian), and also, for the most part, very poor. And then at the top – a small, 10 to 15 percent – was the White populace.

Though smallest, the Whites were the richest and the most powerful. And like Gutierrez, they were Roman Catholic. And like virtually every other ruling class, including the Church’s hierarchy, they resisted any changes which might cause their favored status to be in jeopardy.

That meant that the work of a good Catholic priest was in effect to maintain the status quo. He was to oversee the church’s orphanages and direct its charitable organizations. And he was to administer the Mass both to the poor and to the ruling class.

In addition, he would need to be overtly grateful for the generosity of the rich and the powerful. He would extol their charity and underscore how important it was in helping to feed the poor of Peru.

Indeed, massive numbers of Peru’s poor were dependent almost totally on the largesse, the charity, of the rich. They were dependent upon the food provided, the money contributed, and the support given to the church’s charitable institutions.

As Gutierrez worked within the system, what he saw was heartbreaking. Hunger and malnutrition were rampant. Disease pervasive. Mothers and fathers of huge families, which they could not feed, had more daughters and sons, whom if they survived to adulthood, also would have large families, which they could not feed. Parents with no jobs produced children who, if they survived to adulthood, would have no jobs. Parents who stood in line for charity produced children who stood in line for charity.

In Peru, the rich giving to the poor, and the poor accepting charity from the rich, had the practical effect of keeping the poor, poor, and the rich, rich. And there was nothing about any of the charity which had the slightest hint of changing what was causing the poverty and creating the inequity in the system. There was nothing which would change the favored status of the White ruling class, and elevate the poorest of the poor from the depths of their poverty.

Making it even more difficult for Gutierrez, he was a priestly representative of a church that blessed this system, which perpetuated the inequity, and had ever since 1492, when Pope Alexander VI divided up the unexplored world of the Americas between the Spanish and the Portuguese monarchs, and gave them the added incentive of converting the indigenous peoples in the new world to Christianity. With priests standing by, the conquistadores were brutal and inhumane, and imposed a model of civil governance where the church made the rules and civil servants enforced it. Despite later revolutions, nothing changed for the poor. Until one day, Gutierrez rebelled. He concluded that:

The intellectual basis of his rebellion was that it is crucial to make a distinction between incidental poverty and systemic poverty. “Incidental” poverty is that poverty which we bring upon ourselves through our own actions and decisions. Or, it may be something we had no control over – an accident, a breakdown, etc. But it is unique, and happened only to us, or to some other person or persons.

“Systemic” poverty, though, is what Gutierrez’s colleague, Bishop Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil, saw as something totally different. Systemic poverty, according to Bishop Camara, is “institutionalized violence.”

Now we don’t normally think of poverty as violence. But Bishop Camara said, “Institutionalized violence” occurs when society by its nature is organized in such a way that it perpetuates structures that continue to reproduce the same result over and over.

If tens of thousands of our fellow Americans have lost their homes through foreclosure…more than 30,000 in Lee County alone…if the unemployment rate is at an all time high and Lee County leads the nation in lack of job opportunities…and if our hospital system is having to provide more and more free care to desperately ill people showing up at the emergency room…then, Hello! It’s not the homeowner, not the worker, nor the sick patient…it’s the system.

When our social structures have begun endlessly to replicate situations of pervasive poverty – especially for minorities – then it’s the system, not the individual which is to blame.

And yet when Bishop Calder attempted to do something about the systemic poverty in Brazil, the reaction of the elite class was vicious. As he described it:

“When I fed the poor, they called me a saint; when I asked, ‘Why are the poor, poor?’ they called me a communist.’”

Guess what? In Washington, the same party that in the 1930s opposed unemployment insurance, the 8-hour work day, and Social Security, as well as Medicare in 1964, is now unanimously opposed to Health Care reform, and using all kinds of denigrations to defeat it.

But when 31 million Americans don’t have healthcare, the system is broken. When a significant proportion of those with health care have to choose between food and medicine to afford their healthcare, the system is broken.

Liberation theology used the image of Jesus to provide a critique of society and of faith through the eyes of the poor. It went so far as to say that in the eyes of God there was “a preferential option for the poor” and that the poor are a privileged channel of God’s grace.

What we need to understand is that humanity is on one boat. Some of us are on the upper decks, and others of us on the lower decks. This is the important conclusion to draw from that:

When the lower decks are leaking, and their passengers are drowning, we can’t act as though it doesn’t affect us. We’re all on the same boat.

When hunger, homelessness, and diminishing availability of health care are on the increase, we don’t have the prerogative of saying, let’s wait until next year after the midterm elections, when it will only be worse. We don’t have the prerogative of saying my way or no way. We’re in a national crisis and the Jesus of Christian faith doesn’t have an office at the insurance companies of America; he isn’t holding forth at the headquarters of the pharmaceutical firms; nor is he residing in the halls of Congress.

Do you know where Jesus is? He’s in the Emergency Room waiting for care without a dime of insurance or a dollar in his pocket. He’s one of 800 in Lee County huddling with his family for the night in the cold confines of an automobile, because they’ve lost their home in foreclosure. Do you know where Jesus is? He’s in line at the Soup Kitchen. Do you know where Jesus is? He’s an AIDS patient choosing from our leftover clothes at McGregor Clinic. He’s a child at Hope House awaiting foster parents. Jesus is always the reflection of the sick, the poor, the hungry, the naked, and the oppressed. So says liberation theology, and so say we.

[1] Presented March 21, 2010 at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, located at 2756 McGregor Boulevard, Ft. Myers, FL, the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister. meeting for the last time at the Crestwell School, 1910 Park Meadow.