My sermon on February 28, 2021. Theme: Health care for all is not only a human right, it's a metaphysical necessity. We’re all interconnected. When one suffers, we all suffer. When one is healing we’re all being healed. That’s what it means that the whole world, the entire cosmos is the Body of Christ, and we are, individually members of it. A sermon based on Matthew 8.5-13.
1.
About a year ago, on Sunday, March 1, 2020, just before all this change and challenge fell upon us, I explored the implications of Saint Paul’s vision for the way human beings can relate to one another. We were reading a section from his Letter to the Romans. From that ancient text I was explaining the Christian vision for the truth that we are deeply connected, physically and spiritually.
Ten days later, after consultation with our leaders, we suspended all our in-person gatherings; the pandemic began its devastating sweep through the world that we’ve all come to realize is far more interconnected than most of us ever imagined.
We’ve not only endured much this past year, we’ve also learned much: about all we’ve taken for granted, how interconnected we are; about the ways the health and wellbeing of our families, communities, and the Earth itself depend upon our cooperation.
A year ago I asked you a question in that March 1st sermon: “Do you know what the largest living organism is? Is it an elephant? No. A whale? No.” Then I asked you a riddle. “It’s bigger than a whale, yet hides out of sight. It can fill over 250 semi trucks, but spreads itself paper thin. What is it?”
It’s a mycelium, I said, a humungous fungus that lives just beneath the forest floor of eastern Oregon. The largest living organism on the planet weaves together zillions of living organisms into a whole you’ll never see, but just because you and I can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
Like this humongous fungus, the mycelia that weave together so many of the living things across this planet, there’s a living spiritual organism that weaves together zillions of animate and inanimate things—all things—held together in a harmony, mostly hidden from our eyes, yet something we can know, feel, lean into, experience. That’s the reality we religious people call “Christ”—the spiritual reality in whom all things live and move and have their being.
2.
A year later, we’re reading this story of healing from the Gospel of Matthew. The reading is a witness to the reality of interconnectedness.
As the story goes, a Roman military officer—a member of another race and nation, the man, a symbol of oppression and violence—comes to Jesus with a physical need. Jesus doesn’t put up a wall. Jesus doesn’t discriminate. The officer has a servant who’s terribly sick. The officer comes to Jesus because Rome doesn’t have a health care plan for those who work for the government. Everybody’s on their own to try to get the help they need. The officer knows Jesus is a frontline health care provider who doesn’t discriminate. And Jesus, true to form, doesn’t ask the guy about his employee benefits program, doesn’t ask if he’s got insurance for his staff, he doesn’t care it he’s got Kaiser or Sutter or Dignity Health, or nothing at all. Jesus doesn’t even care that the man isn’t from around here, that he practices a different religion, that’s he’s of a different race, that the officer’s home’s far away across the Sea, that the man works for a government that’s an oppressing enemy to Jesus’ own people. Jesus only knows one thing: a human being is sick. Jesus lives according to a vision of reality that knows no separation, no dualism, no us verses them. We’re all one, all brothers and sisters in the same big family. Jesus knows the truth of our universal interconnectedness. Jesus knows that so long as one person, no matter who they are, is sick or marginalized or whose wellbeing is ignored, none of us can be well. So Jesus heals—because to bring health to one person brings health to us all.
This is the deep physical and spiritual truth of reality. If we live into this reality, the good news is this: we can each experience the wellbeing we want when all can experience wellbeing they deserve. If we don’t live into this really, the news isn’t good because the opposite is also true: none of us can be truly well so long as some of us are not.
2020 taught us that we live in a world so much more interconnected than we ever imagined. And yet we are more divided than ever.
3.
We are all interconnected and every one of us will know a greater degree of wellbeing when all of us know wellbeing. But today in America, 87 million people are either uninsured or underinsured.
We are all interconnected and health for any of us means more health for all of us. But do you know that during this pandemic, around 16 million people have likely lost their employer-provided insurance while our elected leaders in Washington haggle over partisan politics, dividing along party platform lines, while the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the insured and the uninsured, grows wider by the day?
We are all interconnected, all brothers and sisters, but do you know that 11 million undocumented immigrants, many of whom have held “essential” jobs, are not eligible for public or employer-provided health care? They are on their own to get the health care they need.
We are all interconnected, all one, but medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. A 2019 study found that 33% of Americans reported that they or someone in their family had put off getting medical treatment because of the high costs.
Jesus, the healer, refuses to privilege some while ignoring others and yet the failures of our health care system around the COVID-19 crisis have made the pandemic worse in poor, black, minority, and indigenous communities. African Americans have died at a rate of 50.3 persons per 100,000 people, compared with 22.9 for Latinos, 22.7 for Asian Americans, and 20.7 persons per 100,000 for whites.
In May 2019, the previous administration announced a rule that would allow medical service providers and employers to deny health care to transgender people if they have a “religious objection” to equal rights for all.
Some might argue that it’s ok for a government to do such things. But, if you’re a Christian, you can’t argue that it’s ok for you to ignore the vision of Jesus and its moral mandate to find ways for all of God’s children to enjoy access to effective and affordable health care.
When it comes to health and wellbeing, Jesus has no religious objection, no racial objection, no social objection, no objection based on a person’s economic status, no objection whatsoever to anyone in need of healing.
Jesus crosses boundaries. Jesus reaches out. Jesus is a non-discriminating, unflinching advocate of health care for all.
Why?
Not just because healthcare is a human right. Of course it is something all persons deserve. Jesus’ reasoning, like Saint Paul’s reasoning, like the reasoning of those religious persons throughout history who have at the front of just about every movement for healthcare for the poor or underserved on this planet, like the reasoning of anyone who sees the reality of the interconnectedness of life on this planet—Jesus’ reasoning, Saint Paul’s reasoning, our reasoning—is based on reality itself, the interconnectedness of all things.
What affects one, affects all. We are not only our brother or sister’s keeper, we are part of them and they part of us, each members of the universal body of Christ.
The health of the oceans affects the health of the flowers. The health of the flowers affects the health of the bees. The health of the bees affects the health of all that human beings eat. The health of human beings affects the health of the soil. The health of the soil affects the health of the oceans. It’s all one great sacred spiral of reality. One big family, all intertwined.
4.
This is why I’m grateful that DCC is a key player in Healthy Davis Together, a nationally acclaimed joint project between the City of Davis and UC Davis with a goal to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and facilitate a coordinated and gradual return to regular city activities and reintegration of UC Davis students back into the Davis community. I sit on the Healthy Davis Together council, along with 30 other scientists, physicians, business persons, city staff, and community leaders to ensure that everyone in Davis has access to free testing, free masks, quality, up-to-date information about the virus and how we can cooperate together to foster community wellbeing that affects not only the health of every person in the region, but also our economic, social, and emotional health as well.
And I’m grateful for DCC’s leaders, our board of elders, our staff, and our own Covid Council who have led us this past year; in 2018, we adopted our Vision2028 plan and strategy, a prophetic document that summarizes our mission and ministry this way, “We are called by Christ to tend the wellbeing of the place and people around us.” And while our strategy is to remain cautious about our own return to in-person gatherings, we are, right now, working on our Roadmap to Regathering so that as general health spreads and the threats lessen we can find ways to titrate our return, always considering the ways we are so deeply interconnected, wanting to foster health and mitigate infection.
And lastly, as I look back over the past year and the ways we have lived out the Christ-vision, I’m grateful for the innovative programs we’ve initiated that have kept people connected, provided care and compassion, and delivered not only spiritual support, but also meals and boxes of food and prescriptions when folks couldn’t run errands for themselves, provided masks for people who needed them and care packages for families with young children who needed some relief from feeling so coopted up.
When some of our folks were evacuated because of the fires last fall, our people were there for them, on the phone, supporting them in their flight to safety. When others were without power for days a few weeks ago, our people were there checking on them, ensuring they were safe and secure; and when one of you said, “I’m ok, just a little cold. You wouldn’t happen to have some hot coffee and a charge for my cell phone would you?” And one of you made coffee and delivered it and charged his cell phone.
We’re all interconnected, you see? When one suffers, we all suffer. When one is healing we’re all being healed. That’s what it means that the whole world, the entire cosmos is the Body of Christ, and we are, individually, members of it.
What we do locally, here, face to face, we human beings must do on a larger scale. Our practices and policies—personal, commercial, and political—must move away from the kinds competition that have wounded us to the kind cooperation that can strengthen us if our species is going to survive on this planet.
Ruth Coleman, one of our elders, said something wise to our governing board last spring. “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” She was quoting the wisdom of Stanford economist, Paul Romer.
It’s been a tough year. But we have not wasted this crisis. We are proving to be a resilient people, we know that we are an interconnected people, we are learning to be a cooperative people. Not only here in Davis, but across the planet.
And you’ve each being doing your part, contributing to the wellbeing of the whole.
May God guide us beyond the visions of competition that have plagued our race for too long. And may the Christ-vision of the interconnectedness of all things, guide us into new patterns of cooperation for the common good.