Dialogue Concerning Universal Healthcare

I'm having an interesting discussion with an old friend over universal healthcare. I am in favor and he is opposed. I thought I would share some of this because it is very interesting.

ME:

Friend, I would be very interested in knowing how you would deal with the following situation: I have a woman in my church who is dying of cancer, but she cannot afford the treatments. How do you propose this problem should be dealt with?

FRIEND:

Greg, I know your in the middle of a low income area and you provide a vital role in that neighborhood. But the government just is not the answer for the poor. People like you are the answer. People who give out of the goodness of their heart. It is the responsibility of the church to provide for the poor, not the government. How is it just to forcibly take income from people and redistribute it to other people? When I was on staff everyone always was shocked how low welfare payments are. I constantly had to remind people that people on welfare also receive food stamps, Medicaid, child care and rent subsidies. When you factor these things in, the welfare they receive is just spending $. As for the person you are talking about with cancer you should look at a few things. First you should look at the government programs that are available. But if the person is not elderly and has no children then they are not going to qualify for Medicaid. There might be a program for those that are uninsurable. To qualify for that people typically have to demonstrate that they have been turned down for insurance due to their medical condition. The last thing I would recommend is to check with local hospitals about their charity care policies. Almost all hospitals have programs that offer free or reduced care for the poor. This is especially true of not-for-profit hospitals that have to demonstrate that status for their tax exemption. Anyway, that's my recommendation.

ME:

Friend, thanks for the suggestions. I agree that ultimately the poor do not need more money thrown at them. They need good role models and a revival of their values. This will only happen if Christians are willing to leave their lives of comfort and join in incarnational ministry among the poor. I have no issues with my fellow inner city missionaries who are fiscally conservative. I do, however, have major issues with fiscal conservatives who do not build relationships with the poor. Christ clearly teaches us that this must be a top priority if we are to be his followers.

I will respectfully disagree with you on matters of policy. Back when you knew me in high school, I was in total agreement with you. My experiences among the poor have changed my perspective (we are all shaped by our context). I now see the systemic nature of poverty and believe it requires a systemic solution. The church simply does not have the resources to be a safety net for the poor. The church can't even pay me a full time salary, let alone pay for someone's huge medical bill. I will look into the hospital charities that you mention, but we constantly find people like this turned away because of how expensive the procedure is and because of their pre-existing conditions. The woman I refer to has fallen through the cracks and does not quality for medicare or other government assistance programs. It is because I live in solidarity with the poor that I advocate for universal healthcare. Our nation can afford it. It's a shame we won't provide such a basic need for those who are on the margins of our society. As clearly indicated by the Old Testament, God judges the goodness of a society based upon how well it cares for those who cannot care for themselves -- the widow, the orphan, the alien, and the poor.

I fear sometimes that our compassion for the needy has been trumped by a non-Biblical economic and political ideology. There are places where the Bible clearly parts with Adam Smith. And I will side with the Bible.

Grace and Peace,
Greg

Where Do I Even Start?

I've been sitting on my front porch this evening because it is the first day of the year to hit over 70 degrees. As I sat in silence, I could overhear my neighbors screaming at one another at the top of their lungs. One woman's voice was so hoarse, it was obvious to me that she has spent her entire life screaming. Between the three or four uses of "motherf***in'" every sentence, I could make out that she was very angry at someone and was threatening to kill her. At one point she grew extra hostile and screamed, "Can you f***in' pray for me? I need someone to f***in' pray for me cause God told me I was gonna f***in' kill some motherf***er someday and that I was going to spend the rest of my f***in' life in jail." She screamed this with greater violence and vitriol than she had screamed her threats.

I immediately went into prayer. But I must confess I hardly even know how to pray. This situation seems so hopeless and so lost. Here I've moved my family into this neighborhood so that we could make a difference in the lives of people like this, but I just don't know the first thing to do with such chaos and hatred. I don't even know where to start. How does a church reach such a person? How could God possibly use this white boy from Illinois to help her? It's like I've entered a huge board game and been told that I need to win, but I don't even know the rules. Sure, I'll pray for her, but I don't know where to start in building a relationship.

All I know tonight is that I now believe in demons. I believe in them because I hear them screaming outside of my window every night. All I can do is cry out to God and hope that He knows what to do 'cause this young pastor doesn't know how to save his parish.

All Dogs DO Go to Heaven

What people believe about the end of the story has direct impact on how they live now. Some people believe that the end is death – eternal nothingness when the universe will implode in upon itself. Others, like myself, believe that the end is life – an eternal existence of harmony when all of creation will be redeemed. And although all Christians side with the latter, they disagree drastically on what that end will look like. At the risk of oversimplificaiton, I will divide these Christians into two groups:

1)The first group believes that the end will go something like this: Christ will call his people away from the earth and will invite those people into his other-worldly kingdom in the sky. The earth will then be consumed by fire and be destroyed. A new creation will exist in which we will all be non-material “spirit,” free floating in the air with a disembodied existence. The evil of matter will be eliminated for good.
2)The second group, also Christian, sees the end like this: Christ will return to earth and establish his kingdom on the earth. The resurrection will consist of physical bodies which have been reconstituted and “redeemed” as something incorruptible. The earth itself will not be destroyed by fire, but will instead be the seat of the new heaven. In this view, matter is not seen as evil, but as good and simply in need of redemption. (Incidentally, since all of creation will be redeemed, this means that yes, all dogs DO go to heaven).

Without going into too much detail, the first view is deeply indebted to the Greek philosopher Plato who taught that matter is evil and that spirit is good. Heaven then, Christians concluded, must be a non-material reality. Hence, we have a whole spirituality which teaches the denial of the flesh, an “other-worldly” piety, and which devalues the present creation. After all, why be an environmentalist if it is all going to burn? Furthermore, it creates a sharp separation between a person's “soul” and “body.” The soul will live on and is, therefore, much more important. The body will be destroyed and is unimportant.

This has implications on how we live today. If the body doesn't matter, then why care for the physical needs of others? If the only thing that lasts is a non-material, disembodied soul, then all Christians ought to care about is “saving souls.” Feeding physical bodies, clothing physical bodies, sheltering physical bodies, and caring for a material creation is unimportant since they will all pass away.

However, if the second view is accepted (as I do), then care for the physical aspects of creation, both human and non-human, has eternal consequences. In this view, humans do not HAVE a soul; humans ARE a soul. Care for the physical needs of a person is just as important as caring for spiritual needs since they are interconnected. Care for the ecosystem has eternal worth since we are participating in the ultimate redemption of the planet which God will eventually accomplish. Even matters of exercise and eating properly take on great importance since Greg Coates is going to live in Greg Coates' body forever. Whereas the former view devalues this present life, the latter view emphasizes the sanctity of this life and the continuity between our lives now and our lives then.

This has implications for the entire Christian life and the mission of the church in the world today. The reason that the church has been so opposed to the “green” movement over the 20th century is because they have bought into the theology of Plato rather than the theology of the Bible. The same goes for the social justice movement. I write this note to encourage my Christian friends to think seriously about what they believe about the end of the story and to embrace the goodness of this present life and this present creation. Christians from the beginning have believed in the resurrection of the body. Let's carry on that tradition.

Hell

The doctrine of hell repulses me. It ought to repulse anyone who has half a conscience. After all, some rather unsympathetic types in this world support putting human beings to death for certain crimes, but almost no one would support the idea of relentlessly and unceasingly torturing an individual human being for years and years on end. Most people wouldn't wish that on even Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden. But hell, it is taught, is precisely this torment except that it never ends.

Why, then, does a good God cast people into hell? How does this fit with the picture of a loving, patient, redeeming God who is even willing to suffer for the sake of his children? I would like to try to answer that question briefly -- and to offer the only satisfactory account of hell that I can accept.

1) The metaphors used in the Scriptures to describe hell are exactly that -- metaphors. I do not think we can literally believe in a "lake of fire." These were images used by the authors of the Bible to poetically teach us about the nature of hell; it is a place of suffering. That is, You don't want to go there! Moving beyond this moral exhortation into physically mapping out the contours of hell goes beyond the agenda of Scripture.

2) Hell is rooted in the doctrine of free will. If we believe that free, autonomous moral agents can truly make a choice between good and evil, then hell must be a possibility. In other words, hell is that place where free humans perpetually say "no" to good and God and perpetually say "yes" to their own evil impulses. God allows us the freedom here on earth to choose the way of the cross and self-sacrificial love or to choose to make ourselves God. Hell is that place where each individual is his/her own God and the result of this is chaos and an inability to relate to one another in peace. For many, hell begins before death.

3) C. S. Lewis paints this picture. Imagine a man who benefits from the suffering of others for the duration of his life. He revels in his power, feels no sympathy for those he has ruined in order to attain it, and mocks standard moral norms as being merely the 'opiate of the masses.' Sudanese President Bashir comes to mind. In a world in which a loving and just God wishes to redeem all of creation in such a way that man, nature, and God exist in perfect harmony with one another such a tyrant like Bashir simply cannot continue to be what he is and "fit" in heaven. Either he must change to conform to the rules of heaven or be an outcast. For such a man, "what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him? Can you really desire that such a man remaining what he is (and he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed forever in his present happiness -- should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side?" And so the decision is his. He can change his ways ("repent") and become compatible with heaven or remain as he is and be incompatible with heaven. Which leads me to my next (and maybe most controversial) point...

4) Ultimately God does not cast people into hell. Rather, God says to individuals after years and years of rebellion, "So be it. I will give you what you want. You want to be your own God. I will give you a place where you can be your own God." To paraphrase my favorite book (The Great Divorce), heaven is where we say to God "Thy will be done" and hell is where God says to us "Thy will be done." Thus, in one sense God DOES cast people into hell because He gives the free moral agents what they have been asking for all along. But in another sense, people choose to send themselves to hell.

5) But, someone might object, "Why would anyone choose to go to hell?" To this I answer: "People do it all the time right in front of our eyes." People choose to fly into a rage at their spouse even though they know this will make them into hellish creatures. People choose to medicate their ills with heroine even though they know it will eventually destroy them. People choose to harbor hatred and envy in their hearts for others even though they know that it is incompatible with the law of love. In short, people choose evil over good because there is an element of pleasure involved. If evil weren't fun, no one would ever do it. And so hell is a place where there will be a slight amount of pleasure. But it will be a pathetic, weak, fleeting pleasure that does not satisfy. Heaven, of course, is the opposite -- it offers full, robust, exhilarating pleasure, a pleasure of intimacy with the Trinity which Christians have always called "joy." It is the difference between the young man who looks at porn for a brief moment of sexual ecstasy and the young man who drinks of the depths and wonders of love making with a partner who intimately knows him. Both offer a sort of pleasure, but one will last and the other is a thin veneer of pleasure which will soon lose its appeal.

6) My understanding of hell is contingent upon my understanding of heaven. I believe heaven is this: perfect, harmonious relationship between the Creator and all that he has created. As anyone who has ever been in a deep relationship of any kind knows, relating requires a certain amount of selflessness. Peace and harmony cannot exist otherwise. This is written into the eternal laws of the universe. Thus, if we are all to become inhabitants of a land of perfect harmony, then we must conform to the mold of selflessness. Hell, on the other hand, is a place where relationship becomes impossible because each individual folds in upon themselves. In his book Flatlanders, Sir Edwin Abbot describes a "point" which believes that itself is all that exists. It does not comprehend relationship. This is the ultimate destiny of those who refuse to relate -- they will be left alone, completely and utterly alone forever.

Does this view of hell satisfy me? No, not entirely. I still find the doctrine of hell detestable. But it does, at least in my mind, preserve the goodness and justice of God. I picture a God who woos and pursues humans unceasingly, but ultimately will not force himself on anyone. Hell is, in my mind, a fact that must exist due to the very nature of free will. Humans have fashioned hell for themselves and the "doors of hell are locked from the inside."

Cords of Death

David cried out to God:

"The cords of death entangled me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me; the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called to the LORD; I cried to my God for help." - Psalm 18:4-6

I just need to get it out. I feel as though I am drowning. These are my cords of death:

1) Family members who reject Christ and his ways.
2) A teenage girl in my church who gets hit by her drunken father.
3) Fellow pastors in my city who seem to care nothing for the poor.
4) Daughters who are ill and cry out all through the night.
5) Long hours, no recognition, and low pay.
6) The inability to afford a membership to the YMCA.
7) Imprisonment to sin and powerlessness to live a life of holiness before God.
8) The poor whom I try to serve offering no thanks and instead pronouncing insults.
9) Exchanging the comfort and safety of Wilmore, Kentucky for the near eastside.
10) Gunshots at night.
11) Two women in my church who hate one another and refuse to be reconciled.
12) Pharisees who prevent hungry people from finding the bread of life.
13) Underfunded and understaffed programs.
14) The need for marital counseling but no time or money for it.
15) The desire to just "get away" but no place to go.
16) A chaotic and messy house.
17) An unhealthy dependence upon soda, candy, and fatty foods to medicate my depression.
18) Sermons, board meetings, networking with community organizations, balancing budgets, fundraising, exegeting, visiting, casting vision, planning events, counseling, recruiting, managing staff, quizmastering, lesson planning, updating websites, delegating, peacemaking...
19) Darkness inside, emptiness, weariness, silence from God.
20) Mice in my food pantry.

"In my distress I called to the LORD; I cried to my God for help."

I cry to you now, God.

I'm going to give this another try...

I've been living for myself lately and it hasn't been working out very well so I'm going to give the whole "abandonment to the will of God" thing a try again. I'll let you all know how it works out.

Doubt

For the past ten years, no intellectual challenge to my faith has awakened so much doubt within me as what the philosophers call "the problem of evil." In short, it asks, "If God is all good and all powerful, why do such bad things happen in the world?" I took a full course on it in college and another full course on it in seminary and the question STILL haunts me from time to time. When I weep over the way women are being raped in the Sudan I admit that it shakes my faith in an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God. But today in my lenten reading I came across a quote that I found profoundly encouraging and would like to share it:

"I should think ill of any preacher who confesses himself untroubled by all those aspects of our experience summed up in what we call the problem of evil. I should expect him, if he were really a God-sent man, to be familiar with terrible visitations of doubt, to have moments when all the solutions of the problem of evil, even those which he himself has attempted, seem to him in vain; and I should expect those visitations to be more terrible for him than others. Being the man he is, he must needs have his times of perplexity, nay, his times of extremity. They are among the conditions of his service and he must be willing to bear them as a good soldier of Christ. He enlists upon the possibilities that await him, and when they come he must still say to himself, 'for this cause I was born and for this I came into the world.' No less is required of him by the traditions of the service. They were established in the Garden of Gethsemane." - L. P. Jacks

I find tremendous comfort in this and, in fact, it makes me suspicious of those pastors who seem to always have all of the answers wrapped up neatly in a nice, clean package. If seminary taught me anything, it taught me that when talking about God (that "darkness which is above the light" as Miester Eckhart called Him) nothing is as simplistic as we'd like to make it.

Instead, I would love to see a church in which honest, difficult questions are embraced rather than hushed. After all, if God is the God of all Truth, then He will be able to handle our questions. In the meantime, we can rest assured that questioning and doubting is a part of the Christian life and is as natural to it as a soldier taking enemy fire.

Two Competing Loves

For some years now I have felt a tension between two different definitions of love.

The first is quite popular in American culture, but especially prevalent among the liberal elites of our society. This is love as kindness. In other words, if we would all just leave one another alone, tolerate behaviors as long as they do not directly interfere with the happiness of another human being, and rid ourselves of old-fashioned religious standards (which "suppress" our humanness), then the world would be a much better place. This is indeed an attractive option to me. For example, on a certain level I would be very glad to have my closest of friends simply "accept me for who I am" and not try to change me and not feel the need to rebuke or reshape my character on some level. This form of love would see my imperfections, but instead of attempting to surgically remove them (which would undoubtedly be a painful process) it would embrace them as being part of the essence of Greg Coates -- a lovely and yet imperfect being. Under this definition of love, the phrase "Your God loves you as you are, but He is not willing that you should stay that way" is an object of mockery. In short, love of the first type is a "live and let live" love, a love that places tolerance above confrontation, and a love that looks askance at "objective standards of morality" as oppressive -- a wet rag on the goodness of life. Furthermore, this love is rooted in an anthropology that insists we are basically good.

The second definition of love goes something like this: Who you are and who you ought to be are different from one another. The intense love that I feel for you refuses to allow me to remain indifferent toward the deficiencies in your character because who you OUGHT to be would ultimately lead to a greater level of happiness for both you and those to whom you relate. C. S. Lewis describes this love well in the third chapter of his book "The Problem of Pain:"

You asked for a loving God: you have one... not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.

In other words, the second form of love believes in objective standards of behavior which are weaved into the fabric of the universe such that only those who live in consistency with them could ever experience true happiness. To tolerate and allow the "stains" on our character to fester and linger like a cancer is the opposite of love. And we can no more wish them to remain within ourselves than "a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, verminous, polluting creature of the wild pack." (Lewis)

The first love insists that there is not need for me to be tamed. The second insists that a loving person/God will do anything possible to tame me. The first love looks at the second and calls is judgmental, Pharisaical, smothering, and harsh. The second looks at the first and calls it wimpy, Hippy-ish, diluted, and fake.

Lewis argues for the second love and I'm inclined to agree with him. He calls the first love "mere kindness" and claims that those who want God to show them their type of love are actually asking for less love, not more. Lewis concludes: "Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want... If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows -- the only food that any possible universe could ever grow -- then we must starve eternally." Hence, we have an argument for what Christians down through the centuries have called "holiness." We are not what we should be and love has an obligation to bring us to the place where we are ultimately happy (i.e. holiness).

A High Calling

Today is one of those days that makes it all worth it. It was a hard day, but a very good day. Weeks go by that we provide groceries to needy people and they seem unresponsive, unthankful, and remain stuck in their patterns of co-dependency. But not today. Today they flooded the altars, presenting their requests to God, and calling upon their higher power to deliver them from addictions. This job of pastor -- it is a high calling.

I went to a house a few doors down to convince an angry ex-convict not to beat her neighbor to death with a baseball bat. We talked, we prayed, I listened to a constant stream of anger. And then I presented her to God, reminded her that anger will make her a slave, and prayed for her to find the power of forgiveness. She wept and gave it to God and promised to not reach for that baseball bat any more. This job of pastor -- it is a high calling.

I traveled across town to sit for a few hours with an elderly man whose 42-year-old daughter died last night of complications related to colon surgery. I held hands with this spiritual giant as he told me that Jeshua is his fortress and his strength and that God is using this pain to make him into the man God wants him to be. I cried out to God with him in his agony and we embraced and shed tears and praised the name of God in the midst of the storm. This job of pastor -- it is a high calling.

After weeks of struggling to start a recovery group for smoking addicts, two ladies showed up tonight, smiling with their toothless smiles and saying, "Well, we're here." The chains of addiction are breaking and the gates of hell cannot withstand this onslaught. This job of pastor -- it is a high calling.

I sat in a board meeting tonight with a career military man and watched as his heart was softened to the plight of the inner city poor. I noticed the fire in his voice as he spoke about the injustice of a little church like ours being underfunded when other churches including his own have so much. I saw a mini-conversion -- a conversion from blind middle class American values to informed, heart-wrenching pain for the poor. I saw this ex-Marine look in my eyes with his tearful eyes and say, "I love what you're doing here." This job of pastor -- it is a high calling.

I rejoice today, God. Thanks for letting me be part of your team. Not every day ends this well. Not every day is filled with such holiness (or at least I don't notice it). But today you filled my cup. You reminded me why I fight the battle of the near eastside. You reminded me what a joy it is to be one of your agents for change in the world. Thank you for this high calling. Your mission and your beautiful coming kingdom make life worth living.

Plea for Advice

Matt and Maggie are pseudonyms. I'll take ANY and ALL advice!

-----

Case Study:

Matt and Maggie have been part of First Church off and on for about 4-5 years, but have increased their level of commitment over the past year. They joined the 12 week membership class offered by Pastor Greg and attended faithfully offering substantive interaction and feedback. On the last Sunday of December 2008, Matt and Maggie joined officially as members with the understanding that they would faithfully attend a smoker's recovery group and hold to the commitments set forth in the Book of Discipline. These two are a particularly needy couple – they demand lots of special attention, financial resources, and pastoral care. It is not rare for the pastors to receive 4-5 calls per day (EACH!) from Matt about needing a ride to somewhere or payment for something or prayer for something. All was fine until the third Sunday of January. Pastor Greg was on vacation and Jim, Martha, and Brian were in charge. During our weekly time for sharing prayer requests, one girl stood to thank the church for helping her financially surrounding the birth of her firstborn daughter (although she's actually been helped by a member of the church, not the church institution itself). This evidently angered Maggie who prompted her husband to stand and say the following:

“Why does this church help our her when we have asked for money for our rent and been denied? After all, we're members and she is not! Maggie and I are very angry and we are leaving this church for good and never coming back! We give back our membership!!!” Following this, they stormed out of the sanctuary from the front pew where they were sitting. The service, which had been highly enthusiastic and filled with the Holy Spirit, seemed deflated. Pastor Jim did his best to move on with the worship time, but the congregation was somewhat shell shocked.

Not long after this, Matt and Maggie wanted to pretend that it had never happened and be welcomed back into Sunday morning worship. Pastor Greg sat down and explained to them that they had hurt the church and revoked their membership in front of everyone. He kindly asked them to refrain from coming back to Sunday morning worship for a while to let the congregation heal from the hurt that they had caused. He informed them that he would have been happy to talk with them about their grievances privately, but that they had decided to rebuke the church on Sunday morning and that the consequence of this was exclusion from membership and communal worship. This exclusion was something all four pastors had discussed and agreed was the best course of action for the present time. Although this was communicated calmly and in a loving way, Maggie stormed out of the office and told Pastor Greg that he should be fired from his job for speaking in such a way to his parishioners.

Matt and Maggie also attend our Monday food pantry and Pastor Greg gave them permission to continue coming in order to get groceries.

Since then, Maggie and Matt have not returned to Sunday morning, but have contacted a number of our members and told them “we want to come back, but the pastors won't let us.” Some of these members are concerned that we acted too harshly to exclude them – although in the pastors' defense, they feel that Matt and Maggie have decided to exclude themselves (the church is just holding them to their word).

Questions: Did the pastors make the right decision to tell Matt and Maggie to find a new church home? Should the pastors reverse their decision if Matt and Maggie show that they are genuinely sorry for what they did? Where should we go from here? Does the Scriptural passage below have any bearing on this case?

Titus 3:10-11 10 Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that, have nothing to do with him. 11 You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.