1.Who Has Sinned by Rev. Gunnar A. Cerda, MDiv
2. Sermon by The Rev. Timothy C. Ahrens,
3. The Corinthian Plan: By Joel Miller
4."Health Care Reform" Reverend Sharon Dittmar
5. Building the Body of Christ by Reverend Canon Joanna Leiserson
“As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.” (John 9:1-3 NRSV)
My son, Benjamin, is a great kid. He is smart. He has a great sense of humor. He loves slapstick humor and NASCAR. In 7 th grade this year he is in advanced science and advanced math. He has the potential to be an actuarial or aeronautical engineer when he grows up.
Benjamin also has an IEP. For, despite his gifts in science and math, he struggles profoundly with receptive and expressive language skills. His challenges with motor skills make it difficult for him to write for extended periods of time. The classroom can become overwhelming for him at times, causing emotional and mental “meltdowns.” For all of his gifts, Benjamin is equally beset by challenges in areas many of us take for granted every day.
See, Benjamin has Aspergers Syndrome, which is an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Some would call this a “disability.” Insurance companies tend to call it a “pre-existing condition.” Truth be told, it is about as pre-existing as life itself, having existed since birth
One in every 150 children is diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorders. Because of this “pre-existing condition” label, the effects of Autism Spectrum Disorders, as well as remedies, therapies and supports are not covered by insurance companies. This means that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of children do not have access to health care, even if their parents do.
When the question was posed to Jesus ages ago, it was the same basic question we face today: who sinned that this child should be marginalized and excluded from full participation in society as a person of sacred worth? Jesus answer then is just as relevant today, no one sinned, and no one deserves to be excluded.
Our kids on “the spectrum” have done nothing to “deserve” the challenges which they face; they did not engage in any reckless or detrimental activity through which they brought about their challenges. In short, they have not sinned.
And neither have their parents. There is no activity in which parents have engaged which “caused” autism, in fact, there is nothing they could have done to prevent the lifelong challenge they now face. In short, there is nothing that was done which should have deserved exclusion from full participation from society, or removed such a person from the care and compassion of the community, either then or now.
Jesus does offer another perspective, however; he invites his followers and listeners to look at the situation through a different lens; the lens of faith. It is as if to say, regardless of how the situation came to be, God’s realm can be seen through this opportunity. Through healing and reconciliation, the Glory of God, which is love, can be seen in the world today.
This is the same invitation which calls out to us today, for God is still speaking. We have the opportunity to raise our prophetic voices on behalf of those who have trouble expressing their thoughts and needs. We have the opportunity to speak for those whom society has marginalized and designated “disabled” and “uninsurable.” We have the opportunity to co-create a new future with God, one where those who have been outcast are re-integrated into the beloved community of caring. We have before us the chance to live into our call to discipleship as advocates for the realm of God.
Health Care reform is not simply some ivory tower debate. It is a real issue which affects real people; people who already pay for insurance, as well as those who can not acquire coverage. It is an issue which calls us to raise our voices, on behalf of God, for all of the children of God to be treated with Steadfast Love and Justice.
Now is the time for us to heed the call. Now is the time for us to raise our voices. Not just for me as a parent, not simply in response to me as a minister. Not just for Benjamin, or the other kids similar to him in our community. But instead, for the millions of children affected by Autism Spectrum Disorders, both now and in the future. For I have no doubt that if we do, then truly the Glory of God will be seen in the midst of the “other abilities” of the children of sacred worth on the Autism Spectrum, and all the children labeled with and excluded by “disabilities.”
Think Critically, Reflect Faithfully, Act Prophetically!
Rev. Gunnar A. Cerda, MDiv
Ordained Minister in the United Church of Christ
The Rev.Timothy CAhrens Sermon
A sermon delivered by The Rev. Timothy C. Ahrens, Sr. Minister, The First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Columbus, Ohio, June 21, 2009, Pentecost 3, dedicated to Rupert A Twink @ Starr for his leadership in this church and the Columbus community, to my parents on their 59 th Anniversary, to fathers everywhere, and always to the glory of God!
A Health Care: Fix It Now!
Psalm 30, Mark 5:21-43
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of each one of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our salvation. Amen.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I want you to use your imagination for the next couple of minutes. Using your imagination, imagine that you have spent today with your father. You have taken your dad to lunch, bought him a power tool, a tie, or that new CD of Bruce Springsteen that he actually asked for. He has had a wonderful afternoon with you, his daughter, his son. Now it 's later in the day.
He turns to you and says, A I am really not feeling well at all. I have a tremendous pain my chest. @ You take him to the ER at one of our area hospitals. Recently, when he lost his insurance because his company stopped paying the high premiums for their employees in an attempt to help them hold onto their jobs, you fear this hospital will not accept him. When you check in, with no medical insurance, you find he is put on the edge of the ER where others without coverage are placed. They seem to take forever getting to him. Then, when they do you discover they actually have no medical plan to care for a patient with chest pains, you are shocked. You thought they would know what to do. Every imaginable medical person on staff of this hospital walk up and walk on, but no one seems to know how to care for your dad. It ' s not that they are cruel, they just aren ' t organized. They have no emergency plan for care. It feels like a nightmare. Your father is uncared for. Now, this imaginary scenario is over.
I ask you, which part of this hospital scene could actually happen in this day and age?
First, the uninsured are - whether knowingly or unknowingly - treated differently in our world of medical care. That is true. It is a myth that if you don ' t have health insurance the government will take care of you. The fact is that there is no health safety net for the 45.8 million Americas that are uninsured – over 9 million of whom are children. Approximately 57% of Americans have employer based coverage, 4% have their own, 23% qualify for government benefits and the remaining 15.7% of Americans are uninsured. The uninsured who are admitted to hospitals receive lower quality care, fewer services, fewer tests and they are 3.6 times more likely to die in the hospital than those who are insured. In addition, uninsured children and adults are 30% less likely to receive preventative care, increasing the likelihood that they will be diagnosed with advance conditions and face earlier death.
Clearly, all of us know that hospitals have plans in place in every ER to care for patients with chest pains. However, this part of the metaphor leads to a larger part of this story. While we have excellent doctors, nurses and other medical personnel in our congregation and nation, our nation = s overall health care system is disarray. While few of us in this room would venture out on vacation without any plan, and we certainly would not send our youth on missions with no destinations in mind, that is exactly what is happening in our health care system in America. Our health care system has evolved into trip to nowhere.
While it is unimaginable that a hospital would have no structure in place to care for our dads in an emergency room situation, we have a health care system that has no clear goals for fixing what is broken. We have a system with no national legislative commitment to guarantee needed health care for everyone who lives in our nation today. We argue about increasing access, reducing costs, adding people or benefits to public programs, increasing the percent of poverty level that should qualify someone for public assistance, setting cost controls, and the list goes on and on. We have great minds working on all these things, but we seem to lack the overall will as a nation to work together in establishing a just system of care.
While we do nothing, the situation worsens. Last year, 18,000 people died prematurely last year - roughly two deaths per hour - due to a lack of insurance. Health care insurance premiums have risen 35.9% in the last four years while wages have risen at only 12% nationwide. In other words, insurance has risen three times faster than wages. Every minute, five more people are losing their insurance in America. 45% of personal bankruptcies are related to medical debt.
Even families with insurance are forced to make difficult medical decisions. Out of pocket costs for prescription drugs and dental care insured families have forced them to choose which treatments they can afford. While 1 in 11 whites are uninsured, the number increases to 1 in 5 for African-Americans and 1 in 3 for Hispanics. (Statistics come from Families USA – www.familiesusa.org and Universal Health Care Action Network – www.uhcan.org).
In Ohio, a lack of adequate health care affects over one million Ohioans - a number also growing daily. More than 3 of 4 uninsured people in Ohio (76%) live in households below 300% of the federal poverty line - meaning these families can afford to contribute little to nothing to health coverage. Wages in Ohio make health care unaffordable for many Ohioans. In Ohio, a single mother with two children at home must earn more than $38,000 or 225% of the federal poverty line to contribute to health care costs. Couples with two children at home must earn more than $43,000 or 210% of the federal poverty line before they afford contributing to health care costs - meaning that they must sacrifice other basic needs.
And, you don ' t have to be poor to be uninsured in Ohio. 78% of uninsured Ohioans live in families with at least one full-time or part-time worker - 63% living in a household with a full-time worker, 15% in a household with part-time worker. People with pre-existing conditions are unlikely to receive coverage. In Ohio and 26 other states, insurers can exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions for up to one year. In Ohio there are also no objective standards for defining pre-existing conditions. We have faced this situation on our own church staff. (Statistics come from the Ohio Family Health Survey, 2004 and the Urban Institute and Kaiser Commission on Medicaid, 2005).
No plan for digging America out of our economic woes can include turning a blind or unknowing eye to the health care system in America. For example, General Motors has relocated plants in recent years across the border from Ohio and Michigan to because they can save up to $1500 per automobile made in health care costs for Canadian employees as opposed to American employees! Say what you want to about Canada = s system, but that is a compelling statistic and reason for change from an economic point of view.
We need a plan so that we can get well as a nation - in every imaginable way!
I have been a part of a campaign to A Fix It Now! In Ohio and across the country, coalitions of people and organizations from the Salvation Army and AARP to We Believe Ohio and others like - U-CAN Ohio - have come together to push for reform now. From the grassroots people are organizing and calling upon elected leaders and business people to get their acts together. This is no vacation! It is our future and our children = s future - if we cannot figure out how to fix the health care crisis we have for too long buried our heads in the sand to acknowledge
People are going to Washington DC this week to worship on Wednesday at the National Cathedral and march on the Capitol on Thursday. We will demand equitable health care reform and coverage for all - coverage which doesn = t sink the boat of our economy and coverage which is not borne on the shoulders of the poor, the middle class or the wealthy. We are calling for coverage which is fair and good for all. I encourage you to go Washington this week or contact your Congressional and Senate reps to encourage them to A fix it now!
In today ' s passage from the Gospel of Mark Jesus A fixs it now for two women. He heals the woman with a hemorrhage that has been afflicting her for years. He also raises Jairus' daughter from the dead. Against all odds and all protests, Jesus sees the need for healing and does it. In each case the women or their familial representatives come to Jesus. The woman hemorrhaging has been bleeding for 12 years and has been treated as ritually unclean and an outcast. She has been isolated from the mainstream of Jewish religious and social life. She can’t get a job because of her condition. She can 't take it anymore. Jesus heals her and saves her life – religiously, socially, economically, and physically.
The experts in this woman ' s case and Jarius daughter' s case say it can ' t be done. They say their situations are beyond help. Jesus cuts against the grain and shows that healing can happen. Faith draws these people to Jesus. They have faith in his ability to heal - to get things done. My friends, we are Jesus' people. We have to get things done as well.
I spent last week working with 13 teens and 5 adults from First Church in Hinton, West Virginia. We got things done. Day in and day out in rain, sun and heat, we got things done. It wasn = t easy, but we got it done. We took a house in need of help and turned it into one of the prettiest houses in Hinton.
Fixing things is never easy. Healing is never easy work. Changing a sick health care system is even harder. But, now is our time! Now is our time to get on the phones, get letters in the mail, twitter, or make email contact and go with our bodies and ourselves to Washington DC and our own statehouse to get things done in health care reform.
Remember, follow your leader. Jesus got things done through the power his faith matched by the power and belief of the two women and their families around them. We have to do the same. A Fix it Now! @ means all of us, working together to get the wheels back on the system whose wheels have come off. Fixing it now is work for all of us to do. Amen.
Sermon Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31
By
Deacon Timothy Borah
We live in a day where many believe in a Gospel of prosperity: a theology that states materially successful people are successful because God favored them over others. Theologian Frederick Buechner states,
The trouble with being rich is that since you can solve with your checkbook virtually all of the practical problems that bedevil ordinary people, you are left in your leisure with nothing but the great human problems to contend with: how to be happy, how to love and be loved, how to find meaning and purpose in your life. In desperation the rich are continually tempted to believe that they can solve these problems too with their checkbooks, which is presumably what led Jesus to remark one day that for a rich man to get into Heaven is about as easy as for a Cadillac to get through a revolving door.
Today's gospel tells of a financially wealthy young man who approaches Jesus with some idea of becoming a follower of this extraordinary man from Galilee. The wealthy young man concluded his conversation with Jesus by telling about his keeping of the commandments that Jesus had just summarized in their discussion. Perhaps, at this point, the young man thought he had eternal life made, but Jesus loved this young inquirer enough that he spoke of one more radical requirement: "go give your money to the poor and gain treasure in heaven, then follow me."
That was the last time any of the followers of the Way saw the fellow. God's kingdom is described as a place where the first will be last and the last will be first. Jesus' radical remark then, as now, is that wealth is no indicator of God's grace and mercy being bestowed upon an individual.
Jesus says that wealth is no virtue if the possessor of the wealth isn't willing to help pull his brother or sister out of the gutter. No peace can be gained when the possessor of great wealth is enslaved to watching a personal portfolio grow or trapped feeding at the trough of feel-good conspicuous consumption when our brothers and sisters are barely surviving the ordeals that come from everyday life.
The faithful cannot grow to become spiritually at peace and at one with the kingdom of God when they are also worshipping at the altar of their own self aggrandizement through conspicuous consumption. This is the false doctrine of scarcity, "I've got mine so God loves me, let them get their own so God might love them too." Our Gospel tells us there is a better way than the "rat race" where our treasures won't be automatically defined by the size of our bank accounts. God's kingdom is defined as one "where the first will be last and the last will be first" and where persecution for standing up for the rights of the least, the lost, and the last will lead to God's people to eternal life.
However, after the most recent economic downturn fewer and fewer people have any means at all. Could it be that a 'Conspicuous Frugality' has become a new conspicuous consumerism? When a nation as wealthy as ours suffers through months of debate over whether one fifth of all its citizens deserve insurance to prevent them from becoming so ill and indebted that they cannot maintain a household, then our nation itself is ill.
Ladies and gentlemen I don't know where we will be lead, but I truly believe we all have the means to act on behalf of our faith. Rather than sinking into a theology of scarcity, I propose we strive for a theology of abundance. Ultimately, we must live our lives out of the abundance God provides for us as children of God. I imagine this as an offering to God of our time for rest and recreation as well as our labor and treasure.
The Epistle to the Hebrews tells us we have a high priest who has opened the way for us to seek to be reconciled with God and our brother and sister travelers on the pathways of life. The writer tells us all we have to do is approach the way of the Lord with boldness.