Grace and the Healthcare Debate

published on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 by admin

Dr. J. Kameron Carter
Associate Professor of Theology and
Black Church Studies
Duke Divinity School

“There But for the Grace of God Go I.” So said President Barack Obama during a recent “town hall meeting” on Saturday August 14, 2009. It was his response to the wrenching story told by Mr. Nathan Wilkes, who introduced him to the Coloradans that filled the auditorium to hear him hear and to have him answer questions about the healthcare bills that are winding their way through the Congress.

Mr. Wilkes’s story about his son, Thomas, who was diagnosed with severe hemophilia, put a human face on the healthcare debate. His story took the debate out of the realm of figures and stats and put it in the realm of real lives of pain and tragedy.

In introducing the President, Mr. Wilkes told of how one of the questions he and his spouse had to deal with after their son’s birth was the one put to them by their doctor: “Do you have good insurance?” The care their son required caused them to max out quickly on their insurance policy. Fighting back tears, Mr. Wilkes told the audience that he and his spouse were at one point counseled to consider divorcing so that their son could qualify for Medicaid.

It was after hearing this story that President Obama uttered the, in my opinion, fitting words, though they are words that unfortunately have become culturally clichéd: “There But for the Grace of God Go I . . .”

By invoking God’s grace in relationship to our country’s national debate on healthcare, Obama, whether it was his intention or not, has opened another window onto the healthcare issue. He’s suggesting a connection — and as a theologian, I’d say a good one — between the question of our moral obligations to one another in the question of healthcare and what it means to be recipients of God’s grace. “There but for the grace of God go I . . .” is connected, to use the language of ole’ King Jimmy, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The healthcare question in our country is not merely about running the numbers, though it certainly involves this. It is the question of grace, which is tied to the question of morality, the question of our moral duty and obligation to those we consider in the family of humanity.

What are our moral obligations to one another on the matter of healthcare? And how, as Christians, should we be thinking about such matters given our claim to be witnesses to the triumph of life, healing, and health over death and debilitation, a triumph that comes — and this is grace — from of Jesus’ wounded and scarred flesh?

What is needed at this time is a clearer Christian witness to our moral duties to be one another’s keepers, and thus a clearer Christian witness to grace.

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District 9 and the Creation of the Alien

published on Monday, September 14, 2009 by admin

By Dr. Brian Bantum
Assistant Professor of Theology
Seattle Pacific University

District 9 was undoubtedly a terrific movie. It’s plot was original and the story unfolded in both exciting and moving ways. I was enthralled from beginning to end. But something is just not sitting right. I get that the film depicts how societies refuse others and collectively ghettoize and render alien citizens who are different.

I get the whole “if you were in the shoes of the other person you might understand yourself a little better thing.”

But there is something that is keeping me from being really, really, really excited about this movie and the statements it could make about national belonging and otherness.

While the allegorical connection to the movie began with Johannesburg, the fact that these aliens really are aliens and not the people of the land raises a crucial difference in how the conception of difference functions within the movie itself. These creatures literally dropped from the sky. Of course there is going to be societal refusal. The condition the aliens would eventually be left to does well to visualize the practice of differentiation, but in many ways it clouds the processes of formation that creates differences. It is these processes of differentiation that create the spaces of the ghetto, the districts, the internment camps, etc. On the one hand the obvious difference of the aliens creates a helpful visualization of how difference is refused, but it confuses the reality of how difference is created.

The question of apartheid is not only the question of the camps, but of the creation of the conditions that would allow difference to be seen. It is a question of how those on the outside were deemed “natural” citizens. The fact that these aliens are SO different seems to play into the characterizations of difference that create these spaces in the first place. Sure, in many ways the director was trying to ask us the question, “who is really human?” But they so confused the point through a (correctly) muddled view of good/bad within each society that the only marker left was the visual to demarcate the citizen/alien.

It’s along this line that I am really not sure about this movie. The possibility of rendering a people who inhabit a land into aliens is the real miracle of the colonial project and that is the sin we have to reckon with. That we treat others who are different than us badly is obvious at this point. Sadly, the evidence is mounting exponentially. But the response to this must be more nuanced than simple decisions to stop doing it.

District 9 confronts us with the treatment of aliens and not the creation of aliens (or the creation of citizens.) I know movies aren’t supposed to be everything. I am thankful for a thoroughly thought-provoking film. At the same time I am always fearful of the ways such thought-provoking moments can problematically frame our view of the challenges before us.

Dr. Brain Bantum is Assistant Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington. He received his Ph.D. and Master of Theological Studies from Duke University. His first book Mulatto Theology will be published by Baylor University Press. For more thoughts and theology from Brian Bantum, check out his personal blog: http://brianbantum.wordpress.org

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Prayer for the Nation

published on Friday, September 11, 2009 by admin

By Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
Pastor, Greenleaf Christian Church
President, North Carolina Conference, NAACP

Gracious eternal and all wise God. Thou who formed what is out of nothing, and called us into being to serve you. You, oh Lord, who weighs every nation in the balance of your own standards. Today, we acknowledge how great Thou art, the marvelous mystery of your mercy and exalt the excellence of your name.

Because your Holy Spirit brings all things to remembrance, breathe on us now, that we might remember how gracious you have been to this nation we call America. As a nation, we have our faith and frailties, strengths and shortcomings, yet you have allowed grace to be shed upon us. When we have honored your ways and when we have fallen short you have been a merciful God. Remind us that the history of this nation is more about your grace than about our greatness. When we are not where we should be, let us hear and follow what you said to Solomon, 2 Chronicles 7:14, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will I forgive their sin, and will I heal their land.”

In our land we need healing, for a land so blessed by grace there is too much poverty, too much sickness, too many children dying, and too much war. We need a healing. Michael Bell and five others in Jena, or the three year unjust lock down of James Johnson in Wilson are but symbols of a justice system that needs healing. Katrina was more than a flood. It was a failure to protect the vulnerable and a metaphor of the wave of disenfranchise that flows in too many communities. We need a healing.

In your word you have said, he who rules the nation must be just and if we are to please you we must learn to do justice, care for the fatherless, support the widow, loose the bands of wickedness, pay people what they deserve, care for the sick, the homeless, and the hungry. To please you it must be said of us, “For I was hungry, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in; naked and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”

Trouble the soul of this nation as you did in the days of Amos so that no one is at ease in Zion. Use our prophetic words and our prophetic actions to remind those in the seats of power that they are not God. Trouble this nation with the voice of concern and the voice of compassion. Make us mindful of the thousands without paths to the pursuit of happiness…

Shake the foundations of our conscious until we cannot help, but change our course. Move on us to study war no more. Cause us to live our lives to serve others. Teach us that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness requires justice and hope and help and caring. Expand our morality beyond the narrowness of personal piety into the broadness of public policy. Give us the strength to challenge racism, classicism, poverty, and uncheck militarism. Empower us with your Spirit that we might be a nation unto God, not unto fear; show us again that America is only here by your grace. Show us that grace carries responsibility. That a nation under grace must lead the world not merely police the world. A nation under grace must care, must remember her past so that she will not be arrogant in her present. A nation under grace must bring the world together and not tear it apart. A nation under grace cannot refer to people as aliens when we all were created with one blood. A nation under grace cannot leave cities decaying and flood victims barely surviving. Grace demands something better than that.

So Lord as you stirred up dry bones in the valley, stir up hope, and stir up righteousness. Restore the Prophets and the prophetic voices to the land. Revive the spirit of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Corretta, Harriet, Rosa, Cinque, Douglass, Dubois, Sojourner, Jordan, Wilkins and Bethune. Hold and sustain the Congressional Black Caucus whose seats are dipped in the blood of martyrs and were raised to be the conscience of this nation. Call us and challenge us again. Teach even this nation that even with all our power and all our resources we will still have to stand before your judgment one day. Give us leaders who understand that the purpose of power and influence is to help someone. Grant us a citizenry determine to be yoked together in common humanity. Let us know the only way to a more perfect union is for our laws and policies to reflect your kind of love. Let faith be a conviction not a convenience. Help us, Oh God, to smooth out every wrinkle in the flag of our community life until we are one nation under God, with one justice system for all, with living wages for all, with quality education for all. Finally, oh Lord we pray that the mind of the psalmist will be ours:

Psalm 66: 1-7
1 Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands:
2 Sing forth the honor of his name: make his praise glorious.
3 Say unto God, How terrible art thou in thy works! through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee.
4 All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto thee; they shall sing to thy name. Selah.
5 Come and see the works of God: He is terrible in His doing toward the children of men.
6 He turned the sea into dry land: they went through the flood on foot: there did we rejoice in Him.
7 He ruleth by His power for ever; His eyes behold the nations: let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah.

We thank you God that your eyes still behold the nation. We thank you God that you still see injustice, you still see poverty and because you can still see it, these things don't have the last word. We thank you God that you still see America. You still see our leadership. You know how to bring down the high and lift up the humble. O God we bless your name, we lift up every voice, we declare and rejoice that you are still the God of our weary years, the God who is able to bring life out of death. Help us to know like our foreparents sung, ‘Time is filled with swift transition, naught of earth unmoved can stand, Build your hope on things eternal, Hold to God’s unchanging hand.” In the name of the Father who sticketh closer than a brother, watches us like a mother, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. AMEN.

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