|
|
Jun 8, 2006
Jesus the politician: part 3 Jesus cared about the poor. That makes Him a socialist. At least, that's the logic that the pastor quoted in the City Beat article used. And it's true, Jesus does care about the poor. That's fairly evident in any reading of the Bible. Yet, it's also a huge oversimplification of what Jesus was and is all about. I consider myself a postmodern. Also, I consider my ministry to be primarily to postmoderns. As a result, I read a lot about postmodern ministry. I don't always agree with everything I read on the subject, but it is something that is of interest to me. In a lot of these writings, there is a theme that Jesus was primarily concerned with social justice here on earth. I didn't quite buy into that, but after reading this stuff for a while, as well as a few blogs I have been following, I figured that this contitued a high percentage of Jesus' teaching. Then, I heard Tony Campolo speak at a conference this past winter. As he talked about his political veiws, he referred to himself as a "red letter Christian" in reference to his eclectic political views (some issues he's liberal, on some he's conservative.) What he meant was that his views are shaped by the teaching of Christ rather than a political paradigm. So I wondered: what would I find if I read through the red letters. So, I read them. And, it turns out that the poor are not the major theme. The poor are most certainly in there, and the madates concerning them are very strong. But, it's not the central teaching. All of that is to say this: Jesus is far to complicated to hang a Christian political agenda on one issue. Still, taking care of the poor is part of the gospel. That much is clear. With that in mind, how do we handle the politics of the poor. Political liberals, including Christians who are politicaly liberal, generaly advocate a system in which wealth is redistributed. Those who are wealthy are taxed in order to provide services for the poor. Personally, I challenge this system on two grounds. One is fiscal, and one is moral. Both of which are based on my observations made while working within the system. I worked for Medicad for a little while. Overall, I'm glad we have Medicaid. I think it is useful. However, there are those who advocate a state run health care system, similar to that which is in Canada. I think that would be a mistake. The beuarcracy required to run Medicaid alone is crazy. It's expensive. For it to run like it should would be even more expensive than it already is. But, in pretty much every state, the claims processing system for Medicaid is contracted out to an IT company. Of course, the contact goes to whoever promises the most services for the least amount of money. And of course, it never quite works out like it was promised to. So, services aren't quite as good as they are supposed to be. And even with the lowest bid, there is still a lot of money going into it. That doesn't even consider that actual money used to pay the claims. Think of it this way: It costs a lot of money to deny a claim. And, people want to expand this system. It won't work. Even in terms of the money actually spent on the claims itself it won't work. Medical treatment is more expensive here than in Canada, for a lot of reasons that I won't go into here. But, even worse, what it would cost to make a system like that even run. And it won't run well. I know, because I was one of the people running the system. There were simply too many obstacles in our way. Even still, with a mandate to care for the poor, we have to do it, even if it is costly and inefficent, right? Except our call to help the poor isn't just to give them stuff. It's to actually dive in and share life with them. The problem with government aid programs is that they are terribly inhuman. People are numbers. They are treated as cases. That's why fraud is so high. The system doesn't deal with people. Once, Jesus was walking through a crowd, and a sick woman touched him so that she could be healed. This woman's "need" had been met, but that wasn't enough for Jesus. He turned and interacted with her. Justice in the Bible is not about needs being met. It's about people having their dignaty and humanity. And that's the problem I have with political liberalism and Christianity. I can't be content with having the government doing the work that the church called us to be doing. The government doesn't love. Only people can do that. posted
by Unknown @ 11:18:00 PM |
