Today we continue our exploration of "moral values." Before we launch into our topic for the day, I want to spend a few minutes with you thinking about what a "moral" value is. The term, of course, gained currency on Election Day last year, when exit polling showed that "moral values" were a primary consideration for far more people than pollsters and pundits originally imagined possible. I am not sure who came up with the moniker "moral value" - whether it was the voters who claimed that their important issues were "moral values" or whether it was the press who lumped three or four issues together and called them "moral." Regardless of who came up with it, the term "moral values" has loosely come to mean three or four or five issues that have been latched onto by a cross-section of voters, mostly, although certainly not exclusively, by persons of more conservative leanings. And those issues tend to be (although again, this is not an exclusive list) same sex marriage, stem-cell research, and abortion. At times, a few other issues get explicitly placed in this category - end of life decisions, gun control, prayer in school, spreading democracy in the Middle East, and the state of the judiciary. But instead of coming up with a list of what legitimately is a moral values issue, I want to ask, "what is a moral value?" And how would be know? Who has thoughts about this? What makes an issue a "moral value"?

Q & A with congregation

Summarize - a moral value is an issue that involves human dignity and well-being. It is an issue in which God has a stake.

So, on to today's "moral value" - health care. I realize in choosing health care that I am opening a major can of worms. There are so many strands to this issue, so many competing claims, so many ongoing debates. In conversations and in my own thinking about this I find myself going off on tangents and frequently engaging in that most maddening form of ethical thinking, the dreaded "yes, but". You know the "yes, but": yes, providing health care is important, but don't people have a fundamental responsibility to promote their own health and well-being? Yes, medical insurance is too high, but aren't there legitimate times when a physician or hospital is in the wrong and should bear some of the cost? To this I say, Yes, this is a tangled issue, but that does not let us off the hook - it means that we will have to be more patient with ourselves and with one another as we sort through the various arguments and issues. It also serves as a reminder that when we as people of faith seek to come to some meaningful conclusions about moral issues that it is imperative that we ground our thinking and discussion, not in political rhetoric, but in the depth of scripture and our tradition.

Health care. First, as I promised last week, I begin up front with my own position. I believe that health care is a fundamental human right and that every person in our society should be guaranteed health care. I support some version of universal health care that is not dependent on one's employment, age, income, or preexisting medical condition. I support and am ready to pay the additional taxes that would be required to pay for such a system. Already, I can hear some of your and some of my "yes, buts", but this is not a policy position; for me, it is a moral position - my moral position.

As I said last week, my position is not our starting point for a moral discussion - Jesus Christ is our starting point, and that is where we begin again today. In our story this morning, we have two healings - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we have a healing and a resuscitation. The episodes are linked both sequentially, actually not sequentially - the healing of the woman with the flow of blood literally interrupts and the story of Jairus's daughter; the stories are also linked by the word "daughter": the little girl is the daughter of Jairus, a prominent leader of the synagogue; and Jesus, at the end of the interruption, calls the woman who was healed of the flow of blood, "daughter." Now we must admit up front that this is not a story about health care, or health care delivery, or about single-payer health care plans, or about the advantages or disadvantages of health care delivered by private entities versus public. This is a story about Jesus' interaction with two people who are sick and who are in need of healing. So we cannot use this story, I believe, to draw conclusions about the best or most appropriate form of health care delivery - but we can and must enter into the story to discover what it says about Jesus and about human health and well-being.

The first to notice in our story is that health care is not an abstraction, but is grounded in our living - which means that it is fraught with anxiety, fear, and concern. As Jesus steps off the boat, he is confronted by Jairus - a prominent and respected leader. Jairus, I am sure, is used to people coming to him, seeking his wisdom, his experience, his good offices. But Jairus has a need that is beyond his ability to solve - his beloved little daughter is sick to the point of death. So he will throw all propriety, all respectability to the wind and literally get down on his knees to beg Jesus repeatedly to come and do something for his daughter. Have you ever been desperate like that? So desperate for the safety and well-being of another (a child?), that you would do whatever it takes to get action? That's what Jairus did. He was not interested in case loads, in actuarial tables, in triage - his daughter was dying and he wanted, he desperately needed something to be done. And what does Jesus do? He goes. He does not diagnose from afar; he does not refer Jairus to a specialist; he goes. Sometimes when we debate moral values, we do so from afar, in polite or not-so-polite terms. But Jesus reminds us that God is intimately and intricately caught up with our everyday lives - that while God may have the whole world in God's hands, that God also has each one of us which all of our needs, all of our wants, all of our concerns in God's hands. Whenever we engage in discussions of moral values, if we are going to be followers of Jesus, we must always remember that people are people, not just statistics.

So Jesus, with Jairus and a crowd of curious on-lookers hastily sets off to Jairus' house to see what can be done for his daughter. On the way, a woman, an anonymous woman, certainly not the daughter of anyone prominent, sneaks up behind Jesus to have just of a bit of the healing that was in store for the daughter of Jairus. Now Mark tells us that this woman had suffered with a hemorrhage, a flow of blood for 12 years. What this means is that this woman had a flow of menstrual blood which not only affected her physically, but was death for her spiritual well-being. There were strict rules in the Jewish law about a woman's ritual purity at the time of her period. When a woman was menstruating, she was barred from worship in the Temple. So this woman, for 12 years, had been barred from worshipping God with her community of faith. She did not only have a physical disease, she had a spiritual disease. In fact, I would contend that all illness, all ailments, all disease can only be understood in a holistic way. We can never simply speak of physical ailments, but all disease have emotional, social, and spiritual implications as well. This is why health care is so vital - why I contend that it is a moral value - because it not only produces healthy bodies, but healthy relationships and healthy faith and healthy communities as well. The best doctoring is never simply about getting rid of pathogens, but is about helping patients overcome barriers and adopting new life patterns that increase the quality of life and relationships for the patient, his or her family and his or her community. This story reminds us that health care is about the care of whole persons, not just parts of the person or parts of the person's life.

Now here is where this story gets strange. We would expect that Jesus, who was on a mission of mercy, would press on to Jairus' house - his daughter was dying after all, and he could have his conversation with the woman with the flow of blood later. But he doesn't. Jesus stops and looks for the woman. He scans the large bustling crowd looking for the person who touched the hem of his garment. The disciples know how ridiculous Jesus is being. The crowd is immense and anonymous. It could have been any number of persons. And besides, the daughter of Jairus was in dire straits. This pause, this silly demand to know who touched him was wasting precious time. But Jesus knew that this woman was also precious. She too was someone's daughter. And she had been caught in a living death for a dozen years. So Jesus stops and encounters her - not to scold her, but to make sure that her healing was not just about her physical condition, but about her emotional and spiritual well-being. And he ends with encounter by revealing whose daughter she is - she is God's daughter - as all of us are God's daughters and sons. In God's love, all classes, conditions, and stations of life are collapsed; there is neither Jew nor Greek; slave nor free; male nor female. So in this health care parable, we are reminded that God's love transcends all distinctions and that each of us is precious in God's sight.

In the end, both daughters are not only cured, they are healed. Their relationships with their families, their communities, and their God are restored. Both the wealthy daughter and the poor daughter, the daughter with connections and the daughter without are recipients of God's mercy and God's grace.

Health care is a multi-billion enterprise that has so many competing and claims. Only a fool would suggest that there is a simple, clear plan that makes sense. We will debate various solutions and possibilities for decades to come, and we will never reach a consensus on the best way to structure our health care. But in the midst of that discussion, in the midst of weighing options between maximum care and cost containment, between preventative care and extreme intervention, between health care delivery and people's individual responsibility, we can and must be a moral voice that insists that all of these debates and decisions are about people - people created in the image of God and for whom God in Jesus Christ has endless love and mercy. People like Jairus' daughter who was sick to the point of death; people like the woman with the flow of blood whose sickness trapped in an endless death; people like you and me - all of us daughters and sons of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.