Proper 5 / Ordinary 10 (June 5-11)
Texts: Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26;
Hosea 5:15–6:6; Rom 4:13-25
YouTube: https://youtu.be/EUDJeEfwHSQ
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from Chris Murphy
HEALTHCARE JESUS-STYLE
I begin with a paragraph from Senator Chris Murphy’s new book titled Crisis of the Common Good:
Justin Ford Kimball was a lifelong educator before he was hired as an executive at Baylor University Medical Center [way back] in 1929, so it wasn’t surprising that he was the one to notice something odd about the hospital’s [finances]: an unusually high number of local teachers were carrying large unpaid bills. He called up the local teachers’ union and offered them a deal: for 50 cents a month, teachers would be entitled to free stays of up to twenty-one days at the hospital after paying full charge for the first week. The arrangement proved to be so popular that it quickly spread across the country and gained a name: Blue Cross plans. The 50-cent fee was America’s first health insurance premium, and the first week’s charge was the first deductible. Justin Ford Kimball didn’t know it, but he had invented the health insurance industry.1
Did you know that that’s how Blue Cross/Blue Shield got started? It dominated the health insurance industry for much of last century. (I had a favorite aunt that workd there many years, and my mother worked there after becoming an empty nester.) Yet I don’t think I’ve even noticed much how it’s been disappearing slowly before our eyes. Have you? And do you know why? Because health insurance is now a for-profit industry. Your health and my health are now included in the things turned into a commodity, something to make money off of. And make no mistake about it, there’s plenty of billionaire’s making plenty of money off of our health care.
Most of my life I’ve thought of the health insurance industry as a non-profit venture. Blue Cross/Blue Shield, for example, never made a profit. It reinvested all its extra revenue into lower premiums and better care. This wasn’t perfect we know, too, because it was affordable for people whose employers helped pay for it. Self-employed people, and others whose employers didn’t offer health insurance, had to get health insurance on their own — or not all for too many millions of Americans.
But, by contrast, the health insurance industry has moved in a wholly other direction, that of being for-profit. In 2023, the largest U.S. insurer, UnitedHealthcare, crowed that it made a $22 billion profit. In other words, while patients and consumers paid billions in premiums, United-Healthcare bragged that it was skimming $22 billion off the top to make investors in the company richer instead of investing in actual care. What a world.
In today’s Gospel Reading Jesus extends “health care” to two rather different people. The first is a woman who’s been bleeding for twelve years, who’s probably destitute, having spent any money she had on trying to find a cure. Jesus cures her for free. The second person is a little girl who’s not just sick; she’s already dead. Her father, a leader of the synagogue, probably could have paid Jesus a tidy sum. But Jesus raises her back to life for free. It didn’t matter what kind of value these two people had in terms of material wealth — one is poor and the other rich — Jesus treated them as having equal value as God’s children. ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well.’
It’s a good thing that some of the core values in modern healthcare do follow Jesus on this. Individual health care professionals are trained to give everyone care as if they have equal value as persons. When you or I come into the emergency room needing treatment, the doctors and nurses are trained to treat us as having equal value. There is some triage that happens based on the urgency of the need, but triage based on how much one can afford is not supposed to be part of the equation. That’s not their training. And yet they work in a system in which how much you can afford is always in the background, lurking to come into the foreground.
Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized world — which Christians here in this country regard as largely unchurched — have gone more in the direction of Jesus, where healthcare is a universal right. Most other nations of the industrialized north have chosen to organize all health insurance as non-profit, usually through the government. Here in the United States, where health insurance was invented under the banner of a Blue Cross, we’ve chosen to go in the other direction, with more and more of our health insurance becoming yet another commodity for especially the richest among us to make loads more money. The Big Morally Repugnant Bill of last summer moves us even further in the direction of our healthcare being dictated by the values, or lack thereof, of for-profit business. Medicaid and Obamacare were further rolled back so that the billionaires can make more money off of our health, or the lack thereof.
Think about it. Why should health care not be a for-profit venture, right? The wealthiest who stand to make the most money in health care business find their profits soaring to the extent that the rest of us get less healthy. In short, the less healthy we are means more money for them. If that’s you only goal, we’re screwed, right? They have a vested interest in seeing others become less healthy. So the billionaires might further think: why not lobby to also give us less healthy environments to live in. Let’s relax all the regulations for clean water and clean air, so that we can make more money off of other people’s declining health.
And while we’re at it, let’s, as a nation catering to the billionaires, try to offer less healthy food as dictated by mega-agricultural business. We can make more money by delivering less healthy food so that our fellow billionaires in the health industry can make more profits off of less healthy people. Isn’t this the direction we are heading down by choosing a system that works best for the billionaires and not so well for the rest of us?
Senator Murphy’s new book on the Crisis of the Common Good puts forward the argument that this is every bit as much a spiritual crisis as it is a political one. He writes of common spiritual values that we need to guide us in our politics, taking care to be as nonpartisan and nonreligious as he can. But here at church we don’t need to be as careful about where our spiritual values come from. Our values come from Jesus. Jesus shows us how to be better human beings which leads to more flourishing lives. Jesus shows us how to treat one another as having equal value in God’s sight. Jesus shows us the way of love that leads to mutually caring for one another and hence to greater freedom.
But I’ve also been ringing out the theme since Easter that our religious values of following Jesus depend on us getting the Bible’s story right to begin with.2 When we read the Bible’s story as being mostly about our fate in the afterlife, about what happens to us when we die, then it leaves the door open to others dictating to us another set of values to live by in the here and now. It’s less urgent to follow Jesus in the way we live if Jesus was primarily sent to save us for after we die. That makes it easier for folks with another agenda for this life to convince us to look the other way, or to not feel the need to speak up.
Currently, we are heading more and more in the direction of living by the values of a form of capitalism which is obsessed the ability a a few to hoard more and more of the wealth. They do so by persuading us that so-called socialism — which is essentially an economics that puts human beings first — is the boogeyman, the thing that would ruin us. And they offer instead a version of capitalism which sees human beings as consumers of commodities first and foremost, where even our health is a commodity, and so each one of us as health care consumers have a value placed on us as to how much health care we can afford. Or can’t afford/ Aren’t you sick and tired of this? Emphasis on “sick”?
As your pastor in an aging congregation, I watch how this plays out. When you are ninety-something, for example, and in fragile health, can you afford home health care? Or is the value of your life such that we shuttle you off to low-cost healthcare facilities? We could choose to value the lives of our elders and give them the healthcare they need in their last years. But we are currently choosing something else. If we were to choose instead as Jesus does, to address healing and health with every child of God having equal value in God’s sight, then we would be choosing what we truly desire, wouldn’t we? To flourish, to have better health.
But first it is imperative that we get our story straight! It is essential that we understand the Bible’s story as the story of God coming home to God’s creation in a way in which the power of God’s love shapes our spiritual values to care for one another in the here and now. We need to choose to pray, “Thy Kingdom come, they will be done on earth as in heaven,” and to really mean it. With our actions and not just our words.
Jesus came to live the values of God’s reign on this earth, and it got him killed. I’ve given you an overview in today’s Sermon Notes of the Bible as the story of God’s homecoming to save us for better lives in the here and now. The Good News is that, despite it getting Jesus killed, God’s homecoming continues through the resurrection and Pentecost, as God’s spirit of love is poured out on each of us. Graced with God’s spirit, we are able to embody the values of God’s reign in this world, right here, right now. You and I are called to take our places with leaders who are calling for us to make different choices in our democracy. We need to see the choices that Jesus makes in today’s Gospel Reading — choices to bring healing to both rich and poor as having the same basic value as human beings, precious in God’s sight — we need to see that as guiding the choices we can make for our healthcare in this democracy.
Siblings in Christ, let’s get our story straight! Let’s answer the call to let God’s spirit guide us and empower us to advocate for values of God’s reign in the here and now. Along with our fellow citizens, we could choose to help make our nation . . . more humane. Jesus in the life he lived shows us how to be better humans. Let’s strive to show our neighbors and fellow citizens how to be better humans and see where that takes us. It’s time to speak up and speak out for different choices that we might all be more healthy together. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, June 7, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/EUDJeEfwHSQ
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from Chris Murphy
Notes
1. Chris Murphy, Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026), pages 147-48. The first several paragraphs of the sermon rely on Murphy’s section on healthcare, “The Public Commons,” pages 147-52 (the majority of which is the day’s Excerpt Page).
2. Since Easter Sunday, I’ve leaned heavily on N.T. Wright’s main theme of his most recent book God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025).
