"Cold Comfort"

Homily for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost       2 July 2017
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

“Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple — truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”                                                                                                 Matthew 10:45

Pearl, penny. Candle, camel. Rooster, rock. Widow, wolf. Jesus is imaginator extraordinaire as he uses all these images and many more galore, less to entertain and more to make a point, make it stick, make it perfectly do-able 8 o’clock Monday morning.

With so many to choose from, how do Jesus’ images stack up? In a contest, the not-quite-invisible-to-the-naked-eye mustard seed — stand-in for how a smidgen of faith can pack a world-changing punch — usually gets top billing as the lowest-of-the-low, teensiest-of-the-teensy image in Jesus’ repertoire. The little sparrow might be a not-so-close second. And then, there are the hairs of our head Jesus claims are numbered.

Lots of competition in the race to the bottom. The bottom, of course, being not really such a bad thing in Jesus’ book, when you think about all things last reordered to first and first things bumped to last.

But one contender gets overlooked for its apparent insignificance. It may as well be just a drop in the bucket: “a cup of cold water.” Take that a step lower. “Even a cup of cold water” … the low-cost, low-investment, high stakes, high impact gift of even a cup of cold water given by any of us to any of the “little ones.”

The “little ones.” What’s that about? Thirsty kids … parched height-challenged folk … or perhaps the desperate-for-a-drink “little people” with their Lucky Charms?

Well, first, who’s Jesus talking to?

This is one more chapter in Jesus’ bestseller “How To Be a Disciple” for Dummies. Actually, it’s not a chapter per se, because what we have here are the untidy scraps of an arbitrary, chapter-long string of odds and ends — random sayings of Jesus — the Evangelist Matthew has dumped here. They don’t cohere, but Matthew thought they were too good to consign to the Cutting Room floor.

And yet, taking saying by saying, it’s possible to discern that Jesus is coaching the disciples, prepping them for the coming day they leave the nest, test their Moxie, and reveal their “inner Jesus” to the wide, wide world — but especially to the “little ones”: those closest to Jesus’ heart, persons easily and chronically ignored by their neighbors with exponentially-deeper pockets. Pockets untouched by charity at its most basic and humane.

Add that to all the dizzying wordplay Jesus indulges in here — “Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me,” doing this or that in the name of a prophet or a disciple and so on: It’s all charity-based connections.

Meaning: When Jesus’ succession planning succeeds, the disciples’ own work catches on, and the people whose lives they touch begin working their inner disciple, their collective work can be described in the most positive — and, at the same time, most diminutive — of terms: giving even a cup of cold water to the “little ones.”

You have to admit, that's setting the bar low.

Triggering another image — a Bizarro-World image — the negative to the glass of water shared. An image not explicit in Jesus’ stories and teachings, but no less potent in shock value blitzing video and media coverage a week ago: D.C. police arresting, dragging — and, as videotape shows, dropping — dozens of protesters in wheelchairs, some bloodied — dragging them from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office.

What were they protesting? The American Health Care Act, the Senate’s version of the health care bill passed earlier by the House. And because, according to nonpartisan analysts, the Senate’s bill literally will result in the deaths of thousands of our society’s most vulnerable — the disabled — activists from the disabled community themselves staged a “die-in” right there on the spot.

An unforgettable image. The arrests, the manhandling of persons Jesus called the “little ones.” And nowhere in sight not even what Jesus would call the equivalent of “a glass of cold water.”

Now, it’s easy to say, this is “just politics.” But it’s not. This is morality (or the lack of it). This is values.

It’s easy in the heat of debate to get caught up in the data. But these persons — tossed about and discarded — aren’t data. They’re the very people Jesus has sent our way to love and treat as neighbor.

And yet, there’s telling and compelling data behind their protest. More data behind the American Health Care Act, data familiar by now: According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the commonly-called Trumpcare bill now before the Senate would cover about 22 million fewer people by 2026 than Obamacare.

And 15 million will lose the Medicaid their health depends upon.

Complication: “Many of those rendered uninsured would be older, low-income people in some of our country’s poorest states, places hit hardest by the opioid epidemic, violence, and other public health problems,” according to the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack. He’s the go-to guru on public health policy.

Now, it’s also common to say — as I just did — that these 22 million will lose their health care insurance, that 15 million will lose their Medicaid. That’s not true, charges California Sen. Kamala Harris. At least, it’s not accurate. Our neighbors won’t be losing anything. Their health care insurance — their Medicaid — will be taken away from them. That's the galling and glaring opposite of the giving instinct Jesus mandates for each of his followers.

But a clarification: There is giving in the bill. Gobs of giving. Not to the “little ones,” but to the “yuuuuge ones”: the 0.4 percent wealthiest Americans. Not the 4 percent wealthiest Americans. The 0.4 percent wealthiest Americans … amounting to a giveaway — to the already wealthy — of half a trillion dollars in tax cuts.

Now, Jesus was no math wiz, that I’m aware. Sure, he could toss around figures like 7x70 in a forgiveness exercise. But there’s something cockamamie — something anti-christian — about bottoms-up redistribution of wealth like Trumpcare’s tax cut windfall for the gold-plated set. It just can’t be reconciled with the Gospel — the Good News Jesus proclaims to the poor, the disadvantaged, the ignored.

And, as we mark once more the Founding of the Republic, I don’t think it can be reconciled with the American ideal ... an ideal expressed by no less a patriot than John Adams (and President No. 2):

Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men.

“And not for profit of any one class.” The American ideal.

Now, the Senate bill — forged tellingly in secret and kept from the timely scrutiny essential to an open, fact-based, and informed democracy — lacking sufficient support to pass, has been withdrawn for a vote until after the July 4 recess. But zombie-like and just as carnivorous and brain-dead and heartless, come back it will.

And once more, we will be left to conclude that, as has been shown, the American Health Care Act: It’s not an American act. It’s not a healthy act. And it’s not a caring act.

Read: It is an “act.” An act of meanness, pettiness, greed, and light years from the society Jesus calls his followers to create, one that is based on a crystalline principle … a principle that requires each of us — of whatever political party — to choose the Jesus option for health care policy:

“Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple — truly I tell you, none of these” will have their reward taken away.

Amen.