Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Bethesda, which has five porticos. In these lay many invalids-blind, lame and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a very long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?”

The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me. (John 5:2-7)

The poor man had been ill for 38 years. He had some kind of paralysis. Hebrew tradition has it that every once in awhile an angel would descend from heaven and stir up the waters. The first person to make it into the waters before they stopped churning would be healed.

From time to time this man would have someone bring him on a mat to lie by the Sheep gate, and maybe because he was leprous, which was a contagious disease, there was nobody who wanted to be around to help him be the first one into the water. Or maybe the temple authorities were just too busy with their religious duties to help him. Then Jesus came along, and well, he healed the man and the rest of the story is there for you to read.

When I think about this passage I’m immediately reminded of the Conservative Christian attitude towards universal health care. Millions of people are finding that their insurance won’t cover certain illnesses. Millions more can’t afford insurance at all. Children and the elderly are hit the hardest, two particular stages of life when lack of adequate and quality health care can be a traumatic blow.

Yet Republicans and Conservative Christians believe that we should not bother helping the poor man get into the pool before everyone else so he can be healed. As a matter of fact, judging by their reaction to Obama’s health care reform package, they probably would not like it that Jesus healed the man. “Don’t enable him”, they would say. “He does not deserve it. How did he end up there in the first place? He must be on welfare.” Like Pharaoh of old said of the Israeli slaves, “They are idle. Give them more work to do.”

Aside from important church state issues, I don’t understand how the Religious Right can with a straight face refer to our country as Christian. We spent trillions of dollars on two wars that were initiated on lies. After a bail out, CEOs from our largest mega corporations continue to make 100 times more than their employees. The rich still get richer, the middle class is disappearing, and the poor get poorer.

Yet television evangelists continue to ask people to send money in to their ministries, and while we have the greatest medical technology on the face of the earth, the Christian Right complains that they might have to pay taxes to help foot the bill for universal health care. When these people claim day after day that their Savior loved them so much that he died on a cross for them, and while he was here on earth freely healed anyone who was hurting, I am continually amazed that they cling so tenaciously to a social Darwinist “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” philosophy.

I find it difficult to accept that the Christian Right’s fear of government is so deeply entrenched that they won’t even consider something akin to socialized medicine for all of our citizens. I really believe it’s because of greed.

Why else would the late Jerry Falwell confide to his congregation that he likes what Rush Limbaugh has to say, when Limbaugh is a man who constantly berates the poor as people who deserve what they get. Why else would a rich politician named Michelle Bachmann call herself a Christian and have town hall meetings advocating the denial of universal health care to our poorest because she thinks it will lead to socialism? And how else could the “Reverend” Pat Robertson call natural disasters punishment for those who are sick or have lost family members and homes?

These are the “religious” people of Jesus’ day who would not have helped the lame man get into the pool as the waters churned. Their civil-self help religion would tell them to pass the man by because chances are he did something evil to deserve his condition, and besides, he can get a job and work so he can afford private insurance.

We have an opportunity through our government to stop and help and not pass by the lame man. To help one another to carry him into the waters while the angel descends to stir them up. To get him back on his feet and praise the Lord, because God can do miracles through government too.

So if conservatives really believe they are followers of Christ, if we ourselves really believe that we are so, we should all keep protesting and pushing for universal health care. I’m not talking about reform, as important as that was. Chances are that today’s private insurance industry would have denied coverage to the lame man at the Sheep gate because of the preexisting condition of “invalidism”, and despite Obama’s reform, they would hire the best lawyers to locate loopholes for denial of coverage.

We need to bypass the private insurance industry altogether. We need to shout it from the house tops that free universal health care is a God given right for every man woman and child. That God is not so lacking in omniscience that he can’t use government to help us. If he used the state of the art highway system and government structure of the Roman occupation to spread the good news of the love of Christ in the first century, then today he can use our modern “secular” government to help us with our health care by providing us with coverage. After all, this is a part of the good news, or gospel. The lame man at the Sheep gate should not have had to wait so long to receive healing. Neither should we.