Good health is a great blessing. Those who live where there is high quality health care enjoy a divine gift that has few equals among earthly blessings. It is no wonder that such a furor has erupted about the so-called health care plan, ironically called the Affordable Care Act. Who wants health care run like the postal service? There is no time during our earthly lives when our health is unimportant to us. We always seem to be recovering from something, even if it sore muscles after a good work out. When we were children we regularly visited the pediatrician's office. As we grow older our bodies start their long, inevitable slide into the grave. Health maintenance is a permanent situation, even when we don't actually recognize it.

We also find ourselves in spiritual health maintenance mode until we die. Yes, of course, we have all the blessings of forgiveness of sins, life and salvation as promised in baptism and guaranteed to us in eternity. But we haven't arrived yet. In the meantime, we are all the patients of the Physician of the soul, who continues to work upon us maintaining our spiritual health (Lk 5:31). We live in the situation of the man rescued by the Samaritan (Lk 10:30-37), until we draw our last ragged breath. The Lord continues to offer the salve of Word and sacraments to the wounds of our sin, weakness, and suffering. He attends at our bedside with all the power of life. He applies oil and wine to the wounds of the heart. How wonderful that we have a doctor who comes to our sick bed and grants healing now, and promises a new life at the end. We have a doctor who not only heals but is himself the medicine, transfusing us with His precious blood.

There is every reason to remain vigilant about our health and humble about our present condition. We have every reason to confess with the Apostle the battle that is waging within us against our own wickedness; the cancer of death (Rm 7:23-25). We feel the power of the divine judgment that is the wage of sin. That weighs upon us as a spiritual entropy. Only in our confession of weakness and inability is there a truthful description of our situation. We must confess daily that we have not arrived, and that we still require the personal care of our physician, Christ the Savior. He comes to us in the church which until it is translated into the purely heavenly kingdom is the wayfarers shelter in which oil and wine are poured over the wounds we feel and experience. There is nothing more practical or beneficial to us in all the world, than to attend where the Lord continues His care for our spiritual health by providing the true medicine of immortality from His altar and the words of eternal life in the Word of God delivered by the physicians' assistants of the ministry. Now this is what I call health care.

"There are men who are unthankful for grace, attributing much to poor and disabled nature. True it is, when man was created he received great power of free will; but he lost it by sin. He fell into death, became infirm, was left in the way by the robbers half dead. The Samaritan passing by lifted him up on his own beast (Lk 10:30-37) he is still being brought to the inn. Why is he lifted up? He is still in process of curing. 'But,' someone may say, 'it is enough for me that I received remission of all sins in baptism.' Because iniquity was blotted out, was therefore infirmity brought to an end? Such a person says, 'I received remission of all sins.' It is quite true. All sins were blotted out in the sacrament of baptism, all entirely, of words, deeds, thoughts, all were blotted out. But this is the 'oil and wine' which was poured in by the way.