The way to unity is through diversity

Here's the sermon I shared in the 8.00 am service at St Mary Magdalene, Great Burstead, this morning:

In the culture of Jesus’ day, those with disabilities were often excluded from their community because of their disability. We see this in the Gospels in references to disabled people living outside villages and towns and being beggars on the streets. Those who were Jews, were excluded from worship at the Temple because of their disability. Jesus’ acts of healing were, therefore, acts of inclusion because, as a result, those healed were reintegrated into their community. For those who were Jews, we often read of these people being sent to authorities after their healing in other that they can return to their communities.

Despite this, as the theologian John Hull has noted, many disabled people rightly ‘claim the Bible and Christian faith are not so much part of the answer but part of the problem.’ He notes that ‘many Christians still persist with a literal concept of miracle, and the imitation of Christ is sometimes thought to involve healing miracles for disabled people.’ In addition, ‘the Bible itself depicts many disabilities in a negative way.’ ‘He gives blindness as one example, due to his personal experience of this condition, which ‘is frequently used as a metaphor for sin and unbelief.’ This is a metaphor taken from the world of sighted people and used to marginalise and demean the world of blind people. The result of these negative features of the [Christian] tradition’, John Hull says, ‘is that disabled people usually find better things to do on a Sunday morning than go to church’ (https://faithinhealth.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/theology-of-disability-health-and-healing-conference.pdf and http://www.johnmhull.biz/A%20Spirituality%20of%20Disability1.htm).

That situation is the reverse of Jesus’ intent when he healed. He intended to include disabled people in the community, culture and worship of his day but some aspects of the Christian tradition which he began have resulted in disabled people experiencing exclusion. As John Hull has said, ‘The true miracle … is when disabled people are fully integrated into Church life and accepted exactly as they are’ (http://www.johnmhull.biz/ChurchTimesInterview3rdMay2013.doc).

This is why it is vital that we address access issues as a church. We inhabit buildings which visual treasure chests, particularly here at Great Burstead with your medieval wall paintings. We rightly value the wonderful architecture and the beauty of our churches. However, if those who are blind are unable to also appreciate what we see in our churches and those with mobility impairments cannot access the spaces in order to see while those who can access and see the glories of these spaces accept that others cannot, we are actually a places and communities of exclusion. Instead, we need to creatively imagine how we can include those who are currently excluded.

Jesus, in order to communicate with the man in our Gospel story (Mark 7. 31 – 37), uses touch and gesture. There are several different theories as to why Jesus acts in ways that seem very strange to us; putting his fingers in the man’s ears, spitting before putting his fingers on the man’s tongue and looking up to heaven. The simplest explanation would seem to be that touch and gesture were the ways in which communication could take place. The starting point for inclusion for us, as for Jesus, is to enter to some extent the world of the other person, in this case the man who was deaf and who had a speech impediment.

It can only be as we connect with the different world that others inhabit that understanding can come from which inclusion can develop. John Hull says: ‘The major disabilities create a distinctive world of experience, so different from the world in which the majority live as to constitute different human worlds. The powerful majority often create a world which is assumed to be the only world. Those who do not share this world are regarded as being without a world and are pitied or patronised. This idea of multiple worlds is of great political and social significance. If you do not understand my world, how can we relate to each other with mutual respect? If we rush too soon to a single world, we create an exclusive domination. The only way to create a unity of the human species is to go through multiplicity. The way to unity is through diversity … We must also include the different human worlds of experience, such as the disabled worlds we have been thinking about. Just as the Church can’t be holy or catholic without the equal ministry of women with men, so it cannot be holy or catholic without the equal prophetic and sacramental ministry of disabled people with the able-bodied.’

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Carleen Anderson - Let It Last.

We have to put our worlds together

Here is the reflection I shared at today's Healing Eucharist at St Andrew's Wickford:

‘In the early 1980s, after decades of steady deterioration, writer and academic John Hull lost his sight.’ As he adjusted to his new condition, he ‘came to think of blindness as one of the great natural human conditions.’ It is, he wrote, ‘just the way that some people are, and the world which blindness creates is one of the many human worlds, which must all be put together if the human experience is to become entire.’ In fact, ‘to believe in the God of all being who is Lord of all life’ means ‘we have to put the worlds together’ because ‘we need each other.’

In our Gospel reading (Mark 7. 31 - 37), we see Jesus enter into the world of a deaf man who also had an impediment in his speech. Jesus understands this man’s communication issues and responds to him in ways which aim to minimise his distress and maximise their ability to communicate. Jesus realises that being in a crowd would have been disorientating for this man, so takes him away from the crowd in order that they can communicate one-to-one. Then, he uses the heightened senses that this man possesses - sight and touch – in order to communicate with him. As a hearing person with speech, Jesus could have stayed in his world and sought to use words to communicate. Instead, he uses touch primarily and sight secondarily to mark the places to be unblocked and opened.

Jesus sometimes asks those he heals, ‘Do you want to get well?’ This may seem a surprising question, yet if disabilities, such as blindness or deafness, do create their own worlds, then there is a choice to be made about which world to inhabit. John Hull discovered great insights through entering the world of blindness, so it may be that when Jesus takes this man aside that he asks him which world he wishes to inhabit. On many occasions when Jesus heals, the result of his healing is that the person healed is re-included into society generally and the local community. In Jesus’ time, many disabled people were excluded from the Temple and forced to exist on the edge of society. Following many of his healings, Jesus sends the healed person to the priest in order that the person can be re-integrated into society. Today, we realise that instead of needing to change the person in order to be inclusive, rather we need to change society, both attitudinally and physically.

My friend Fiona MacMillan chairs the Disability Advisory Group at St Martin-in-the-Fields. She says: ‘Historically the church has been amazing at caring for people on the edge of society. For hundreds of years the church challenged, led and changed society through its valuing of those who are powerless. It practiced faith in action by feeding, housing and caring for people who otherwise would have suffered or died through poverty or sickness.

But since the 1960s the disability rights movement has campaigned for greater autonomy, and the Church has been slower than society to respond to what is a significant sector of the population. In the UK today there are about 11 million people with living with a disabling physical, sensory, cognitive or mental health condition, of whom 80% were born healthy and have had to learn to adjust. All of us spend our lives somewhere on a spectrum between the super-fit athlete and the profoundly impaired person, moving and changing as a result of accident, illness or ageing. Disabled people may be an uncomfortable presence in a society lauding strength, but in the Church which professes a paradox of vulnerability we're often objects for pastoral attention rather than agents of change.

The Church of the 21st century frequently fails disabled people, hearing echoes of an understanding that links sickness with sinfulness, mental health issues with possession, and disability as being in need of cure. Pounced on by street pastors, spoken about rather than listened to, regarded as difficult or demanding, costly or time-consuming, it's not surprising that many disabled people are put off going to church – even if we can get in. Access is often focused on getting in rather than joining in – ramps and lifts, hearing loops and loos – with participation seen as a step too far. We are more likely to be known by our needs than celebrated for our gifts.’

Fiona is arguing that, while the Church has at times been effective in offering healing and care, it hasn’t been anywhere near as effective in terms of inclusion, which was the overall aim of Jesus’ healing ministry. We need to do more, as the Church, to put our different worlds together and, as Jesus did, to enter the world of disabled people and then receive the gifts found in those worlds. As John Hull stated, ‘We have to put the worlds together’ because ‘we need each other.’

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Edward Elgar - Lux Aeterna.

The Meaning in the Miracles: Seeing and Believing

Here's the reflection I shared tonight in Bread for the World at St Martin-in-the-Fields as part of our Lent Course on 'The Meaning in the Miracles' by Jeffrey John. 

At this service we shared a newly commissioned drawing called ‘Blind Jesus (no one belongs here more than you)’ - see below. The drawing has been commissioned by Celia Webster from the artist Alan Stewart with the aim of creating discussion in churches and the wider community including encouraging others to create their own Last Supper images. Both Celia and Alan joined us for the service. Celia is part of the Church of England disabilities steering committee, while Rev Alan Stewart is currently the vicar of two churches in Hertford. He studied Foundation Art at Belfast Art College, then graduated with a degree in Fashion and Textiles from Central St Martins in London and has exhibited in various churches and galleries. This image in charcoal of the Last Supper, to which I refer in the reflection, includes the central character of a visually impaired Jesus, surrounded by twelve people of differing ages, backgrounds and abilities. At the table, an empty chair invites the viewer to find themselves at the table. This Jesus challenges theological and Biblical imagery of blindness as sin or something to be cured. The image is offered as the beginning of a conversation. It asks questions like... What associations do we have with blindness? How does this Jesus ‘see’ me? Why has each figure been chosen? What are their stories? Who else should be at this meal? Is the empty chair for you?:

Tonight, we grapple with two of the more problematic elements of Jesus' miracles. As one whose teenage faith was renewed through the Charismatic movement, with its belief in supernatural healing, while also later becoming father to a daughter who not only has epilepsy but whose character and personality has been shaped through that experience, these are stories with which I grapple personally. In the book, Jeffrey John is crystal clear on one of the issues with which we grapple tonight. In the chapter on ‘The Withered Fig Tree’ he says that the way this story is told in Mark's Gospel 'exemplifies the way the early Church imported into the Gospel an anti-Semitic ideology which had no place in the original teaching of Jesus, and which has spawned a terrible legacy of atrocities perpetrated by Christians on Jews down the ages.’

John says that our response should be to ‘align ourselves consciously with Paul and against the evangelists, in particular, with Paul’s continuing love and respect for the tradition of Israel, his unbreakable conviction that God’s promises stand firm, and his yearning hope that in the end all Israel – the Old and the New – shall be one in God’s salvation.’ Jeffrey John doesn't go as far in regard to disability, but I want to suggest that we should essentially do the same.

The way in which disability is understood and treated within the Gospels and in Jesus' healing miracles is an issue with which we have grappled at St Martin's because of the work of our Disability Advisory Group led by Fiona MacMillan. Much of what I will say tonight is based on my understanding of their work and the issues they have raised, including use of several insightful phrases coined by Fiona.

The issue is highlighted by our title for tonight's session ‘Seeing and Believing’. If seeing is equated with believing then those who do not see, including those who are blind, are excluded from believing. The fact that Jesus heals blind people and speaks about such healing relating to faith seems to reinforce the problem. It is a problem that also applies to deaf people who are viewed in a similar way within these stories. A focus on prayer for supernatural healing also removes agency from disabled people and leads to accusations of a lack of belief on the part of those not healed.

The problem goes deeper still, however, because of an Old Testament belief that the difficulties we encounter in life derive from our sins or those of our ancestors. This is a belief that Jesus explicitly rejects, doing so in relation to the healing of a blind man. Nevertheless, it is an understanding that has found its way into the hymns and liturgy that we commonly use in church, and which alienates and excludes disabled people. As example, think about how you would feel singing these lines from ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘Just As I Am’, were you to be a blind person yourself:

‘Amazing grace / How sweet the sound / That saved a wretch like me / I once was lost, but now I'm found / Was blind, but now I see’

‘Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind’

While we know that the language of blindness, sight and salvation is intended metaphorically and refers to a sinfulness in which we all share, nevertheless to hear a fundamental aspect of your identity as a blind person equated to wretchedness is deeply galling, disheartening and is ultimately exclusionary.

Jeffrey John is clear that the point of Jesus' miracles is not medical but theological and spiritual. This has the effect of making them about all of us, rather than solely about those who were healed. John also argues that we are all blind or deaf before God opens us to his presence. However, while this universalises the stories, it also reinforces the equation between blindness or deafness and sin.

A different understanding of healing can emerge from these stories if we begin, as Jeffrey John does, with the understanding that the purpose of Jesus' healing ministry was to restore those who had been excluded to worship and to community. That is why the healing miracles often end with those healed going to see the authorities of the day in order to be readmitted to society. John notes that the healing miracles cover most of the excluded groups from Jesus’ time.

Healings were the way – the only way at that time - to return those who had been excluded to worship and community. Today, however, the social model of disability is based on the understanding that society disadvantages disabled people; that society is not set up to support the needs of disabled people and, therefore, it is society, not disabled people, that need to change. If we remove the barriers in society that exclude disabled people we can achieve the end that Jesus intended, which is the Messianic banquet in which everyone is included. That banquet is symbolised for us by the Eucharist.

Believing is not primarily about seeing supernatural healings that prove the existence of God but instead about seeing a vision of communion and community in the Eucharist, a place where all can come and where all are valued, where people can get in and join in.

A key part of that inclusion is that everyone has insight and understanding. Everyone has perceptions of God to share. As a result, physical blindness is not a barrier to knowing God or to sharing aspects of that relationship with others. The writings and experience of John Hull, a theologian who was blind, clearly show this to be true. In his ‘Open Letter from a Blind Disciple to a Sighted Saviour,’ he notes that it is not necessary to the witness of faith, regarding the way our ignorance, sin and disobedience prevent us from responding to the love of God made known in Jesus Christ, that that witness ‘should be cast into the form of the metaphor of blindness.’ That it was is surely, he suggests, ‘a case where the metaphor kills but the spirit gives life.’ He argues that it is necessary that all those who are spoken to by the Bible, including blind people, ‘should have an opportunity to reply, and thus the conversation which is within the Bible can enter into conversation with us today, and through offering a voice and a hearing to everyone, we can create a community of genuine free speech.’ There should be ‘a proliferation of many meanings until everyone's meanings are gathered in.’ ‘This is the way that the Bible becomes truly ecumenical, truly catholic.’

Alan Stewart's marvellous drawing of the Last Supper gives us just such an ecumenical or catholic image through its depiction of a diverse group of disciples surrounding a blind Jesus at the Last Supper. This is an image of many who have experienced barriers to inclusion getting in and joining in with the recognition that experiences of exclusion are central to a faith that sees Jesus become the scapegoat for humanity in order to remove the barriers to encounter with God that we had previously erected. The Jesus who does that bears on his body the marks of his Passion, carrying those signs and experiences into an eternity of unity and communion. His experience of being scapegoated and excluded becomes revelatory and is the route by which all can return to community.

In the same way, the experience of disabled people must become central, as in this image, not through the eradication of disability by means of supernatural healing, but by the eradication of all barriers to communion so that the insights of all can be received for the benefit and building up of the whole people of God. When one is excluded, the body of Christ is not whole and currently many remain excluded. To reverse that situation, we need to see the vision of communion that Jesus institutes through the Eucharist, that he shares in parables of the Messianic banquet, and which will become our experience in eternity in order that we begin to live that future now.

That is the vision that we need to see in order to believe, because belief is not primarily intellectual or propositional, instead it is about practice and demonstration – living God’s future now. It is a vision in which those who are blind or deaf or otherwise disabled have a valued place as those who, like Jesus, have come through exclusion to join in at the table. That is the vision that Alan Stewart sets out so compellingly for us in his Last Supper image. See and believe.

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June Boyce-Tillman - We Shall Go Out.