Downward Mobility

Last Sunday’s reading from Jeremiah 1:4-10 is a special one for me. It’s special because when I first started seminary over 20 years ago, this was the passage that I chose for my very first exegetical paper. I chose it because as a brand-new seminary student, having just moved from where I grew up in Southern California to the Pacific Northwest, where I had never been before, I felt very overwhelmed and out of my element. I knew that I had sensed a call from God to ministry, and that call had been affirmed by others in my sponsoring church, but I found the seminary environment very intimidating. I felt like a fraud compared to other students, who seemed to have everything together and had been doing amazing things for God their whole lives, whereas I was a kid who was a skateboarder and played in punk rock bands and then became a Marine. And so in God’s words to the prophet Jeremiah, another fired up but uncertain young man, I found a message of chosenness and belovedness that resonated deeply with me.

It was also in that same class that I was introduced to the writings of Henri Nouwen. Nouwen became a guiding light for me in much of my formation for ministry over the years, especially his writings about God’s unconditional love. But he is also known for his work with and writing about people with disabilities. Nouwen lived and served many years in a community for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and this experience shaped his view of God. He came to view disability as a blessing, a path to what he called “downward mobility” that led to freedom from the expectations of our world that actually steer us away from God’s love.

Last Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke 13:10-17) also tells a story about disability, and about freedom. On the surface, it’s a story about the Sabbath, but it’s also a story about the nature of Jesus’ ministry and the message he came to deliver to the world. When Jesus heals the crippled woman in the synagogue, he pronounces her “free from bondage.” In what sort of ways was this woman bound? Obviously, her physical ailment placed her in bondage, limited her freedom in some ways, and Jesus does provide healing from this. But even more so, she is also bound by other forces related to her status as a disabled person in an abled world – she has likely been excluded, shamed. She has certainly experienced trauma, from both her physical pains and from the way she was treated because of those pains.

You see, society both then and now is not very good at dealing with disability, with imperfection, with anything outside of the norm. In Jesus’ time, disability was viewed as a punishment, something deserved for either one’s own sin or the sin of a family member. And even if we don’t take such a view today, can we deny that our modern world still recoils at disability? It reminds us of our own brokenness, our own mortality – it makes us uncomfortable, so we want to look away, put it out of sight.

It's interesting to me that Jesus describes the woman’s condition as being “bound by Satan.” The word “Satan” means “accuser”, and so rather than a red guy with horns and a pitchfork, what if we understood “Satan” as the accusing voice of the world, of society, that tells people to be ashamed of their imperfection? That tells people that they will never been good enough, especially if they are physically not like others? Satan is that accusing voice that tells us we must have deserved whatever affliction we have suffered, that our brokenness makes us unlovable, that our trauma isn’t real and should be ignored or buried.

 If we understand Satan this way, it might also change our view of sin. The great 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that the root of sin is pride, but feminist theologians have challenged that view and said no, the root of sin is actually denial of our belovedness. So freedom from sin, the nature of healing that Jesus gives to the crippled woman and to us, is the permission to own our nature as God’s beloved sons and daughters, not in spite of our faults and imperfections but with all of our faults and imperfections.

The gospel tells us that the crowd rejoiced at Jesus’ healing message. This is who we are called to be as the church as well – bearers of that message which is good news for everyone because we are all broken vessels. I believe that this is a message that will resonate very strongly in a world where we still view woundedness as something to hide, to be ashamed of.

But we can only create such a space if we can model what we have experienced ourselves. And so we too must begin the practice of hearing God’s word of blessing that counters the accusing lies of the world. So in as much as you in this community have entrusted me as your priest to speak those words of blessing – I want to say to all of you hear today: you are loved and accepted unconditionally as God’s own children, not in spite of your brokenness but with all of your brokenness. The God who knew you before you were formed in the womb knows you in all of your beauty and ugliness, and there is nothing that you need to hide or be ashamed of. And when we as a church gather together at Christ’s table, to which all are welcomed, let it be a sign of that belovedness that we experience ourselves and then share with the world around us. It’s a message of freedom, real freedom, that the world is waiting to hear.