WRITTEN THINGS
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Good morning, beloved of God, you who bear God to this community in your many and varied bodies, you who show us who God is in your very flesh as it is today. I bid you good morning and declare it to be one, because we get to spend this time together. Here at Augustana, we make a point every Sunday to affirm the vastness of God’s beauty, the fullness of God’s glory, and the divinity of God’s image as it is revealed in every one of us. We joyously proclaim that when we say “all are welcome as you are,” we mean it, and that when you’re here you’re home. And almost every week, we affirm to each other out loud that we are made in God’s image and are beautiful as we are. I’m grateful to be in such a community -- it is one of the reasons I so enthusiastically accepted your call. I am also hyper-aware, this week in particular, of how vast is the gap between what we speak, believe, and do, as a nation, society, and church. Because we are people living in both time and eternity, both on the ground and in glory, we live in tension between what is and what ought to be and where we fit on the bridge between them. And even though we love hard and love well, there will always be room, as the Apostle Paul said in 1 Thessalonians, to “Excel still more.” Excellence is often, I’m sorry to say, expensive and inconvenient. This is all especially real to me today because our Gospel is about more than the miraculous healing of a man born with blindness -- in fact, some suggest and I’m inclined to agree it’s not actually about that at all. It is, instead, about us, and our relationship to him. Let me start by saying that I am a disabled person whose home is full of disabled people. I have generalized anxiety, major depression, and ADHD. And I have explicit permission to share that both my spouse and son are AuDHD -- autistic with ADHD. Our road to self-discovery and diagnoses began when Elijah was in third grade. After a months-long process of neuropsychological evaluations, the doctors called me and Paul in for results. As they told us he is autistic, I remember how the energy in the room was heavy, constricted, and morose, as they asked how we, his parents, felt after hearing this “difficult information.” But for me it wasn’t difficult but liberative. Now I had answers and context for the ways that Elijah shows up in this world, in our home, in his schools, and in his skin, and answers for why his teachers so often targeted him with worry, discipline, or condescension. And let me tell you: When they learned of his official diagnosis, their behavior and tactics changed near-immediately. Their constant annoyance and aggravation were replaced with accommodations they’d previously withheld and they no longer treated his behaviors as ‘acting out’ but acknowledged his ‘overstimulation.’ What’s more, that dread and despair his doctors expected from me came not from learning his diagnosis but from seeing how many of his teachers required one before they were willing to treat him like a person, a little kid, whose inner workings and sensory experiences and expressions deserved a place to both shine and rest rather than be constantly policed. I also joined groups on facebook for “Autism Moms” and quickly learned they were not the place for me, when I did not share their lamentation, disappointment, or impulse to “fix” their autistic kids because I did not think mine was broken. Instead, with the help and guidance of a couple autistic adults I know, I joined groups like ‘Ask Me! I’m Autistic!’ and Autism Inclusivity, and learned to listen to and believe Actually Autistic people first. I learned that there’s a vast canyon between what they say they need and want from society, and what a lot of autism moms and “advocacy” groups like Autism Speaks say about them. And I learned how much harm abuse autistic folks have suffered because parents and caretakers insist on speaking for and about and over them rather than letting them speak for themselves. Which is all to say, when I stepped into the gospel of John and began to study it for the first time since all these diagnoses, I came with new questions and sought answers from different kinds of people, including disability justice theologians Amy Kenny who authored the book My Body is Not a Prayer Request, and Eli Claire who wrote Ideology of Cure. And I began to notice things I hadn’t before. Like how the text doesn’t say whether or not Jesus asked the man born blind if he wanted to be “healed,” or if he was okay with having saliva-mud slathered across his face, nor did Jesus tell him the mud would “cure” his blindness. Jesus just did it, then told the man to go wash at Siloam, which he did. That made me wonder how many other would-be miracle workers or just passers-by over the years felt entitled to touch him or do something similar, such that he didn’t fight or resist but simply went to bathe. The text doesn’t tell us what happened to or in him when he received sight either, how he experienced the sudden onset of a new sense -- only what everyone around him had to say about it. Was he terrified? Did he understand what was going on? Did he think he was going crazy, with all these new colors and unfamiliar shapes and shades and lights and shadow bombarding him in the eyes? When I asked Elijah what he might feel like if he woke up one day and wasn’t autistic, he laughed and said, “How can I know? I’ve always been autistic!” Which was the most honest answer I could expect, I suppose. But when I asked Paul the same, his answer was more earnest: “I wouldn’t be me. That would be terrible,"he said. So yeah, I wonder if the man born blind felt healed when he opened his eyes at Siloam, or if he felt more broken and mixed up than ever. I wonder if what people called “sight” felt more like blindness to him. And who, if anyone, was nearby to help him navigate this abrupt and extreme physical transformation? We’re limited by and to our sanctified imaginations, because the text doesn’t tell us. And that’s part of the point, I think: The text never tells us anything about the man’s own lived experience of gaining (or losing) sight; but revolves entirely around the experience of those around him, and what they say and think about it. How his sight disturbs their peace and upends what they’ve been taught to think and believe about his disability. We know what they do to him, as a result of him being “cured:” They debate amongst each other about whether or not he is who he is, and then interrogate him endlessly while remaining incredulous of the truth he speaks. They drag him before the religious authorities for further interrogation and insult, as they attempt to add him to their catalog of evidence against Jesus Christ who performed the sign on the Sabbath. They ignore and dismiss him out of hand every single time he lifts his voice to say, “I am he, and I can see because of the man Jesus.” They even call in his parents to testify about and against him, which must have been humiliating. He is a grown man, and they called his mom and dad. When his parents defer to his testimony -- which, the text says, they do not out of respect for his agency and autonomy, but to avoid the scrutiny and judgment of those who’ve got him by the neck -- the religious elite drag him in again, and begin a back and forth that finally comes to an explosive head as the man reclaims his personal agency and the truth and authority of his experience, and exposes that their debate is rooted not in their hunger for God’s glory, but in their envy and resentment toward Jesus whose power they lack, despite that they are disciples of Moses who heard and saw God on the mountain, and should therefore be able to recognize God’s work among them. Now, folks -- now they’re listening to him. Why? Because the man born with blindness Sees them exactly as they are. And so the story ends just as it began: The man first excluded for the sin of being born blind is once again cast out for the sin of seeing what they can’t. When Jesus hears about the whole debacle, he comes to find them and reveals himself as the Messiah. The man believes and worships -- not just because he sees, but because finally he is being Seen. Which is all beautiful and incredible, and still resolves nothing. See, according to the text, the man who received sight is no less a problem for those around him than he was when he was blind, he’s still cast out and excluded from all the same places he was before. They still withhold the respect due him as a human and neighbor. And that’s because their eyes have yet to be opened. They have not, do not, and cannot see him as anything more than his diagnosis. To them, he was from birth and still remains a Thing with a Problem: His body, which was first an object of pity, scorn, scrutiny, and charity, is now a topic for debate, scientific inquiry, and wonder. He is never the subject of the story. Now we come to the crux of today’s gospel: The problem was never that a man couldn’t see, but that his community refused to see him. Which is why I’m not inclined to read this story as a revelation of God’s glory in the curing of his blindness, but of a story of our blindness to God’s Glory revealed in people with disabilities. Friends, it is not difficult to see the same storyline playing out all around us still, both in public and sacred spaces. In conversations around justice for persons on margins, Disability Justice rarely ranks. Even as the ADA crumbles and people with physical, mental, developmental, and so-called “invisible” disabilities lose what few legislative, economic, and institutional supports we have, outrage over our persistent dehumanization, stigmatization, and infantilization never seems to catch. As Amy Kenny writes, “our bodies and lived experiences in them remain problematic abnormalities, relegating us as people who need to be fixed or healed through the charity and love of those who pity us, or erased from existence entirely through eugenics.” All of it because our “normal,” “neurotypical,” “able-bodied” culture -- which is rooted in and inextricably bound up with capitalism’s assessments about the productivity and profitability of our bodies -- cannot fathom a life worth living if it not normal, neurotypical, or abled. And because we do not listen to disabled people who have their own voices and can speak clearly, plainly, and authoritatively as the experts of their own experiences. But it does not have to be this way. If there’s anything we can learn from all those neighbors, friends, family, and religious folk, including Jesus’s disciples, who talk about and around and over and for but never to or with the man born with blindness, it’s this: If we are intentional about seeing people, specifically people with disabilities, whole as they are; and deliberate about letting them speak for themselves and listening deeply, we will see new revelations of God’s Glory in them, and that will heal us. Amy Kenny encapsulates this truth far better than I can, so I will close with her own message to us, her siblings in the church: To assume that my disability needs to be erased in order for me to live an abundant life is disturbing not only because of what it says about me but also because of what it reveals about people’s notions of God. I bear the image of the Alpha and the Omega. My disabled body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. I have the mind of Christ. There’s no caveat to those promises. I don’t have a junior holy spirit because I am disabled. To suggest that I am anything less than sanctified and redeemed is to suppress the image of God in my disabled body and to limit how God is already at work through my life. [Beloved] we need to be freed not from disability but from the notion that it limits my ability to showcase God’s radiance to the church. What we need to be freed from is ableism. Oh God of Liberation, may it be so. Amen, Àse, Ahó.
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