Texts: Exodus 3:7-10; Luke 4:16-19; John 20:17-18

The late Bible scholar Marcus Borg used to say: “Tell me your image of God, and I’ll tell you your politics.” 

Borg divided the biblical images of God into two major categories.  One is the distant patriarch who rules at the top of a hierarchy, like a king, issuing decrees, making judgments, separating the righteousness from the unrighteous, offering favor and forgiveness to those who follow certain protocols and beliefs, possessing great power to accomplish his will.

The other primary image of God is of a spirit present in all things.  God as all-pervasive spirit is more cooperative with creation than dominating over it.  This Spirit infuses all things with intelligence, making every river, mountain, bird, and fish a unique manifestation of divine Wisdom.  Spirit invites, nudges, delights, but never forces.      

I think reducing God-images to just these two categories is a bit of an over-simplification, but it does make the point.  It’s not hard to imagine how tending toward one of these images of God would impact one’s politics.

Now, this isn’t a sermon about politics as in “Hey did you see the latest poll numbers?”  But it is about politics in the more general sense – the affairs of the community – how we relate together, how power is exercised, and how resources and dignity are distributed.  Whether you feel like running far, far away from or can’t get enough of that first kind of politics, there’s no hiding from the fact that we are always negotiating and navigating through the issues of the more general kind.  

More specifically, we’ve been talking about the politics of disability, accessibility, and inclusion.  Those are the area highlighted in our Vision for Ministry.  And in case this series is the first time you knew we had a Vision for Ministry, that’s a statement about the areas we’d like to give special attention for the coming year.  By design, the Vision for Ministry changes every year or two.  So, while this is the final Sunday of this series, it’s the beginning of our ministry year, and we’re all invited to give attention to these themes.

For today, I’d like to play a bit with that second God-image, the Spirit, as it relates to ability and disability.  I’d even like us to imagine that as this non-coercive Spirit present in all bodies but without its own body, God has a disability.  That’s not an idea you hear every day, but let’s give it a whirl.

The three scriptures we heard are all call stories where different individuals are called on to do work God can’t do without their willing assistance. 

We skipped over the burning bush part of Exodus 3, but that’s the context for this conversation between God and Moses.  Moses is out in the wilderness.  He had fled his childhood home of Egypt after killing a taskmaster mistreating one of Moses’ enslaved kindred.  Now he’s a shepherd, married, watching the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro.  And one day, as he’s doing this, he sees an usual site.  A bush is blazing with light, like it’s on fire, but it’s not burning up.  So he turns aside, and the plant speaks his name, Moses.  The plant becomes a channel through which he encounters the divine who is present even in bushes in the remote wilderness. 

After some further introductions, the Lord says, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt…and I have come down to deliver them.”  Well, that’s a very powerful thing for the Lord to do.  Very noble.  To come down to deliver the Hebrew slaves.  How will God do this?  Well, it turns out, God needs some help.  Like, a lot of help, actually.  God expresses God’s commitment to liberating Moses’ enslaved kindred, and then says, “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.” 

Now, if you’ve heard this story before you know this is how it goes, and you know Moses resists and eventually agrees to go with some help of his own from his brother Aaron.  What we don’t often emphasize is that along with this being a revelation of God’s desire for oppressed persons to be liberated, it’s also a revelation of God’s disability to do so alone.  In order to carry out this worthy task, God must borrow a body, one able to speak and appear before Pharaoh and the Israelites.  The body of Moses.

We’re perhaps used to identifying Jesus so closely with God that we can minimize that Jesus made actual choices in his life, that he freely allowed his body to be borrowed by that same Spirit that called on Moses and many others.  When Jesus returns to his home synagogue in Nazareth, he reads from Isaiah, claiming the same spiritual task as that of the ancient prophet:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to free those locked away in prisons, to proclaim sight to the blind and declare the year of the Lord’s favor, Jubilee.”

These liberatory acts put Jesus in conflict with the powers of his time, and his crucifixion and resurrection led to a transformation in how people experienced God.

In her book The Disabled God, Nancy Eiesland, herself born with a congenital bone defect, says that the early church came to experience the presence of God among them “in terms of the death and resurrection” of Jesus (p. 99).  The resurrected Jesus appeared to them as one with impaired hands and feet, and as one bearing the spiritual power to overcome fear and invigorate a community based on the sacred worth of each individual.  She writes: “Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the marks of impairment their own connection with God, their own salvation….the disabled God is not only the One from heaven but the revelation of true personhood, underscoring the reality that full personhood is fully compatible with the experience of disability” (p. 100).

The resurrected Christ becomes a new form of the Spirit, calling on others to become the body he no longer has.  Like when he meets Mary Magdelene in the garden, calls her by name, Mary, and invites her announce the resurrection to the other disciples.  Mary is remembered as the apostle to the apostles, the one who first allowed her voice to be borrowed in service of resurrection life. 

Here’s something I recently learned about that relates:

In the city of Toronto, there has been an artists’ collective called Artists Without Barriers.  The primary members are artists with mobility and dexterity disabilities.  Each is paired up with a volunteer, often an art student, called a scribe.  The only job of the scribe is to serve their partner’s artistic vision.  In other words, they use their hands to create the art being described to them by the artist.  Or, shall we say, the artist uses the scribes hands to make visible what had existed only in their imagination.  As they collaborate, the scribes are constantly checking in to see if the colors, the angles, every feature of the piece being created, is how the artist desires it. 

In a CBC radio article, “Artist Amanda Maltais says that an effective scribe has ‘to be a good listener, a good communicator, and (have) the patience to sit with someone.’”  The scribes are essentially allowing their bodies to be borrowed by a creator, someone with a vision for how a canvas can appear, who just needs some willing hands to help make it so. 

Much the way Moses, after some resistance, and plenty more to come, allowed his body to be borrowed by God, to carry out God’s vision of liberation.  The way Jesus embodies the Spirit so purely that he came to be seen as the very incarnation of God.  The way Mary Magdelene became the apostle to the apostles by lending her voice to the resurrected Christ.  Sometimes God is like a disabled artist with a beautiful vision others can’t even imagine, who just needs some willing hands and voices and hearts to help make it so. 

This is an image of God that might affect your politics – the way you participate in the affairs of a community.  It locates God in the place of the help-seeker, and let’s face it, we’ve all been in the position of seeking help.  Mutual care is what makes us human.  At some point in our lives, the care we need might qualify as a disability.  And that’s when we come to be in solidarity with the God known through Jesus in a way we couldn’t otherwise know.  We, like God, must sometimes borrow bodies to achieve what we otherwise couldn’t do.  

I hesitate a little bit to say these things, because the goal of a community committed to accessibility is to reduce the needs for this kind of dependence.  Given the choice of whether to always be having to borrow bodies, or to have barriers removed so one can do something oneself, we choose the dignity of independence.  This particular image of God as a body borrower isn’t intended to glorify disability so much as to help us locate ourselves within a community of interdependence.  We all need scribes – companions who are good listeners, communicators, and patient – to help us carry out our vision for life in ways we can’t do alone.  And the more ways we each occupy the roles of both scribe and artist, the healthier the community. 

This is one of the great meanings of the communion table.  In proclaiming the bread and the wine as his own body and lifeblood, just before those very things were taken from him, Jesus invites his followers to be participants in his ongoing life.  To be the body he no longer has.  When we come to the table we allow our lives to take in his energetic presence.  We allow ourselves to be incorporated into his body, present now as the gathered community.  By the abundant grace of God, the Spirit, also, is upon us.  The same spirit that met Moses in the wilderness, anointed Isaiah and Jesus, empowered Mary Magdalene.  The power of resurrection brings together disability and ability into a communion of solidarity.  We are each scribes for God, creating landscapes of liberation and shalom. 

Let’s prepare our hearts to receive the bread and cup.