Sermon - "What are you worth - Reflections on Valuing disabled people" - Preaching through Art Fall 2022

 

Luke 12:13-21

Someone in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." But he said to him, "Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?" And he said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions." Then he told them a parable: "The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, `What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, `I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, `Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.' But God said to him, `You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God."

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

When I first started my graduate school career, I had 2 really unsettling and upsetting interactions with professors at my university. 

The first was when I went to see the head of the graduate committee for the department to ask why I wasn’t offered any funding for my master’s degree. 

When I said to him…. you know, I have a 3.85 GPA and excellent GRE scores, so what is the deal? 

You see, I had talked to some of the other students who had been accepted into the program for the coming fall, who HAD been offered assistance, and discovered that some of them had lower scores than me…

His response was that “well grades don’t matter” and “they are just better prospects than you”. In his next breath, he also went on to say “At your age, we just thought you would be established and have a job and insurance and stuff and be doing this “on the side””. I was only 35 at the time!

So the real reason was ageism and the thought that my career would be “shorter and less productive” than my younger colleagues. 

At this point I had not really gotten as ill as I am now, I was still relatively able-bodied. Not for long though, because it was during my master’s program my health really deteriorated and I became truly “disabled”. 

Fast forward to the beginning of my Ph.D. program. 

At the beginning of my PhD program, the second incident occurred. My adviser told me that I should never mention my disability to anyone in the department, and that they would see me as “flawed” and “less able” than the other students. 

And she also advised me that I would need to work much harder than the able-bodied students, and not show any weakness because if I did then I would be judged much more harshly than my peers. And this by and large would have been the case had it not been for a couple of professors in my department who over and over went to bat for me. 

I refused to give in to the demands of ableism, but this has not been without its repercussions, and I have faced numerous incidents of ableism since then.

In the gospel reading from Luke, there are a few things happening that we should give attention to…first we are reminded of the true abundance of the earth. 

The land on which the man in Jesus’s parable resides is a really fertile, good land that provides him with much. 

The man busies himself producing lots of places to store up this abundance, building bigger barns and silos, thinking that this means that he will get to rest up when he is older and be secure. 

Now, if we stopped the story RIGHT THERE, and did not go any further. (Let's pretend for a minute that we don’t know how it ends). 

We all might look at the guy - let's call him Todd, we might all look at Todd and say “Well, he's such a smart fellow, and so diligent, so productive, what a good person he is! Thinking ahead!” Todd decided that he did not deserve to rest, eat, drink, and be merry until after he had been incredibly productive and amassed a sizable “nest egg”. 

I mean, this is what we all think right? We all do this…. all the time…what is the first question we ask people when we meet them? we ask people what they do for a living almost without fail. 

Many in our society consider wealth and security as signs that someone is a good person - that they possess personal character traits that lead them to have said wealth. Things such as diligence, intelligence, and hard working - we consider those with wealth to have more of these positive traits than those who are poor or disabled. 

Now, there is plenty of good reason for this - let's be fair to Todd. There is a certain amount of material wealth that we all need to be safe and healthy.  But also… let's resist our temptation to take the “easy reading” of this text and run with it…bit here, and let's read against the grain of this text for a moment. 

Jesus rarely gave us any lessons in which the most obvious and easiest reading was really what he meant for us to focus on…we need to excavate a bit of our own personal cultural biases most of the time in order to really understand the value of his stories. 

So first…Life is not easy, and as someone who has lived dirt poor, with 3 kids, on welfare, and on occasion, homeless, I can say that there is something to be said for some level of material comfort and wealth. Having a safe home and bed, adequate nutritious food, health and medical care, and education really are not “luxuries” and are simply the necessities of life. 

But, perhaps that is where Todd was before he started getting crazy, building bigger barns. However,  I don’t want us to interpret the rest of the story to mean that people need to forgo material possessions, wealth, comforts, and all that completely - because even beyond the need for the necessities,  these types of interpretations have been used for centuries by the wealthy to cement their power and deny it to poor and marginalized people. 

I want us instead to focus on our own propensity to equate productivity with a person's WORTH, and also to consider how this linkage might affect the way we perceive the worth and value of disabled people.

  As a disabled person myself, I have struggled an awful lot with feelings of worthlessness, and uselessness. 

I have wondered if I am a burden to others? 

I wonder if my family might be better off if I died.

I know for sure that insurance companies would prefer that I just kicked the bucket, so they could make more profit, as evidenced by the endless struggles that I have to go through to get treatments, testing, and medications that I need.  

I am not trying to be morbid here, just honest. 

Our society is organized in such a way that people like me have to perpetually struggle to convince others that we are worthy of things - worthy of their time and attention, worthy of jobs, worthy of health care, worthy to spend the money on us for medications, mobility aids, building accommodations to improve accessibility and other things we might need to just live life.

 In our society, even the kindest, aware, and generous-hearted of us…still tend to equate a person's value with their ability to be productive and contribute to society, and to that end, we often focus on providing accommodations for people with disabilities to be able to achieve the same things as their able-bodied counterparts. 

Now, I am not saying that this is a bad thing…people with disabilities SHOULD have the choice! 

BUT…if a person with a disability also chooses to simply just do the basics of survival, they are also worthy of receiving all the same kinds of access to the things they need for life without having to struggle to build bigger barns and silos to be worthy.

We should acknowledge that for some disabled people flourishing looks like access to school, jobs, and careers in addition to adequate healthcare and meds.

 And for some flourishing looks like having access to REST, in addition to healthcare and meds. That both of these, and every place on the spectrum between them are valid places for people with disabilities to reside, with dignity and respect. Because our worth is not tied to our productivity. Our worth lies in our status as human beings…as image bearers. 

Now, the end of the story - Todd didn’t know it but his very life would be demanded of him that night. And maybe he should have focused on being rich to God rather than amassing riches for himself. 

None of us are actually going to get out of here without our very lives being demanded from us, we will all age (if we are lucky), and we will all suffer, we will all encounter disability on a personal level to some degree, and we really don’t have any way to predict when that will happen. 

Even Jesus suffered and became disabled. Jesus rose with all his wounds, and perhaps part of the reason we have the story Peter and his doubts is so that Jesus can reinforce this idea in us. 

We too often focus on the idea that we need to have a perfected body to be considered divine, and all expect that is what we will get when we get to God’s Kindom…however….Jesus carried his wounds with him. Maybe being wounded, being disabled isn’t a disqualifier from divinity. Or from being one who can minister the word, following the example of our beloved, wounded, and disabled Christ. 

 And so, I ask you all, what might Todd have done that would have been rich towards God?

 He could have used some of his excesses to make sure that his aged and disabled neighbors had what they needed and still had plenty for themselves. That would have been a good place to start. 

Jesus was always concerning himself with the well-being of the poor, the disabled, and the widow - those who the rest of society may not have seen as worth his time or his attention.

And those who were certainly not seen as being worth spending time and money on to ensure that they have what they need to flourish. 

We do this in our modern society by paying taxes, donating time and money to charitable organizations, by being involved politically on behalf of our friends and neighbors of all ability statuses, and we should do so with the recognition that disability is the norm and not the exception.

 And it's wise of us to focus on this truth - that our worth is inherent in us, because we are image bearers, not because we are “productive”. Because as we saw in this parable, it wasn’t Todd who was productive in the first place, it was the Land, it was God, giving us all good things.

 And God gives them to all of us without reservation. 

In this way we can learn to be truly inclusive - not by simply creating our able-bodied spaces and then devising “accommodations” for the disabled - we can do better….

We can include the disabled in the process of creating our society and our spaces so that their needs become part of the fabric of society. This, rather than their basic needs is something “extra” that they need to do additional work and tons of emotional labor to gain access to.

 Providing universal health care so that everyone who needs it has access, is just one example of being truly inclusive. Designing buildings and spaces that are accessible to people in wheelchairs at all points that they are accessible to able-bodied people is another. Most of the time our institutions make the concession of a single door with a single ramp in a building, which may mean additional or more complex or time-consuming travel for individuals in a wheelchair…which isn’t really “equal access” or being truly inclusive. 

We as a church can also do better…by understanding that disabilities are not shameful, not an aberration, and not necessarily something that people need to be cured of or prayed over for. Jesus did not necessarily go around curing people of all their afflictions, he went around healing them. Sometimes this meant that people picked up their mats and walked away, but sometimes it didn’t.

 People should be allowed to be disabled without the main focus on them being the curing of their disability. We can love our disabled bodies, and the disabled bodies of our friends and neighbors, after all,  Jesus rose with all his wounds. They were part of his humanity, and also part of his divinity.

We can resist the temptation to engage in “inspiration porn” - the practice of viewing or portraying people with disabilities as “inspirational” simply due to their life circumstances. 

Most of the time we really don’t want to be inspirational to you because we did something like…going to the grocery store in a wheelchair, having a medical procedure, or doing other daily chores and tasks. 

We aren’t more “brave” than other people, we are just doing what all humans do…adapting to our circumstances and continuing to live our lives - none of us gets to choose to either be or not be disabled, it’s just what is. 

Be critical in your consumption of media when it pertains to disability, and try to understand how the tropes and misrepresentations that you see in the media might influence the way you interact with disabled people out in the wild.

 A couple examples are the way that ambulatory wheelchair users in media are accused of not being disabled if they actually both use a wheelchair AND have the ability to walk…how many times have you seen the scene where someone is revealed to be “faking” because they aren’t totally paralyzed while using a wheelchair…

Another is the idea that disabled lives are too painful and terrible and costly to be considered worth living - the movie “Me, Before Us” comes to mind… able-bodied people might consider the male protagonist ending his own life before he became “more” disabled so as to not be a burden on the female protagonist as a “noble sacrifice” - while those of us in the disability community look on with horror as yet another film explains the reasons we are better off dead, and that our lives are not worth living. 

Our lives and our value as humans never were and never should be tied to how much we can produce, how many hours a week we can work, how many books we write, and how much of anything we do…God is the productive one, who gives us all good gifts

And we are valuable because we bear the image of God into the world, and into relationship with one another.

 We never know when the moment might come that we are left unable to be productive, and maybe spending some of our time now eating, drinking, being merry, loving our neighbors, and being grateful for the gifts of our Good God might be the best thing we can do. And using our excess to make sure that our brothers and sisters in Christ who may need help with meeting basic needs would be the best thing to do with our riches. 

So I ask you to consider closely how you value your disabled brothers and sisters. And I ask you to consider the questions - what makes you worthy, and what are you worth?