(This is part I of a “sermon” I had to write for an Old Testament class. I hope some of you find it helpful).
Jonathan son of Saul had a son who was lame in both feet. He was five years old when the news about Saul and Jonathan came from Jezreel. His nurse picked him up and fled, but as she hurried to leave, he fell and became crippled. His name was Mephibosheth. — 2 Samuel 4:4
One of my most vivid and horrifying memories is the day seven years ago when my son Garrett had his first epileptic seizure. The sound of his labored breathing woke me. At first I thought he was choking. Then I saw his little two-year-old body contracting in spasms that I recognized as a grand mal seizure. He had many more seizures after that first one. The area of his brain that is affected by his epilepsy controls speech, and as a result he lost the ability to process language. Today, as a nine-year-old, Garrett understands very little spoken language. He gets by with a mix of words, signs, and pantomime.
Although Garrett is otherwise intelligent, his loss of speech affects his emotional and cognitive development. We have no idea whether Garrett will ever be able to live independently — to go to college, hold a regular job, get married, have a family of his own. And we have no idea whether Garrett will ever really be able to understand the message of the Gospel and what it means to follow Jesus. For now, thankfully, Garrett is happy and content in his own world. We as his parents, however, live every day with uncertainty that gnaws at the hope we want to have for his future, as well as with the stress and burdens of constantly dealing with his unique issues.
I know that there are many of you here today with the same sorts of concerns. Some of you have children with Autism, Down’s Syndrome, Tourette Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, or other ailments that limit or destroy your beloved little one’s potential. A few of you, I know, understand that your child’s condition likely will limit his or her life expectancy severely. And on top of this emotional stress, you are often simply physically exhausted. For you, there is no such thing as a “simple” morning or evening routine. While other children, by the time they are out of diapers, become increasingly self-sufficient, you must continue taking care of your child’s basic needs — getting dressed, eating, cleaning up after themselves, even using the bathroom — long after they should be taking care of themselves.
Your children are extensions of yourselves, so all of you who care for special needs kids know something of the pain of being “other,” of living in a limbo that is rarely acknowledged or appreciated, of adjusting your expectations for the future in ways that, if you are honest, are deeply disappointing.
I’m afraid that some of your disappointment must be with the Church. I know this is true even for me. Many times we celebrate the healthy babies and able children of our congregation. When we dedicate a baby, or send a group of kids out on a summer missions trip, we often unconsciously present a narrative of ability and success to our families: you will nurture and train your children, and a time will come when they, too, will follow Christ exuberantly.
Of course, it is good and right that we remind ourselves of our responsibilities as parents, and that we commission and celebrate young people who go out from us to serve Christ in the world. Yet, we seem to ignore the inconvenient realties of children with disabilities. The very presence of such children challenges to the core how we think about God and about our mission as the Church. The Church, we seem to think, is not supposed to be filled with people who look strange, who make unexpected noises, or who can’t comprehend a sermon.
And I’m guessing that many of you have asked – or have been afraid to ask – questions that the Church seem ill-equipped to answer – because I know I have:
“Why did this happen to my little one?”
“What did I do wrong? Why are you angry with me Lord?”
“God, why don’t you afflict me instead? Just let my little one be healed.”
“What will become of my child when I’m too old to care for him, or when I’m gone?”
“How could a God who is ‘loving’ and ‘good’ let this happen to an innocent baby?”
“If my child is mentally incapable of understanding the Gospel, can he be saved? If not, of if I can’t be sure one way or the other, how is it ‘good news’ for him or for my family?”
“How can I bear the weight of caring for this child’s needs over the long term? It’s not fair. It’s too much.”
“What about the tens of millions of other disabled, impoverished, hungry, orphaned, diseased, broken children in our world today? Are they any less valuable to you than my little one? God, do you take any delight in or gain any glory from their suffering? What kind of God is glorified by such a weight of destruction? Is there no justice for them at all?”
At this point, I’d like to walk methodically with you through the historic theological principles that will answer these questions. But I cannot.
In part, this is because I fear that we have lost the resources to do so in any meaningful way. To be sure, there are flickerings here and there in the Christian tradition of efforts to respond to questions like these. In general, Christians have focused on the Church and its sacraments as the means by which the faith of the Christian community is imputed to and absorbed by those who are not able to comprehend and correlate their lives to the Gospel. It has often been acknowledged, in fact, that even the “able” among us are incapable of conforming to the Gospel. We all need the Church’s communal faith in some sense. The presence of disabled children among us should remind us that genuine Christian faith is always a corporate faith and never just an individual one. Perhaps the honest airing of your questions will help to correct our distorted individualistic concept of faith.
In another sense, I cannot answer these concerns methodically because they simply occupy a space in which all analytical methods break down. There in some important ways are no “answers” here; there are only some paths of “acceptance.” “Acceptance” isn’t a logical reason, it’s a relational status, it’s the act of a character in a human drama. Perhaps this is one reason why the Bible doesn’t give us a systematic theology of disability. What it does give us is a story. . . .