Preaching Disability: The Power of Words and Attitude from the Pulpit
Consider two stories:
“A mother takes her autistic son to church. He starts to make some noise. The deacon comes and asks her to move to the back. The noise continues. The deacon then asks her to move to the vestibule. There, as the service continues in this liturgically focused congregation, the mother begins to realize that her son’s sounds are in fact mimicking the prayers, chants, and participatory responses. But even then, the deacon says the noise is disturbing others and asks them to leave. The irony is that the passage for the day is ‘Let all the children come to me’.” (Email written to this author)
“While sitting in worship with my two young children, an older woman asked me to remove my disruptive toddler. She spoke with a condemning tone, to which I would soon become immune. I took my children to the nursery and cried. A few weeks later, I tried to take my children to worship again, but my son (who had autism) was just as disruptive. When I stood up to leave, the pastor who was in the middle of her sermon, stopped me., She told me to sit down and told the congregation that my son was a member of our church, and that it was all of our responsibilities to raise him and teach him the ways of God. The tears I am shedding as I write this story are of gratitude; in contrast to those I shed seven years ago in the nursery of my church."1
As people with disabilities and their families become more visible in our communities and congregations, the power of congregational invitation, hospitality, and inclusion become more apparent, beginning with the pastor. We should not expect the pastor to do it all, but his or her attitude, words, and actions are powerful signs of God’s embrace to the individual, the family and the whole congregation.
Pastors and congregations have a choice about which version of the inclusion story gets told, i.e., one of embrace or one of exclusion, first within a family, and then within an extended family, other families with children or adults with disabilities, and within the wider community. It is an evangelical decision, especially when a growing number of congregations are attributing their renewal, in numbers and spirit, to doing what it takes to welcome and include people with disabilities and their families.2
What does a pastor then say and do? The worlds and words of disability are fraught with changing understandings and conflicts about what language to use when talking about disability. Thus, a preacher’s words and the way he or she talks about disability become indicators of attitude, identity, and vision.3
When in doubt, ask an individual with a disability or a family: “Tell me your story and your faith journey.” “How can we be most welcoming and supportive?” “What terminology do you prefer?” The most recommended route is using what is called “people first” language. 4 Disability is an adjective, not a noun, a “person with a disability,” not “the disabled.” One then quickly learns that there is a lot of difference within the worlds of disability, because the deaf and, increasingly, the autistic, claim the label as a definer of culture and diversity and not as deficit. It may be obvious, but the first label is someone’s name.
What Might One Say from the Pulpit?
It can start with prayers that let everyone know that disability is all right to talk about. A pastor once included, “families with loved ones with mental illness” in his pastoral prayer; the next day his phone did not stop ringing. Those few words offered a sense of sanctuary. People could finally talk about issues related to disability in their family. The numbers don’t lie: some one in five individuals deals with a disability and about one in four households or families struggle with some form of mental illness. For many with disabilities and their families, the first question is whether or not it is safe to share those concerns with the pastor.
In preaching, the options are legion. One may think that there is not that much about disability in the Bible, but a foray into the new work being done by Biblical scholars and theologians changes that vision and understanding quickly.5 Before addressing a few of those, there are three areas for careful reflection before proclamation: healing stories, heroes and/or victims, and using disability as metaphor for faith.
Healing Stories
People with disabilities and their families will tell you that the issues of faith and healing are often ones that have driven them from the church. The questions raised by disability are normal: Why did this happen? Who, or what, caused it? But the assumptions and responses made by others about faith and disability can be hurtful.
We might think that reactions like the crowd in John 9: “Who sinned? What did you as parents do that caused this disability in your child?” are questions of an age long past, but they still appear in explicit or implicit forms. A series of medical or psychological evaluations, covering every detail of a pregnancy and genealogy, implicitly carries a message of control: if you had known, or done something differently, things would be different. It is more explicit with acquired disability because sometimes accidents are avoidable.
The worst response, though, is “if your faith were strong enough, you could be healed.” Ask people who use wheelchairs. Many have had strangers approach and seek to pray over them, uninvited. The impact, of course, is that the lack of cure then assumes lack of faith in a heart and mind that may be deeply faithful and /or deeply searching. A religious leader should ask why an obvious disability elicits that remedy from pastors or people of faith when conditions like cancer or other health problems usually do not. The best response I have heard from a person with a disability was even more Biblically based: “If your faith were strong enough, you could cure me.”
The key issues for preaching have to do with exploring the difference between “healing” and “cure,” the unexpected ways in which Jesus paid attention to someone on the margins with a disability or stigmatized condition, and the ways that his public diagnoses of “forgiven sins” directly countered the crowd’s assumptions of causation. In most of those stories, the crucial end result was a return to community.
Heroes and Victims
People with disabilities and their families can be described by their strengths and limitations, just like anyone else. What most of them resent is being seen as one or the other, either “super-crip” or "special parent” on the one hand, or “helpless” and/or “victim” on the other. A growing shift in disability services describes people as having strengths and weaknesses, gifts and limits, dreams and vision as well as prognosis. In Essential Lifestyle Planning, one of the person-centered planning processes used in organizing supports, the question “What is important to someone?” gets just as much focus, if not more, as “What is important for someone?”6
Individuals with disabilities and their parents simply need space and permission to be people. If we are to talk about limits, let’s talk about everyone’s limits and vulnerabilities.7 There are heroic role models, as in any area, like Helen Keller, Franklin Roosevelt, Beethoven, and more. You cannot prevent someone from thinking a person or family is “inspirational” in the ways they handle a disability. But the reverse is also true; so many fears and anxieties about our own limitations get projected onto people with disabilities.8 I have had people tell me: “Please don’t work out your issues through me.”
Also take a look at the Biblical heroes. Many of them dealt with some form of disability: Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Saul, Job, Jonah, perhaps Paul (thorn in my flesh), and others. The question is not how they “overcame” their disability, but rather how they responded to God’s call and how their own coping and struggle led to qualities of strength, wisdom, and faith that enhanced their leadership qualities.
Disability as Metaphor
Labels often become as stereotypes as well as put-downs, e.g., you “retard,” “Are you deaf?" or “dumb?” or “blind?” Those words are used as metaphors in the Bible to talk about people, but they were used by Jesus, for example, towards those in power and authority along with the reverse proclamation that those who cannot hear or see, really can.
Be careful when using disability as metaphor because people who are blind or deaf may be very sensitive to those words being used as a spiritual metaphor that critiques faith. If a religious leader is tempted to do that toward others, the best caution is to start with oneself. When in doubt, ask members in your congregation with those disabilities. Some will tell you to lighten up, and not get so worried about what you say to or about them that no one will speak to them.9
The Power to Renew Preaching
As a pastor and preacher, if you gather a group of people with disabilities and/or their families and ask them to tell you “their faith stories” or “church stories,” the number of stories that can “preach” may be astounding. As congregations include people who have been on the margins, be prepared for unexpected experiences that break open unspoken congregational “rules” and may, when examined carefully, be moments of reversal, revelation, divine humor, and parable. For example, a rhetorical question may get a spontaneous answer voiced by an adult with an intellectual disability…perhaps one that everyone else had been thinking about.
As one gets capable of reading scripture through the lens of disability, Biblical themes and passages come alive in ever-new ways. For me, those have been understandings of hospitality to the stranger, remembering the body, the importance of sanctuary and Sabbath (respite), redemption that calls an outcast or slaves out of exile and into community, the call to everyone to use their gifts in service, and the myriad of ways that different senses can be used to express and experience the Holy Spirit. Perhaps a recent story told to me sums it up best in which my colleague preached in a Baptist church that not only welcomed people with disabilities but also ran their own residential program: “It was wonderful. It was as if the whole family of God finally showed up.”10
A preacher’s words, attitudes, and actions can help many more to accept that invitation and live up to the ubiquitous part of every church sign: Everyone’s Welcome.
Notes
1. A. Walsh, Walsh, M.B., and Gaventa, W., Autism and faith: a journey into community (New Brunswick, NJ: Boggs Center, 2008), accessed Feb. 19, 2013 from http://rwjms.umdnj.edu/boggscenter/products/documents/AutismandFaith.pdf. Accessed 2/27/2014.
2. B. Gaventa, “The Power of One.” (2010) Short article available from bill.gaventa@gmail.com.
3. B. Gaventa, Identity and Inclusive Communities: what languages do we use? Chicago: 2102 Summer Institute on Theology and Disability. Videotape at http://bethesdainstitute.org/Theology2012Presentations. Accessed 2/27/2014.
4. Association of University Centers on Disabilities. Portrayal of People with Disabilities. http://www.aucd.org/template/page.cfm?id=605. See other links there as well, including www.disabilityisnatural.com. Accessed 2/27/2014.
5. The Summer Institutes on Theology and Disability. Audio and video presentations by several leaders in theology and disability. www.bethesdainstitute.org/theology
6. M. Smull, and Sanderson, H., Essential lifestyle planning for everyone. Annapolis: (2005) The Learning Community.
7. T. Reynolds, Vulnerable communion: A theology of disability and hospitality. (Ada, MI: 2008, Brazos Press).
8. Parker Palmer, Merging two worlds: The company of strangers Video presentation available at http://bethesdainstitute.org/page.aspx?pid=1417. Accessed 2/27/2014.
9. Excellent 25-minute video useful for many congregational groups: The Ten Commandments for Communicating with People with Disabilities. www.disabilitytraining.com
10. Dan Aleshire, Executive Director of the Association for Theological Schools, in conversation with author at AAR/SBL Conference, 2013.
