The popular notion of responding to God’s call is that once you have some degree of clarity as to where God is calling you in your life, you land on Easy Street and everything will be just dandy. My personal experience runs completely the opposite direction. Once the family decision was made to pack up a former life of business and high technology in California and start a new life for all four of us plus the dog in a seminary apartment across the country in Massachusetts, we all had the usual concerns about a major relocation and life change, but we shared some sense of the finality of the decision. “This is it”, we thought, so we set our hearts and minds towards the east and a new future.

 Then in April 1995, six months prior to starting seminary in Cambridge Massachusetts, I was on a business trip to Boston when a previously undiagnosed tumor that had been in my left ear for nearly forty years ruptured through the eardrum. It was an incredibly scary time as we descended through medical diagnosis and eventually two lengthy surgeries. In recovery after the first surgery, the surgeon (a lapsed Episcopalian who started attending church after this operation) told me it was a “good thing the tumor made itself known when it did.” At the time I was unable to walk because my balance was so disrupted. I told him that I failed to see the good news in all this. He said, “It is good news because if we hadn’t removed the tumor now, you would have died from a brain infection your first six months of seminary.”

Life as I knew it before the surgery was now totally different. I was made a different person. While I had struggled with hearing and vision problems all my life, now I had a profound experience of difference. I cannot hear things the same way people with two ears do. That is why during announcements if you need to get my attention, wave your hand. I cannot tell where your voice is coming from.

Because we humans are sheep and because of our enormous desire for similarity, when human difference arises, we find ourselves uncomfortable and often we fail miserably at seeing the image of God, the divine spark, the face of Christ in that other person who is different. Through the small impediment that I acquired, I am able to experience at a very small level what it is like to be different. Of course I can always retreat to my position of “normal” bodily capabilities, social class, education and privilege.

But if you believe that God was there suffering with Jesus on the cross, and if you believe that God dwells in us and we abide in God, then you cannot escape the conclusion that God suffers with the poor and marginalized of this world AND that God’s demands for justice START with addressing the oppression of the poor. Jesus clearly tells us that the man born blind did not sin nor did his parents. As he challenged the Pharisees and legal systems of his day, Jesus clearly challenges us change our hearts and minds and do something to address the inequality, injustice and oppression of those who are different and suffer from our society as a result.

In other words, this is a direct appeal to change our hearts, to repent. But how?

1. By forging links of justice and evangelism – As long as a church community remains rooted in one social class they are blind to the inequities and injustices done to those on the margins. Furthermore, when the community consists of one social class, that community is incapable of seeing how their higher social position benefits from the injustice and oppression done to others. Our American culture values independence and individual achievement. These values perpetuate an illusion that runs counter to the teachings of Jesus. We are not independent. We are in fact enormously dependent upon one another. In other words, “All God’s children got to sing in the choir” and all the rest of us who are blind to their situation must listen to them – carefully. 2.

2. By solidarity – Those of us with education, jobs, retirement, and other social benefits have great difficulty coming in contact with and hearing the voice of the poor. Worldwide, those with disabilities tend to be the poorest of the poor. We are often uncomfortable with the poor. We find it hard to “read them” socially. We are unsure whether an individual is threatening or just messing with us. We are blind to the needs and concerns of the poor.

In spite of our discomfort, we MUST follow the example of Jesus who had intimate social interactions with the poorest of the poor. We must move our hearts from work like Habitat for Humanity where we do something FOR the poor to just sitting down, listening to them and incorporating them into our community.

3. By challenging our institutions – For example:

a. Where is God when our government and insurance companies refuse to pay for needs making it possible for the disabled to work? Where is God when we still have rampant discrimination against the disabled?

b. Where is God when the church refuses to admit people with disabilities as full members converting them instead to the object of an outreach ministry? The disabled and the poor are ministers in their own God-given right. We need to let them in.

c. Where is God when the church refuses to recognize God’s vocational call to ordination for a person with a disability because of presumptions about disabilities?

d. Where is God when our church recognizes the need for its buildings to be accessible and yet refuses to make the necessary changes for rectories [houses provided by the church for the clergy] to be accessible?

e. And finally, why do our bishops and those in high places constantly plea for justice in faraway lands when our dioceses and churches fail to meet the demands for justice right at home?

My friends we are all blind. Jesus calls us to turn around, make a change of heart, to repent. We must welcome those with disabilities and the poor into our community as full-fledged members. We are not called to fix them or their situation. We are called to listen to them, get to know them, and welcome them into Sunday school, the choir, the vestry, the altar guild, and every other corner of our church.

When we do that, we will join hands with the man born blind and with John Newton who wrote “Amazing Grace”, and we will sing once more that line with tears in our eyes – “I was blind but now I see.”