Sermon for 10-10-10: SPACIOUS PLACES
Spacious Places: I love how those words go together. I think it’s the A’s. SpAcious PlAces. And the words rhyme. For whatever reason, as soon as I saw these words together in our psalm for this week, I was
hooked.
Psalm 66 is a hymn of praise to God. We said its opening words as our call to worship. The psalm remembers the history of God with God’s people. The psalmist says:
For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried, you brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water; yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.
What’s a spacious place? The word ‘spacious’ speaks of a sense of vastness, of unlimited openness. I am a meditator, and now and then one of the fruits of a meditative practice is a great sense of spaciousness in my mind and heart – a sense of freedom, openness, aliveness, potential. It’s a gift of this spiritual practice, given now and then when it isn’t sought.
The psalmist knew this place of openness and potential and thanked God for it, and for the journey to it.
Today in the UCC it is Access Sunday, and this coming week has been designated as Disabilities Awareness Week. The United Church of Christ defines itself as Multicultural, Multiracial, Open and Affirming, Just Peace and Accessible to All. If you get to UCC gatherings outside of Maine you can see more of the multicultural and multiracial aspect, and many Maine congregations have claimed an Open and Affirming identity, and some others as Just Peace churches. But there are a very few congregations nationally who are Accessible to All, or A2A. There are a variety of reasons for this.
The voice for accessibility within the UCC is the Disabilities Ministries board. I sit on that board, so you will hear from me about accessibility and disability now and then. And also, hopefully, about how the UCC’s stand for ‘radical inclusion’ is one way, and a very good way, of understanding God’s desire and capacity to bring us into ‘spacious places’.
“Spacious places’ are open. And accessible.
I was really happy to see your ramp. And your accessible bathroom! There’s a phrase in the disability world: ‘If we can’t go, we won’t come.’ And the ramp into the Parish House/Community Hall. And your hearing assistance system. These are great aspects of becoming accessible.
Accessibility is about ramps, and about so much more. Persons with disabilities, when they are reflective about these things, will tell you that as important, and sometimes even more important, than ramps and other assistive devices, are attitudes. So people talk about barriers, architectural and attitudinal. The architectural barriers are dealt with by physical construction and equipment. The attitudinal ones are sometimes harder to cross.
What is this notion of ‘radical inclusion’ about? It’s a very different theological notion from messages which are communicated in some variations of Christianity (not to mention Judaism and Islam here), where only the ‘elect’ or the ‘pure’ are allowed entrance after jumping through hoops, and generally understood to be white, male, heterosexual and able-bodied. The sense that God is still speaking, the sense communicated by Jesus that there are no barriers to entry into God’s kingdom, the sense that this God we worship and serve has a deep, deep hospitable core, and that God’s revelations are unfolding in history, leads us to a different understanding of what it means to be faithful people in our world.
There is a field of study known as disability theology, and although I have not read deeply in it, when I have read, or been in conversation with, theologians who are some of the lead voices, I have had an experience of having my mind and heart stretched in ways that for me definitely are into that realm of ‘spaciousness’. When I was in St. Louis a couple of weeks ago at the WIDENING THE WELCOME conference, which was on moving towards full inclusion of people with physical and emotional/cognitive disabilities, I had this experience as I spent time with Debbie Creamer, a faculty member from Iliff Seminary in Denver. It was like my peripheral vision expanded, and I got a glimpse of the ‘wideness of God’s mercy’.
I care deeply about this topic because I had a husband who had a bipolar disorder who committed suicide, and I have a son with a bipolar disorder and an acquired brain injury. So much of my life since I was about 15 has had me closely connected to disability concerns. You will meet Doug: he lives in South Portland, and now works on Saturdays, so we have to be able to work out our schedules for him to be with us here, but that will happen one of these days.
Today I want to tell you about Ryan. Ryan is also on the Disabilities Ministries board, and is a third year student at Eden Seminary in St. Louis. He’s from Ohio. He’s about 25. Ryan uses an electric wheelchair, and his hands and arms are ‘different’; he always has a stick with him that assists some of his hand and arm functions. Ryan plays trumpet, and recently got a tattoo on his upper arm which he designed himself and which is a cross and musical staff. He hadn’t told his mother about it, and was looking forward to showing it to her when she visits him. Ryan has a keen intellect and a great heart. He will be a very good minister, though he’s not naïve about the challenge of getting called by a congregation. (The path to ordination has developed some amazingly courageous and strong clergy who have disabilities: I have been humbled by some of the people I have met in this work.)
The WIDENING THE WELCOME conference was in a hotel with some accessible facilities, and a parking garage for those who were staying there. But Ryan lives in St. Louis, so he wasn’t staying at the hotel. He drives a van modified for his use. The first day of our meeting he had to park in a public garage. He asked me to accompany him to the garage when he was ready to leave, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to access the ticket machine which would open the gate and allow him to leave. We got out on the street, and he couldn’t really remember where the garage was – this was downtown St. Louis and there were a LOT of garages. I tried to keep up with him as I walked snd he powered his chair. We finally found his van, in a garage about 8 blocks from the hotel. Next day we got him a parking space at the hotel using my room number, since I didn’t have a car.
I drove with Ryan the next day when some of us were going to Eden Seminary. What an experience. He’s a fast driver. I had never been in an accommodated vehicle: he steered by using a knob on a small circular wheel, and he had buttons that he pushed for other functions – I think he shifted when necessary by pushing buttons. We travelled safely, thank God.
But the next day as Ryan came into the hotel parking garage, something let go in his steering and he hit the garage wall. This is not good news in anyone’s life. He wasn’t hurt at all – that was the good news. But the bad news was the level of complexity about dealing with his van, and the complications added to his life by not having it. He was able to get it towed back to the seminary. But he couldn’t just go to Enterprise and rent a substitute vehicle. He was able to get back to the Seminary because a friend was able to pick him up, literally. His chair could be broken down enough to fit in a trunk, and then he needed to be picked up and placed into the car seat. As he was waiting in the lobby to be picked up, he talked about getting his van fixed. Not everybody can do the repairs: the last time his van needed work, it had gone to Texas. He was figuring this could take MONTHS to get fixed. He was doing field work for one of his classes. He wasn’t sure how that field assignment could be accomplished without his van. As much of a bother as any of us have when our cars need work, the impact of this on Ryan’s life was huge.
I tell this story partly for interest and partly because it points out one of the truths about working for increased accessibility. Those people with disabilities who are the leaders of this movement, and it is a movement now within the UCC, have to expend a whole lot of their life energy figuring out the everyday tasks that so many of us are blessed to be able to do without thinking: the dressing, the driving, the navigating through our lives. But no one who knows Ryan has a doubt that he isn’t gifted for ministry in God’s church. Ryan and many others need allies, even as they lead the way in this work. Before I left St. Louis I talked with a couple of Ryan’s seminary buddies who were also at the conference, and they assured me that they ‘had his back’. I sensed they do.
Geoffrey Black, the general minister of the UCC, gave a talk at the Saturday luncheon of this WIDENING THE WELCOME conference. He named this work ‘a movement within the movement that is the UCC’, and pledged his support to bringing this move towards accessibility to the forefront of our awareness. We heard his words with gratitude, and as challenge to live into. You all have a good start on this work: by the accessible features already added here, it appears to me that you have the heart for it. I hope and pray we will want to move it forward and let this Pemaquid peninsula know that widening the welcome is what we can be about, and that we are a ‘spacious place’. With, and by, God’s grace. Amen.
