Wednesday of 1 Advent

A Sermon by Jean Sando

When Father Jamie asked me if I could cover this week, I asked him what readings or topics I should include, and he listed St. Nicholas and St. Clement (no idea who he even is) as well as St. Ambrose.  All worthies, I’m sure (I was raised in the Methodist church so my familiarity with the Saints is slightly limited), but there’s really only one person I think about this time of year, this season of Advent, and Father Jamie said the sermon could be about anything really, so I’m going to talk about Mary.

Growing up Methodist, Mary wasn’t someone I venerated.  I learned to pray the rosary when I was in college from my Roman Catholic roommate.  I found the prayers rhythmic and comforting but growing up, Mary was the young woman with a blue shawl on her head kneeling serenely by the manger in the Christmas pageant. More important in the narrative than Joseph, certainly more important than the donkey my sister demanded to play one year.  I was never Mary. I was an angel. The loud angel. The angel/narrator. I’m sure you can’t imagine why I was typecast into this role.

So Mary wasn’t a big influence in my Christian life. She wasn’t anyone I thought very much about.  

Until I started to try to become a mother. I’m very good at lots of things, but at getting and staying pregnant, I was rather a failure.  Getting pregnant took doctors and shots and scans. I also didn’t manage to stay pregnant very well.  

I developed a very difficult relationship with Mary. My first miscarriage happened in March, but my second happened three days before Thanksgiving. I went through the entire advent that year alternatively numb and crying. I became angrier every time I heard the Mary story.  A Virgin birth? Sure, she gets pregnant conversing with angels, and I can’t get pregnant even though I’ve been talking with 32 specialists and 4 people at the health insurance company. 

Did you know that the only Christmas carol that doesn’t mention a baby is “O Come O Come Emmanuel”?  I do.

I’d love to be able to tell you “then suddenly I was pregnant!” and to pretend the story has a simple, happy ending.  It doesn’t. I did get pregnant with twins in February 1998. We knew one baby’s heart had stopped beating, so we knew we had lost another baby.  What was completely unexpected was for me to deliver the baby who died and remain pregnant with the other twin.

That just doesn’t happen. It’s so rare that a standing room only group of residents in the Chicago hospital where I’d been sent for consultation came in to see me and have my case explained.  With an insensitivity only certain doctors possess, the oldest doctor in the whitest coat said “This is very rare. Most likely infection will set in. Both the fetus and the mother are at risk. Less than a 3% chance.”

I knew the implications.  This was going to take a miracle.

But most of you have met the miracle. He was 2 months old at his first Christmas, and Mary and I were able to be friends again. All the “long-awaited baby carols” spoke the words that were in my heart.  There are still quite a few I will cry through if you’re watching. And you’ll maybe hear Kris ask “Mom, are you crying?” in the way he does.

Looking back, we knew our miracle was different from the beginning. He seemed lost in the world, very sweet but a little confused. This place didn’t quite make sense to him. 

Recently, I saw a funny meme on Facebook.  A singer is crooning the popular Christmas tune “Mary Did You Know?” and a sassy Mary snaps back “I think I made that clear in the Magnificat.” Well, I didn’t know what was going on with our baby.  Mary had been given insight that isn’t, Thank God, given to most mothers. 

As Kristofer’s life unfolded, it was clear he was not going to be like other people.  No, Kris isn’t the Messiah, but he isn’t typical, either. Kris is special. Kris is autistic. Kris has a disability.

In that song, “Mary Did You Know?” the lyrics say “The blind will see, the deaf will hear, the dead will live again.  The lame will leap, the dumb will speak, the praises of the lamb.” In our gospel message today, great crowds come to see Mary’s son on a mountain and he heals the lame, the maimed, the blind and the dumb.

And Jesus does that over and over again in the Gospels. In fact, this is part of how we know he is God. He performs these miracles of healing. Mary’s son comes at last and heals all the disabled people in the world.  There’s only one problem with that. I have a son with a disability, not a disease, not an illness, and I would step in between him and anyone who tried to “heal” him.  

My son is precious, exactly as he is.  

But the Bible and the Church and especially the stories of Jesus confuse us in regards to who the disabled are and what their purpose is among us and where they belong in the church.  Oh, not here at St. Stephen’s. We know where Kris belongs. He belongs in front singing. He belongs in his acolyte vestments and at the door greeting as an usher. He belongs in the gardens and pacing in the undercroft. Here he belongs.

But the isolation and exclusion that adults with disabilities experience is real. Too often the Church sees people with disabilities as people they pour mercy on instead of looking to people with disabilities as those who can pour mercy on us. 

We get drawn into this with these stories of Jesus’ healing.  We get the message that the disabled are “broken” and need to be fixed.  That they are not alright just as they are. The focus we have on these stories can be terribly alienating and off-putting.  I have a friend who is blind who has had random people approach her and pray for her sight to return. It’s bizarre. 

But maybe we are wrong about the whole story.  In Jesus’s time, there was no social safety net, people with disabilities had no way to access the community, or earn a living and were often seen as “unclean.”  Jesus doesn’t just heal them, he restores them to society in the only way he can. Maybe that’s what he’s really doing on the top of that mountain. He is giving those people a path back into the community as only Jesus can.

But maybe we’re understanding even less about who has disabilities in the Bible than we think. In the Book of Daniel, God is described as sitting on a throne of fiery flames with wheels of fire. God is in a wheelchair? When Jesus comes back from the dead, he retains his scars.  His body is not restored to perfection. Why not? Is it okay to be a scared and broken Jesus? Surely he could heal himself if perfection was the point.

Even more, consider Nicodemus.  According to Anne Memmott, in the Gospel of John, we find Nicodemus is a legal specialist for the Jewish community, so he would have had an encyclopedic knowledge of the religious texts, many autistic people have exceptional memories.

Just ask Paul Sando about trains sometime; he has Asperger’s.  Nicodemus approaches Jesus in the quiet and dark, away from the huge and loud crowd. Our Katie isn’t autistic, though she shares some traits and you can ask her about how the world can feel “too people-y.”

Nicodemus misunderstands metaphor, many autistic people misunderstand non-literal language, and Jesus re-explains it to him.  Later, Nicodemus tries to save Jesus by insisting the rules need to be followed, autistic people can be very rigid about rules, and, at the tomb, there’s Nicodemus staggering up the hill with a simply extraordinary amount, a hundredweight, of herbs and spices. Normally people would bring a small quantity. All of this reads as entirely normal autistic behavior, and there he is at the tomb, very much part of Jesus’s life, as a friend. He was not someone Jesus pitied and healed.

Autistic people, people with disabilities are there in the Bible.  And in today’s world, they aren’t here to be pitied or healed. They do need to be brought into communities.  That was why Jesus healed them. Today we need to heal our communities that fail to make a place for people with disabilities. We need to examine our ableist assumptions and practices in and outside the church.

When Jesus, Mary’s son looks out on that crowd in the reading today, he has compassion on the people.  He heals those among them to enable them to enter the community, then he provides for the whole community.  He feeds every last one of them, men, and women, and children. All of them eat together. All of them are at one enormous table.

I don’t know how my son Kris’s life will unfold.  But Mary knew. She knew from the beginning. She says “he has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things.” She knew her son would create a loving and  welcoming community, for all the people.