Third Sunday of Easter, 18 April 2021
Clapham
Nancy Eiesland was born with a congenital bone defect in her hips. By the time she was 13 years old, she had had eleven operations, and realised that pain was always going to be with her. She was a Christian; and as she matured she developed a remarkable ‘take’ on her faith and destiny. She said that she hoped that when she went to heaven she would still be disabled. [1]
The reason Nancy gave for this remarkable statement, was that her disability made he who she was; that her identity and character had been formed by the mental, physical and social challenges of her disability. She felt that without her disability, she would “be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God.”
She died, aged 44, in 2009, not from her bone condition, but from a possibly genetic lung cancer. By that time Nancy had taken her understanding of life and faith even further. She had come to believe that God was in fact disabled. The key for her was the scene described in Luke 24, which we heard today, in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds. [2] She wrote a book called The Disabled God, [3] in which she describes the ‘epiphany’ she experienced:
My return to intimacy with God began at a … rehabilitation hospital for persons with spinal cord injuries. A chaplain asked me to lead a Bible study with several residents. One afternoon after a long and frustrating day, I shared with the group my own doubts about God's care for me. I asked them how they would know if God was with them and understood their experience. After a long silence, a young African-American man said, "If God was in a sip-puff, maybe He would understand.”
I was overwhelmed by this image: God in a sip-puff wheelchair, the kind used by many quadriplegics that enables them to manoeuvre the chair by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device. Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. This was an image of God as a survivor, as one of those whom society would label "not feasible," "unemployable," with "questionable quality of life.”
Several weeks later, Nancy was reading in Luke's Gospel about an appearance of the resurrected Jesus (24:36-39). She saw how “the focus of this passage is really on his followers, who are alone and depressed”. Jesus says to them, "Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see.”
This wasn't exactly God in a sip-puff wheelchair, but Nancy realised that “here was the resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are - disabled and divine.” “In this passage,: she said, “I recognised a part of my hidden history as a Christian.”
She realised that “The foundation of Christian theology is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yet seldom is the resurrected Christ recognised as a deity whose hands, feet, and side bear the marks of profound physical impairment.”
This was my epiphany [she wrote]. The resurrected Christ is a disabled God - one who understood the experience of the others in my Bible study in the rehab centre, as well as my own. Encountering this disabled God became for me the source of a "liberation theology" of disability. Jesus Christ, as a living symbol of the disabled God, shares in the human condition; he experiences in his embodiment all our vulnerability and flaws. In emptying himself of divinity, Jesus enters the arena of human limitation, even helplessness. Jesus' own body is wounded and scarred, disfigured and distorted.
Nancy Eiesland offers us the remarkable insight that “In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God.” God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued - he is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing.
This is a very different way of approaching our perennial questions around God and suffering, and our perennial speculations about the significance of the resurrection. Luke reports that the resurrected, scarred and disfigured Jesus “opened their minds to understand…” demonstrating how the resurrection can open our eyes to previously unimaginable perspectives on the world, how the disabled God enables us to see our human condition in very different ways.
The writer Mark Sandlin says,
When you think about the Resurrection, consider this insight: that “resurrection” is a verb – not a noun. It describes something alive and active. The Resurrection is something we live into; it’s not merely an event we remember.
When they saw the wounds which Jesus presented to them, ‘something changed for the disciples. It was transformative. That’s what resurrection both does and reminds us of: true love is transformative.’ [4]
This active transformation continues to spread through the witness of people like Nancy Eiesland, and anyone prepared to see that rather than abandoning people to a life of suffering and the insufficient promise of healing in heaven, the disabled God stands among us in the here and now, embodying the possibility of our living life in all its fulness - even though our bodies may be suffering and scarred. What good news for us all as we try to steady ourselves in the storm of a global pandemic which has in some ways or other crippled us all.
And here we are this morning, trying to steady ourselves by joining in worship, by returning gladly to the table to which Christ invites us. Nancy Eiesland contended that in the eucharist, Christians encounter the disabled God. This encounter may spark in us “new imaginations of wholeness and new embodiments of justice,” she said.
The resurrected Jesus said, “Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself.” “While in their joy the disciples were disbelieving and still wondering.” If we respond to the resurrection like that - with a mixture of joy, disbelief and wonder - that’s a sign that God’s resurrection Spirit has begun to work on us too, opening our minds to imagine new possibilities for ourselves and our world, opening our hearts to play our part in making these new ways possible.
“Resurrection” is a verb – not a noun. The Resurrection is not merely an event we remember; it’s something we live into.
Notes
This is an edited version of The disabled God, fully alive, first preached in Somerset, 2015.
[1] My gratitude to Paul Nuechterlein, in Girardian Lectionary, Year B, Easter 3b, for introducing me to Nancy Eiesland.
[2] Opening paragraphs are adapted from Douglas Martin, Nancy Eiesland Is Dead at 44; Wrote of a Disabled God, New York Times, March 21, 2009.
[3] Nancy Eiesland, ‘The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability’.
[4] Mark Sandlin, The Resurrection is Real, But Not How You Think it Is, The God Article, Pantheos, April 14, 2015
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