Reflection 1 John 9:13-34

*Due to the 1st century authorship of this weeks excerpt from scripture, there is some ableist imagery invoked.
Just as slavery, sex trade, stoning, and arranged marriage are no longer acceptable, neither is ableism. To give context, but not excuses I will have notes on how and why this ableism is present along with a short reflection on how to approach mine own, and others ableism without internalizing it further into your own beliefs.
[{Trigger Warning}] Blind Ableism
Thank you for reading, and may grace and peace be multiplied unto you.*

John 9:13-34 

Since my faith crisis in my late teens, I have undergone a massive shift in faith. Gone are the prescriptions and clean edges. Gone is my ability to box the world in and claim mastery over. Gone is my certainty. Gone are the easy days of childish faith and dogma. � In return I have been given something better. Something I wouldn’t trade for the world. Security in God. No matter what, I had the holy spirit, the scriptures, and my experience in the world all to guide me.
So I began a journey that would lead me down the very hard path, not because I was mad at the church or God, because I loved and trusted them both so deeply I stepped off the boat, storm surrounding me, and walked.
I won’t pretend it was easy. It was and continues to be, the hardest thing I have ever done. I have stumbled. I have suffered. I have been pained. I have grieved and wept more times than I can count or remember.
I have also cause stumbling. I have been the abuser. I have been wrong, more times than any one can know.
But i thank God for that pain, for without it, and without him I would never have come to see all that I do now. A plank was in my eye, and now I daily work to remove it.
When I returned to the church in which i grew up, I found resistance. It wasn’t until years later i was able to realize why. They were contentedly, lovingly, dogmatically, assuredly, growingly certain. I would never be again.
Now when I meet someone like them they are often baffled at first. They may ask questions and debate, they may view me as a curiosity, but this never stays. Eventually it always comes to a point where they no longer view me as a contemporary. They broach that single heavy question, and i know our relationship may be coming to an end. “But are you saved?”
When I inevitably explain that this phrase is as meaningless as asking me if I feel heat from the sun, that I believe the healing power of Christ calls all men at all times to healing, when I explain that we all reject and accept this call daily in minute small actions, when I explain that we must work the works of He who sent Christ, they revile.
They ask was this not the same child who grew up reading his Bible every day for more than a decade? Does he not know he speaks heresy, and that his salvation is in jeopardy?
For they are the orthodox, they know The Truth, they hold all of Gods words. So certain are these pharisees that i am wrong. I have not even the certainty to think I might be right, and yet they ask for a declaration with more meaning than I have ever seen.
I can but muster the “one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 

For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true. Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,
“Sleeper, awake!
Rise from the dead,
and Christ will shine on you.”

Amen

Source
This weeks reflection came from my following of the United Methodist Church lectionary calendar. The calendar can be found at UMCDiscipleship.org/worship/lectionary-calendar
The verses provided are 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41

Notes and After thoughts
Thank you so much for reading the first of very many my reflections! If you have any questions comments, or critiques, or suggestions for future reflections please leave them below, and if you enjoyed it throw me a like!

Ableism
In 1st century Israel, and indeed most the world, the blind, deaf, hard of hearing, and many many others were relegated to the fringes. In this time frame it was considered an amazing act of mercy and compassion heal someone of these things. Now however we know these things to be vital and a defining aspect of someones culture or identity. These people are whole without us, they function without us, and despite us. For more on this please message me and we will discuss this at length with a reading list to share.

A blank page of any sort can be terrifying—a blank screen or “they’re not going to be around anymore tomorrow or the next day or the next day” or “we worked together for however many years and now we’re not going to work together anymore."
[Or there's] the person who lost their job yesterday: What am I going to do? That terror can be read another way as well. Which can be deeply insensitive to say to someone, “Hey, you lost your job, think about what tomorrow may bring.” But the truth is, given a larger perspective, “So ... well ... what do you want to do now?” The whole book is about a paradoxical gift, a sort of bloody, traumatic, awful, strange gift.
In the Jewish tradition, the first thing you do when someone dies is you go over to their house. So the first thing you can give people is your presence. Perhaps in that sense the book is step two or three as opposed to, “Oh, something horrible just happened? You need to start reading.” It may be a while.
I just got a text from a woman who had a relative who took his own life and it wasn’t that long ago and for her the book spoke to her exactly where she’s at. I was interested that she was able ... 'cause sometimes you’re in enough pain and you’re like “Okay, the good side of this? C’mon.” Even the idea of a good side [seems impossible]—but the book isn’t like “Hey there’s a good side”
it’s more like “in the midst of this agony are all sorts of interesting
paradoxes, let’s just sit in them.” I’ve tried to be very respectful of
people and hopefully what people come out of it [with] is real and not sort of manufactured, “Hey you should buck up.” It might be a while.

Rob Bell

The image i had of god growing up was always so small. It was a jealous man in the sky who arbitrated the right and wrong of the world.
I regularly and was encouraged to question the bible in a way. To look for patterns and emergent phenomena. However i was always told it was a different matter to question God. I was pointed to the story of job and how he never questioned him. So i did as he and never did.
But once you start you really can't stop. I was pointed to Genesis 22 by a friend. She had me ask as many questions as i could about it. And i laid it on about covenants, and symbolism to the crucifixion later and all these technical things and on and on.
and she sat silently before asking me "Is that it?"

You don't wonder why Abram would leave his family his only safety, to go to a foreign land which was often invaded and violent, all at the behest of a novel and unknown god?
You don't wonder what kind of loving god asks a man to kill his only son? Why would god do that?

Then she explained that her god is big. not like how it was taught in our sunday school. Way bigger. He can handle her questions, doubts, convictions, and seasons of disbelief. Not only can he handle it, he loves it. When jacob wrestles the divine eesh angels came from heaven to proclaim jacob successful! Not because he had won out over the divine but because how do you fail when you wrestle the divine.

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

— Antoine St. Exupery

Currently, NASA’s Mars science exploration budget is being decimated, we are not going back to the Moon, and plans for astronauts to visit Mars are delayed until the 2030s—on funding not yet allocated, overseen by a congress and president to be named later.

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, every few weeks an article, cover story, or headline would extol the “city of tomorrow,” the “home of tomorrow,” the “transportation of tomorrow.” Despite such optimism, that period was one of the gloomiest in U.S. history, with a level of unrest not seen since the Civil War. The Cold War threatened total annihilation, a hot war killed a hundred servicemen each week, the civil rights movement played out in daily confrontations, and multiple assassinations and urban riots poisoned the landscape.

The only people doing much dreaming back then were scientists, engineers, and technologists. Their visions of tomorrow derive from their formal training as discoverers. And what inspired them was America’s bold and visible investment on the space frontier.

Exploration of the unknown might not strike everyone as a priority. Yet audacious visions have the power to alter mind-states—to change assumptions of what is possible. When a nation permits itself to dream big, those dreams pervade its citizens’ ambitions. They energize the electorate. During the Apollo era, you didn’t need government programs to convince people that doing science and engineering was good for the country. It was self-evident. And even those not formally trained in technical fields embraced what those fields meant for the collective national future.

For a while there, the United States led the world in nearly every metric of economic strength that mattered. Scientific and technological innovation is the engine of economic growth—a pattern that has been especially true since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. That’s the climate out of which the New York World’s Fair emerged, with its iconic Unisphere—displaying three rings—evoking the three orbits of John Glenn in his Friendship 7 capsule.

During this age of space exploration, any jobs that went overseas were the kind nobody wanted anyway. Those that stayed in this country were the consequence of persistent streams of innovation that could not be outsourced, because other nations could not compete at our level. In fact, most of the world’s nations stood awestruck by our accomplishments.

Let’s be honest with one anther. We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us.

But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.

As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.

All these piecemeal symptoms that we see and feel—the nation is going broke, it’s mired in debt, we don’t have as many scientists, jobs are going overseas—are not isolated problems. They’re part of the absence of ambition that consumes you when you stop having dreams. Space is a multidimensional enterprise that taps the frontiers of many disciplines: biology, chemistry, physics, astrophysics, geology, atmospherics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering. These classic subjects are the foundation of the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—and they are all represented in the NASA portfolio.

Epic space adventures plant seeds of economic growth, because doing what’s never been done before is intellectually seductive (whether deemed practical or not), and innovation follows, just as day follows night. When you innovate, you lead the world, you keep your jobs, and concerns over tariffs and trade imbalances evaporate. The call for this adventure would echo loudly across society and down the educational pipeline.

Dr. Neil Degrasse Tyson, WRITTEN TESTIMONY SUBMITTED TO THE U.S. SENATE
COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION
RUSSELL SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, ROOM 253
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON March 7, 2012

Today what i share with you is something that was shared with me. A hard truth for me to swallow, but swallow i did, and i am all the better for it. 

When i first started truly sharing what i believed about the world i mostly had criticisms to share. Criticisms of our government, our ruling parties, and of the church. Criticisms that i was not quiet about.
In my duelist framework i had been taught from birth, as all Americans are, as was reinforced in my church, and in my school, i believed the only option to correct these evils was to brazenly and openly condemn them. That was either a part of the problem or the fixer of the problem.
I thought if only they could learn some humility and decency and i will be the one to show people that. 

A friend, who i respect immensely, contacted me in private and in half scorn, half concern told me to stop. I helped no one with my criticism. That if i was truly that hurt by the whole thing why wasn't i doing anything. After all who better than the person who noticed the problem? 

It has taken me nearly a year to fully grasp the gravity of his statements. That while he simply spoke of the church, this really applied to everything.
That instead of simply tearing down i will build. 

Grace and Peace.

“How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.”

“Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again?” 

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro... two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American...”

“The equality in political, industrial and social life which modern men must have in order to live, is not to be confounded with sameness. On the contrary, in our case, it is rather insistence upon the right of diversity; - upon the right of a human being to be a man even if he does not wear the same cut of vest, the same curl of hair or the same color of skin. Human equality does not even entail, as it is sometimes said, absolute equality of opportunity; for certainly the natural inequalities of inherent genius and varying gift make this a dubious phrase. But there is more and more clearly recognized minimum of opportunity and maximum of freedom to be, to move and to think, which the modern world denies to no being which it recognizes as a real man.”

W. E. B. Du Bois

“When someone in vulnerability tells you everything they’ve known has fallen apart, the correct response is not to quote scripture, the correct response is not biblical apologetics, the correct response is a hug. The correct response is to say, I love you. They have to encounter an impossible love. It’s the only way the gospel comes to life.” 

“What I've learned to do is be certain that I am uncertain. To revel in the fuzziness of my understanding of the world. And to look with great anticipation toward the next moment I'll figure out that I'm wrong about something. And that lets you get on this trajectory where you just become more and more and more open.”

“People grow when they are loved well. If you want to help others heal, love them without an agenda.”

Mike McHargu