Romans 12:9-18; Luke 12:22-34
I already knew what I was going to order–an omelet with avocado, sauteed onions, black olives and extra goat cheese. I was looking forward to it. Even more, I was looking forward to catching up with my brunch companion, Jenny Baylor. I knew she had made a recent job change to gain balance in her life, and I was curious to hear about it.
Both the omelet and the conversation exceeded my expectations. It was fascinating to hear about Jenny’s work, as a teacher and now a classroom assistant, working with children with multiple disabilities and complex medical issues. As she described what she does, I found myself thinking, “Wow! There’s a sermon in this!” A few minutes later, I thought the same thing again. The third time, I said it out loud.
“There’s so much spiritual wisdom in the work you do,” I began. “It would make a great sermon. Do you want to preach one?” Jenny was clear. “No thanks.” We came up with the idea of my preaching a sermon series that would lift up spiritual wisdom from the work and play of different church members. Jenny agreed to have her work be the starting point.
I could easily focus an entire sermon on the difference Jenny makes in the lives of her students. Instead, I want to turn it around and focus on the difference her students and her work make in her life. More broadly, I want to reflect on how the wisdom that emerges from her work gives all of us fresh insight into our Christian faith.
Every Sunday, in one way or another, we try to convey a central principle of our faith: each person is beloved by God, and so each person is of infinite worth. I like the way Ruth Carney says it when she is liturgist: You are a child of God, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
These are profound words. They are much easier to say, though, than they are to live. Even with our best intentions, we readily absorb what our culture teaches: that a person’s value is related to their productivity and their potential for independence.
Jenny’s work challenges these deep-rooted cultural assumptions. Her students may not move or communicate or process information in the ways we expect. Jenny looks deeper than those expectations to discover the unique ways her students can move and communicate and learn. Her job is to notice the things most of us don’t see: the slight movement of a finger, the wry sense of humor. Then she partners with her student to figure out how to build on those gifts.
It is a partnership: not Jenny doing everything for the student, and not the student doing it all for him- or her-self. It is, as Jenny writes, “providing and gradually reducing levels of support, guidance and prompting to help students become as successful and independent as possible.” The goal is not complete independence; it is finding the right balance of self-sufficiency and working together. The process honors the wondrous gift of interdependence.
When Jenny and her student find that balance, her work, she writes, is about “celebrating every achievement, no matter how big or small.” The celebration is a reminder that our conventional ways of measuring success, our assumption that bigger is better, is deeply inadequate.
Jenny especially loves working with students who can’t talk, sign or use communication devices. She has learned that these student can communicate, with facial expressions, eye gaze, vocalizations and body movements. “My favorite conversations,” she writes, “are conversations with no words at all.”
As she has learned to listen deeper than words in order to understand what a non-verbal student may be trying to convey, so she has also learned creative ways to get past words with the material she is teaching. She loves, she says, “to make literature ‘come to life’ in multi-sensory ways.” She has adapted books like Gulliver’s Travels and The Secret Garden using sensory materials, music, acting, and even going on field trips.
It strikes me that the challenges in Jenny’s work are also the blessings. It takes a lot of patience, time, and creativity to communicate with a child who is non-verbal. The fruit of that extra patience and time and creativity is a deeper relationship, a sacred connection that is not filtered through words.
In one of our email exchanges this week, Jenny shared some thoughts about healing. Sometimes, she suggests, we can get so focused on curing what we define as a disability that we lose sight of a person’s gifts. Maybe, she adds, healing is less about a cure and more about “easing someone’s pain, bringing someone comfort, sharing someone’s sorrow, understanding someone’s frustration, keeping someone safe, boosting someone’s self-esteem, encouraging someone to do their best work and take pride in their achievements, acknowledging and respecting someone’s communication (verbal or nonverbal, conventional or nonconventional), listening to someone’s story (in whatever way they’re able to tell it), supporting self-determination and self-advocacy, accepting, appreciating, and valuing someone just as they are and encouraging them to accept, appreciate, and value themselves just as they are too.”
Hearing about Jenny’s work offers me a fresh way to understand the words and actions of Jesus. Jesus looked past what everyone else saw to recognize the potential in people others were inclined to dismiss–Zacchaeus the tax collector up in a tree, Bartimaeus the blind beggar whom the crowds tried to hush, children seeking a blessing whom the disciples wanted to send away. Jesus called them to come; he touched them and blessed them and asked for their hospitality.
Much of Jesus’ ministry involved healing people who had been ostracized and isolated because of society’s fear of their illness or disability. We often read the stories of Jesus’ healings as though they were all about cures. I wonder, though, if healing in the gospels is actually closer to what Jenny describes in her work. Maybe Jesus’ healing gift was to see deeper than a person’s brokenness and to call forth that person’s wholeness.
Jesus recognized the value of interdependence: with the exception of the times he went away to pray, all of Jesus’ ministry happened in community. He needed his friends. He ate meals with friends and strangers and even adversaries. He inspired a little boy to share his bread with 5000 people. Wholeness, for Jesus, was not about self-sufficiency or independence; wholeness, then and now, is about helping one other, about giving and receiving in community.
Jesus turned our usual ways of measuring importance upside down. The kingdom of God, he said, is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds. The first shall be last, he proclaimed, and the last shall be first. To enter the realm of God, you must become like a child.
***
When I asked Jenny about life lessons from her work, she wrote about something she learned from Dr. Jan van Dijk, an expert in the field of educating people with severe disabilities and deafblindness. In a webinar, he spoke about “the importance of looking for, creating, enjoying and appreciating moments of shared joy with students.” This, Jenny writes, is what she tries to do every day in her work.
Wow! There are so many goals we strive to achieve. In special education, there are IEP’s, benchmarks, objectives, tasks and evaluations. Amidst all those very real things for which we strive, there is a different kind of goal, a higher purpose behind all the planning and listening and learning: creating and appreciating moments of shared joy.
Van Dijk’s invitation to this higher purpose bring me back to our gospel lesson. “And do not keep striving,” Jesus says, “for what you are to eat and what you are to drink.” Do not keep striving for all those layers we have added: our striving for achievement, for recognition, for success, for productivity. Instead, Jesus says, strive for God’s kingdom. Instead, focus your energy on this higher purpose–being part of the realm of God’s love–and you will find you have what you need.
I’ve talked a lot in recent years about the realm, the kin-dom of God, because I am convinced that it is at the heart of Jesus’ teachings. I’ve struggled to define it, but there is no single definition that encompasses the richness of this concept. I’ve tried out a few partial definitions: The kingdom of God is the radical assurance that there is something more powerful that the kingdoms of this world. The realm of God is God’s love breaking into our world, hope in the midst of despair. The kin-dom of God is any community where we give and receive freely, where we try to offer one another grace. The reign of God is the assurance that God is at work, the promise that the mustard seeds of love we plant will ultimately grow to fruition.
Today, I want to add another definition to my list. The kin-dom of God comes to fruition whenever we look for, create and appreciate moments of shared joy. That is a kin-dom I want to be part of.
***
The opportunity to reflect with Jenny on her work has been rich and rewarding. Our conversation leaves me with a series of invitations–invitations that draw me deeper into the wisdom of our Christian faith.
Jenny’s work invites me to slow down, especially in my interactions with other people: to notice gifts I might otherwise not see, to listen deeper than words, especially when words, or their absence, have become a barrier.
Our conversation invites me to rethink the ways I measure success, to remember that what seems small and insignificant to me may be glorious and grand to God.
Jenny’s work invites me to reclaim the value of interdependence–each person giving as they are able and receiving what they need.
Finally, I hear in Jenny’s work an invitation to enter into the realm of God’s love by creating and treasuring moments of shared joy.
Would you join me in saying YES to these holy invitations? Amen.