Soteriology and Disability

I have recently been writing about our being formed by the lives that we live, that our discipleship often constitutes the stuff out of which our faith emerges.  In living lives in a certain way we are formed into people we would have never been otherwise.  For me, waking up early in the morning to help Walton shower, dress, brush his teeth, and eat breakfast is a constant reminder that I will never become a person who is not formed by my life with Walton, and I will never conceive of a God who is less capable of being God for Walton as for me.  

I have not stayed in the denomination with which I was affiliated before I left home.  Because of this reality, some often try to play the shepherd to round me back up into the flock.  I remember meeting with someone who might or might not have been attempting to do this denominationally but who at least wanted my faith to conform to his vision of orthodoxy.  I remember I asked many bad questions, and of course when you ask bad questions, you get bad answers.  Much of our worst theology has arisen simply because we begin with the wrong questions.  More specifically, we often take our quesions too seriously and God's, not enough.

That day, I spoke to this minister about the profound faith I have observed in Walton.  Walton is unable to express his faith in the ways that we do.  The best he can often do is repeat certain phrases after us and close us with a self-assured "Amen".  But in having witnessed this man live his life, I have come to have greater hope for the rest of us.  No, he lacks our intellectual capacity and so this hope cannot be the hope that if everyone gets enough education, then we will learn how to get along.  This was a very different form of hope.  I observed that Walton's body is sometimes cruel to him.  He is often hospitalized for a digestive condition.  He suffers.  He has cerebral palsy.  He had a cerebral hemorrhage and is bound to his wheelchair.  This is the life of his body.  When my body feels bad, I am cranky.  I am short with other people and often take it out on them.  But Walton doesn't do that.  No, he only hurts himself.  In fact, he has broken his nose after pressing on it too hard in a fit.  It is a tragedy, and I do not want to romanticize it any more than we shouldn't romanticize poverty, but Walton, in his disability, in his humanity, he never puts his pain onto other people.  He bears it himself.  There is some hope for me in that.  While I do not wish for anyone to do that to themselves, especially not sweet Walton, it is prophetic in a world where we bomb other people.

I learned many things from Walton.  I learned about who he is, who I am, what it means to be human, and who this God is that is involved in the mess of our lives.  It would be impossible for me to separate my being, my belief, from the person I have been shaped into by Walton.  I mentioned to this minister that I think maybe Walton's witness might be instructive for salvation.  It might just be that our cognition is not the thing that saves us (where they assume Jesus left off, since Jesus cannot fully save us by himself).  I posited that Walton teaches me that we do not show up at the gates with a 3 by 5 index card with a set of propostions about the nature of God in order to receive salvation.  Instead, I have experienced something of salvation by being in relation to Walton.  And so, could it possibly be that as Walton cannot formulate these words for himself, that God will also work beyond any words I could ever affirm about God.  What might Walton's faithful witness tell us about God's economy of salvation.

I will never forget the response he gave me.  He said, "do not think of Walton and people with disabilities as the rule.  Do not form your rules around them.  They are the outliers."

Sure, that sounds about right.  Don't think that the world is shaped around who Walton is.  And I've learned that truth often with Walton when the world casts him aside.  But I was not asking about the world.  I was asking about God's world.  And as I see things from my love for Walton and from the world I encounter in Scripture, Walton is anything but an outlier.  In fact, Walton is at the very center of the life of God.  The rule is structured around him.  He is at the center.  The "kingdom of heaven" as Matthew refers to it is related to heaven, but it does not mean heaven itself.  It is better understood as the "rule of heaven".  And in Matthew's rule of heaven, our productivity is drowned by God's outpouring of grace (Laborers in the Vineyard, chapter 20).  And also, we are judged, so says Matthew, on whether or not we fed the hungry, cared for the sick, visited the imprisoned, and not because these are all pious activities.  No, we are told that in doing these things, we were not feeding just anyone, we were feeding Jesus.  The one in need, Jesus says rather straightfowardly, is none other than Jesus.  

And evetually we get back to the Sermon on the Mount.  Matthew begins not with the commandments of what we are to do, but with the beatitudes.  You know, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."  These phrases are not commandments.  They are statements.  Statements about who God is.  God is the one in whom the meek are blessed.  God blesses the meek.  The meek inherit the earth in light of this God.  

And they are outliers?  This is what I was told from a minister who comes from a tradition that holds the Bible to be at the least inerrant, if not infallible.  They take the Bible more seriously than us mainliners...so the story goes.  Walton is an outlier?

I've come to a place that I don't really care to worship a God that will save me if that God cannot save Walton.  And after all, what kind of God would this God be if God cannot and does not save Walton?  Now this minister never made the claim that Walton would not be saved.  He just proposed that Walton will get the easy way out, that Walton will get around the rules for us, that Walton is the outlier.  I don't think I could even worship a God in whose economy of salvation Walton is an outlier.  Luckily, I find the Biblical faith to be one that places Walton at the center so I need not choose between my tradition and my intuition.  

Read Luke 14:15-24.  God throws a banquet.  You and I don't go...we're too busy with our jobs, our estates, our families, our well-laid plans.  You know who is at the banquet when we don't go?  Walton.  

God tells us that when we give a banquet we are to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  Why?  Because that is who this God is.