Disabling disability

A sermon for the congregation of St. Saviour Anglican Church, Penticton BC and for a wider online community of spirit seekers — Sunday, July 6th, 2025, the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost — The Very Rev. Ken Gray

Nice to be back with you following five wonderful weeks in Victoria. We return at the height of the summer season; our timing this year is brilliant.

I return with some awareness of the recent General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada. Many say this was a great synod. I am glad that many members feel hopeful. I know our new primate reasonably well; we met a few times at meetings of the North American Cathedral Deans conference. He is intellectually brilliant and a strategic thinker. He is warm and compassionate and deeply aware and engaged with the emerging Anglican Indigenous Church. As bishop he brought good life and hope to his Ottawa diocese. He must now tackle the myriad of challenges facing our national church. Best of luck Shane; thoughts and prayers from your western Canadian friends.

One report emerging from synod concerns disability and inclusion within our church. We hear a lot about the inclusion of 2SLGBTQ+ persons in both church and society, and rightly so. We hear less of the struggles of persons who live with disabilities in and beyond church. As someone living with legal blindness since birth, we have always been here; we have struggled to find assistance and companionship, not pity, but respect and welcome.

Before I continue, let me speak to my sermon title today: “Disabling disability.” Many react negatively to the word “disabled” though increasingly, many of my disabled colleagues still prefer to use this term. To speak of persons as “specially challenged” downplays the reality of our daily experience. I invite you to play with these two words. Treating the first word as either an adjective or a verb produce different interpretations.

It’s good to see disability concerns out in to the open. Parishioners from my former cathedral parish in Kamloops, themselves crippled (another loaded word) in later life, recently tried to attend a meeting of lay pastoral visitors which meets in the lovely cathedral chapel. While cozy and beautiful, the chapel is an accessibility nightmare. Organizers have yet to rectify the situation and move the meeting elsewhere. Really?

In such conversations our church is challenged to unpack and rethink its engagement with disability. Jodey Porter, a member of St. Mark’s Anglican Church in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. in the diocese of Niagara who serves as Anglican appointee and co-chair of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada’s (ELCIC) Task Force on Ability and Inclusion, offered context for the resolution in a June 24 presentation.

Porter, who became mostly blind around the age of five and has lost all vision in recent years, said disability is an issue for Christian communities, noting that 27 per cent of all Canadians identify as disabled according to Statistics Canada.

Speaking personally, while I know I put on a good show, disability – visual, hearing, and significant arthritis – affects my decisions, needs, and outcomes every day. I have been blessed to function as a priest and musician over many years. I know many who have tried, hard, to accomplish these same things, who often meet with disappointment. (I will not use the word “failure.”) With the support of others — including family, colleagues, organizations, and publicly funded initiatives — I have enjoyed a life of privilege and what some might call success.

More generally, in our church, Jody Porter continues:

“The sad thing is that many disabled Canadians do not feel a whole part of our Christian communities in Canada or internationally,” she added. “So our committee took a hard look at what the issues are, why they’re there, and where can we go from here.”

Porter used a powerful image in her synod presentation: “The leper’s window,” an image which hearkens back to medieval Europe and what she described as a means of accessibility that churches made for lepers, who were excluded from their communities because of valid public health concerns.

I have seen two of these windows, one in Norwich and another in Lincolnshire in England. They are a Good News response to medieval understandings of leprosy.

Porter describes how churches have overcome many physical accessibility barriers. There remains however a barrier instilled in our theology and the way we teach it. She cites the work of theologian Nancy Eiesland outlined in her 1994 book The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Of Eisland’s work she notes: 

The way for the church to cross [this] barrier [is] through disability theology, a school of thought Eiesland pioneered . . . Eiesland, who suffered from a congenital bone defect and suffered from chronic pain and disability until her death from lung cancer at the age of 44, “was tortured by her sense of exclusion from Christianity… feeling not part of what was the whole community of Christ,” Porter said.

Yes, you heard correctly; she said “tortured.” Disability is a social construct, not just a physical descriptor. What, I ask, is the problem with some people? Is disability so scary, so shameful, so discomforting for some folks? Donald Trump and his gangster ilk have not yet come for the disabled, but they will, especially for those with mental health challenges. They have come for persons of colour, the 2SLGBTQ+ community, the elderly infirm, the poor. They have not yet come for the disabled as did Adolph Hitler. It’s a historical pattern.

In her book, Eiesland points us to Jesus, the “author and perfector of our faith,” the Creator of our bodies, disabled or not. She points to the scene described in Luke 24:36-39 in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds.

“In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God,” she wrote. God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued — he is not cured and made whole; his injury (post-resurrection) is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing.

I read her book many years ago and will repeat the exercise in the next few weeks. I realize I share common experience with her. After she was fitted with a full-leg brace at age 7, her father told her: “You’re going to need to get a job that keeps you off your feet. You’ll never be a checkout clerk.”

A high school drama teacher pulled me aside one day asking what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. He said I needed to find a vocation not dependent on my eyes. He said “you can talk!” Well . . . here we are.

Disabled people for Eiesland play a role as prophetic witnesses who can provide unique theological insights and challenge injustices, both within the church and society as a whole. Rather than ideals of self-sufficiency and independence, disability theology emphasizes interdependence, shared vulnerability and mutual care.

Consider for a moment today’s story of Naaman, commander of the king of Aram, who lives with Leprosy. He learns of an Israelite prophet, Elisha, who can cure him of his leprosy. Armed with a letter of introduction from his Lord (an old boys’ network is in play here) he arrives expecting a FOX-News-type curative display. Eventually he is instructed to dunk in the dinky little Jordan River, and is cleansed of his leprosy.

In this story, everyone wins: Naaman enjoys restored health; a bond is created between rival kings; the ministry of the prophet grows in reputation. Does such healing happen in identical fashion every time? Obviously not. But if the church ups its game regarding persons living with disabilities, our community would be richer, more prophetic, and just.

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