Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

Stumbling is a pitiable business.  It often comes with age, and with all kinds of disability.  It can be physical or mental; missing your footing, or struggling to articulate.  It is one step before a fall, before failure.  Stumbling is alarming to see in others, and a shock to see in yourself.

For Jesus in the gospel today, stumbling can also be spiritual.  We can cause others to stumble in their faith, which is condemned in the most dramatic terms – better to be thrown into the sea with a millstone around your neck.  But equally we can cause ourselves to stumble – better to lose a hand, a foot, or an eye, says Jesus, than for them to hinder us on our way into God’s kingdom.

Of course, there is hyperbole at play here – that well-known rhetorical devise to emphasise a point – as when we declare ourselves to be ‘starving’, when we are merely ready for something to eat. Jesus is emphasising the responsibility we have for ourselves, and for one another, in matters of faith.  This isn’t about physically removing bits of our anatomy, but it is about clearing away the obstacles to belief, to trust; for ourselves and for others; and seeing this as a priority; a priority as great, indeed even greater than the concern for our physical bodies.

However, one thing we might infer from this hyperbole; when it comes to entering the kingdom of heaven, physical perfection is not required.

It is a while ago now, but I once worked in a hospice for children with terminal and life-limiting illnesses, and then in a school and college for students with all kinds of physical and learning disabilities.  Physical or mental ‘perfection’ might have been in short supply, but the nearness of the kingdom of God was unmistakable.

Many of the children and young people told me stories that frankly made me cringe; of well-meaning Christians who decided they were going to pray for healing, as the epistle of James taught them, and then looked disappointed when no-one leapt out of their wheelchair.  Worse were the stories where the children or their parents were told that a lack of healing was a result of their lack of faith – stumbling-blocks indeed.

I suspect we all lack imagination when it comes to healing – what it might look like, beyond the obvious.  We especially struggle to understand how there might be ‘healing’ even in places where there is still pain, debilitating disease, and ultimately death.  Hospices and special schools can help with that; and at the risk of being glib, the Cross can help with that too (How else do we make sense of the saying, ‘By his wounds we are healed’?).  Without colluding with suffering, or fetishizing it, perhaps we can learn just how widely, powerfully, and subtly healing can manifest itself, if we let it; if we stop being too narrow about it; stumbling, as we often do, over our own mortal anxieties and fears.

Many of those children and young people had to get used to being objects of pity.  When they stumbled over words, struggled to get one foot in front of the other, people would look sad.  At one level, this is perfectly understandable, and pity is certainly better than being ignored; but what both the hospice and the school showed me was how to get beyond pity to a different mindset.  Yes, it is sad to see a young person, (or anyone) confined to a wheelchair, or unable to communicate verbally, but might it be more constructive to think about the stumbling-blocks that are getting in that person’s way?  What about making buildings and transport more accessible, so they can get into the same spaces as anyone else, and join in with what others are doing?  What about providing some sort of technology that might make communication possible, for someone without speech?  Above all, and this was in some ways the hardest and most essential lesson to learn, what about investing time, slowing down, giving attention, in order to truly perceive the obstacles in the first place; then to carefully and meticulously negotiate them in order to allow and make a fully human connection; a communion on a shared human journey.

As a carer, as well as Chaplain, I would often be running from one task to another.  That would be just the moment when a certain student would approach in his wheelchair, arms waving about his head, indicating the alphabet board that was stowed behind his headrest.  He wanted to communicate something, and it would take a while.  Letter by letter he would spell out his concerns.  Over time, I got better at anticipating what the issue might be, but sometimes you just had to sit and patiently wait to allow communication to happen.  It was a repeated lesson in how precious and miraculous communication is – how lightly we treat it; how often we use it abusively; creating verbal obstacles for one another to stumble over.  Spending time with Luke was always a blessing, a timely lesson in being human and limited, graciously protecting me from stumbling over my own impatience and presumption, albeit it was never at a moment I would have chosen!

It may not require the amputation of an arm or a foot, but something else might have to be sacrificed if we are going to enter the kingdom of God together with those who live with disability; if we are to find the kingdom of God in one another, as we are all in Christ.  It could well be time; it could well be money.

The epistle of St James isn’t so much a manual for effective intercessory prayer, but a call to be a properly inclusive community – praying for one another, helping one another on the way of life and salvation, whether we are suffering, sick, or rejoicing – keeping one another from all kinds of sin, including those sins of omission; of failure to attend to the stumbling-blocks, the obstacles that keep us from full communion with one another, and so with God.

The other option is, as Jesus puts it so starkly, nothing less than hell itself – not forgetting the hell of loneliness and alienation; an unquenchable, life- and health-consuming fire.

What most of the youngsters I worked with wanted above all was not be left out.  And I have often wondered what effect it would have if every workplace included some people with significant support-needs, even those with life-limiting illness – people who couldn’t be as economically-productive, but might have other things to offer, by their presence, their humour, their little daily victories.  We might all learn to live a little better, a little more compassionately, perhaps a bit less frenetically – and in doing that, I wonder what that might do to our creativity, our overall, collective productivity.  I’m not saying it would be easy, but it I suspect it would bring us closer to the kingdom of God.

People with disabilities (which could include each and any of us) present our culture with a challenge and an opportunity. A challenge to all our easy assumptions about our human abilities and capacities, as if they were inalienable rights and possessions rather than precious, time-limited gifts; a challenge to our cherished autonomy and individualism, and a reminder of our mutual dependence. A challenge, and an opportunity to drill deep into the question of our humanity; how we are made for one another, to keep one another from stumbling and to lift one another up when we fall.  How we are made to share in the hope and promise of God’s kingdom, where whatever physical or mental abilities we may have now will be as nothing compared to the unimaginable perfection that awaits us all in Christ; that sharing in the life of the Trinity, where we shall be perfected in knowledge and in the perfect communion of love.