Biblical Text

You can read Isaiah 56.1-8 here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

[Note: The actual sermon will differ somewhat from what I had typed.]

Right at the start, I should give all of you a fair warning. Today’s message is a topical message. Hence, I will not be unpacking the passage that Divya read, as I normally would. Rather, it is only toward the end of the message, when it is time to understand what Isaiah was saying in the passage and to understand the hope he attempted to capture that I will actually address elements from the passage. With that disclaimer out of the way, let me proceed with what God has laid on my heart and mind to tell you.
In the debate about whether or not abortion should be legal, Christians have argued against abortion and in favor of letting the fetus live on the basis of verses like Psalm 139.13, which reads, “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” I think the use of this verse is perfectly justified. The fact that we are able to explain biological processes during conception and gestation does not mean that God was not involved in the processes. This is because an explanation of mechanism cannot exclude an agent explanation.
But if we insist that God is involved right from the moment of conception, as I certainly do, then we must face a truly sobering fact. Babies are born everyday with physical deformities. Some have non functioning limbs; others fewer or extra limbs. Some are born blind or deaf or mute. Others are affected by cerebral palsy or some other congenital disorder. We cannot in good conscience claim that God was involved right from the moment of conception if we cannot also give an account for that involvement in light of physical disability.
And we need not restrict it only to physical disability. Many people develop neurological or psychological conditions that restrict their ability to function adequately on an individual or social level. Where is God in all of this? How is he involved in the development of both the person born with no disabilities and the person born with some serious disability? And we cannot have it one way and not the other. If a baby born with no disability leads to a recognition of God’s providence so also must the birth of a baby with a disability.
Indeed, God himself requires that we have such a view for he asks Moses, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?” You see, if healthy babies are from God, then, in like manner, babies with disabilities are also from God. If we are inclined to ask, “Why did God give me a baby with a disability?” we cannot do so without also asking, “Why did God give me a baby who is healthy?” Too often we praise God for what we consider to be good and question him about what we perceive as not wholesome.
However, a robust view of God’s sovereignty must consider all aspects of our lives, no matter how we view them, as being under the sovereignty of God. But what do we say in response to the fact that disabilities are so widely prevalent? Where do we see God’s love and justice, wisdom and power in all of this? What role, if any, does the presence of disabilities play in God’s purposes? And how are those of us who do not have serious disabilities to view our relationships with those of us who do?
Today, many churches around the world observe Disability Sunday, a day when we recognise that there are others who are differently abled in a variety of ways. All of us are broken and none of us can claim to have a body and mind that functions perfectly. But some experience it to a greater extent than others. Some are born with a disability. Others sustain it during their lives. But most of us would be aware of people who experience physical, physiological, neurological, developmental, or psychological disabilities.
Putting ourselves in the shoes of a person with a disability is not just difficult, it is downright impossible. How am I, who knows the joy of a vibrant sunset to explain it to a person who is blind? How am I, who has heard the Lacrimosa of Mozart’s Requiem, to explain to a person who is deaf why it moves me so much? By virtue of a disability, many people are automatically excluded from the experience that most of us take for granted. But, for a lot of human history, we have also used disability as a pretext to exclude those who have them.
My earliest memory of exclusion was when I first watched the movie Ben Hur. During the course of the movie, Judah Ben Hur’s mother and sister contract leprosy and are sent outside the city to the leper’s colony, where they are forgotten and left for dead. And I wondered about this disease that they had. What was it? Why was it so horrible that they had been outcast and declared untouchable? To my shock, I discovered that the exclusion was biblically sanctioned. And this question lingered in the back of my mind for many years – How could God command this?
The next truly memorable occasion when I saw exclusion was when I was on my way to begin my role as a vacation Bible school leader. I was in a car with another person when we stopped at a signal. Our windows were rolled down. As we stopped a couple of eunuchs approached the car and the person I was with told me to roll up my window just as they began rolling up their window. Thankfully, I kept my window down. Why were we humans so afraid of contamination by those different from us? Why do we so easily form ingroups and exclude others?
In order to understand today’s passage and what it means for us living in the twenty-first century and anticipating Jesus’ return, we need to go much further back in the Old Testament to learn the role and position that those with disabilities had in ancient Israelite society. What we must first unlearn is our assumption that the Levitical practices had to do with individual sin as we understand it from the New Testament. Too many erroneous views in the church stem from this assumption that there is a one to one correspondence between words in both testaments.
However, the Levitical practices and rituals had very little to do with individual sin. One reason, of course, is the simple fact that none of the rituals in the Pentateuch were designed to deal with intentional sins. If I intentionally planned to kill someone and followed through with the plan, there was no sacrifice in the Old Testament that could remove my guilt. The only legal recourse would be the death sentence. The second reason is that the Levitical practices had a different kind of purpose than what we normally imagine.
The bible presents the greatest desire of God as being to live with his human creatures. That is why we begin in a garden with the humans in the presence of God. And that is why we end in a city in which the home of God will at last be with his people. This deep, divine desire is something that the church has forgotten through the ages. But this deep, divine desire finds its expression in the heartfelt, human hunger for our earth to be once again filled to the brim with the presence of God and the glorious knowledge that would bring.
You see, the Levitical rituals are based on the premise that, since we humans have sinned and continue to sin, our sin has defiled God’s good earth, spreading the stain of death in it. In order for God to still be able to tabernacle with his people, God instituted some rituals through which sacred space could once again be established. This happened between the cherubim on the cover of the ark of the covenant. Human sin, however, threatens this merger of heaven and earth because sin brings with it the stain of death.
The blood of the sacrificed animal, precious as it is and symbolizing the life of the animal, is then sprinkled on the altar, the life it symbolizes neutralizing the stain of death and restoring the delicate balance and once again permitting heaven and earth to intersect and interlock. But why were such rituals needed? How were they effective? The common Christian answer is to claim that God is utterly holy and therefore cannot be in the presence of anything that is sinful. Have you ever heard this? Of course you have! You probably have even affirmed the claim.
But let us think about it. If God cannot stand to be in the presence of anything sinful, then does he depart from me when I sin? If God cannot be near sin what was Jesus doing when he was hanging out with the prostitutes and sinners? Did the divine Word that became flesh stop being divine when he was fraternizing with the sinners? Or did the divine Word depart from Jesus during those times? Does God hate sin? Absolutely! But the way of dealing with something you disapprove of is not to disengage, but to engage.
This is precisely what happened in the incarnation! God hates sin so much that he decided to engage fully with us sinful humans. You see, the rituals were never designed because sin was so powerful that God could not come near and remove it with his presence. Rather, the rituals were designed to communicate to us how grave the situation is and how our sinfulness separates us from God and threatens the establishment of the heaven and earth reality that we were created to enjoy and that our hearts earnestly long for.
It was because of this that God gave the ancient Israelites a whole set of regulations concerning what was acceptable to him and in his presence. These fall into six categories that we will deal with briefly. First, the instructions about animals offered to God are very clear that, when making a sin or guilt offering or an offering for the passover, the animal must be without blemish. Why such a restriction? If a lamb is blind or lame, was it not God who made it that way? If he is responsible for its lameness or blindness why does he not accept it as an offering?
Remember, the laws were given to communicate to humans how grave the consequences of our sin are. As a shepherd, it is easier to offer a lamb who is blind or lame and, therefore, a threat to the safety of the rest of the flock, than to offer a healthy lamb. By refusing the disabled animal God was telling the Israelites that offerings made to cover their sins need to have as high a consequence for the offeror as the sins actually have. They could not get away with offering an animal whose death actually made their situation better.
Second, a person who was ritually unclean could not come into the presence of God. We need to remember that ritual cleanliness has nothing to do with physical cleanliness. A person with a skin disease was considered ritually unclean not because the skin disease was transmittable but because skin diseases spread in a similar way as sin spreads. The social exclusion that such a person experienced served to underscore the effects of our sin. Our sins exclude us from God’s presence just as the disease excluded the person from the community.
Third, it was for the same reason that a menstruating woman was not permitted to enter into the presence of God. The menstrual flow was a sign that her womb, which is the locus of life, had failed to produce life. The association of the menstrual flow with death is what rendered the woman unclean. Granted this does not alleviate the sense of alienation the woman would have experienced. But this was precisely the point. The natural process, now associated with death, was a reminder of how our sins have alienated us from God.
Fourth, a special case of ritual contamination is contact with a corpse. A person who touched a corpse contracted the impurity associated with death and was excluded from the presence of God. There is no guilt associated with such an action because ensuring a proper burial for a deceased person was expected. However, the stain of death was considered strong enough that even this act that was expected would result in ritual impurity and exclusion from the presence of God. It was another reminder that our sin has brought on the stain of death.
Fifth, in particular, the High Priest was not even supposed to come near a corpse, not even for the burial of his mother or father. This communicated how grave the contaminant of sin is. The High Priest was the supreme mediator for the maintenance of the heaven and earth reality in the tabernacle and later in the temple. So precarious was that balance that he was not permitted to participate in the burial rituals for his parents. When a High Priest’s father or mother died, his absence from the ceremonies would communicate the gravity of the situation.
Sixth, even the other priests had restrictions. A disabled person from a priestly line was not permitted to serve as a priest. Once again, it is important to understand clearly what this restriction was and what it meant. A normal Jewish person, not from the tribe of Levi, was allowed to enter the presence of God and make his or her offerings. However, the priest officiating in the presence of God could not be a disabled person. One reason for this is similar to that concerning the animals offered to God.
Offering a disabled animal to God would have been an easier task. In like manner, many cultures have a practice of dedicating a child to the household god. In such cultures, in many cases, if a family had a disabled child, he or she would be dedicated to God. This meant that the disabled child would no longer be a burden to the family because the temple would take care of him or her. This was not permitted in Levitical practice. You were not allowed to offer to God something the offering of which would make your life easier.
The second reason for this is that the priest’s task was very dangerous. He had to have the muscle power to subdue an animal in order to kill it. He then had to be able to climb the ramp to haul the carcass from the place where the animal was killed up to the altar. He then had to be able to lift it up onto the altar where the carcass would be burnt. This was hard physical work. Also, most of the tabernacle was made of flammable materials. A blind person groping in the dimly lit holy place was a recipe for disaster.
From the above it can be seen that there is a common thread to the practices in the Old Testament. Anything that reminded us of the spread of death due to our sinfulness was not permitted in the presence of God. And anything, the offering of which made our lives easier, could not be offered to God. And anything that was a practical nightmare was prohibited as well. Contrary to the claim the bible discriminates against the disabled, the common threads actually allow us to have a deeper understanding of the bible’s perspective on those who are disabled.
What the bible tells us is that we cannot hand over our disabled family members to the place of worship, expecting “God to take care of them.” They are our responsibility and our privilege. Whatever the disability – physical, physiological, neurological, developmental, or psychological – we have the privilege and honor of caring for and nurturing someone who bears the image of God. And we need to do it in a way that affirms their God given dignity as his image bearers and not in ways that might seem expedient to us.
The book of Isaiah can be divided into roughly three parts. The first and largest part is from chapter 1 to chapter 39. The second is from chapter 40 to chapter 55. And the third is from chapter 56 to chapter 66. The first part deals roughly with the state of the Israelites prior to the exile. The second part delivers the promise of restoration from exile. The third section looks on to the future state in which God’s justice would spread over all the earth, culminating in the unbelievable promise of a new creation with a new heavens and new earth.
Our passage forms the introductory proclamation of the third part of the book. And in it we see Isaiah stretching his imagination to visualize what a final state would be like when God’s justice would fill the whole earth. Isaiah wrestles with this matter through the course of these eleven chapters before concluding that the only solution that could be viable was for God to utterly transform the current creation so that we would live in a new creation in which the new heavens and the new earth would be intertwined and interlocked forever.
But he starts his journey of imagination by focusing on one of the hardest problems those who believe in God face, namely, the problem of unmerited human suffering that leads to alienation and exclusion. He talks about foreigners, those who do not have the rights of citizens because they have moved to some place, either forcibly or of their own volition, that is not their own. A foreigner, of course, is just symbolic of the human propensity to form in-groups and out-groups. We define ourselves over against others and in so doing exclude others.
And so Isaiah envisions a day when humans will not exclude those who are different. To the contrary, Isaiah sees a day when the foreigner would be counted among the people of God. In other words, according to Isaiah’s vision, God’s people would finally include people who are not descended from Jacob. God’s people would truly be multi-ethnic and multi-national. This is Isaiah’s grand vision of inclusion when God renews the heavens and the earth to bring about his just rule over all of creation.
But Isaiah does not stop there. He speaks of eunuchs who, by virtue of their not being able to have children, were ostracized within society. Note that Isaiah does not promise a reversal of their condition so that they would be able to have children. That would actually be just another way of saying that a eunuch could not be accepted in God’s presence. Rather, through Isaiah, God promises the eunuchs the one thing that their being childless denied them – a legacy. God would give them a monument, something that lasts, that would be better than children.
It is very important that we note what God’s promise to the eunuchs and foreigners are. He does not promise a reversal of their condition. The foreigners are not included among the people of God after they convert to the Israelite faith by getting circumcised. And the eunuchs are not promised a new found fecundity by virtue of which they could have many children who would remember them after they died. Rather, the eunuchs and foreigners are included among God’s people and accepted in God’s presence as eunuchs and foreigners.
This surprising vision of Isaiah calls us to question how we perceive those who are different from us and especially those we might consider disabled. All too often I might think that I am in a better position than a blind person because I am able to see the vibrant sunset but he is not; or that I am better off than a deaf person because I am able to hear the Lacrimosa but she is not. But could it be that my sightedness blinds me to other visions? Could it be that my ability to hear deafens me to other truths?
In other words, while we have often pitied those who have what we would consider disabilities, could it be that these differences actually enable them to comprehend something that our senses prevent us from comprehending? I don’t intend to romanticize any disabilities. But at the same time, I would like us to consider that we are not all wise or all knowing. We do not know why God made one person mute while another is able to speak or why one person is blind while another has perfect eyesight.
Isaiah envisions a day when there are no outcasts because everyone, from all nations and with what we would consider disabilities, are accepted and gathered into the one group that is the people of God. What this means is that God is big enough, wise enough, knowledgeable enough not only to include those who are differently abled but also to enable them to flourish in his new creation. In other words, it is likely that what we consider disabilities are conditions that hinder us only in this fallen creation, but will enable us to flourish in the new creation.
Many of us with disabilities might ask ourselves, “Why did God make me like this?” Why am I blind? or Why am I deaf or mute or lame? In a world that is out of joint due to human sinfulness, those who are different face many uphill challenges that the rest of us can never even begin to imagine. And they may likely face exclusion in many forms that we can hardly even comprehend. But Isaiah asks us to imagine a world in which God shows us that his people include people of all sorts – including especially those we might consider disabled.
Isaiah asks us to imagine a God who is so inclusive and so unbelievably creative that he has a place in his new creation not only for those whom we might consider whole but also and especially for those whom we might consider hindered by some disability. This is the grand ingathering that Isaiah paints with bold brush strokes and asks us to imagine after him. It is a world in which the unimaginable has become reality, where those whom we would consider disadvantaged turn out to be those who have a central role to play in new creation.
This is the world we look forward to, not some disembodied existence in the clouds playing ridiculously small harps! Rather, the bible promises us a fully embodied existence in which every aspect of our bodies have somehow been subsumed in and transformed by the creative love of the God whose love and creativity know no bounds. I long for this unveiling, when God would show us how each one of us plays an integral role in the wonderful plan he has for his beautiful new heavens and new earth.
Don’t you long for it too? Don’t you long for the day when God will show you that he has included even what you would consider your weaknesses into his plan for his new creation? Don’t you yearn for the day when you will finally know the answer to the question, “Why did God make me like this?” For when that day comes, you will finally understand the role you play in the grandest love story of all. So let me encourage you to spend the rest of your days anticipating the great ingathering.