Smuggling Grace

[Image description: A graphic with a white background with a red border and black text with the words “It is all of our responsibility to think about and help create accessible spaces and community.” At the bottom, centered: #AccessIsLove]

As I shared yesterday, Disability Activists Mia Mingus, Sandy Ho, and Alice Wong have recently launched a campaign on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook called #AccessIsLove, framing accessibility as an act of love and a priority for moral inclusion — not an afterthought, not a burden, and not an inconvenience to be avoided. Throughout this week, I plan to write about issues of accessibility in churches, and as I do so, I want to spotlight the perspectives of disabled people. (I also recommend following them on social media.)

Casual Ableist Language

I want to begin this post with an excellent video from Annie Segarra who teaches about casual ableist language. She gives a lot of examples, naming ways that people use words associated with disability and illness to make insults, create jokes, or describe something as negative. It happens so casually. And these phrases are so common that people may not even consider the ways they reveal negative associations with disability.

Casual Ableist Language in Worship

How does casual ableist language show up in worship? In sermons? In liturgy? In directions?

Maybe we’ve spoken or encountered language like,

“We are blind to our sin.”

or

“No matter what Jesus said, it seemed to fall on deaf ears.”

“God promised to be with them, but they were paralyzed with fear and wouldn’t move forward.”

In all of these cases, the words ‘blind,’ ‘deaf,’ and ‘paralyzed’ are used to indicate some kind of moral shortcoming.

These days, I’m also pondering how we give directions, particularly issuing invitations to stand. A lot of times, a worship service will begin with a leader saying something like, “Will all who are able, please stand,” or “I invite all who are able to rise.” I think the intention here is to indicate it’s okay to stay seated. But… there’s a negative impact: This language immediately marks and separates the community into categories of who is abled and who is disabled, and of course, abled is upheld normative.

I stopped saying this a while back, and most of the time, I’ve replaced it with something like, “I invite us to rise in body or in spirit.” But… I’m realizing this is ableist too. It still separates, and it frames abled people as bodied and disabled people as disembodied.

I appreciate these words from the Rev. Jessica Harren, and I recommend reading her entire post, A Posture of Reverence: Words Around People’s Bodies Matter, Especially tho Those with Disabilities.

“Please stand as you are comfortable.”
“Please take your posture of reverence for prayer”
“Please take your personal prayer positions”
“Please take your personal reverence positions”
“Please take your person singing positions”
“Please take a posture to support your singing aloud and stand if comfortable.”

We could also say,

We are invited to … (mirroring this language)

Let us… (mirroring this language)

Mindful of Language

Concepts shape language, and language shapes community.

There is a great deal of negativity about disability baked into our common, everyday English. So we have to pay attention to that. And our language shapes how community is formed and who upheld as valuable.

This is something we need to be conscious about. We’re going to make mistakes sometimes, and we’ll have moments when we realize we’ve been framing something negatively for a long time. But if we want to have an accessible church where every body authentically belongs, we have to be intentionally mindful of our language.

—Renee Roederer

This post is part of a series. Feel free to read the other pieces too:

#AccessIsLove: Inaccessible Church Buildings
#AccessIsLove: Invisible Disabilities in Church Communities
#AccessIsLove: Neuro and Sensory Diversity in Churches
#AccessIsLove: God Is Disabled

 

[Image description: Two graphics with a white background with a red border and black text that features two quotes by @Mia.Mingus on Instagram: “Access is a practice of love when it is done in service of care, solidarity, and disability justice.” — And — “When access is a practice of love it is no longer simply about logistics and something you have to do, but something you want to do.” At the bottom, centered: #AccessIsLove]

Disability activists Mia Mingus, Sandy Ho, and Alice Wong have recently launched a campaign on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook called #AccessIsLove, framing accessibility as an act of love and a priority for moral inclusion — not an afterthought, not a burden, and not an inconvenience to be avoided. Throughout this week, I plan to write about issues of accessibility in churches, and as I do so, I want to lift up the perspectives of disabled people. (I also recommend following them on social media.)

How do we make congregational life fully accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities? In community participation? In leadership?

[Image description: A graphic with a white background with a red border and black text that features a quote by @notyouravgho on Instagram: “How we understand access is also how deeply we dare to dream, create, and exist as a collective.” At the bottom, centered: #AccessIsLove]

Church Buildings and ADA Exemption

[CW in this section: Homophobic Language]

When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990, houses of worship and religious schools were identified as spaces exempt from compliance. As disability activists pushed for this landmark legislation, some church leaders fought and lobbied hard for a firm exemption for their own buildings. Some expressed concern about the expenses of renovations, while William Bentley Ball, a representative of the Association of Christian Schools International, became an influential voice in leading a movement to name these changes as government intrusion. He rooted his arguments in homophobia and ableism, claiming that churches, private schools, and day cares are “morally required (as a matter of clear and unconditional religious principle) to discriminate against carriers of AIDS where AIDS was incurred through immoral conduct.”

I learned about this particular history in Shannon Dingle’s excellent article, Resisting Ableism in the American Church. I recommend reading it.

Church Buildings: Still Inaccessible 30 Years Later

As a regional Chaplain, I am often invited to preach and lead worship in a variety of church spaces, filling in frequently for leaders who are away on Sunday mornings. These days, I find myself thinking quite a bit about inaccessibility as the legacy of the ADA exemption is still with us thirty years later.

— Sometimes, sanctuaries are accessible only by steps with no alternate routes into the worship space. Sanctuaries are often the central space for congregational life, as Sunday worship and larger meetings are held there. Inaccessible sanctuaries exclude people with disabilities from community participation and communal worship.

— Sometimes, entire wings of the building — often, spaces for education for children, youth, and adults — are placed on upper or lower levels in a building without an elevator or any other kind of lift. Inaccessible floors of the building exclude people with disabilities, including children, from meeting with their peers and participating in Christian Education.

— Most churches I visit, including those that are otherwise accessible for mobility, have steps leading to the chancel spaces in their sanctuaries. These chancel areas are the spaces of leadership where people preach, read scripture, choirs sing, and people make announcements. Inaccessible chancel spaces exclude people with physical disabilities from roles of leadership within a congregation.

And when it comes to leadership, I also find myself thinking… Seminaries are training disabled people who have discerned a call to serve in pastoral ministry, and yet… so many churches are inaccessible. How does this lead to a challenging call process? How does this lend itself to discrimination?

Disability activist Imani Barbarin also points out another crucial concern as well. (I recommend follwing her at Crutches&Spice and @Imani_Barbarin)

I appreciate you reading and engaging this post. What observations would you add? Let’s have a conversation.

–Renee Roederer

This post is part of a series. Feel free to check out the other pieces too:

#AccessIsLove: Changing Ableist Language in Churches”
#AccessIsLove: Invisible Disabilities in Church Communities
#AccessIsLove: Neuro and Sensory Diversity in Churches
#AccessIsLove: God Is Disabled

[Public Domain Image]

This sermon was preached at First Presbyterian Church in Saline, Michigan and was focused upon Ephesians 3:14-21 and the story that is told in Luke 5:1-11. An audio recording is above and a written manuscript is below.

“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth…” –Ephesians 3:18

And so… what if it’s true?

What if there is a love at the heart of things? A love so large, so expansive, and so abundant that is hard to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth? A love that is truly hard to wrap our minds around, and yet a love that is an invitation — a love that is summoning us into the fullness of God, the fullness of community, and the fullness of the vision God seeks to initiate and invigorate even through us?

What if that is actually true?

What if that love is calling us… ? What if it has been calling us all along? And what if it is calling us in new ways — today? now?

This love invites us into fullness:

-This love calls us into community. This love invites us to view our neighbors and live among our neighbors through a vision of kinship — to trust that we are so deeply related that we belong to one another, and that what affects one, affects all. Perhaps today, this love invites us even more deeply into that kind of vision.

-And we discover that this love invites us into what Jesus called the Kingdom of God, what we might also call the Kin-dom of God, one translation of what Jesus was describing. This Kin-dom of God is a connected to a community of people that is seeking — imperfectly, of course — to lean into the direction of God’s vision for this world, which always includes justice, peace, dignity, and belonging. Perhaps today, this love invites us even more deeply into that kind of vision.

-And as we seek to live in this direction, imperfectly, but working at it again and again, we discover that this kinship vision is alive here in our own community at First Presbyterian Church, and that together, we are a household of faith, a household of belonging where we practice the particularity of care — care which involves really and truly knowing one another, tending to one another, including one another, encouraging one another, praying for one another as we seek God’s calling, and dreaming as we ponder what an expansion of this community might look like. Perhaps today, this love invites us even more deeply into that kind of vision.

We might say that this kind of love has been calling us all along. But there are moments when it completely takes us by surprise.

I wonder if that was true for four fishermen in 1st century Galilee. When Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John went fishing on a particular day, they were not expecting any of this. They were not expecting that a loving vision would radically invite and re-orient what their lives would become.

It’s possible that these four fishermen didn’t expect very much. This was a mundane, routine day. This was the practice of their livelihood. They likely went out in those boats with nets day after day. But also, I wonder if their trade had not been doing well overall, and if that was yet another reason not to expect very much.

In this story, Simon Peter says that he and his fellow fishermen had been out all night, and they had caught nothing. Nothing. How discouraging. It would be easy to keep expectations low.

But on this particular day, Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, and a crowd was there, wanting to hear from him. In fact, the story says they were pressing in on him. And he saw these two boats, sitting there. Simon Peter, his brother Andrew, and James and John, two other brothers, were standing nearby, washing nets, again after they had caught nothing.

And then, Jesus got into one of their boats. It was the boat belonging to Simon Peter, and he requested of Simon Peter, “Put out that boat a little way from the shore,” so that people could hear him but with more space and less commotion.

I wonder if Simon Peter and the others had heard of Jesus, or if this was their first encounter with him. Even if they had heard some extraordinary things, they might not have expected any of this to impact their own lives.

But Jesus wasn’t only interested in addressing that crowd there on the shore of the lake. He was interested in addressing and loving these four fishermen who were before him. After he finished speaking, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Put out the boat to the deep water, and let your nets down for a catch.”

Well, this didn’t make a lot of sense… They had already caught nothing. They had already cleaned their nets. This might have been fruitless and inconvenient. But Simon Peter decides to trust just a little bit. He says, “We’ve worked all night long and have caught nothing, but if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

And then they encountered a shocking amount of abundance — so many fish that they could barely pull in the nets. And their boats began sinking!

But this was just a prelude to the kind of abundance they were about to experience in following Jesus. And Jesus reinterprets this moment with an invitation, with a calling into a love that is abundant.

Jesus says, “Do not be afraid. For now on, you will be catching people.”

Of course, this is a bit different than the metaphor may suggest… as if this is an effort to pull people unwillingly into these large nets of entrapment! (I’ve always thought this metaphor was a bit odd.) So no, not that. But this is something deeper. This is invitation to a way of life — finding people, finding people as they are, loving them as they are, and tending to them, and being challenged by them, and together, building each other up so that this community and vision for kinship grows ever larger into abundance.

This moment was the entry point into what would follow for them. But that’s true for Jesus too. Jesus inaugurated his vision with partners, people who were participating into this vision of the Kin-dom of God. Jesus called them into this way of life. Love called them into this way of life.

And so, I wonder, how are you feeling called into this way of life now? How are we experiencing that kind of invitation at this juncture in our lives? How are we experiencing it in our collective life as a community? Where do you sense it? Where do you see it?

I imagine we could all tell stories of calling — moments when we left our nets, so to speak, to move in a deeper direction. Maybe it was a choice to belong more fully, or perhaps it was a recognition that we have come to belong even more deeply than we could have known to choose.

Maybe it involved stepping away from something — from a home, from an addiction, from from a tendency toward cynicism, from a belief that we’re not worth very much, or a belief that our body isn’t the right kind of body, or a belief that our gifts and talents aren’t really worthwhile…

toward community, toward relationship, toward neighborhood, toward calling, toward bravery, toward vitality, toward fullness, toward wholeness, toward the very God who holds it all and calls it all into being.

And so I’ll close in the way I began.

What if it is true?

What if there is a love at the heart of things? A love so large, so expansive, and so abundant that is hard to comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth? A love that is truly hard to wrap our minds around, and yet a love that is an invitation — a love that is summoning us into the fullness of God, the fullness of community, and the fullness of the vision God seeks to initiate and invigorate even through us?

What if that is actually true?

—Renee Roederer

As we began our choir rehearsal, we flipped open to the Agnus Dei. In a bit more than a week, we’re going to perform Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. It’s a powerful, evocative piece.

When we began to sing the unison opening, I was suddenly brought back to a moment I experienced six years ago, and it was a lovely feeling.

At the beginning of 2013, I traveled from our home in Pasadena, California to Austin, Texas to spend two weeks in a doctoral seminar at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This was a return; Austin was also home. We had lived there for five years before moving to Pasadena. I had studied at the seminary previously as well, and after I got my degree, I started working in campus ministry. So many meaningful, long-term relationships came from this period of time, including a big community of students.

During my visit to Austin, I spent a lot of time dreaming about what could be next… Ian was coming close to the end of a three-year postdoctoral position in Pasadena, and we were dreaming up where might move. At the top of our list was Ann Arbor, Michigan.

There was no tangible opportunity for me yet, but Ian thought he could do some significant work at the University of Michigan. I loved my time in Pasadena, but I knew I ultimately wanted to return to working with students. I thought… Wouldn’t Ann Arbor be a great place for that?

One particular day during my 2013 visit to Austin, I spent some time with a handful of former Texas students. Some still lived in Austin, and a couple more drove all the way from Houston so we could all have time together. And frankly, the whole day, I felt so much joy and gratitude to be gathered with them in person.

Then that night, I had some time to myself. I took a walk (goodness, you can do that in January in Texas) listening to music, and after a particular track first came on shuffle, I began to listen to it continuously. It was the Angus Dei movement of the Duruflé Requiem (my favorite Requiem).

And I began to dream about Ann Arbor, Michigan. I began to dream about doing this all over again… I began to imagine that there were other students I could come to know… I began to imagine building community among students in similar ways…

I remember all of this so vividly. I was walking along Guadalupe Street between 27th and 29th streets. I walked those long city blocks multiple times in a loop. I remember exactly which restaurants I passed, dreaming about students I might come to know in Ann Arbor, Michigan should we ever have an opportunity to move there. I remember feeling such love and possibility. I remember feeling like I was preparing myself for something.

This is a memory I’ve cherished for a long time in part because it’s also now true. We did get to move to Ann Arbor later that year. Those students have names now and are very dear to me. And with gratitude, I keep meeting more.

All of this came rushing back into my memory on Monday night when I sang another Agnus Dei with my Ann Arbor choir. It just felt in sync with that singing and dreaming. Right here in Ann Arbor.

–Renee Roederer

My friend Kathryn made this cute little sticker and sent it to me and some other colleagues.

So I offer it as encouragement in whatever direction you need.

You can do the thing!

I’m performing in another show tonight, and I’m really excited.

Those who have known me for a long time, and those who have followed this blog for a long time likely know that comedy is a pretty new endeavor for me. But thanks to a student who first invited me into her improv group and then a local friend who organizes shows several times a year, I am now… from time to time… doing stand-up.

This is not something I’ve expected!

But I really enjoy it. I especially enjoy sharing the stage with wise, hilarious, and brilliant women, and that’s what I’ll be doing tonight. This evening is the sixth Hersay show with comedy, storytelling, and music from women who are incredible performers, including two of the students I’m closest to at the University of Michigan and Eastern Michigan University.

It’s going to be a good time.

And I’m pondering… Could I do a full show sometime…? Thinking up material….

You never know how the people you meet will invite you into endeavors you never quite dreamed up on your own.

–Renee Roederer

Yesterday in Ann Arbor, we had temperatures that included a -45 degree windchill. -45 degrees! That’s almost incomprehensible. It’s just completely outside of our typical experience. It’s also dangerous to people, animals, and infrastructure.

In the final days before we reached these temperatures, I was moved to see community members cultivating care and safety for one another. There were big efforts to ensure ample shelter resources for people experiencing homelessness. Some initiated a very successful and helpful GoFundMe fundraiser to provide hotel rooms to people who have been living in tents throughout the winter so far.

Students from the Michigan Student Power Network launched a petition for the University of Michigan to close and cancel classes on Wednesday and Thursday, arguing that staying open (its nearby counterparts tend to close, but the University of Michigan has only closed twice since 1978) casts disproportionally negative impacts upon students, faculty, and staff with disabilities and low-income status. And the University closed for the third time since 1978.

A number of places opened their spaces as warming centers, including Go Ice Cream in Ypsilanti, whose staff said, “You don’t have to buy anything. We just want you to be safe!” and they offered hot cocoa throughout the day.

This is community care at its best.

I also think… what if community members had not risen to these occasions personally on their own? Would there have been adequate resources in the city? Or adequate attention to people who have vital needs in times like these?

After all, right here throughout this winter, people are living in tents in 20 and 30 degrees. And students with disabilities experience barriers in academia quite frequently. Some street dependent people cannot choose to go to daytime warming centers because they have to make money outside to pay for hotel rooms at night.

There is more to do. More solidarity, more advocacy, and more community care.

This week revealed more of what is needed and more of what is possible.

–Renee Roederer

While walking around this morning, I watched the crows embark from their nightly roost. I enjoyed how they took up the whole space of the sky. There were so many of them, cawing, leaving collectively and moving collectively to wherever they were going.

I immediately thought of this wonderful quote from adrienne maree brown, the author of Emergent Strategy, a phenomenal, imaginative book about collective change. On page 13, she writes,

“There are examples of emergence everywhere.

“Birds don’t make a plan to migrate, raising resources to fund their way, packing for scarce times, mapping out their pit stops. They feel a call in their bodies that they must go, and they follow it, responding to each other, each bringing their adaptations.

“There is an art to flocking: staying separate enough not to crowd each other, aligned enough to maintain a shared direction, and cohesive enough to always move towards each other. (Responding to destiny together). Destiny is a calling that creates a beautify journey.

“Emergence is beyond what the sum of its parts could even imagine.

“A group of caterpillars of nymphs might not see flight in their future, but it’s inevitable.

“It’s destiny.”

As I continued to walk outside, I saw cars moving around town, driven by their people, and I wondered, do we feel connected to one another? I saw students walking around, listening to music on their own phones as I also do so often, and I wondered, do we feel connected to one another?

I thought about several community efforts this week to keep people safe in very harsh weather we’re experiencing (perhaps more about that tomorrow). Some truly work to survive in weather like this. I wonder, do we feel connected to one another?

It’s good to keep pondering and strengthening those connections. The crows were a good reminder.

–Renee Roederer

💜 Every body is a good body. 💜

Every body is a worthy-of-love body.

Every body is a worthy-of-care body.

Every body is a worthy-of-resources body.

Every body is a worthy-of-taking-up-space body.

Every body is a worthy-of-dignity body.

Every body is a worthy-of-connection body.

Every body is a worthy-of-self-expression body.

Every body is a worthy-of-advocacy body.

Every body is a worthy-of-self-determination body.

Every body is a worthy-of-having-needs body.

Every body is a worthy-of-tenderness body.

💜 Every body is a good body. 💜

–Renee Roederer