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What Can Ezekiel’s Call Teach the Church about Disability?

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The following is a blog post that I crafted for my Disability & Anglican Ecclesiology Class. In this post, I aim to read Ezekiel 2:1-3:4 from the lens of disability and show how this passage can serve as an encouragement for disability advocacy work within the church today.

What can the prophet Ezekiel speak to us about the theme of disability? Well, this is the very question that I look to answering today. But before we get to that, we need to cover some brief history necessary for understanding the person of Ezekiel.

Ezekiel lived during some turbulent times. He prophesied during the years 587-571. This is notable because in 587, Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar. Before God called him to be a prophet, in 597 he and a bunch of other people from Jerusalem went into exile.[1]

Exile is a common theme throughout the Bible. When we meet the Hebrew people in the book of Genesis, we meet them as nomadic people. At the end of Genesis, the Hebrew people settle in the land of Egypt under a deal that Jacob made with Pharoah. They experience a short period of prosperity living in Egypt, but after that Pharoah dies, a new Pharoah rises and puts the people to work as slaves. The people cry out to God and after a series of 10 plagues, Pharoah chases the people out of the land of Egypt only for them to wander for 40 years in the wilderness. The Hebrew people eventually establish their own kingdom called Israel but that only lasted so long before it splits into two. The two halves of the Kingdom, Israel to the north and Judah to the south operate as two independent entities with their own rulers for a period. Israel is the first to be conquered by the Assyrians in 720. Judah is conquered in 586, which brings us up to where our passage is today.

Amid a conquered people, the LORD calls out Ezekiel as a prophet. This initial calling was not merely one of words but a prophetic vision. In the opening of the book, we see that Ezekiel was at the River Chebar when the hand of the LORD was on him and he experienced a vision (Ezek 1:2). After seeing the vision, Ezekiel does not know what to make of it. The vision came from the north with stormy clouds and within these stormy clouds were four different living creatures. They are described as being in human form but with four distinct faces: the first a face of a human, the second of a lion, the third of an ox, and the fourth of an eagle. Ezekiel did not know what to think of this sight. He experienced sensory overload. All he could do was fall on his face for he knew that he experienced “the appearance of the likeness of the living God” (Ezek 1:28). 

It is at this moment that God speaks directly to Ezekiel. Keep in mind that these words that Ezekiel hears directly follow the vision that he had seen. In this vision. The LORD became manifest to Ezekiel in ways that Ezekiel could not fully understand at the time of the vision and these words are his best attempt to explain. In Ezekiel 2:1-3:4 we read:

2:1 He said to me: “O mortal, stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you.”2 And when he spoke to me, a spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard him speaking to me. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day. 4 The descendants are impudent and stubborn. I am sending you to them, and you shall say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God.’ 5 Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.6 And you, O mortal, do not be afraid of them, and do not be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns surround you and you live among scorpions; do not be afraid of their words, and do not be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. 7 You shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear, for they are a rebellious house.

8 “But you, mortal, hear what I say to you; do not be rebellious like that rebellious house; open your mouth and eat what I give you.” 9 I looked, and a hand was stretched out to me, and a written scroll was in it. 10 He spread it before me; it had writing on the front and on the back, and written on it were words of lamentation and mourning and woe.

3:1 He said to me, “O mortal, eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.” 2 So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. 3 He said to me, “Mortal, eat this scroll that I give you and fill your stomach with it.” Then I ate it, and in my mouth it was as sweet as honey.

            Ezekiel 2:1-3:4 (NRSVUE)

Contained in this passage, there are a few elements I want to highlight as having relevance to disability theology. In 2:1, we see that the Spirit of the LORD enters Ezekiel and sets him on his feet. In this, the LORD spoke to Ezekiel in an embodied way. There was something notable about Ezekiel’s physical position before the LORD spoke to him. Also, notice how it is the LORD who set Ezekiel on his feet, it was not an action that Ezekiel did of his own volition. In 2:1, the word of the LORD called Ezekiel to stand upon his feet but in 2:2, the spirit is the agent that causes Ezekiel to stand. In sum, Ezekiel did not initiate the act of standing of his own volition.

One thing that I learned from a class about the Midrashic interpretation of Scripture is to read in the white spaces, or rather to read in between the letters of Scripture. Put a little differently, what is not explicitly written in Scripture is just as important as the words that are written. Appling the Midrashic principle to this passage, I wonder why the spirit of the LORD was the agent that set Ezekiel on his feet. Might it be that Ezekiel was so caught up in the vision from the first chapter that he could hardly know what was going on around him? It is not uncommon for people to become so overwhelmed that they have trouble with ordinary functions of life. I know that I have. Something was blocking Ezekiel from carrying out the bodily functions that are so often considered normative in many societies.

So, how then can we interpret the LORD setting Ezekiel on his feet considering a disability reading of Scripture?

I see the LORD as guiding the church as it navigates structures of disability within society, but often we need a different vantage point to see or hear things clearly. [2] Sometimes new vantage point involves a physical change in location while other times this move is more metaphorical. Additionally, this movement does not have to be mutually inclusive, involving both physical and metaphorical shifts. As people, we tend to want to surround ourselves with those who are like us. Intrinsically, this is not a bad thing. There are times when what we need is to be supported by a like-minded community. However, we also need to be aware of the ways that surrounding ourselves with only similar people can be a detriment to the community. We ought to act in ways that are in the best interest of the community, not our own. In The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Act of Communal Worship, Rebecca Spurrier explores the various aspects of Christian liturgy within church communities. Spurrier offers the following thesis:

Christian liturgy embodies consensual, nonviolent relationships that rehearse a Christian response to an encounter with the creative beauty of divine love, which makes possible belonging to a community through and across difference.[3]

Often, we do not even know where to start to engage with people who are different than us and desperately need Christian liturgy to help shape our inward thoughts and desires. We need an external force to help us experience the world in a way that is greater than ourselves. This passage serves as an encouragement that by the Spirit of the LORD, God can and will move us to give us a different vantage point.

Once Ezekiel can experience his surroundings from a different vantage point, his ears are receptive to the LORD’s message. This message involves sending Ezekiel to a nation of rebels, a people that have transgressed against the LORD. Based on what these people have done, they probably not going to listen, but for some reason, the LORD still decides to send Ezekiel on this seemingly impossible mission. There is a presumption that the people will not listen to Ezekiel and yet the LORD calls Ezekiel to go out and speak to them anyway. The reason the LORD provides for doing this is so that “they should know that there has been a prophet among them” (Ezek 2:5). Within this community, there is something significant associated with having a prophet in their midst. In The Prophetic Imagination, Old Testament scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann asserts that “the task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”[4] For Abraham J. Heschel in his work, The Prophets, “prophecy is not simply the application of timeless standards to particular situations, but rather an interpretation of a particular moment in history, a divine understanding of a human situation. Prophecy, then may be described as exegesis of existence from a divine perspective.”[5] Heschel goes on to assert that “the life of a prophet is not futile. People may remain deaf to a prophet’s admonitions; they cannot remain callous to a prophet’s existence.”[6] In applying the biblical perspective of prophecy to Ezekiel, it does not matter if Israel listens to him. According to both Brueggemann and Heschel, that is not the point of a prophet. All that really matters is his presence within the community regardless of if they choose to listen.

So, how can we apply the task of prophetic ministry when approaching topics of disability in our world today?

As the church, we are called to advocate for the poor and marginalized of society. We are called to advocate for the vision of dignity and justice for all people regardless of one’s ability. In this advocacy work, there will be people who hold power and authority that desire to maintain the status quo. A way to break through this status quo is by the themes of lament. When the LORD gave Ezekiel the scroll, written on it “were words of lamentation and mourning and woe” (Ezek 2:10). In analyzing themes of disability from a biblical perspective, Amos Young, author of The Bible, Disability, and the Church, asserts that “lament has to do with naming the social stereotypes that burden people with disabilities and exclude them from life’s amenities in various ways.”[7] When initially engaging with issues of systematic injustice, we can often feel so overwhelmed that we do not know where to start. These feelings are valid. The tool of lamentation allows us to safely express our own pain and the pain felt by other people in this world. Through the act of lament, the pain present amongst individual members of the community becomes shared with the community at large. Through lament, issues of injustice become a shared communal endeavor and no single person is looked to bear the pain all on their own.

In the last part of our passage, we see how facing injustice is a central and enduring theme of the prophetic tradition. The LORD records this message that Ezekiel had just heard on a scroll and then precedes to tell Ezekiel to eat this scroll. By doing so, this initial word that the LORD gives Ezekiel is memorialized for his ministry to come. By eating the scroll, Ezekiel engages multiple senses in memorializing his prophetic call. This prophetic call does not come in one ear and out the other, but this call is internalized within his bowels. After Ezekiel ate the scroll, he described it as something that “was as sweet as honey” (Ezek 3:3). This call that the LORD called Ezekiel upon was one that would be very difficult. There would be days of very trying times soon to come, but at this moment, the call was as sweet as honey. Just after a taste of the scroll, Ezekiel knew that there would be nothing else he could do.

Our pursuit for justice and equity for all people ought not to be done out of a dutiful obligation to the LORD. If that is where your heart is right now, stop what you are doing and first get your heart right. Rather, our fight for justice should be done out of genuine love for God and the people we are serving. If we look at Ezekiel, we notice that within his prophetic work, he was prophesying to his own community. Likewise, when working for justice, we ought to be motivated by a genuine love for our community.

In this call for justice, let us end with a prayer.

Almighty God, who looks at us through the lens of love, we pray that you would enable us to love one another through our thoughts, words, and deeds.[8] Use us as your instruments of love to the world around us. Open the eyes of our hearts to the injustice of living in ableist societies and give us the imagination to dream of how we can fight for a more just society shaped by your love. We pray this in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 

[1] David L. Peterson, “Intoduction to Ezekiel,” in The HarperCollins Study Bible : New Revised Standard Version, including the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books with concordance, ed. Harold W. Attridge et al., The HarperCollins Study Bible (San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco., 2006), 1096.

[2] Sarah Jean Barton, Becoming the baptized body : disability and the practice of Christian community, 22, https://login.proxy.lib.duke.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=3356901.

Barton draws from the work of Jill Harshaw in arguing “without robust connections to core church practices, theological accounts of disability, even those rooted in distinctively Christian accounts of the imago Dei, friendship, and inclusion, largely fail to support transformation of churches’ lived practices.” In this Barton shows the that it is curtail for churches to have a multi-faceted approach to disability in a way that is rooted in core church practices and the church’s tradition.

This paper aims to draw from this multifaceted approach, especially in terms of the usage of inclusive language. It should be of note that this passage, and for that matter this paper, uses a lot of sensory language to describe the relationship between God and Ezekiel. I want to acknowledge that an emphasis on a single sense has the potential to be ableist and inclusive. Therefore, I will pay close attention to the verity of senses (sight, sound, touch, taste) to describe the relationship between God and Ezekiel.

[3] Rebecca F. Spurrier, The disabled church : human difference and the art of communal worship, First edition. ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 17.

[4] Walter Brueggemann, The prophetic imagination (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis, MN : Fortress Press, 2018), 2.

[5] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, 1st Perennial classics ed., Perennial classics, (New York: Perennial, 2001), xxvii.

[6] Heschel, The Prophets, 22.

[7] Amos Yong, The Bible, disability, and the church : a new vision of the people of God (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011), 45.

[8] Book of Common Prayer,  (Huntington Beach: Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019), 57.

The phrasing “though our thoughts, words, and deeds” is adapted from the Confession of sin in the Compline Rite of the BCP. In this rite, the person is confessing the things they have failed to do in the day leading up to the prayer. The collect at the end of this post is intended to remind readers of the prayer before bed and account for the actions they carry out through the course of their day.

References:

All scripture references are taken from the New Revised Standard Updated Version (NRSVUE)

Barton, Sarah Jean. Becoming the Baptized Body : Disability and the Practice of Christian Community. https://login.proxy.lib.duke.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=3356901.

Book of Common Prayer. Huntington Beach: Anglican Liturgy Press, 2019.

Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis, MN : Fortress Press, 2018.

Heschel, Abraham Joshua. The Prophets. Perennial Classics. 1st Perennial classics ed. New York: Perennial, 2001.

Peterson, David L. “Intoduction to Ezekiel.” In The Harpercollins Study Bible : New Revised Standard Version, Including the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books with Concordance, edited by Harold W. Attridge, Wayne A. Meeks, Jouette M. Bassler and Literature Society of Biblical. The Harpercollins Study Bible, 1096-98. San Francisco, Calif.: HarperSanFrancisco., 2006.

Spurrier, Rebecca F. The Disabled Church : Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship. First edition. ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.

Yong, Amos. The Bible, Disability, and the Church : A New Vision of the People of God. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011.

Genesis for Normal People Book Study

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Genesis-for-Normal-People

Do you want to better understand the book of Genesis? If so, this study is for you. We will be using the book Genesis for Normal People by Pete Enns & Jared Byas to walk through the various themes of Genesis. In each session, we will walk through the discussion questions in the back of the book. The interactive study will be held on June 24 – July 22 at 3:30 PST / 6:30 EST via a virtual format on Zoom. To register, please use the link below. If you missed a session or are visiting after the class has ended, the session recordings can be accessed below.

Register Now

Previous Sessions

Session 1 (Infomercial & Chapter 1)

Session 2 (Chapters 2-3)

Session 3 (Chapters 4-5)

Session 4 (Chapters 6-7)

I Want It Now

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This is my first blog post. I have been wanting to do something like this for a while, but I made up a ton of reasons why this was not the right time or that I was simply not qualified to produce something that would make me proud. Then I started to think that I have to start somewhere so why not here.

That being said, allow me to get into the topic at hand.

I recently graduated from Life Pacific with my Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Studies. I am extremely proud of this achievement. While I was in high school, all I wanted to be was a pastor and I wanted to get there the quickest way possible. Within my faith tradition, ministers do not have to have any formal higher education, so I had plans to do a few internships and then get a job at a church. Although this was my plan, God had others and I am so glad I did. Even though I was resistant, I got my bachelor’s, and this was the best choice I have ever made. I realized that I love education so much that I was crazy enough to enroll at Duke Divinity School for my M.Div this fall.

Dispite all of this, but I have a voice in the back of my head that I need to get my life started. I l look around me to see many of my friends getting jobs in their field right after their undergraduate. Although this could have been me, I know this is not the path for my life. I recognize the extraordinary dreams that I have but in order for me to carry out these dreams, further education is a requirement and one that I would rather do earlier than later. My main issue is I want things to happen faster than they are, but to my dismay life rarely works that way.

As I reflect on the biblical narrative, I am starting to notice that things rarely happen in people’s timeframe. This point is made clear in the lives of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. These two characters were used powerfully by God but their “biblical contribution” for lack of a better term did not come in until later on in their life. We look at each of them for what they have done but for this blog post, I would like to analyze each of their formation process leading up to their achievement.

Abram, otherwise known as Abraham, is the son of Terah (Gen 11:27). At the beginning of his life, he took Abram from the land of Ur into the land of Canaan (11:31). It is here where Abram lived with his father until God gave him other plans. At the age of 75, God gives Abraham a promise that he will make Abraham into a great nation (Gen 12:2 cf 4). Before this promise is given, the information given related to Abraham is relatively sparse. All we are his father and his homeland, that is it.

There is a bit more information relating to the early life of Moses and the Israelite’s exile from Egypt. Whereas Abraham’s narrative only takes up a portion of Genesis, Moses is involved with the whole rest of the Pentateuch. Like Abraham’s journey, Moses starts at his birth but with him, we get a little bit more details. Moses was born to a Hebrew woman who gave him up to live in the house of Pharaoh due to the persecution of the Hebrew people (Ex 2:1-10). As he grew up, he began to see what was happening to the Hebrews and eventually kills an Egyptians that was beating one of the Hebrews (Ex 2:11). To avoid his own death from Pharaoh, Moses went to the land of Midian (Ex 2:11) where he took a wife and bore a child (Ex 2:21-22). During this time Moses was the keeper of his father-in-law’s flock in the land of Midian. It is not until God appears to Moses in the burning bush that he receives the call to lead the Hebrew people out of the land of Egypt (Ex 3:10). By that time, Moses was relatively advanced in years, but this is when his public “ministry” starts, although the Old Testament does not describe it in those terms.

Even Jesus was not immune to this length of preparation that is seen with Abraham and Moses. We do not have an abundance of information about his early years but even with what we do have it is apparent that he was something special. From his birth, an angel prophesied that he “will save his people from their sins” (Mt 1:21). Even at a young age, his teaching amazed all who had heard him (Lk 2:46-47). Despite his giftedness and anointing, Jesus did not start his ministry until his baptism at the age of 30.

All three characters were used mightily by God but had a waiting period in their life. In the case of Abraham and Moses, I do not think that they even were in this waiting period. They were simply living their life the best they could when God intervened. This intervention entirely changed the course of their life as well as the course of religious history. With Jesus, I would like to think he could start his ministry whenever he wanted and yet even, he waited until the time was right. The details of all three of their waiting periods are relatively sparse but I would like to think that this time prepared them for the instrumental change they would eventually have.

Today I want to encourage you that your waiting period is your time of preparation, even if you may not know the end goal. For many of us, this waiting period is longer than expected. This is especially true within this global pandemic that we are now facing. Many people have lost their jobs or at the very least have given up the plans for this year that they once had. No matter where you may find yourself, be encouraged that there is something great coming up. It may seem far away right now, but it will come closer than you know. You are not alone and I am right there with you. As you can see in scripture, there are generations before you with the same type of experience.