When I was growing up, all the
Nativity sets I saw had fair-haired figures.
It didn’t start to bother me until I was about nine or ten, the age when
I was exposed to the civil rights movement.
Why, I wondered, did Jesus have golden hair if he was born in the Near
East? I grew highly critical of European
nativities, and then European religious paintings, particularly when they were
clad in what was contemporary clothing for that time. How dare Michelangelo depict God as an old
white man, I wondered?
But as I grew as a person and as
a Christian, I understood that I was looking at things all wrong. I think what that helped me understand was a
set of Chinese silk paintings I bought at a yard sale. They were religious in nature, and one
depicted the Holy Family. There, with
Chinese faces, dressed in traditional Chinese dress, were Mary, Joseph and Baby
Jesus, adorned with halos and surrounded by tiny winged Chinese angels.
And then I remembered my small
creche from Mexico, with its traditional Meso-American painting, animals and
figures, and my carved creche from Africa, with its native figures and
animals. Every culture looked at Jesus
and the Holy Family as belonging to them.
In a way, this is good. God is
accessible. When you are in a homogenous
culture, God is inclusive. But when you
live in a modern, heterogeneous culture, this can be dangerous.
The writer Anne Lamott wrote,
"You can safely assume you've created God in your image when it turns out
that God hates all the same people you do," and modern culture and faith
traditions have certainly used God as a way to determine who is good and who is
bad. Anyone not like you in terms of
race, faith, income, ancestry, appearance, or other arbitrary factor is therefore
not like God, and therefore open to neglect or mistreatment.
Since Biblical times people with
disabilities have been seen as something “less.” When Jesus was presented with a man who was
born blind, the apostles asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his
parents, that he was born blind?” John 9:2 The mentally ill were “demoniacs,” who lived among the tombs. Matthew 8:28
I love the author James
McBride’s sharing of his mother’s description of God. McBride’s father was black, his mother an
Orthodox Jew who converted to Christianity.
God, she declared, is “the color of water.” God, I believe, is also sighted, blind,
hearing, deaf, able-bodied and uses a wheelchair, developmentally disabled,
places on the autism spectrum and is mentally gifted. God looks after each of us, and looks like
each of us. God has no ethnicity, and is
every ethnicity. If we truly believe we
are made in God’s image, and God makes no mistakes, then God is a gloriously
diverse God, with gloriously diverse dis-capacities, as the word translates from
Spanish. And aren’t we blessed to have
such a God on our side?
Prayer update from Terry McDorman of the Northern Illinois conference
Accessibility Ministries committee regarding the effectiveness of their
November accessibility conference: “Since the Conference, I have nine request for teams to go
out and meet with Boards of Trustees to do audits and assist them in setting
visions and goals to make their church buildings as accessible as possible. I
have also received numerous inquiries regarding personal hearing devices, large
print materials and similar items. We even have a request for the architect
that was at the event to design a new church that is accessible. So, God
was working that day.”
Praise indeed! Please remember you can submit your prayer
requests, or your praises. We are a
mighty force when we work together.
Dear God, We thank you that we are fiercely and
wonderfully made in your image. Remind
us that we are yours, that we are never alone, and that when we step or roll
out in faith to do you work, we will be successful. We might be just the sowers of seeds, but we
trust you that they will find fertile soil and bloom. Thank you for choosing us and using us. In the name of Christ, the Master Gardener,
Amen.
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