12: A Threatening Offer: Flawed Creation
Forming Habits. Two stories of people dealing with serious health and disability issues and the common habits they formed.
Accepting and Blocking. Different means of blocking the situation.
Assessing Status. Four status issues.
- Whose story is it?
- Needy children are a subtle critique of society. Akin to fool for Christ.
- Needy children are a microscope through which the rest of society is explicitly judged.
- The story could not be told without these needy people.
Questioning Givens. Three givens:
- Suffering and evil have in large part been eradicated.
- Optimism of medicine colors how we think .
- Goal of care for the needy is “normality.”
Incorporating Gifts. Three kinds of overaccepting.
- Struggle is part of the larger struggle of humanity with life and with God.
- Experience must be actively received.
- The most needy people redefine out whole understanding of God.
Reincorporating the Lost. “In conclusion the final unity of the severely mentally disabled and the “able-bodied” is an eschatological one, portrayed perhaps in the relation of the gerim to the Israelites in the Old Testament. The gerim were sojourners or resident aliens who could not be integrated into society. In other words the analogy for the mentally disabled is not the poor or marginalized, for there is no question of full integration. The analogy is of the sojourner, who always reminds the Israelite that once the Israelites were sojourners in Egypt. Part of the experience of the able-bodied is that, in the land of the mentally disabled, they too feel like resident aliens. And in the language of the New Testament, the whole people of God are gerim, longing for their homecoming in heaven.”
Excerpt From: Samuel Wells. “Improvisation.” iBooks. https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/improvisation/id473939687?mt=11