(The following sermon was preached on World Communion Sunday many years ago. For the blog I had to update the statistics regarding L’Arche. Jean Vanier is now ninety years old and still lives within the L’Arche community he founded fifty-five years ago.)
One of the greatest saints living today is Jean Vanier. Vanier is the founder of L’Arche. His movement started in 1964 when he invited two men (Raphael Simi and Phillippe Seux) with severe developmental disabilities to leave the institution in which they had been living and to join him in becoming a community of shared love and care. Vanier chose a house in Trosly-Brueil, France to be their new home. To Vanier’s astonishment, the movement began to spread. This was never his expectation. He simply wanted to live out his discipleship with those who had been marginalized and forgotten. Young people heard of what Vanier was doing and asked how they could become a part of this movement. Today there are 154 communities in 38 countries on all five continents. The movement includes over 10,000 members who seek to live in the spirit of the Beatitudes found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
Vanier tells of a retreat held by the community he is a part of in the north of France. At one point during the retreat the group was discussing the passage from Revelation (Rev. 3:20) where Jesus knocks at the door and promises to dine with whoever opens the door. One participant in the discussion, a very simple man named Paul with extreme handicaps, said, “I know what I’ll eat when Jesus comes to dine with me. We’ll have pancakes. We’ll have muffins.” And then he said, “And Jesus will say something. He’ll take me in his arms and he’ll say, ‘You are my beloved child.’”
All of us need to hear these words and to be held in such loving arms. All of us are wounded, disabled, and handicapped in some way. And we can all be discounted in some manner or another in and by this world. But there are those who are acute victims of marginalization and disenfranchisement. For example, the mentally and physically challenged are often valued far less than the more “productive” members within our society. In a world sold on competition, power, and status, there is not much of a place for Paul and his kind. And there is less and less place for us as we, for various reasons, become less “productive” in our world. We all have witnessed people who overnight find themselves robbed of their health, mental faculties, or emotional wellbeing. It is devastatingly shocking how a stroke, heart attack, car accident, and extreme forms of abuse can make even the strongest and most “productive” member of society feel undervalued. I once knew a pharmacist who had no use or patience with those less fortunate or even those who were physically and emotionally vulnerable. He bragged that he had “pulled myself up by my bootstraps” and that anyone else could do the same. He claimed he was not responsible for the “useless, weak, and lazy” people in our society. One day he and his wife, who shared his perspective, were involved in a car accident. The pharmacist was blinded by the accident. What do you do with a blind pharmacist? He learned overnight how quickly one could go from wrongly and arrogantly believing that he was self-made and self-sufficient to becoming totally dependent on those around him. The brutal truth is that we are all one heartbeat away from marginalization and disenfranchisement.
If, however, we can see Jesus dining with Paul, holding him in tender arms and calling him his beloved child, perhaps we can gain some deep insight into the nature of this God who chooses “the weak and foolish” from the perspective of the world to reveal the scope and character of our salvation. And perhaps we can come to believe deep down where we are wounded and bereft that we too are worthy of divine company at our tables, being held by tender arms of love and hearing those words, “You are my beloved child”—words which can bear us on the wings of love to heights of peace and belonging as we reach our potential as sons and daughters of the Living God.
Who is the “Paul” who can reveal to you the smiling face of Jesus? What wounds and handicaps do you have which can be touched by the healing and loving presence of Christ? And do you really know that God is revealed in the wounds of this world—even in your wounds?
[I would invite you after reading this sermon to read I Corinthians 1:18-31. This is one of the most amazing passages in the New Testament. The church in Corinth had within it people who arrogantly claimed they were more spiritual than other Christians. The wealthy and intelligent in the church were taking advantage of and looking down on those whom they judged as poor, ignorant, and insignificant. Paul reminds them that the “weakness and foolishness of God” witnessed in the cross is stronger and wiser than all their strength and wisdom. And it is because of God’s “weakness and foolishness” that they have been chosen and affirmed. Paul writes, “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” If you are like I am, you will have to read this passage many times before all of the profundity of these words sinks in and touches your heart.]
