“Blessed Are We” based on Social Principle on “People with Disabilities” & Matt. 5:12

I was a very happy camper, I mean this literally. I really loved going to camp. Well, I really loved going to my local United Methodist Church Camp. I found other camps suspect, and usually thought they did it wrong. I was an awkward kid who struggled socially in school and church camp was the place beyond my home that I was welcomed, loved, and celebrated for who I was! I wasn’t asked to be different. Awkward was OK! At camp, as I experienced it, I was ok.

Which means that I thought that church camp was the best place on earth and church camp staff were the coolest people on earth. [Giggle.] I’m not sure why I’m using the past tense, I may not be a kid anymore but I still love my church camp with my whole being, and I still think camp staff people are AMAZING although I guess I have changed a little. I now think campers are the coolest people on earth.

When I was finishing High School I applied to work on camp staff and to my utter and complete amazement I was hired and got to be a camp counselor and I loved it SO HARD. Then I got to run the counselor in training program (which at Sky Lake we call SNAP for Special Needs Assistant Personnel) and it turned out I loved that just as hard.

I had thought I’d spend time with kids, taking them swimming and taking walks in the woods, and playing silly games. Sometimes I did! But it turned out that Sky Lake has a number of camps for people with disabilities, and I was mostly assigned to them and … well, that’s one of the best things that has ever happened in my life. I mean it, up there with finding my spouse, being a parent, and getting to be a pastor.

To be clear, since “disability” is an incredibly wide ranging description, our “Special Needs” campers at Sky Lake are people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. (At least most of the time, few of the campers who come to the camp for those with physical disabilities do not have intellectual disabilities.) And, it should be said, people with disabilities, including those with intellectual disabilities, are a diverse group of people with their own personalities, preferences, pet peeves, and… well, humanity. Broad strokes rarely apply to this group, as a whole people with intellectual disabilities are more diverse than any other group I can think of.

And, at the same time, the experience of working with people with disabilities is profound gift in my life. This, if we’re honest, is about ME even more than it is about the campers. Our campers who are people with special needs are the best teachers I’ve ever had, are some of the longest running relationships in my life, and are sources of pure joy and delight. Without them I would not be who I am, and I would know so much less joy.

When I read the Beatitudes as part of Worship planning, I was trying to find ways to fit together the scriptures and the Social Principles. I was then asking “what Social Principle fits best with the Beatitudes?” and it is my personal bias in life that landed on the answer “People with Disabilities.” Here in the United States with live in unfettered capitalism which is a profoundly broken system that exists at odds with our faith. It is a system of universal competition where people are seen to have value because of what they have and not because they are. It is a system where humanity is secondary profits. It is a system where some people matter and some do it.

Unfettered capitalism doesn’t value people with disabilities. Maybe, sometimes, those of us with vision impairment that can be resolved with glasses can sneak by without much devaluing but most of the time any ways that people are different or any ways that people struggle are seen as LESS THAN.

This is profoundly at odds with the values of the kindom of God where every person is made and beloved by God as they are and where differences are valued and celebrated. It is also profoundly at odds with my life. The Beatitudes invert the values of the world and claim the values of the kindom. The world devalues poor people, honestly in the time of Jesus and today people who live in poverty die younger and struggle more. But God knows that people who live in poverty are blessed and important, loved and gifted, valued beyond measure.

The world devalues meek people, because it values the sort of strength that is the power of violence and obedience. But the kindom of God knows that the meek among us are the ones that offer the best care, the ones on whom the fabric of society depends, the wisest of all. The kindom of God knows that it is the powers of love and relationship that really matter, and where strength really lies.

Similarly, the world devalues peacemakers. War is profitable and fighting over resources is our global norm. But peacemakers live the values of the kindom, caring about all members of the community and seeking win wins and breaking down barriers and letting love shine through.

Within all the inversions of the Beatitudes, I hear the unspoken one “Blessed are those with disabilities, for they know true wisdom and true strength.” When people are dismissed because of their disabilities, there is not only damage done to the one who is dismissed. The whole body that doesn’t get to receive their gifts is damaged by missing out on them.

OK, so this has been a little bit vague so far, and I want to bring it into a more concrete story. The first week I was a camp counselor, when I was green and basically useless, I was assigned to a camp for people with physical disabilities, most of whom also had intellectual disabilities. It was a camp where most of our campers were in wheelchairs, and the pace of camp was SLOW. One of the campers was a man named George who started attending camp in 1973, meaning by the time I showed up on staff in 1999 he had 26 years of camp under his belt.

George was dangerously fond of flirting and women, going so far as to write plays where he saved damsels in distress so that in acting out the play women would give him kisses on the cheek in gratitude. He lived for his one week at camp a year, spending the rest of the year buying treats he could give away during camp. He particularly enjoyed giving out nerds candy because it was a treat and an insult wrapped in one.

George liked to tell jokes but had a really severe life-long speech impediment. So, he wrote down his favorite puns on pieces of cardboard – the joke on one side and the punchline on the other and when he wanted to tell someone jokes they’d be responsible for reading them out-loud and then laughing at them. The jokes remained the same day after day and year after year, so for some of us they got fairly familiar. One of George’s favorite moments of his life was when one of the staff members pretended to laugh so hard at his joke cards that he had to run off to pee before there was a problem. That individual had read them about a hundred times before.

The thing that always amazed me most about George was his patience. One time we were practicing one of his places in preparation for the camp talent show and another counselor asked George if he would like some lemonade. George replied, “spleetd.” Fifteen minutes later, and after several attempts at spelling the word for us (he could spell beautifully but his speech impediments made it hard for us to even understand the letters he spelled) we were still lost. Finally, we realized that he was asking us if the lemonade was spiked. He stayed with us, speaking and spelling and trying to be understood for 15 minutes in order to make a joke about whether or not the lemonade was spiked.

I’ve often thought about that moment, and what I might have been like in his shoes. I imagine feeling so frustrated. I imagine giving up. I imagine deciding my joke wasn’t so funny and wasn’t worth the effort. I imagine crying and screaming and shutting down. But George cared about us enough to keep trying to help us understand, and that is a gift I’ll aways be grateful for even if the joke wasn’t THAT good.

In addition to spending 51 weeks a year buying treats to give away, George spent those weeks writing letters to camp staff. He wrote on legal paper, with ¼ inch margins, single spaced, on a type-writer. He put them in envelopes marked S.W.A.K for “Sealed with a Kiss” and they were a godsend for understanding him more than I ever could from spoken conversations. He’d write about friends and family, about trying to cheer people up, about favorite memories – usually of camp- about the stupidity of racism, about his frustration with his body’s decreasing capacities. He also wrote about frustration with a time that someone at camp washed his clothes without asking his permission, which was a fabulous reminder to me about the importance of consent.

He’d send holiday cards, and track my schedule. He liked to call on holidays too, there were a lot of calls on Christmas morning where he’d play his favorite Christmas song “Grandma got run over by a Reindeer.” This was back in the day, so my immediate family also had to learn to interpret his speech well enough to figure out that they should pass the phone to me.

I spent 5 weeks with George in my life, and he died 20 years ago. I think about him constantly and talk about him regularly. His love, his humor, his passion, and his willingness to show me his interior life was a huge part of breaking me free to see the full and wonderful humanity of people with disabilities. He broke my heart wide open.

I struggle to put words to the degree to which my campers matter in my life. Everything I can say sounds too weak or too cliché. I’ve already said that I believe that people with disabilities are blessed. But truthfully I believe that any of us whose lives are touched by people with disabilities are blessed. Blessed are we who get to spend any part of our lives with those who have disabilities, we will never be the same again.

So, if you want to see the kindom of God at play, if you want to experience blessings you never knew you needed, if you want to laugh harder than you thought possible… talk to me at camp. And, I should say clearly again, United Methodist Church Camp also exists for neurotypical kids and they’re great too. The kids and the camps 😉

But, mostly, dear ones, thank God for the differences among us and the ways those differences bless our lives. Amen