Welcome to Family Matters: Fully Human Edition. This is Melanie DiStefano. This is a reflection entitled, “Inclusion: Is There Anything New Under the Sun?”

When I was a student in seminary, one of my Old Testament professors, Fr. Tarazi, had a catchphrase that he liked to say every chance he got. “There is nothing new under the sun,” his voice would boom, usually talking about an Old Testament prophet and that prophet’s teaching to the people of that day regarding their wayward attitude toward God and the life that he was calling them to and repentance.

Back then I was an idealistic young woman who had just been set free from a prison of falsehoods that had, frankly, been a compass for most of my teen and early adult life. I was newly on fire for Jesus Christ, who had found me, cleaned me up, and set me on a new, hope-filled path, unlike anything I could ever have dreamed possible. And so every time Fr. Tarazi said, “There is nothing new under the sun,” I internally cringed. It felt like an assault to this new life I had found, this truth, this way that I had been found by, an assault to my very Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who I knew with all my heart could make all things new, who was so good and beautiful and holy that it was inconceivable that his coming in the flesh was not the one thing new under the sun that would change everything under the sun.

What I didn’t have the maturity to accept at that time was that repentance was to be a long and quite painful process that largely depended on my own willingness to align myself to his will and how utterly stubborn and deeply rooted were the lies that I held as truths and which dictated much of my actions and decisions, even in very subtle and subconscious ways. Now, 20 years later and hopefully not coming from a place of cynicism, I often find myself lamenting at my own lack of repentance and humanity’s collective lostness, using Fr. Tarazi’s very words: “There is nothing new under the sun,” or so it seems.

One of the ways I see very little change from biblical times centers around the issue of inclusion of people with disabilities in worship and faith community life. Are we really so different from the people of Jesus’ time? Have we learned or grown even a tiny bit more like him over the centuries? Frankly, it feels as if the answer is: There really is nothing new under the sun. Just like we read of in many Gospel stories, sometimes we revert to warped and ancient perspectives about sin and physical maladies and attribute disability to the sin of the person who has the disability or that person’s parents or to some type of curse from God. And sometimes we humans, on the other hand, love people so very much that we are willing to break down walls—or roofs—in order to bring people with disabilities into Christ’s midst. It all hinges on our willing response to answer God’s call to repentance.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” was the cry of all the prophets, including St. John the Forerunner, and among the first of Christ’s public teaching exhortations. So we know God’s glorious kingdom is at hand. It is that close to us. It is so close that it is within our reach. If we choose to follow his lead, we can touch it.

When the blind man, Bartimaeus, heard reports of Jesus passing by, he started to get excited and call out for Jesus: “Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” The knee-jerk response of some of Jesus’ even close disciples was to try to quiet him. They shushed him! But he didn’t care. He cried out louder: “Lord Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Fast-forward to our modern, 21st-century church services, and we will likely find instances in every parish across the world wherein both typically developing and atypically developing children are scolded with scornful shushes and scowled at with irritated stares from among the “faithful people” present.

Have we considered that these little ones might just be crying out for Jesus in the only ways they are able to do so? Of course, we can gently encourage and teach appropriate behavior and etiquette in church services, and we are called to model it, but we just might scare away families who are already sensitive to behavioral differences, and make it even more unpleasant for them to fight the battle of exhaustion to attend a church service, because why in the world would anyone run to a setting in which they are made to feel ashamed?

What can we do to make sure there is something new under the sun? We can repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. When the blind man was healed in the Pool of Siloam after Jesus formed new eyes for him out of clay, instead of rejoicing that a fellow human being had received such an amazing gift, the leaders of the established people of God interrogated this man. And when they didn’t like that he pointed to Jesus Christ as the healer and, through the power of the Holy Spirit, proclaimed Jesus to be a righteous man, they said, “You were born in sins, and you are teaching us?”

How have things stayed the same with today’s people of God? They have stayed the same through the mindset that persists to this day, that a person’s parents must have sinned greatly or the person himself must be guilty of something to have received a physiological illness. This plays out mostly in our secret hearts, but it will come out in our attitude towards families with disabilities, even if we don’t realize it. This happens when we look at people who have a disability with condescension, and we do not expect that they can teach us anything new or true about God.

What can we do to make sure we allow God’s newness of life to be present under the sun? We can repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. When four loving and faith-filled friends cut open a hole in the roof of a house in which Jesus was preaching because they had no other way to bring their paralyzed friend into his midst because of the crowd. They served as an example of the fact that something new was stirring under the sun. They had a new hope in this new Person, Jesus Christ, that he would love their friend as much as he loved anyone else.

Today I see those few faith-filled and loving friends in every community, doing their part to break down the barriers of separation, toiling, and thinking outside the box in order to open up innovative ways for people with disabilities to become full members and participants in Christ’s body. If we examine ourselves and find that we are not among those few door- or roof-openers, the same call that was under the sun back then rings out today for our ears to hear: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”