Mtr Kelli Joyce

“Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’” Acts 3:6

Friends in Christ,

Today’s story from Acts may seem simple at a first reading - Peter and John meet a man who cannot walk, he asks for alms, they miraculously heal him instead. But there’s a lot going on beneath the surface here.

Jesus has been executed and risen from the dead, and has ascended into heaven. The Holy Spirit has come upon his followers at Pentecost. And now Peter, the lovable but rash screw-up who rarely gets anything right in the Gospels, finds himself a leader of the rag tag group that will come to be the Church.

On their way to pray, they meet a man who has endured a lifetime of suffering because of his physical disability. He wants something small from them - whatever change they can spare. It’s a request he’s made countless times, and as small an ask as it is, he is used to being not only denied, but utterly ignored. But Peter and John look at him, and he thinks he’s gotten lucky. He may now know where his next meal will come from. Then Peter says “I don’t have any money.”

First, I want to make what I hope is an uncontroversial claim: those of us who do have money are obligated by God to share what we have with those who are in need. Throughout the Bible, those who have are instructed to care for those who do not - without concern for how those with money earned it or why those without any don’t have it.

But Peter *doesn’t* have any money, and the reality is that even if he did, it would surely ease the symptoms of the man’s plight, but do nothing to keep him from facing the same vulnerability and lack the next day. The alms that Peter could not even offer would still not have been enough.

What does Peter do? He acts to bring the man into the full life of the community around him; a community he has been forced to watch from the sidelines his whole life. Peter ends the cycle of lack and charity, and replaces it with a relationship of dignity and equality.

We, as a general rule, aren’t able to miraculously heal the physical infirmities of those around us. But I don’t think that’s what’s needed. The man who sat at the gate called Beautiful suffered because he was excluded, looked down upon, and made to depend on the whims of others’ magnanimity for the basic necessities of life. Perhaps if we want to do for those around us what Peter did for him, we need to focus not on healing bodies, but on healing our society, and reshaping the way it thinks about physical ability and the way it treats individuals with disabilities. How, as a society, can we recognize the dignity of people of all abilities and disabilities, without excluding or tokenizing? How can we, as a parish, work to ensure that the material necessities of life are secured for everyone, not just for those who can see or hear or walk or speak “perfectly”? Beyond our gifts of silver and gold, what healing gifts can we offer to each other in the name of Jesus of Nazareth?

In peace,
Mtr. Kelli