One of my favorite podcasts is a show called On Being with Krista Tippett. One of the earliest episodes I heard on the show remains one of my favorite. In it, Tippett interviews the parents of a child on the autism spectrum, who speak with her about what they have learned from their son about creativity, about disability, about being human.

In one of the most poignant parts of the episode, the father, Paul Collins, recounts being asked, “What if we were able to do genetic screening for autism?” His response was “What are you prepared to lose?”

Both parents are authors who have written about famous people who were likely on the autism spectrum, one of whom is Isaac Newton. Tippett reminds Collins that he wrote, “There are Newtons of refrigerator parts, and Newtons of painted light bulbs, and Newtons of train schedules, and Isaac Newton happened to be the Newton of Newtonian physics and you cannot have him without having the others too.”

He proceeds to clarify that he is not suggesting that we do not address the very real and profound issues that some people on the autism spectrum face, but in the gifts his son brings to their family, he and his wife came to understand more of the gifts we bring in our different ways of being human. Their perspective transformed me the first time I heard it and has stayed with me since.

Even putting our label of ‘disabled’ on people defines some people according to what they cannot do, despite the reality that no person is able to do everything. Our world, and especially our culture, are so obsessed with ‘fixing’ anything imperfect that a New York Times piece I read said, “I fear that being human is itself fast becoming a condition.”

We forget, as Collins reminds us, that different people enflesh their humanity in different ways, and that we must remember that whatever we try to fix or remove from our rich tapestry of humanity will be a loss to us all. I think many of us have experienced this truth. In knowing someone who our society would label as disabled, different, or special, how many of us been affected by their ability to love, or have had at least the sneaking suspicion that for all they ‘don’t get,’ they did know something fundamental about our world that we didn’t?

And how do we, as followers of Christ, approach the impairments of others, and our own? Though we as modern people usually look at dramatic faith healing with skepticism, do we not imagine that our resurrected, heavenly bodies will be free of the impairments and ailments that we experience in this world? We too still equate our ideas of perfection and normalcy with God’s healing and wholeness.

Yet our Gospel reading today challenges that perspective. As on every second Sunday of Easter, we have the famous story of “Doubting Thomas,” who insists that he must see and touch the marks in the hands and side of Jesus if he is to believe that he is alive again, and Jesus comes and offers his scarred body for him to do so.

Usually our focus is on Thomas, his lack of faith in this story, and the reaction of Jesus to him. Yet have we really stopped and thought about the fact that Jesus still has scars? The resurrected, heavenly body of Christ still bears at least the marks of his wounds.

This story gets more surprising – Thomas’s reaction to seeing those scars is the most explicit statement of Christ’s divinity in the Gospel – “My Lord and My God”. Stop and think about this for a moment. God has wounds, and it is not in spite of them, but by those very wounds that Thomas – and the other disciples – recognize God in the flesh.

Does this mean that we should give up on ending suffering, and lose hope that even God cannot bring healing to our deepest wounds? Absolutely not – God became Jesus and endured a disfiguring death and rose to life again to bring us healing and wholeness and restore us to the very image of God in which we were created.

But we must remember that the God in whose image we are made now has scars. This does not render humanity or divinity powerless or pitiable, but it does call for us to re-conceive our notions of wholeness.

A few years ago, when I was first mulling over the words of Collins, Jonathan told me about the theologian Nancy Eiesland. She was born with a congenital bone defect and spent much of her life undergoing surgeries and experiencing pain. She wrote a book called The Disabled God in which she particularly points to the idea that the resurrected Christ had these impairments, and that tells us something fundamental about both divinity and humanity. In this God, she sees that we do not agree to care for each other by stepping down from our position of independence and power, but rather that our interdependence, our need for each other, is fundamentally part of our created identity, of being made in the image of God.

We all have limitations and impairments – some we were born with, some are scars that we have acquired during our lives. Too often we buy into the lie that to be perfect and whole is to triumph over the limitations and vulnerability of being human.

Sometimes this very passage is even used to encourage this notion. Jesus says that those who have believed without seeing will be blessed. This is clearly an encouragement from the writer of this Gospel to the Christians who he knew had no opportunity to see, touch, and hear Jesus in the flesh. I think often this has worked into our way of thinking of our faith as something beyond bodies entirely, something purely spiritual.

To leave our faith in a supernatural, ethereal realm would lose something fundamental to our faith, and a great source of our hope. Jesus became flesh and lived among us – and just because Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t walk among us right now, it does not mean that God is not involved in every element of reality in our world.

This passage does not tell us that the fragility of our physicality deems us powerless, but rather shows the incredible power of our limited, finite, physical world because it is precisely through this world that  God has chosen to be known to us, and assures us that God longs to be made known in every element of who we are, even those parts of ourselves we believe impossible.

This is the way God has worked throughout our story, and today the Gospel assures us that the resurrected Christ only infiltrates our world more, and this is not a reason to despair, but rather the source of our hope.

Every time we baptize someone, we recount the way God has used water, and we use it to welcome someone into the body of Christ. Every Sunday that we gather, we share bread and wine and believe that somehow those elements bind us together in communion with God. And in our passage, Jesus tells the disciples that if they forgive sins, they are in fact forgiven – he tells them that their words and actions affect what we might call a spiritual reality.

And the truth that the physical affects deeper realities is not limited to the walls of church. Consider a kiss – does it not both represent a love that is already true and also have the power to affect that love?

Water, bread, wine, words – God uses all these things to love us, to be known to us. And God is most known to us in the physicality we know most intimately, these bodies in which we live, made in the very image of God.

We do not know God despite our limitations, but through them. It is precisely our limitations that teach us what it means to be loved and to love. This was what the original followers of Christ found – a way of being in community in which different members brought their different gifts, none more important than others and all necessary to function together as one body. Is it any surprise that the best metaphor for this new reality was the most physical representation of God among them – the body of Christ?

Our own baptismal vows include our commitment to seek and serve Christ in all others.  Is there any chance we may recognize Christ in others in the same way that Thomas did – in their scars? Perhaps doing so would help us to offer the same grace to ourselves – to hold out our own impairments, our own scars, our own limitations, and believe that they are not an impediment to others recognizing Christ in us, but the very way in which God may be made manifest among us.

Many of you have heard this story, but I’ll close with it again today because it has become fundamental to how I understand this life.

Five years ago, I was hit by a car the week before Jonathan and I were ordained as priests. After a long process and much work to be prepared for that day,I found myself unable to walk those last few steps up to the examination. So Jonathan put his arm around me and we hobbled up together. When it was time to be ordained, other priests came and helped carry me, then placed their hands on my head to ordain me while holding me up at the same time.

For so long I had been proud of my fierce independence, but that night I had to put my arm around others and let them help me because I could not make it alone. And that night I came to understand something fundamental about the priest I was called to be, and more importantly, the person I was called to be.

We don’t walk this journey alone. We need each other, and that is good, so deeply true and good. In the resurrection of Christ which we celebrate today and every day, we have been redeemed, we have been saved, we have been healed, and that does not mean that we have become infinite, independent, all-powerful people. This is not because God is not capable of that, but because God loves us too much for that. To be completely independent would meant to be completely alone, and from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, God knew that it was not good for us to be alone. It is not how we were made to be. Being alone is not the image of God. We bear God’s image together, when we live together, caring for each others needs and seeing the beauty in our scars, wrapping our arms around each other and walking this journey together.

This Easter, may you know the resurrection of Christ. May you know the God who loves you too much to ever let you be alone, and may you see God who comes to us in the water, in the wine, in the bread, in the words, in the scars and wounds on others, and in the scars you bear yourself, and may you know God to be all around you and within you now and always. Amen.