(Message given at Wayside Friends Church on April 19, 2026)
My family moved from California to Oregon in the fall of 1981, right before I started 8th grade.
I weirdly have a really strong memory of when we came to Oregon to look for a house. We stayed at a hotel that was right off I-5, at the Tualatin/Nyberg Rd. Exit.
It was a hotel that isn’t there anymore. The Sweetbriar Inn used to be right where Famous Dave’s Barbecue is now.
This weird thing happened: that hotel became the center, became my “sense of home” in Oregon.
We looked at houses all over the Portland Metro area, lots of driving. My parents ended up choosing a home in Clackamas, and at the time I was not happy. It was so far away! Why were we going to live way over there?! Why so far away from home?!
It’s so funny when I look back on it. The three day trip staying at the Sweetbriar Inn instantly and completely caused me to re-center my sense of home away from California. But that switch was invisible to me, and I couldn’t comprehend that of course when we actually moved to Clackamas, we were going to stay way longer than three days, and we would pretty quickly re-center and re-home from Tualatin to Clackamas.
It’s funny that I was resisting a re-center, when the truth was that I just HAD re-centered.
As we move, as we grow, we have the opportunity to expand our reference points, to move our center and move our sense of home.
Sometimes we embrace that change, that re-centering. And sometimes, like 8th grade me after just three days of a new home, we strongly resist any change whatsoever.
We have a choice when our world gets bigger.
We can hold on to our old sense of home, or we can embrace the new one.
When I frame it that way, you can tell that the obvious “right” answer is to figure out how to embrace the new and move on. But that isn’t always the right thing.
If we apply this analogy to our values, to our understanding of goodness and rightness and justice…if we move the analogy to values and principles, then I think we start to realize that there are positives and negatives to the old and the new.
Moving to a new value system or a new understanding of truth can have advantages and disadvantages. Just like holding on to our long-held beliefs can have advantages and disadvantages.
There are dangers and benefits, no matter which we choose.
So how DO we decide if it is right or wrong to embrace a new way of thinking?
When a belief is challenged, how do we know whether it’s something we need to hold tightly to no matter what people think, or whether it is a belief we have mistakenly held and needs to change?
In other words, when do I hold firmly to my convictions, and when do I change and pivot to a new thing?
I’ve been wrestling with a sort of test for this for awhile, and I’m still not sure I’ve figured out how to articulate it clearly. But I want to try this out on you and see what you think.
Sometimes living out my belief simply reaffirms me, makes me feel good about where I am at and how I am acting, no matter how it affects others.
I think that might be a sign that I may need to leave that belief behind. If it’s something that is reaffirming that I’m in a better place than someone else, and therefore it doesn’t matter if my actions hurt them—that doesn’t sound healthy or like the God I know.
Sometimes, holding onto my belief pushes me to stretch myself for the good of another.
It might even cost me something. It might take my time or energy or money, it might hurt my reputation to live out this belief for the benefit of someone else. If holding on to my belief might cost me something and benefits someone else, that’s something that does sound a bit like the God I know, and might mean I do need to hold on to that belief that is under pressure.
When I’m considering whether to hold onto a belief I’ve always held, or whether to change and move, to re-center and re-home, I think God’s expansive love for all people is a good measuring stick.
Today, we’re looking at a passage that is familiar to me, but that is re-centering me, moving me toward unfamiliar places. And I think the re-centering is causing me to see God’s love in a more open way.
So I’m thinking maybe this is a good place to move and re-center.
Let me read Luke 18:35-43:
As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind beggar was sitting beside the road. When he heard the noise of a crowd going past, he asked what was happening. They told him that Jesus the Nazarene was going by. So he began shouting, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
“Be quiet!” the people in front yelled at him.
But he only shouted louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
When Jesus heard him, he stopped and ordered that the man be brought to him. As the man came near, Jesus asked him, “What do you want me to do for you?”
“Lord,” he said, “I want to see!”
And Jesus said, “All right, receive your sight! Your faith has healed you.” Instantly the man could see, and he followed Jesus, praising God. And all who saw it praised God, too.
We’re in a series where we are learning from the ways that Jesus treated people.
The easy and familiar ways I’ve understood this passage before have centered around how Jesus extended mercy and healing to a blind man, one the crowd was trying to block from coming to Jesus.
Jesus heard the blind man; brought him near; and then healed him. Jesus does not turn people away who are in need. Jesus can bring healing to us no matter the issue.
That’s the familiar home for me in this passage, and it’s not a bad or a wrong place to be.
I think all of those things are true about Jesus, and I think they are beautiful and wonderful.
But that first question Jesus asks is the one that is re-centering me, a question that is opening up new possibilities and asking me to consider expanding my sense of home.
“What do you want me to do for you?”
Many times in my life, I’ve thought, “Well, duh, Jesus. Any blind person would want to be healed, why even ask?”
At this point in my life, I can think of a couple things I didn’t consider earlier in my life when I had that “duh” reaction.
One reason Jesus asked the question might be the whole idea we better understand now, the idea of consent.
Now granted, Jesus didn’t ask everyone who he healed what they wanted him to do; or at least, the bible doesn’t record him asking the question in every case. But here in this passage, there’s something beautiful in seeing that Jesus respected the blind beggar enough to ask him what he wanted Jesus to do.
There’s respect for autonomy and agency. There’s a clear sense of letting the blind man be the center, not Jesus and his healing mission as the center. I like that. I like that new sense of “home” and “center” from the old “home” and “center” where I lived when I was younger.
There’s something else that I’m seeing in this question, something that is only there because of a book we are discussing in our Sunday Morning Brunch group.
In fact, the whole idea for choosing this passage for tonight is because David Reid brought it up during our discussion last week.
The book we’ve been discussing is called “My Body is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church” by Amy Kenny. In chapter after chapter in this book, as she recounts her own experience as a person with a disability participating in the life of the church, we are confronted with the ways that ableism creeps into our understanding of God.
What is ableism? It is a set of beliefs or practices that devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities. With the examples she gives in the book, I’ve been forced to wrestle with how my assumption that God always wants to bring us to a place of health and wholeness can be a form of ableism.
If I say that God’s work and intent is for people to experience health and wholeness, I can create something unintended. I can send the message that any one who is NOT healthy or whole is LESS than what God wants.
Amy Kenny says it this way in her book: “If we believe that disabled people are not whole until they [experience healing when they] cross an enchanted threshold into the afterlife, that will certainly impact the way we engage with them in the here and now.” (p. 150)
So let’s go back to Jesus’ question with this in mind. “What do you want me to do for you?”
What if I just take that question at its most literal face value?
What if Jesus asks the question because he doesn’t assume, like I often have, that the most important thing this blind man needs is his sight? What if this question is asked because there are a whole lot of healings Jesus can bring to us, and he doesn’t assume that healing of a disability is always the most important one?
Amy Kenny again: “Let disabled people lead in imagining what new creation could be for us. For some, that’s using wheelchairs; for others, it is not. For some, it includes God using ASL. For others, it means seeing. Who’s to say it will be the same for all of us? The disability community is a diverse group of various physicalities, mentalities, and beliefs. Learn from us when we tell you how we imagine restoration.” (p. 151)
Now we are moving into a new home. A new home that forces me to confront my unconscious bias, my hidden ableism. A new home where my seeing eyes aren’t something that already places me higher up the Jesus hierarchy than someone who is blind.
How is that a hierarchy?
Well, if I think the obvious thing Jesus would do for a blind person is heal their sight, than that means the obvious thing Jesus would do for a blind person is something I don’t even need. I’m higher up the chain. I’m fine. I might need Jesus, but I don’t need Jesus for something as significant as that. (Please note the sarcasm!)
This question and the new implications I am seeing are moving my center, moving my home—and since the result is forcing me to confront my own unconscious sense of being better off than someone else, I’m willing to think this is a move that is leading me to a better, more Jesus-centered space.
How did Jesus treat people?
At deeper and deeper levels, I am coming to understand how profoundly Jesus sees us human beings as equals.
He cuts through social status. He cuts through human society’s hierarchies of sins. He cuts through the way we devalue and discriminate against people with physical, intellectual, or psychiatric disabilities.
Jesus’ question “What do you want me to do for you?” is an open ended recognition that what we most need and want from Jesus may not be defined by human or societal values and hierarchies.
In this case, the blind man does want his sight restored.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and there is beauty in the fact that Jesus has the power to do exactly what the man wants and what the crowd tried to keep him from asking Jesus to do.
But taking the question at face value and really wrestling with it, it’s not hard to recognize there are a whole host of other valid needs that could have been present.
What if the blind man had been estranged from his daughter, and wanted Jesus to heal that relationship? What if the blind man wanted Jesus to heal deep self-loathing?
These imagined things are very valid, and remind me that we are such complex beings.
There are so many ways we may need Jesus to do a profound work in us.
If I look openly and honestly at this interaction Jesus has with the blind beggar, it opens a much deeper response from me.
What do I want Jesus to do for me?
How would I answer that question? If I let the unconscious bias stay, the bias that says “of course restoring his sight is what Jesus would do for that man…” If I let that stay, this man’s encounter with Jesus stays over there, because I don’t identify with a blind person. As a seeing person, Jesus then also stays over there.
But if I challenge that bias…If I recognize there are all kinds of things that blind beggar might rightly have asked Jesus to do…If I challenge that bias, then Jesus is right here. Right here asking me what I want him to do for me.
And then I have to recognize that I legitimately have all kinds of things that need healing. Even though I can see just fine. (Well, with glasses. Oops. Maybe I’m not up the hierarchy at all!)
This re-centering, this re-homing, is taking me to a good place.
This new home is one where Jesus sees everyone as equal. Where Jesus sees everyone as having multiple, multi-layered needs: some physical, some relational, some societal, some spiritual.
This new home is one where Jesus has the power to intervene. A place where Jesus is present with us right here, not over there doing things for people who “really need it.”
This new home is one where Jesus looks me in the eye and asks me to consider what in me might need healing. Where he asks me to honestly consider and ask what I need, and to not let those needs be ranked hierarchically by societal or churchy expectations.
May we see Jesus as he is—with the power and the will to heal hard things in our lives.
May we see others as Jesus does—as equals with multiple and varied needs.
May we also see ourselves—not defined by societal and church hierarchies, but as complex people with multiple needs. People who are always deeply loved.
And may we wrestle honestly with what we need from Jesus, and be willing to respond as he asks us, “What do you want me to do for you?”
(After I spoke, my friend Peggy rightly and helpfully shared that we should also look to the strengths of people with disabilities, not just their needs. There are things that can benefit us all!)