“At BiG, we call our community members citizens,” shared Jennie Thollander, director of program expansion at Brookwood in Georgetown (“BiG”), a community for men and women with special needs outside of Austin, Texas.
Amy, Citizen at BiG, photo courtesy of BiG
Citizens. While sharing the BiG story at a Praxis pitch event last week, Jennie referred to the community members as artisans and bakers. This language communicates BiG’s values. They don’t define the people they serve by what they lack, but by how they contribute and participate in BiG’s mission. On the BiG campus each day, citizens make pottery, garden, design cards, and experience the love of Jesus. They are not recipients nor beneficiaries, but collaborators.
Nobody better preached and practiced this than Jesus. In Luke 14, we see one of many examples of this. Jesus is a dinner guest at the home of one of the Jewish religious leaders.
As these religious leaders jockey for the best seats in the room based on who has the most seniority and rank, Jesus calls it out: For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.
He then illustrates what he means. Jesus tells a story about a man who plans a great party for his powerful neighbors. But his high-society guests produce all sorts of excuses for why they cannot make it—from recent land and livestock purchases to a new marriage. All told, none of the heavy hitters at the top of his invite list could make it.
So the man decides to throw out his list and start over.
“‘Go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame,’” the man tells his servant. “And the servant said, ‘Sir, what you commanded has been done, and still there is room.’ And the master said to the servant, ‘Go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in, that my house may be filled.”
This, Jesus says, is how he throws parties. The religious leaders in the room would have understood just how provocative this story was. Inviting someone to your home for a party is a sign of honor and esteem for your guests.
The poor, crippled, blind, and lame represented the least powerful and most overlooked people at that time. Again and again in Jesus’ ministry, these were the people Jesus did not overlook and those who he said in his eyes were the most powerful. But he doesn’t stop there. Because even after the man includes these four groups in his party invitation, there’s still room. So the invitations extend to those living along the “highways and hedges.”
Theologians agree “highways” and “hedges” communicate this man is inviting two additional groups: those on the hedges are people living as squatters and vagabonds—so poor they do not even have a place to lay their heads—and those on the highways are those from outside the land entirely. These were the people the religious elite truly despised: The Gentiles, the Samaritans, the Romans. Yes, even these people are invited to the party.
Now, when I stop scolding the religious leaders sitting with Jesus that night, I imagine sitting in that very room. I wonder what categories Jesus might have used if it was me jockeying for the seat of honor and privilege in that room. In our society, who would I overlook?
Here’s the beautiful truth communicated in this story: Jesus’ party is an upside-down affair. He sees those our world ignores. He esteems those we’re prone to dismiss. And this is what is on full display at BiG.
“Part of our mission is to not only provide a beautiful, excellent vocational opportunity for adults with special needs,” BiG founder, Erin Kiltz said in an interview with Community Impact. “But to actually change the way the world views our population group.”
Changing the way the world views people with special needs to the way Jesus sees them. Like BiG, Jesus sees and dignifies them as people with unique gifts for a world that desperately needs them.
