9-20-2015 Bioethics Part 25

The speaker begins with a prayer and then discusses the topic of gene cell modification. They explain that although it is not currently being used in humans, it is being used in fruit flies to study insomnia. The speaker then discusses the different types of gene therapy and the potential ethical concerns surrounding it. They mention that somatic cell modification may be permissible, but germ cell modification raises more skepticism due to the potential effects on future generations. The speaker also discusses the virtues of contentment and courage in considering gene cell modification. They emphasize the importance of using gene therapy for curing diseases rather than seeking perfection. The speaker then shifts the focus to the treatment of mentally handicapped individuals, suggesting that they should not be viewed as a problem to be fixed. They address concerns about including mentally handicapped children in regular classrooms and challenge assumptions about education. Okay, well, let's pray and get started. God, we thank you for this day and for each other, and we pray that as we seek to think hard about what it means for us to be the church and what it means for us to be human, that you would help us, in Jesus' name, Amen. Last week, we were dealing with the topic of gene cell modification. Question, is this practice currently in use in human beings, yes or no? No. It is being used in things like, for example, fruit flies. They are, I just heard about this the other day, they are switching off genes in fruit flies that turn them into insomniacs in order to figure out how to cure insomnia. Just another brick in the gigantic wall, which is gene cell manipulation. So, if it's not being used, then why should we study it? Okay, so it could potentially be used soon, good. So, there's the proximity kind of argument to it, what else? Yeah, okay, so just think about whether this should even be something that's done, and then if it should be done, should we even participate in it? What exactly is gene therapy? Does anybody remember? We have three different ways we can go about it. Removing, replacing, or providing new genes. Yes, removing, replacing, or providing new genes. There's two different kinds of gene cell modification that we talked about. Remember what the names of those two kinds of cell modification are? Somatic cell modification, which would be what? Body cells, right, so changing a person's physical body, and then what's the other one? Germ cell modification. What the heck is that? Right, sex cells. Which one might be morally permissible? Somatic cell modification may well be permissible, but why not germ cells? Why should we be highly skeptical about using germ cells? Yeah, alright, so we're not dealing with individual people, we're dealing with humanity. We're changing what humans are by shifting around our genes, and there's no way to tell what those results will be in a reproductive way going down the line. So we thought about, okay, what is it going to take then to be the kinds of people that we need to be to think about gene cell modification, because it is so powerful. We saw that even when it comes to somatic cell modification, we should be careful to avoid doing one thing and pursue doing something else. What should we avoid doing, even if somatic cell modification becomes a reality? Or what could it be used for that is maybe interesting or might be really cool, but we should probably avoid doing that? Yeah, exactly, so just making ourselves better and always seeking after perfection, so bigger, faster, stronger, smarter. Those things are probably things that we should not delve into as we heard from Gilbert Mylander. We already have enough problems screwing with our kids when it comes to nurture. We should probably not get wrapped up in the nature game. But what should it be used for? If somatic cell modification becomes a reality, what might those things that we could pursue, what would the areas be? It's like curing diseases. There's lots and lots and lots of gene-based diseases. And if we could cure those things, then we should seek to do so. But how do we determine whether or not we should go about those things or what kinds of people do we need to become? What are the virtues, particularly in this area, and kind of all the virtues apply, but what are some of the virtues that might really apply in this area that might help us to think about, should I do this or should I not do this, or help somebody else think about it? Contentment. Why would contentment be so key? You guys are actually going to have to talk a lot today because I don't have very many notes. So you're actually going to do a lot of the work for me today. We're going to do kind of a, this is, you didn't know it, this is a pop quiz. This is kind of a, maybe not a final test, but definitely kind of a midterm today. So why would contentment be so necessary in trying to determine whether gene cell modification is something you should pursue or not? That's right. A lack of contentment is always a negative quality trait. Now when we say contentment, do we mean passivity and just like, well, I guess this is the way things are, never doing anything? What is it then? Okay. So it's seeking to be content in my present state and then saying if I have the opportunity to do something else, then I'll pursue that thing, realizing that this well may be the rest of my life, and if it is, then that's okay. Good. What other kind of virtues might play into this? What? Making the best of things? Yeah. So that's kind of what contentment would be, right? Just being like, yeah, this is okay. Let's just deal with what we got. Anything else? Courage? Yeah, all right. Good. Courage. Why courage? Yeah. Yeah. Good. So courage works in two very distinct ways. On the one hand, it gives you the courage to kind of trust that God might know what he's doing, and then if you do go through with it, the courage to say, let's do this and let's take what comes of it, which will continually come up as we talk about the end of life at the rate we're going about seven years from now. So, as I mentioned last week, these gene cell treatments are still quote-unquote miracle pills. They're not yet ready. They're close, but they are not yet ready, and it's not exactly true if they're even ever going to be completely ready because our bodies are not like cars. As I said last week, you don't just take out a part and put in a part and then we're all good. If you change a gene, the unknown of what else that might change is still out there. Thankfully, we don't just swap body parts on humans and go, I wonder what this will do. That would be a pretty bad world to live in. But it is something that very, very many people are waiting for, and I hope that we can understand why. The question is, what about now? How should we live in light of these things that aren't options yet? And we said that we're going to spend the rest of our time this morning thinking about particularly the mentally handicapped. There is a real possibility, it's a strong hope that many families have will be able to rid their children of mental handicaps, as well as stuff like sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, leukemia, those kinds of things. We read from Stanley Howell, I'll read it again. We can care for the cancer patient by trying to alleviate their cancer without destroying the patient. But you cannot eliminate retardation without destroying the person who is retarded. Such policies seem good because we assume compassion requires us to rid the world as much as possible of unnecessary suffering. Those born retarded seem to be suffering from outrageous fortune, cruel fate, that if possible should be eliminated. But ironically, in the name of responding to suffering, compassion literally becomes a killer. Simply put, what we're trying to answer this morning is what do we do about the problem, quote unquote, of the handicap? To begin with, probably the simplest thing we could do is to quit viewing the handicap as a problem that must be dealt with. It's understandable, but surely not right, that you and I oftentimes struggle to see the handicap as something other than a problem. Something other than just a tragic reality that just, their lives must be miserable and man, what are we going to do to fix everything? Just because most of us assume that we're normal and that the handicapped are not like us, is it true that in some ways a person who is mentally handicapped is not like you? Very possibly, right? However, you and I and the mentally handicapped, all of us share almost everything in common. Even the language of us puts a very artificial but in our minds real divide between handicapped people and us. Like, what do we do about the handicapped? Like, who's the we and who's the handicapped? And the assumption is, because they're handicapped, we're normal. Like, some of you are married, all of you have friends, at least I hope you do. You should, especially the older you get, come to the realization that you are not normal. You are weird in your own way, right? You have particular struggles and also particular successes. You are very much like everybody in this room and yet you are unique. We are all messed up and we all have things that are great about us. You may have heard the fear coming from parents. This is particularly kind of the way that this idea of us and them comes up. Maybe you feel this way. If so, I really truly and love hope I'm stepping on your toes. There's this idea that like, there's a fear of including handicapped children in the classroom. This is where it comes up most often. Now, I'm not going to ask for you to speak from personal experience. You could say, I have a friend who, that's fine. But why is it that people are often hesitant to have mentally handicapped kids in a regular classroom? Yeah, so they're afraid about how it might affect their child. And what is those, like, affected how? How are they fearful it's going to affect their children? It interrupts the learning process. That's right. It's going to hold my kids back. It's going to slow things down. Now, that assumes a number of things that we believe about education. Anybody want to begin the train? We won't name all of them. But has anything come to mind about what that might assume about education? That's right. The more the merrier. We can't slow this thing down. It must be very structured. That's right. No distractions. I have planned 55 minutes. We will do 55 minutes. You little jerks will know how to move decimal points by the time we're done here. If it kills me, so help me God. What else? Yeah, but do you really? Yes, that's a true statement. Come on, you virtue boy. We're not talking about the positive things. We're talking about the fears people have about including them in. So I agree with you, and we're going to get to why that's true. But what are the fears people have about what if we do this? And then the assumptions that we have that lead to those things. Probably some fear of the parents of the handicapped children that they won't be treated well. That's right. So I don't know how they're going to treat my children. Which is a real fear. Primarily because you and I view handicapped children as a problem. So we create the problem. If you're like, well, just put them in regular school. Also, you and I do not view handicapped kids as truly needy and special. In their own ways. Every kid is needy and special in their own way. But we just kind of like, well, let's just treat them as normal. There's something to that. But it is a fine line because they are, quote unquote, slower. At least when it comes to academics. It also assumes that education, public education, group education, is solely existent for the purpose of gaining knowledge. That's it. Why are we here? To learn stuff. It's not actually true. I do believe that you can, for example, be homeschooled your whole life and turn out relatively normal. At least I hold that hope out for the world. It's possible, but even to talk to anybody who's homeschooled their kids or is thinking about homeschooling their kids and what's one of their number one, quote unquote, fears or concerns or what we need to really pursue purposefully and intently, how are we going to get our kids to socialize? And there's ways around that. There's things you have to work on, but you have to work on that. Even that, people admitting that, assumes that there's something other than just gaining information that comes from this educational experience. We actually have to learn how to become human. And when we just say it's going to slow us down, it's going to interrupt the process, it's going to hold our children back, it assumes, for example, there's some kind of level that we have to achieve. In this hyper-modern society that we have, we have charts for everything, right? We have percentages and we have all this stuff. They have to achieve this level. And if they don't, it doesn't work. It was humorous how many people believed I would go nowhere at the end of high school because I graduated with a 2.2. I didn't forget the quote-unquote life experience or anything else I had. It was like, you didn't do well in high school. Okay, then you go and crush college or something. And it's like, oh, how did you do that? There's that question. And it's not like I'm this shining example of the world, but there's 10 billion stories like me. People go, I'm not good at this, but I'm good at this, I'm going to fail over here, but I'm going to succeed over here, because humans are not. They're test scorers, college kids. You're not your test scorers, which is good because if they were, some of you would be less than others. Morals matter in our society. We would all agree with that. I believe that one of the things we could do in order to instill morals, just the very basic senses of common decency, would be to have all kinds of people around us all the time. Our society is moving to a place that has less and less of a place for the handicapped. It's true. We have the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990. It's the reason why you have to have ramps everywhere and handrails. It is. Talk to engineers. We have some here. Talk to anybody who's ever built anything to code. Not in this building, but somewhere else. And it is very, very difficult. And some of the things seem very arcane and very just kind of weird. And could the system be revised? I'm sure it could be. You guys run for office and then change the Americans with Disabilities Act. However, we do have these things in place, but ironically, the more accessible we make the world for handicapped people, the less we want handicapped people around us, because they're different. Now, it's not just the handicapped. We don't really want anybody who's less than or different from us around us. Families often feel incredibly isolated and discouraged. I don't know if you've ever known a family that has somebody who's handicapped to whatever degree. They feel they are completely alone, living in a society that is, quote-unquote, very accepting, which, compared to other societies, it is. I remember being a child and going to Mexico on a regular basis to visit my aunt across the border. We lived in California. She lived in Baja, California, in Mexico. And we would go and visit this. It's really a terrible name. I don't know why they call it this, but they call it a deaf ranch for children, which would assume that it's just the kind of verbal implications that deaf children like cattle, but whatever. So there's these deaf kids because they were all abandoned by their parents because their parents didn't know what to do with them. So they would just drop them off. These kids are just deaf, right? They could all learn sign language and all did learn sign language, but there's no place in society for them. They just abandoned them. It's crazy. This is a very, not to diminish people who are deaf, but that is a minor handicap compared to the much more severe kinds of handicaps that go down the line. And it gets worse for people the more handicapped they are in many countries. And here, too, the more handicapped you are, the more difficult it is. But our society is rather accepting of them. But families still feel incredibly isolated and discouraged. This, again, is not a public policy speech. This is a pastor talking to a church. So what is it that you and I should actually do? How is it that we should actually be? As we saw when it came to abortion, you and I could just beat ourselves up about the fact that we're not saving the world, about the fact that we're not surrounded by women considering having abortions and abortionists themselves, and we could just wring our hands and go, man, that's too bad. Dear God, bring us some struggling women, which would get us absolutely nowhere. Or we could imagine what kind of community you and I ought to become in order to be a place that would be able to welcome the handicapped into our midst. And the first thing that we should acknowledge is that not having the handicapped amongst us is actually to our detriment. I believe firmly that we are a worse church, worse-off church, for not having handicapped people amongst us. We should hope that God would be gracious enough to bring the handicapped into our midst. Why? The same reason we desire to see people from West Nashville, all parts of it, come into our church, because they're our neighbors. That's all. It would be very sick and wrong on a certain level to pray, God, bring us handicapped people. We just want to fill up with handicapped people. We want to love on some handicapped people. That was a super weird phrase. And it could just be this thing of, like, we're just desiring some handicapped people ministry. And then we run into handicapped people. We go, where do you go to church? We have a church that seeks to be nice to handicapped people. That's not what I'm talking about at all. But a desire to be the kind of church where handicapped people, should they come, and we are all surrounded by lots and lots of handicapped people, would be perfectly welcome here. And it would make us a better church. And I have eight reasons why, but I'm not going to give you any of them, unless you just run out of reasons or don't have any. Here's what we're going to do for the remainder of our time. I want somebody in here to give me a reason for why having handicapped people here would be to the benefit of our church. And then, either the person who gives me that answer, And then, either the person who gives me that answer, the rest of everybody is going to tease out why that might be true. Okay? So, have at it. One at a time. Give me one reason why having handicapped people would be a benefit. Yes? I think that just as, you know, you can have like babies that are crying, you know, like off the chain, kind of whatever. Mothers that are, you know, you've got two kids, and both of them are doing the same thing, that others can benefit, that she can benefit, but others can benefit by being able to be able to, one, stand it, you know what I'm saying, but also to be able to go and help with a kind of compassion, heart, whatever like that, or even grow in that way, which is not a problem. It's like we are here for each other in that same way, so in the same way as a mentally retarded or a handicapped person presents, quote-unquote, something that would, some other, it would present an opportunity more than when you're sitting here listening to you go home. Okay. It provides an opportunity to grow with people. So, it would force us, slash, give us the opportunity to put our faith into practice. Why is that so important? It kind of seems like a no-brainer, but why is it so important? Why can't we just come here and have a nice time and sing and just feel real good about ourselves and then just go home and watch the next football game? Because we, like I was thinking about the Good Samaritan type of thing, Levi and the priest kind of guy, they're comfortable in their little world, but their world is small. It's not the world, you know what I'm saying? So, God put these people who were robbed in their place and stuff like that. Okay. So, that's not the world. The world is, overall, kind of the first thing that researchers actually need to learn how to deal with, live in, without ignoring it, like you do with a person on the side of the road. True. Okay. So, let me ask the question maybe in the backwards way. What if we don't have... Let's start with this. Do we have to have handicapped people here in order to put theory into practice? No. Absolutely not. Then, what's the benefit of having a handicap? Yes? The more foolish and suffering we are, the more we die. Okay, good. So, yes, that plays into this big time. Just the fact that we get a better understanding of ourselves and a better understanding of God, right? When we have those kinds of people around. Again, do we have to have those kinds of people around in order to understand that stuff? No. So, what is it about the handicapped that would quote-unquote force us to serve or help us to realize our own weakness? What is it about them that would do that? Like, what's the benefit of having them here? Because we've all said that, like, we don't have to have them here, which is a good thing because we don't presently. But it's like, why should we even desire that? I mean, the first thing, my answer would be the experience of it. Okay. It's more than just understanding something. What is it about them that would do that? What is it about the experience? That's not just one thing, but what is it about the experience that would help us to do these things or understand these things? Yeah, so that's another point that I had. But still, why? What is it, like, why would they maybe have particular gifts that we don't have? Okay, there you go. They just don't have our inhibitions. You all really, really, really struggle to be honest about the way that you are in the world, correct? You struggle to not come into this room, to be around these people, and put on your happy Jesus face, right? And even if you maybe let somebody in behind the mask, it's still only, let's be honest, like 20% of what's going on. Many times, the handicapped don't have that. There's no sense of, I'm fine, right? I'm fine. Except, maybe, oftentimes they are going through stuff that you can't even imagine, and yet they're like, oh, this is fine. Which, you know, puts your problems in a serious, serious frame of perspective. So they don't have the inhibitions. That's true. Let's get back to the idea that it helps us see our own brokenness, and then see God for how great He is. Why would that be true in the case of having a handicapped around us? Well, it gives a picture of all the different types of people that God has called to the Christian church. And God has called people to the church to try to exist. He uses the name of God. So if you call Him that person, despite their belief in any church, that actually means that even though God is a different way, that's just what He is. Yeah. So it just shows us God's grace, including people who are surprising. I mean, let's just be honest. It's all surprising to any of you that I'm here. But when we see these kinds of people who we would ordinarily not imagine to be a functioning part of the church, like, oh look, they're actually part of this. What kind of God is this that would work in this kind of way? Having the mentally handicapped around us, this gets back to something that Tim touched on at the very beginning, would also just remind us that there's handicapped people in the world. We're about to do nine weeks on homosexuality. I hope that by the time we're done, one of two things, maybe both things, happen. I hope for lots of things. One of them is, though, that people who either currently in our church wrestle with same-sex attraction would be open enough to talk about it, or that people who struggle with same-sex attraction at places like Lipscomb or places like your job would desire to come here in order to hear about it, learn about it, and talk and be able to be like, oh, you guys actually want to talk about this instead of just standing up there on the mountain and yelling? All right. Having people who are not like you around you tempers the way that you speak and the way that you think in a way that having a class for a year really can't. It is amazing to me the things that we say and the things that we think about people because we really don't spend a lot of time around kinds of people. This is probably most clear when it comes to the president of the United States. I'm not talking about our current president. I'm talking about the office of president. And what many people have observed over time, through many different presidents, is that people who are absolute haters of the president and disrespect him on every level, when they walk into the Oval Office and they're in the presence of the president, just something changes, right? It's like tone, everything. They don't just walk in there and start trash-talking the president and maybe they're thinking those things, but something changes. The same is true when you get people who, a big thing right now that's happening, it's happened for decades thankfully, is they get youths from Palestine and Israel together to do things like go surfing. Many of them hate the other group before they go and by the end of a time of a week spent together they realize, oh, you're actually human beings. Huh, interesting. So they don't just become less prejudicial against that other people group they used to hate, they just become less prejudicial in general. The same thing is if we had the blessing of the handicapped amongst us, then it would lead to us thinking and living in more thoughtful and loving ways. Not just towards those kinds of people, but for everybody. One of the things that we have seen here is that as we've gone through this thing on bioethics and people ask me at the very beginning, and continue to ask me, why are you doing this? It's not just so we can know certain things about certain things, it's so that we actually become better human beings and deal with all kinds of people in better ways. Some of you have shared with me just the ability to have better conversations about even things as remote as politics. Because you're like, oh, this is how we should think and this is how we should seek to hear other people. Is there anything else you could think of that would make us better? There's a couple of big ones that I have. I will give the category, you answer why. It would help us to slow down as a church. Why would that be beneficial? Good question. In the same way that if you're in the math class and the teacher is trying to teach something and you have to get through only a quarter of your material instead of all of it. It would make us do that with everything. Why would it be good to slow down? Right. It's very easy, especially in this church and churches like ours, to be really, really smart about what Christianity is and means and has said and is saying today. Debates, the differences, where we came from, how to think, how to be. It's very easy to know those things and never really put any of those things into practice. And by slowing down, we really have to think, oh, how does this work out? A lot of these categories are spilling over into each other, as you can probably already tell. Because you'd actually have to live out what you believe. It would give us the opportunity to see how weak we are. If you ever think you're a good theologian, I would invite you to go teach the elementary children at YES what it means for God to exist in Trinity. You will run your head into a brick wall for the next four hours. It is almost impossible. Those who know what they're talking about are able to communicate it to children. Right. And to have to make it clear and understandable would be to our good. Also, it would be good to slow down because we're all just so busy all of the time. And we're all just like, okay, what's your problem? Let me fix it. Let me go on. Let's do this, we're going to do this, and we're going to do this, and we're going to do this at church, and we're just going to get it done. Well, you can't do that nearly as fast when you have people that are trying to catch up all the time. So you either leave them in the dust, or you slow down. It would also remind us that knowing everything is not everything. Salvation often is wrapped up in being the smartest person in the room, particularly in our culture and in our circles. I would love it if there was a mentally handicapped kid that wanted to get baptized in this church. Just to watch y'all and see what would happen as far as whether you interacted with him or her or not, and the ways that you spoke, in private, in public, whatever. And not only reflect it, again, on them and their baptism, but human beings and their baptism. And then, what does it mean to be a Christian? I would learn much more about what it means to be a Christian by having people that don't quite get it or can't quite express it nearly as neatly as some of us. One of the hard things about doing membership interviews here, particularly when this comes into play when it's couples, is that one member of the party is usually much more eloquent in the expression of the question, what is the gospel than the other one? And the other one usually feels dumb. Because one person's like, you know, God, from before the foundation of the world, sovereignly ordained by his decree. You know, it's like four hours long. You're like, thank you. And you go to the other one and they're like, what he said, or what she said. It's like, no, you can't do that. And they're like, Jesus loves me. It's all I got, right? And the really encouraging part is you're able to go like, yeah, you're both right. Good job. You've been having people amongst us that can't sit for 15 minutes and learn something. But they're like, yeah, I get this. I want to be a part of this. It would do good for us as a church. It would also teach us what it means, in probably a more profound way than ordinarily possible, what it means to love our neighbor at a great cost to ourselves. See, when you've got a church where everybody's just pretty much okay, then loving other people in this church really doesn't cost you anything. And you can feel like a great human being because you really love and care for and pray. You know, I'm not going to pick on the college students, but I am. Not ours in particular, because we actually have pretty great ones around here. I have spent a rather extraordinary amount of time in the last couple weeks and will for the probably remainder of my life at a coffee shop next to Lipscomb Campus. And it's just kind of ridiculous to see people who are quote-unquote doing life with each other, who are dressed exactly the same, whose one-on-one interactions and loving each other consists of drinking some kind of foamed milk drink and talking about the latest four-page book that they read about how to be missional or something. And then missional is like making crafts with other kids at Lipscomb. And, oh, I mentioned the school. And then, you know, and we can look at that and we can laugh, and there's something laughable about it. And also sad. But here's the thing. You and I are actually not all that different. Our group of people are different, maybe the things we do are different, but it doesn't really cost us anything. One of the great things about the church is that it should be a place where people walk in here and go, now what is it exactly that you all are doing and how is it that you all exactly came to be together? Because you all are weird. Like, are you all just like best friends? Is that some kind of secret thing that you all do together? The church should be the place where you go, no, actually, I don't really like a lot of these people. And we don't really have anything in common. And getting together and talking is extremely awkward because I love whatever, basket weaving, and it's my passion and nobody else shares that here. But I'm going to dedicate myself to these people because of Jesus and not because of basket weaving because I've got a basket weaving club that I go to on Thursday nights. Right? Which ends up being incredibly subversive in a society that will only hang out with people who are exactly like them. More and more as time goes by. It would also help us to realize our collective dependence on God. There's a sense in which we would understand our own, like, brokenness individually before God, but also our collective brokenness before God. How might that be done? Like, our need for God is a corporate body. It kind of goes back to the question of what does it mean to be human, what does it mean to be a Christian? It's those individual questions that come across. I'm always a church, and we have to say, oh, I do that, that person does that, does that make me a person? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so it's just like, we all got problems, right? And we all, what does it mean to be a person? It is, as we saw, like, the image of God isn't even really able to be fully expressed in one human being. It's in us all together. And as we have people who are, quote-unquote, more broken than us in some ways, it would help us to realize our collective dependence upon God, because if you would like to learn how to pray, one of the biggest things that I can encourage you to do is surround yourself with people who are messed up, like, very messed up, in all kinds of ways. It's not just one kind of messed upness. But you see, you and I don't really need God when everything's just fine and you're all... It's like, I've got the solution to your problems because I've been where you've been, and we all just kind of deal. And this isn't just like an older to a younger people thing, like, how do I deal with younger people? You know, because I've been where you've been. But it's also like, younger people to older people, how do I encourage people who have kids and are 50? You know, what do I do? It's one of the great things about having a diverse church, is that not everybody is like everybody else, so everybody's got to kind of go, what the heck am I doing and how do I do this well? And we all are in the same boat, and by doing this we would realize our collective dependence upon God. And in closing, I'd like to say, how do we prepare for loving the handicapped well? Same thing as what we do when we talk about abortion. We start practicing these things now. We don't think about these things and go, yeah, if we ever get handicapped people here, this is the kind of people we should be. The funny thing about it is, this is the kind of people we should be now. I'll end with another quote from Stanley Horowitz. He says this, only when we learn how to be with those different from us can we learn to accept the love that each of us needs to sustain a community capable of worshiping God. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Christians may well be seen in the future as a people who have learned how to be with the mentally handicapped. We may accordingly be thought to be very odd indeed if our society continues in the direction of the threats to remove the mentally handicapped altogether. Yet we believe that nothing could be more significant for a world that assumes that God has not given us timeful imaginations to be with the mentally handicapped. God has given us timeful imaginations. The ability to slow down and realize that it's not just about productivity and it's not just about getting things done, but it is truly about living together as the people of God and worshiping Him together. Let's pray. God, we thank You for the time that we've had. We thank You for the people that You've drawn together in this church. We do pray that You would continually bring people, all kinds of people. We thank You for the fact that we are not all the same. We do pray that You would help us to learn how to love each other well, that You would shape us into the kind of community that You desire us to be. We know that in praying that, that is going to cost us something. And so we pray that You would give us hope and faith. You would give us patience and constancy and humility before You, knowing that we don't, quote-unquote, deserve any of this. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.