I reread this sermon as I began work this week and thought it deserved posting, largely because in it I share some of my earlier experiences of ministry with the homeless, from the vantage point of a suburban parish.

Proper 5_YrC

St. James

June 10, 2007

When I was growing up, our rural Mennonite Church had as one of its outreach projects, providing a monthly service at the Cherry Street Mission in downtown Toledo, Ohio. I don’t remember now how many times our family went, but to the best of my recollections it must have been several times a year when I was a preteen. It was an old style mission, where those who wanted something to eat and a bed for the night, first had to sit through whatever kind of worship service we put on. It was of course a cultural conflict of enormous proportions. We were well-off, white, Mennonite, small town and rural folk; the people at the mission were urban, overwhelmingly African-American, predominantly alcoholic and homeless. We didn’t provide the meal, we didn’t help out with the soup kitchen; we simply gave our hour-long worship service, and got back in our cars and drove the forty-five miles home.

I don’t know now how many times I went, or how old I was when my parents began taking me. I do know that by my teen years, I was able to wheedle my way out of participating, but for all I know, people from that church still drive to Toledo once a month. My guess though is that things have changed dramatically since my childhood. Neither do I remember what was said or what we sang. What I do remember are the faces of those who had to sit through our service—the poverty and despair, the haunting eyes that looked at us like we were from Mars.

Fast forward fifteen years or so. Now I was in my twenties, living in Boston. I fell in love with Boston the day I arrived. In a few short months I got to know all the ins and outs of the downtown area. I would walk the streets for hours, watching people, getting to know neighborhoods, soaking in all of the urban life that I could. But part of that urban life was also the increasing homelessness, brought on by cutbacks in social services by the federal government and by the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. The homeless were all around—on the trains of the T, on the streets and sidewalks, in the public library, on steps of churches. Among them were some notable characters. For example, the garbage bag man, who was dressed head to foot, in garbage bags.

As a casual resident of the city, as someone who walked the streets to soak up the atmosphere, homeless people were little more than a nuisance to me. I brushed them off or ignored them when they asked for help. They were at best a nuisance and occasionally a downright problem. It was only after I began working in a church in downtown Boston that I began to see that the plight of the homeless mattered to me. In fact, one of my responsibilities was to help coordinate the neighborhood churches’ response to homelessness. The church I worked at had a big porch on its front and for years homeless men and women found shelter there during Boston’s cold winter nights. When I walked past that same church ten years later, I noticed that a high iron fence now made it impossible for homeless people to stay there.

Another image. A few years ago, Corrie and I were in Toronto for a conference. Right outside the conference hotel was a little Anglican church. We attended an early service on a cold November Sunday. When we entered the building we immediately noticed the long tables filled with sandwiches, hot coffee, and tea. We also noticed that the people congregated around the tables didn’t much look like your typical Anglican or Episcopalian. We made our way forward for the service. There were probably twenty people in attendance and as we worshipped we could hear the activity in the back—homeless people who had found shelter from the cold inside the church.

We have two lessons today, a story from the Elijah-Elisha cycles in I and II Kings, and the gospel. Both of them relate tales of resurrection but in each, the miracle isn’t as important as the story around the miracle. The lesson from the Hebrew Bible takes place during a time of drought. Elijah comes to a widow’s house and asks for food. But she has none. In fact, there is so little in the house to eat that she expects she and her son will die of starvation. So Elijah works a miracle and there is enough flour and oil to suffice until the end of the drought.

All is well. But then the son grows ill and dies. And the widow, already a marginalized person looks forward to a life of even more destitution. There will be no one to take care of her. She complains to Elijah, and in response he intervenes with God, and brings the son back to life. The woman’s response is to acknowledge that Elijah is a true prophet, a man of God.

In the gospel reading, Jesus has just performed a miracle, healing the centurion’s son. He has also just given Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. Now he and his disciples are traveling again. As they walk, they encounter a burial procession. A man has died, survived only by his widowed mother. Jesus notices the grieving mother, tells her “Do not weep” and in Luke’s words, has compassion on her. Jesus raises the man from the dead and then according to Luke, gives him to his mother.

Our focus as readers or hearers of both stories is likely to be on the miracles. But Luke’s focus lies elsewhere. This is a story about Jesus compassion for a widow. She is already a marginalized figure because her husband is dead. Now, with the death of her son, her future looks even bleaker. She has no one to turn to in this patriarchal society, no one to help her. But Jesus reaches out to her, he has compassion on her and in the end, he gives her son back to her. He restores her to the community of which she is a part. In a very real sense, like her son, she is brought back to life.

Who are the widows in our midst? On whom should we look with compassion with the eyes of Christ? Who are the marginalized, the weak, the frail, whom we tend to overlook? I’ve been thinking about that question all week as I’ve thought about these readings and about my sermon. And you will note that I began on an obvious note, talking about homeless people with whom I have come in contact over the years. And that’s an obvious and natural response. But I kept wondering….

And as I wondered, my mind turned to another Episcopal Church with which I am quite familiar—the Church of the Incarnation in Gaffney. I’ve been consulting with them off and on for four years. They are in a difficult situation: a small church in a community whose economy has struggled since the downturn in the textile industry. Their mantra for four years has been: ‘we need to get families with young children here.” And I immediately knew exactly what they meant: nice white middle-class families with 2 or 3 kids—kind of like what we at St. James mean when we talk about families.

But then I looked at the demographics. In Cherokee County, where Gaffney is located, roughly 40% of the children under age 18 live in single-parent households (the numbers for Greenville County are only a few percentage points lower). And of course, the percentage of single-parent families that aren’t involved in churches or other religious communities is much higher than for traditional families. To reach out to those families, families who really need a community like Incarnation, would require enormous change, and would transform the life of that church.

We have all kinds of non-traditional families that attend St. James. There are singles, there are widows and widowers, there are single parents with children; married couples without children, divorced people, there are even unmarried couples. You could extend the list. But how many of those families are fully integrated into our parish life? How many visitors who don’t fit the norm, never return because they weren’t welcomed with the same eager greeting and open arms that a married couple with pre-school kids were?

To look with compassion on those around us, to look with the eyes of Christ at those in need, means to look not only at people very much like ourselves. Sometimes, it’s pretty easy to reach out to those who are most unlike ourselves—the homeless, for example, who don’t really challenge our assumptions and our world. To work in a soup kitchen or help out at a homeless shelter, to give money to United Ministries, while all of them being very good, keep us in a comfort zone and certainly keeps St. James comfortable.

To be the community of compassion that Christ calls us to be, however, means something more. It means to welcome people into our midst who don’t fit our demographic, to offer them the love of Christ and the love of our community, to restore them to life as Christ restored the man, and his mother. Which kind of church are we going to be? The one that ministers in quite conventional ways? The one that erects fences so people we don’t like can’t hang around? Or one that opens its doors to all and allows everyone to come to the table?