The Reverend Kirk T. Berlenbach

Easter IV, Year A

April 13, 2008

It was getting late. I peered out my living room window out towards the front steps of the church. The cold November night was made that much colder by a steady rain. Out the window I watched him. Watched as he walked his bike up the sidewalk and to the edge of the steps. I knew what was going to happen but I just kept watching as he walked his bike up the steps. I felt the tension growing in my body and I wrestled internally about what to do.

Now don’t get me wrong. We had consistently helped this guy out. Anytime he came to my door we would give him food. We provided him with razors, deodorant and soap. We even got him clothes, blankets and a backpack. Then one night in October when it was pouring rain he rang my bell and asked if he could sleep on the porch. I thought about it for a while but finally I said yes. It wasn’t long before I was finding him on the porch in the morning several times a week. Eventually because we would leave his trash and his meager belongings behind him that we asked him to stop. He didn’t. Eventually we had really lay down the law and we told him that we would call the cops if he did it again. But in spite of these warnings there he was, right in front of my eyes.

He had planned his timing out carefully, hoping that the sexton and myself would both be asleep by the time he came. But I wasn’t. Instead I was awake and I was paralyzed by indecision. I knew he had nowhere else to go. But on the other hand I also knew that he was essentially homeless by choice, refusing to go to shelters because, “The people there are crazy and they smell.” Sadly this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He had even been offered a spot at a VA home but turned it down at the last minute. But even though I knew this all this, the reality was that it was cold and it was wet outside and all he wanted to do was get out of the wind and rain to sleep. And so I just stood there, staring and fretting… and while I felt both sympathy and frustration with him, above all what I felt was resentment. I resented him for showing up even when I told him not to. But above all, I resented him for putting me in this moral quandary.

Then a sudden realization came over me. In a flash I understood what lay beneath all my feelings of resentment. The issue was not that this man was trying to sleep on the church porch… because if he wasn’t sleeping there, he would still have to be sleeping somewhere else. And the truth was that “somewhere” would be cold and wet. Even though I was angry because he was refusing to follow the rules we set for him what was really making me so frustrated and resentful was the fact that his presence was forcing me to face up to the awful truth. This man had nowhere else to go. And at that very same moment he was just one of many who was trying to find a place to sleep that was out of the rain; one of thousands across our city and one of millions across our country.

This is a truth that none of us really wants to face up to. It is so much easier to turn a blind eye and to follow the old adage, “out of sight, out of mind.” But that isn’t what G-D calls us to. If we are to be true to our faith we cannot look away. We must face up to the truth and therefore must also endure the emotional pain that comes with it.

Today’s reading from Acts gives us an idea of what this looks like. The first Christians pooled all of their possessions and they would give to everyone in their community as they had a need. Now while this is very challenging in terms of its economic implications, it has a much deeper implication… there is a sense of responsibility not just for oneself or one’s family, but for everyone. Each member of this earliest form of the Church took the needs of the other members as their personal responsibility. And so they used their own resources to help meet the needs of others. And as a result no one went without the basic necessities of life.

Such a system runs contrary to how most of us think and act. We are, by nature, focused not on others but on ourselves. We worry about our needs, our wants, our comfort. When it comes to others the most we do is to expand this concern to our family and perhaps a group of friends or small community, like co-workers, school or church. The more distant someone else is from us, the less we care for them and the less their needs matter to us. This does not make us callous or bad. It is simply how we function. As finite beings we cannot care for everyone else to the same degree that we care for ourselves. Indeed, it is hard enough to keep the needs of our immediate family in mind, let alone trying to remain care for everyone else. But that does not mean we should not try. Jesus calls us to “Love our neighbor as ourselves.” There are no qualifications in this command. He does not tell us that it is ok to stop caring for others once they get removed past a certain point. The obligation to love and to care applies to every other human being on the planet.

If we ever want to make progress in carrying out his command then we have to start somewhere. Taking responsibility for others begins by opening our eyes to the reality that is all around us. It is painful to see. It hurts to accept the truth, that just within the boundaries of our own city, that there are so many people who do not get to enjoy the basic necessities of life; so many who do not have a roof over their heard, or good food or warmth or clean clothing. Like you, I understood this in an academic sense but once I started to get to know the homeless man who came to my door, my perspective really changed. Homelessness was no longer an abstract problem… it had a name and a face.

As many of you know by now, our parish is taking a bold step into a new ministry. After two months of research and deliberation the Vestry has decided that we should become a host parish for the Northwest Interfaith Hospitality Network. By partnering with NWIHN Saint Timothy’s is taking a conscious step towards opening our eyes to the reality of homelessness. For two weeks, from May 25th through June 8^th, we will be providing a home for four homeless families. We will open up our church home so that they might not be homeless and for two weeks we will feed them, shelter them and keep them company.

This is a remarkable undertaking and one that fully embraces the legacy that the first Christians set for us. By pooling our time, our labor and our resources, we will work together to meet the needs of a few of our neighbors… men, women and children who were once invisible.

I am pleased to say that a number of you have already volunteered to help when we become a host for the guests of Northwest Interfaith Hospitality Network. During the next few weeks we are hoping many more of you will do the same. There are so many ways to help. By shopping for groceries, by cooking a meal, by coming down in the evening to have dinner with our guests, by helping their kids with homework or by staying overnight at the church as a host. No act is too small and everyone’s help is needed.

Now as some of you have rightly observed this will be a lot of work. You are correct. It will take some money and a lot of labor in order to pull it off. But what you really need to know is that this is the easy part. The real challenge will come after our guests have departed. What we do over the course of two weeks has the power to change the rest of our lives. It will forever change how we view the homeless. Once we have met them… once we have connected with them as real people and not just nameless statistics… once we understand that they are not so different from us, and in fact, that some of us have been only one paycheck or just a few bad decisions away from being where they are now… then we will never again be able retreat back behind the shelter of ignorance. As a congregation we are going to take responsibility for our sisters and brothers. But once we do, it will always be a just little bit harder to go to sleep, knowing that as we do, someone else is just outside, trying to find a dry place to bed down for the night.