What do you think the average homeless person in the city of
Allentown looks like? Don’t say anything yet, I promise we will come back to
this question.
Now, I want to share a story with you. One that will might
challenge some of your views on a significant population of our society, but it
is a story that I believe needs to be shared. I came across this story in Jonathan Kozol’s
book Rachel and Her Children Homeless
Families in America. The book was published in 1988 so the numbers have
changed since then, but the problem still remains.
“He was a carpenter. She was a woman many people nowadays
would call old-fashioned. She kept house and cared for their five children
while he did construction work in New York City housing projects. Their home
was an apartment in a row of neat brick buildings. She was very pretty then,
and even now, worn down by months of suffering, she has a lovely wistful look.
She wears blue jeans, a yellow jersey, and a bright red ribbon in her hair-‘for
luck,’ she says. But luck has not been with this family for some time.
They were a happy and chaotic family then. He was proud of
his acquired skills. ‘I did carpentry. I painted. I could do wall papering. I
earned a living. We spent Sundays walking with our children at the beach.’ They
lived near Coney Island. That is where this story will begin.
‘We were at the boardwalk. We were up some. We had been at
Nathan’s. We were eating hotdogs.’
He is cheerful when he recollects that afternoon. The
children have long, unruly hair. They range in age from two to ten. They crawl
all over him-exuberant and wild.
Peter says that they were wearing summer clothes: ‘Shorts
and sneakers. Everybody was in shorts.’
When they were told about the fire, they grabbed the
children and ran home. Everything they owned had been destroyed.
‘My grandmother’s china,’ she says. ‘Everything.’ She adds,
‘I had that book of gourmet cooking…’
What did the children lose?
‘My doggy,’ says one child. Her kitten, born three days
before, had also died.
Peter has had no real job since. ‘Not since the fire. I had
tools. I cannot replace those tools. It took me years of work.’ He explains
that he had accumulated tools for different jobs, one tool at a time. Each job
would enable him to add another tool to his collection. ‘Everything I had was
in that fire.’
They had never turned to welfare in the twelve years since
they’d met and married. A social worker helped to place them in a homeless
shelter called the Martinique Hotel. When we meet, Peter is thirty. Megan is
twenty-eight. They have been in this hotel for two years.
She explains why they cannot get out: ‘Welfare tells you how
much you can spend for an apartment. The limit for our family is $366. You’re
from Boston. Try to find a place for seven people for $366 in New York City.
You can’t do it. I’ve been looking for two years.’
The city pays $3,000 monthly for the two connected rooms in
which they live. She shows me the bathroom. Crumbling walls. Broken tiles. The
toilet doesn’t work. There is a pan to catch something that’s dripping from the
plaster. The smell is overpowering.
‘I don’t see any way out,’ he says. ‘I want to go home.
Where can I go?’
A year later I’m in New York. In front of a Park Avenue
hotel I’m facing two panhandlers. It takes a moment before I can recall their
names.
They look quit different now. The panic I saw in them a year
ago is gone. All five children have been taken from them. Having nothing left
to loose has drained them of their desperation.
The children have been scattered-placed in various foster
homes. ‘White children,’ Peter says, ‘are in demand by the adoption agencies.’
Standing here before a beautiful hotel as evening settles in
over New York, I’m reminded of the time before the fire when they had their
children and she had her cookbooks and their children had a dog and cat. I
remember the words that Peter used, ‘We were up some. We had been at Nathan’s.’
Although I am not a New Yorker, I know by now what Nathan’s is: a glorified
hot-dog stand. The other phrase has never left my mind.
Peter laughs. ‘Up some?’
The laughter stops. Beneath his street-wise manner he is not
a hardened man at all. ‘It means,’ he says, ‘that we were happy.’
They were a happy family until the fire destroyed their
world. The fire claimed all of their resources and priceless possessions. When Peter lost his tools in the fire he lost
his ability to provide for his family. The family had no way to rebuild after
the fire. The fire made it impossible
for Peter and Megan to provide for their five children. Not only did the fire
destroy all of their resources, the fire split up their family. Peter and Megan lost their children. Their
five children lost their parents and their siblings. The harsh reality of this
family’s story is that they had no one to turn to for help. They had no one to
help get them back on their feet. Now all they can do is think back to the time
before the fire when they were as Peter put it, “up some.”
The writer of James says that having faith is a good thing. The
writer then goes onto say that we need to put our faith into action. We can say
that we believe in God, but we must have faith with deeds. Faith with action heals
the broken spots of our world. Faith with action has the power to keep families
together after fires. Faith with action has the potential to end homelessness.
The writer is saying that as part of the God movement we must actively
participate in the healing of our world.
We can talk about homelessness all day and we can quote
scripture after scripture, but it will not do anything to change the fact that
the age of the average homeless person in Allentown is 9. How many of you
pictured a child when you thought of the average homeless person in the city of
Allentown? The only way to end homelessness is to put our faith into action. The
command to protect the orphan is found throughout the Torah and Jesus shows us
time and time again that in order to follow him we must take care of the
children. When the disciples tried to stop the children form seeing Jesus, he
told the disciples that the Kingdom of God belongs to children. The Kingdom of
God belongs to the average homeless person in the city of Allentown.
Kozol says that, “The cause of homelessness is lack of
housing”. Homeless people are not lazy. Homeless people are not criminals. They
are people that do not have a place to live. Homeless people are people, just
like you and me. They want to be loved, accepted, and cared about just like us.
Too often we do not invite them to our church because of what they look like
and even sometimes because of how they smell. Well, the thing is you would
smell too if you had not changed your socks in two weeks; how could you when
you only own one pair of socks? You would smell too if you had no place to take
a shower and nothing to clean yourself with; how could you if you do not have a
house and therefore you do not have a bathroom that has a shower? The love and
grace of God looks past the raggedness and the stench of the homeless person.
The love and grace of God sees only a human being.
I
found this quote in one of the many books that Pastor Joanne gave me to read.
In his reflection on the Book of James, Luke Timothy Johnson says, “When the poor
cannot find a place in the Christian church, that church no longer has any
connection to Jesus.” At first I thought I understood what he was talking
about; Jesus said to help the poor. About a week later I dawned me that that
wasn’t what he was talking about; Jesus was poor. Jesus was homeless. Jesus did
not have a lot of resources. Jesus travelled the countryside barefoot and the
disciples slept on rocks in gardens. As part of the God movement we are called
by God to love one another, because God first loved us. We are called to love as God loves us. We are
called to love the homeless person. As part of the God movement we are called
to save people from a gospel that is only about people and not the systems that
enslave them. As part of the God movement we are called to hear the cry of the
oppressed and change the system. As part of the God movement we are called to
extend the amazing gift of grace that has been freely given to us with
everyone, from the Kardashians to the homeless man we walk past on our way to
dinner at Allentown Brew Works. Putting
our faith into action can take many forms; advocating to our local and national
law makers, volunteering at the 6th Street Shelter, inviting a
homeless person to your home for dinner, donating food to the food pantry at
St. Paul’s United Church of Christ in Trexlertown, donating money to
micro-credit organizations such as Kiva, getting involved with the Lehigh
Valley Conference of Churches, and participating in the Crop Hunger Walk.
May
we leave here today with a passion burning in our hearts to heal the brokenness
of our world. Amen.
go in PEACE. live PEACE. be Peace.
