A Little Reminder from God

This week, I think God sent us all a little reminder about our scripture lesson from last Sunday through an encounter we had here at church, with a houseless neighbor.

I hesitated a bit to write this, because to write about every good deed can start to feel like false-humble bragging; and also because we should never sugarcoat the true challenge of assisting houseless neighbors. As I’ve told you before about our ministry in subfreezing temps, for every example of “success,” there are many times when you feel helpless to do anything positive.

But this week a little hopeful moment unfolded, and gave me a message that stuck with me that I think God wants me to share with you.

I think God speaks to us through little events that happen.
And if we’re listening closely to life events, our opportunities to help others leap out in front of us.

Tuesday afternoon, I was working in the office, when Oscar Brown stopped by to let me know the Day School Staff and parents were reporting a houseless neighbor, passed out on our playground.

As I’ve mentioned to you several times in recent weeks, encountering the homeless is just one part of living in the urban core of any large city.

It didn’t especially surprise me to hear this.

But, I also didn’t know what we’d find once we got there.

I won’t go into many of the details of what he said to Oscar and I as we talked to him on a Roberts Forest picnic bench. I will say he clearly had not bathed in a long time, he had two different shoes on his feet, and he looked very hungry.

This week, Oscar wrote about this encounter as well. And here’s some of what Oscar about walking up to a houseless neighbor like that:

“This is where there is a fork in the road for most of our society.

Do we treat this individual as a potential criminal, drug abuser, dangerous to society and call the police to deal with him (with “IT”) not seeing the human life before us? The Judgement Route.

Or do we treat this individual with compassion, understanding that we do not know how or why this young man is in this condition but find a way to help him – not just deal with”‘IT.” The Empathy Route.

Christ presents himself to us daily in the flesh in the form of “the least of these” ; the vulnerable, the hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, and sick, the marginalized.

He presents himself to us to see how we react. With judgement – or with empathy?”

——————

I think Oscar has definitely identified the “fork in the road,” and the moment of truth that life puts before all of us.

So, as I sat on the picnic bench with him, Oscar retrieved some brand new shoes and shirt, along with a sandwich and water.

(Yes, Oscar keeps all these things at the ready with himself, because he has as special love for our houseless neighbors…)

Mary Ann Climer stopped by with a Bible…he had asked us if he might have a Bible, so we got him one from the church.

I’m not sure he did much more than cursorily flip through it that day. But I volunteered to stay with him, while Oscar and Mary Ann resumed their work, getting ready to serve the residents of Hillcrest House.

As they headed out to serve a hot meal with other KPUMC volunteers, me and our new houseless friend just continued to sit there, in the natural beautify of Roberts Forest.

At first, our new friend agreed to go with emergency services to the hospital.
Good news…

But soon, he backtracked, and said he wouldn’t go.

And so, this left me inwardly wondering just how this encounter might end.

I said, “No problem…we’ll just sit here a bit longer…”

Then he stopped flipping through the Bible and he let it fall open where it wanted to.
It took my breath away.

I looked over to his lap, and could see, very clearly, that the Bible had fallen open to James, Chapter 2.

I felt like God had hit me, and all of us, dear friends, right between the eyes.

This was our scripture passage from just this past Sunday, when we talked about how God calls us to not show partiality to the rich, or ignore the poor.

Here’s a part of what’s on the page that Bible opened to:

“For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, “Have a seat here, please,” while to the one who is poor you say, “Stand there,” or, “Sit at my feet,” have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?”

To be clear, he couldn’t have possibly known that we had just read this passage.
And the book just fell open to that page.


And, sure, maybe Mary Ann pulled a Bible out of the pews that had just been opened to that page two days prior…and therefore there is physical reason it “fell” to that page.

I have no idea.

All I know is, I whispered to God:


“OK…OK….

I get the message, God…

I get the message…”

See. This is how messages from God work.

Can you explain them in some other, physical way?
Sure you can.

Or, you can see with your spiritual eyes, and wonder what meaning there might be in such a moment?

And who says we can’t do both?
(We are meaning-making creatures, of course…)

So, I didn’t know how this would play out.

I only knew neither of us were going anywhere for a while. 

After some time (most of our time was awkward silence, where he fidgeted or looked around as if he was trying to find a thought, any thought) he looked straight at me and asked, “Can we go in the sanctuary?”

We went in the sanctuary, and sat in the front pew, facing the Rose Window.

He asked for piece of paper and started scribbling random, incoherent lines, and saying very little. Like he was in some other world. Then, he was back again…asking if we could listen to YouTube.

Turns out, in his better times he’d made YouTube playlists of his favorite music to listen to.

So…we listened to YouTube on my phone.

We sat there, the two of us, listening to heavy metal, as the late afternoon Sun gave the stained-glass rose window a holy, luminous glow.

Finally, his Mother called back.


Oh, I forgot to mention, he had offered his Mother’s number to me out on the playground. (She lives in the greater DFW area…)

We had called her when we were sitting out on the picnic tables.

She’d come home from work and seen the call, and was calling me back about an hour later.

Without revealing too many confidences, she shared that she hadn’t see him in a month, and tearfully described how he needed help for many physical and mental issues.

She shared a story I have heard many times before: That after many years and times of trying, she was unable to physically or emotionally care for him at this point…but that she spends every day, worried sick about him.

I put her on speaker phone, and she convinced him to go to the hospital.
She tearfully told him that she loved him, as he hung up the phone.

We called EMS, and Dallas Paramedics sensitively took his information, talked to his Mom, and transported him away.


And that’s how the story ended. I have no idea what happened after that.

I’d like to think he got some help.

But given my previous experiences, I’d put the odds at about an 80%-or-so chance he just walked back out on to the streets of Dallas again later that night, or the following morning.

Whatever the case, I can assure you that today, there is a 100% chance his Mother is worried sick about him, once again.

“God chose the poor in the world,” James says, “to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? But you have dishonored the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you?”

Later, James says that the key to living this way is the second-clause of the Great Commandment: 

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

But…there’s an ethical core of this teaching that we often rush past. Truly living a Great Commandment life, James says, means being consciously aware to neither show partiality TO the rich, or AGAINST the poor.

And as I said Sunday, there is no harder thing to do than this work of being conscious and aware of just how much we make distinctions between people.

Lot’s of people say “I don’t see color,” when it comes to race.
Brain science and MRI scans for implicit bias tell us: “All of us do…”

We like to think we treat poor and rich “the same.”
I think much of how our entire society is organized would tell us the opposite.

“Is it not the rich who oppress you?” James asks us all; and not really rhetorically.


Don’t the rich trick us into giving them a kind of deference?
And don’t we all fear a random stranger who smells bad, has shabby clothes, and might be either mentally ill, on drugs, or both?

Oscar Brown notes that our Christian Churches, tragically, often perpetuate these very distinctions social class, instead of doing what they can to do this hard, messy, kind of ministry when it comes to them. Oscar puts it more passionately:

“There are churches in the Dallas area not far from KPUMC – pastors, so called preachers of the word of God and the story of Jesus – who would have sat high in their offices and called 911 to have the police “deal with” a possibly dangerous but clearly unsightly homeless person on “their property”.

Their property?”

Oscar is on to something….

Christians are supposed to believe that everything we have, everything we own, comes to us as a gift from God.

Our calling is to use what God gives us in the moments that come to us, to, as our founder John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can…”

It’s not easy.

We’re not gonna get a ticker tape parade by helping the poor.
We’re not likely to find those God puts in front of us are always “grateful” for our “beneficence.”

In fact, for every story like this one, I can tell you ten that didn’t work out so neatly, or with any kind of hopeful message, whatsoever.

As I like to remind everyone, every chance I get: When we give of our time, talents, and life, we should assume we WILL be taken advantage of!!

In fact, that uneasy fear that sometimes wells up in us, that we are being taken for a ride, or not “in control” of a situation…maybe that’s not just self-protective. Maybe that’s also a clue that some of God’s beauty and grace might just be breaking through….that some God-human connection is about to be made.

Or, not.

Not every kindness will be greeted with, gratitude, or even be seen as “kind.”

Sometimes we’ll be greeted with outright hostility or conniving cruelty.

These last “asides” are my attempts at human honesty, instead of “preacher-glossing” the true way of the world.

So, I don’t know how to end this story, except to remind you of what I know to be true of all such encounters, whether or not they result in a neat, tellable, story.

I’d remind you…

That our world is hurting.

That the macro-solutions are complicated, and if they weren’t we’d have fixed the chronic issues that frustrate us, already.

That we tend to either idealize or condemn the rich and the poor, failing time and again to see that neither group of people are either super humans, or sub-humans.

That until get much better at the kind of impartial love, kindness, and compassion James urges, we’ll continue to be in a world of hurt.

Christians are *supposed* to do all of this whenever we can.

But, as I like to say, you don’t have to run out and find some random person to love with God’s compassion. You don’t have to “manufacture it.”
(In fact, if you try to manufacture it —like thinking too much about improvisational music— you’ll likely ruin it....)

If you’re human and you’re alive, my strong guess is that you encounter folks every day who could use your attention.

The key is SEEING the poor, of course.

And also…deciding not to explain-away that moment when a Bible falls open to James, Chapter 2.