If you'd like to see a video of today's sermon, you can find it here.
Jesus was not the only one who did not have a place to lay his head.
This bronze sculpture by Canadian Timothy Schmalz portrays Jesus as person with no place to lay his head.
But then neither does David…nor Lizzie…nor Danny…nor Matt.
They are all people I have gotten to know during the last year at Christ Pres. They are all about in their 40s, They are all people who have been with us in our space at one time or another. They are people some of you have gotten to know as well. For today, I’ve changed their names.
They are people we have been able to help a bit with our Compassion Fund. And they are people who have taught me a bit about the challenges of being without a place to lay your head – at least without a place they could call home.
They are hardly alone. As of last Thursday, according to a story in the Wisconsin State Journal, the list of people who are homeless waiting for housing included 609 singles and 72 households with children. And those are just the ones on an official list.
Bryan Stevenson, whose book Just Mercy took readers inside his work to free people unjustly on death row and whose Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama brings us face-to-face with the racial injustices across the centuries, talks a lot about proximity.
“If you are willing to get closer to people who are suffering,” Stevenson says, “you will find the power to change the world.”
That’s part of what I experienced with these four people. It’s part of what you experience when you eat with guests at Luke House or chat with people who come to the Community Fridge looking for food.
Danny had been sleeping outside in parks along the lake – including right behind the church. He said that his wife had left him a while ago and brought his kids to Madison, so he came here to be nearby.
A carpenter by trade, he was looking for a job, but had no place to live. He stayed at the emergency men’s shelter for a while, but then his backpack with his laptop and clothes was stolen, so he took to sleeping outside.
The day I met him at church, he was looking for clothes. All he had at that point, he said, was the tee-shirt and shorts that he was wearing.
I took him over to the Beacon on East Washington – an amazing place that was packed with other people without homes looking for help – for housing, for a place to wash their clothes, for a place just to hang out for a while. They have been serving up to a record of 250 people a day during August.
They told Danny they would find some clothes for him, but they were so busy and understaffed that it would take a few hours. He said he understood and would come back later in the afternoon.
A few weeks later, he stopped by to tell me his phone had been stolen. If you are trying to find work, you need a phone where prospective employers can reach you. So I used our Compassion Fund to get him a $50 smart phone and $50 in phone minutes.
He was thrilled – and grateful. But then within a week, while he was sleeping at James Madison Park someone had stolen my old backpack that I had given him. There went his phone.
“I’m just not good at being homeless,” Danny told me.
We went over to St. Vinnie’s to get a set of clothes he could wear to a job interview and he was off. He did not get that job – he needed a car to get to the various work sites, but now he has landed one at a company that does masonry restoration. I learned a lot about resourcefulness and persistence from Danny.
But he still has no place to sleep inside. The exhaustion of sleeping outside may well affect his ability to keep that job. I don’t think any of us are very good at being homeless. Even Jesus, after all, noted that he had nowhere to lay his head.
Lizzie had a place to lay her head – sort of. When she first came to Christ Pres in late November, she and her 12-year-old daughter were sleeping in her car. She fled what she described as a bad situation in Chicago. She had been working with the Beacon and the Salvation Army to find a place to stay, but nothing had opened up.
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| Family shelter |
But life is never simple. She went to Chicago in December to try to get her 14-year old daughter to come back to Madison. She had gone back to Chicago with friends whom Lizzie did not trust. But Lizzie could not get back to Madison that evening and her daughter could not stay at the shelter because there was no adult with her and could I pick her up? No, I could not, for a whole variety of reasons. And it went on like that.
Lizzie came here for Advent Vespers, sat in on a Bible study or two, tried to navigate dealing with two challenging teens. Through it all, she marked two years of sobriety. Finally, she decided the only thing she could do is go back to Chicago, even with all the troubles she faces there.
From there, she keeps posting on Facebook about her faith in God to get her through all this and sending good wishes.
I learned a lot about resilience and faith and determination from her.
I learned a lot about how overlapping issues can send you over the edge from David.
He had been an assistant professor at UW-Madison for six years, was a research fellow at Harvard, taught at Northwestern – and last fall was facing eviction, losing his car and potential arrest for failing to pay child support for his now 16-year old daughter to the tune of some $50,000.
What went wrong? So many things.
He had emotional and physical disabilities that ultimately cost him his job. Part of what happened is he stopped opening his mail, would not answer or make phone calls and he was very hard to help since he wanted to do things his way. He had no income and his mother – who lived in another country - was draining her savings to support him where she could.
Yet people did reach out to help. Our own Ron Konkol restarted the process to see if he could get Social Security Disability. The Aging and Disability Resource Center got him a case worker who could try to reestablish health care. The Tenant Resource Center provided an attorney who helped him get an extra month before eviction. Our Compassion Fund covered his car payment and insurance so he would not have his car impounded.
So many complications. At the end of September, a moving truck took his stuff to storage and – as best I can tell – he and his mother fled the country to avoid the warrant that was now out for him for failure to pay child support.
When you are living on the edge, there are not always happy endings.
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| Men's shelter |
That shelter now is setting new records for people staying there – 270 guests were jammed in there on Aug. 22, up from 210 earlier this summer.
Matt was married for 20 years. He and his wife had six kids – one of them now grown and living in Arizona. He worked as a custodian at St. Mary’s Hospital and Home Depot. But then two years ago, he and his wife got divorced. He is still in touch with his kids. He is very close with his 16-year-old son. But life is so complicated.
Rent at the place where he was living was $1,300 a month, but the building was sold, and the new owner raised the rent to $1,700. Matt could not afford that. He sold his car to keep solvent for a little while. Now he was without a home or a car, so he went to the men’s shelter.
He got a job with the City of Madison Traffic Engineering Department painting lines on streets. But his shift was from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. and the buses don’t run in the middle of night. So he’d sleep in a park after work, then catch one of the first buses at dawn back to the shelter.
Folks had to be out of the shelter by 8 a.m., so then he’d go to a library, maybe getting a bit of sleep until a librarian woke him up and told him he could not sleep in the library. The Compassion Fund helped get him cab rides from work to the shelter for a few weeks, but now he is back on his own.
He worked with folks at The Beacon to try to find better housing. He applied for other, better jobs and got one at a downtown hotel as a maintenance worker. Rob Striker, who is on our Compassion Fund Committee, met a few times with him to give him some moral support. But in the meantime, Matt is still sleeping in the shelter.
Here's a guy with no criminal record, dedicated to his family, working a tough shift on a city job, and bumping into one obstacle after another, including having cash from his paycheck stolen out of his wallet one morning at the shelter.
It became clear to me even with a good job and a clean record how hard it is to find a place to live, even just a room he could rent in someone’s house. He is hardly alone. Finding housing is the biggest challenge for every agency that works with people without homes, domestic violence survivors fleeing their abuser, people returning from prison, immigrants arriving in our city.
The time I spent with Danny and Lizzie, with David and Matt drove home to me so many of the challenges people face when they are trapped in poverty. No place to live, no car for transportation, no job because they have no phone, emotional illnesses, fractured relationships.
One of my heroes is Fr. Greg Boyle, a Jesuit priest who 35 years ago in Los Angeles started an organization called Homeboy Industries that works with gang members.
In his 2017 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, Fr. Greg told the graduates that a healthy community stands “in awe of what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment of how they carry it.” He added that “the measure of our compassion is not in our service to those on the margins but to see ourselves in kinship with them.”
One of the great blessings we have here at Christ Pres is the Compassion Fund that has been able to help people both within our congregation and those in the wider community.
A bequest from a member a few years back has given us the resources to work with. That money will not last forever, of course, and our Deacons Compassion Fund committee works hard to use the funds both generously and wisely.
That empty plate that the homeless Jesus is pointing to gets filled and refilled thanks to the work of people here.
But we do more that provide resources. In that Gospel story we heard today, Jesus healed people in their distress. That inspired others to follow him. I think for many of us, that inspiration propels us forward as well.
We are among those who try to love and to serve our city. We cry out for justice. We reach out to those in need. We let their lives affect ours. We experience proximity just as Jesus did.
So let us join together in a hymn. It’s #351, “All Who Love and Serve Your City.” We’ll sing verses 1, 2 and 4.
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