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Davidson Loehr
17 November 2002
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CENTERING:
(Selections from the beatitudes in the gospels of Luke and Matthew, read interspersed with the lyrics to Bette Midler’s recording of “Hello in There.” written by John Prine)
SERMON: Homeless in Austin
You probably recognized the words I read in counterpoint with the song “Hello in There” as the beatitudes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.” You may not know that there are two versions of those beatitudes in the New Testament, and that they are quite different. They were edited by two very different kinds of early Christian communities.
The version most of us know comes from the gospel of Matthew.” It’s the spiritual version:
Most biblical scholars are clear that this is much more like the other messages of Jesus: very down-to-earth and concrete.”
Even though I’m not a Christian, I have always liked Jesus’ sayings, because they make people so uncomfortable.”
Churches are polite, well-dressed, refined places compared to the streets.” The sermons are always rated “G”; even last week’s war stories wouldn’t be rated worse than “PG.”” We gather here with our kind of people, you know.” They look like us, think like us, are probably educated or over-educated like us.” They’re clean; they dress well.” They don’t embarrass us by coming up to us during coffee hour to beg for spare change, and they don’t smell.” Sure, they may be spiritually hungry or homeless, but they all eat regularly and have a warm place to live.
Things aren’t so neat with people who are really poor, hungry and homeless.” They aren’t always fed.” They can’t always find a warm or safe place to lay their weary heads.” Their clothes are usually dirty, and they often smell.” They’re not our kind of people.” Not much like the people who gather at any church.”
And when we think of giving some spare change to them, we usually do it kind of furtively, seldom meeting their eyes.” We do it because they made us feel guilty, or because it makes us feel better for a bit.” But it’s almost never anything you would call a spiritual experience.”
Jesus sided with them, but then he was homeless himself.” He had no home, no job.” He begged for his food.” So of course he felt at home with the street people: he was one of them.
Christianity has always had this double message, about both the spiritually hungry and homeless, and the really, physically, hungry and homeless.” So have most other religions:
In some of our worst inner cities, the Black Muslims have become well known for their work on the streets, among the poor, hungry and homeless.
Hinduism probably has the most spiritual and least literal of all god-images.” They have four arms, or the head of an elephant, so that nobody could ever take them literally.” They’re all spiritual symbols.” And yet right here in Austin we have the largest Hindu temple in North America.” It’s the Barsana Dahm temple south of the city, where many of us will be next Sunday afternoon, as they’re hosting the 19th annual AAIM Thanksgiving service.” And as anyone who’s been there knows, one of the most dramatic and impressive things in the whole compound are their two huge commercial kitchens, with cooking pots over three feet in diameter that can cook more than fifty gallons of food at a time.” They routinely feed two to three thousand people there: real, down-to-earth delicious vegetarian food.”
And some Buddhists take this physical care for other life more seriously than any of us would want to take it. Since they believe that all life is linked, that all living creatures were once humans in a former life, some Buddhist monks are carried through the streets, lying in beds filled with bedbugs. They collect money for food, but the food is the monk, whose sacred duty is to feed the bedbugs.
OK, that’s going way too far for me.” I couldn’t be a good Buddhist in that order of monks.” Still, all religions teach about caring for both the spirit and the body.””
But so far, these are all kind of superficial teachings, about duties we owe to those less fortunate.” Frankly, while I agree with them, the argument has never moved me very much.” I think they’re true, but not very compelling.” Nor are they particularly religious.”
When I’m being brutally honest, I have to admit that I don’t feel any particular kinship to beggars.” I’ve worked hard, I have a job, and I don’t always understand why they can’t.”
On any given day, about 300,000 of those homeless people are Vietnam vets.” I have some feeling for their pain, because it’s a pain I have felt myself.” But it’s been thirty years!” Something in me cares for them; something else in me wants them to get on with it.
I’m speaking only for myself here, not for you.” But if you look at our actions, I’m betting they show that we look at helping the homeless as a charitable act we would do, in which they really couldn’t offer anything in return.” A condescending kind of charity, where we do all the giving, they do all the receiving, and we get to feel virtuous.
As long as we see it just as a matter of economics or exchange, it might be ethical, but not very spiritual.”
But there’s another dimension to this idea of interactions between fortunate and unfortunate people that opens this out in directions that are profoundly spiritual.”
Whenever we deal with stories about spiritual transformation, we’ll almost always find they’re written in supernatural, fantastic language, with magic, gods, miraculous transformations and so on.” This seems to be because this kind of magic goes beyond the reach of our ordinary language.”
Here’s one of the stories, for example.” It’s about a poor man who was told a great treasure would await him if he could find gods and cover their heads.” He was given five brand new beautiful hats, and he started home.” He was looking for gods, though he didn’t know exactly what gods looked like, so it wasn’t easy.” On the way, he was very tempted to exchange one of these beautiful hats for his own hat, which was old and dirty.” But he didn’t.”
He walked home slowly, looking everywhere for gods but not finding any.” He was almost home, when he saw six filthy beggars sitting right in front of his house.” One was blind, two were crippled, and all looked thin and smelled bad.” They had clothes, but the winter wind was blowing bitterly, and their heads were exposed.” He stopped to think about it, then said to them “Well, my friends, I am home and I couldn’t find any gods, so I give these hats to you.” It is said that if you can place them on the heads of gods you will find a great treasure.” I hope you have better luck than I did.”” He placed the five hats on the first five beggars, then stopped.” The sixth beggar looked into his eyes, and he couldn’t bear to refuse him, so he took of his own tattered hat and put it on this last beggar.” Wishing them well, he walked into his house, but he could hardly recognize it.” It had been transformed into a mansion of marble and gold, with sacks of gold coins everywhere.” He looked outside just in time to see the six beggars begin to glow with a bright golden light, then ascend back up into their home in heaven. They only looked like beggars; but their essence was sacred.
Here’s another story.” A certain Jewish synagogue had fallen on hard times.” It was now very small, no new members ever stayed, and all the old members picked and griped at one another, each blaming the others for their sad state of affairs.” They knew this was punishment for some undiscovered sin.” Finally, when they heard that a famous rabbi was coming through their town, they sent one of their members to ask him what was wrong, and who was at fault.”
He explained the whole story to the visiting rabbi, who began nodding knowingly before he even got to the end.”
“Yes,” the rabbi said, “you are being punished for a sin.” Your sin is the sin of ignorance.” You see, one of you is the Messiah, and you act like you do not know it.”
The old Jew walked back to his community completely puzzled.” And when he told them what the rabbi had said, they were all puzzled.” The Messiah, among us?” How could this be?” Who could it be, they all wondered silently?” Surely it couldn’t be this one; he was nasty.” And that one was too rude, and the other too selfish, and all the others are so very ordinary.” Still, the rabbi said it was one of them, and they obviously couldn’t tell by looking which one it was.
Gradually, they began treating each other kindly, just in case.” Rather than blaming, they began offering to help.” Before long, the word got out in the larger community that there was a synagogue in town where everyone who came was treated like he might be the Messiah.” Soon, they had more members than they could hold, the place was bursting at the seams, and they built a new synagogue, dedicated to the belief that the Messiah was always among them, so they should treat everyone as if it might be them.”
When you look at people and see the holy in them rather than just their failings, it can transform both of you.
How many fairy tales are there with a similar plot?” The princess kisses a frog, and he turns into the prince of her dreams.” Or was she just able to see that he was already a prince, needing a tender kiss to awaken his sleeping soul?
Beauty performs the same miracle with the beast, and probably in the same way.” He was never really a beast; people just couldn’t look at him through the eyes of love.”
The ugliest duckling becomes the swan, Cinderella becomes the princess, and beggars turn out to be incarnations of God.”
The miracle happens, I’m convinced, when we can look into another’s eyes, see their spirit, and say “Hello in there.””
Jesus once said “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do also to me.”” It’s that same story.” Treat them like dirt, and we betray the fact that our religious vision can’t see beyond our own kind of people.” Treat them like children of God, they feel more like our own brothers and sisters, and we realize that, my God, we are all in the same family, we’re all in this together.
It’s the season when we will start providing dinner, a warm place to sleep and breakfast for about fifty adult homeless people here on nights when the temperature is close to freezing. The woman who works at the Austin Resource Center for the Homeless which coordinates freeze nights told me her people really like coming to churches.” “Why?” I asked.” “Our floors are hard, we don’t have cots.” “No,” they said, “but in the churches, people talk to them.” They are so hungry to be spoken to, to be treated like people.””
What she’s saying is that more than almost anything, almost more than food, they wish someone would meet their eyes and say “Hello in there.” When that can happen, at a very human level they suddenly become our kind of people.”
We’re hosting a panel here tomorrow night called “Faces of Homelessness,” with the panel made up of present or former homeless people.” Come hear them, see if you don’t feel these people are much more like us then not.” They bleed when they’re cut, shiver when they’re cold, cry when they hurt, and hurt when they’re sloughed off as though they weren’t people at all but only dirty things that clutter up our streets.
One trap for liberals in preaching on subjects like this is that it sounds like Democrats or Green Party people wrote all of our examples.” So I was delighted this week to find a “Republican” reading.” It comes from the great Hindu writer Rabindranath Tagore’s book Gitanjali:
“I had gone begging from door to door in the village path, when your golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings!” My hopes rose high and I thought my bad days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust.” The chariot stopped where I stood.” Your glance fell on me and you came down with a smile.” I felt that the luck of my life had come at last.” Then you held out your right hand and said, “What do you have to give me?”” Ah, what a joke it was to open your palm to a beggar to beg!” I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my wallet I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to you.” But how surprised I was when at the day’s end I emptied my bag on the floor to find a least little grain of gold among the corn.” I bitterly wept and wished that I had had the heart to give you my all.” (Tagore, Gitanjali, #50)
What would happen to us, what would happen to our society, if we began to believe these people homeless in Austin really were our brothers and sisters?” What kinds of laws would we then fight to change?” What kind of safety nets would we then work to create?” Even the most fortunate of us is little more than one serious brain injury or a few financial disasters away from the streets.” We don’t think it could happen to us.” But once, they didn’t think it could happen to them.
What happens to us when we stop seeing these poor, hungry and homeless people as things, and see them as our brothers and sisters?” What is the treasure that both religious myths and children’s fairy tales say can come to us when we treat them as though they might be incarnations of beauty, of ultimate worth, of God?”
Something in us looks into them; something in them looks into us and we say “Hello in there.” Hello.” I recognize you.” You’re like me.” I know your hopes and dreams and fears because I have them too.” Hello in there, my brother, my sister, hello.””
One thing I’m sure of is that once we see how much alike we are, how much we really are all sisters and brothers, that it can change our world.” We can easily let subhuman strangers live lives of dangerous desperation, but we can’t as easily let it happen to those to whom we have said “Hello in there.””
Because when that happens, we feel that we didn’t encounter a beggar after all.” We encountered something holy; we encountered God.” Then the homeless people are no longer the dregs of life; they’re the essence of life.” We know, then, that our souls came from the same stuff, are woven of the same fabric of hopes, yearnings and fears, that we are all trying to find ourselves a home in this world.” In a spiritual sense, we become homeless together, as children alone in the world with only ourselves and each other to count on.
You may wonder how that could really change the world.” The truth is that it’s about the only thing that can.
