Our Homeless Lord

            Where did Jesus live?  I know, he lived in Nazareth with Mary and Joseph when he was a kid, but later, during his ministry, where was his home?  He stayed with Mary, Martha and Lazarus in their home in Bethany for a short visit; he visited Peter’s home in Capernaum and healed Peter’s mother-in-law, but during the three years of his ministry, where was his home?

            It seems to me that he didn’t really have a home.  He spent his time with the poor and the outcast and more or less lived with them.  That is certainly what he told his disciples to do when he sent them out. He very carefully told them not to take much of anything with them, but to live out of the goodness of the people whom they met on the way.  He told them that if they weren’t received in a particular place to shake the dust off their shoes and to move on. 

            For a while, that is how the church lived also.  They met in various homes, sometimes as many as forty people; they sang hymns, prayed and took care of those who were in need.  Their economy was basically communistic.  They pooled their resources and used those assets to take care of not only each other, but also those who were in need in their community.  It didn’t take long, though for the church to lose its focus on need and begin to pay more attention to its own needs.  This is when corruption began to take hold in religion.  It had been there all along, it just began to take over.  The church began to build buildings and isolate itself from the rest of society.  Then, after Constantine recognized Christianity as the state religion, Christians began to compel others to become Christian by threats and sometimes even torture.  There were people who continued to practice the religion that Jesus gave to us; but mostly, we had a church of compulsion.  There was a wonderful eruption of monastic movements.  Francis of Assisi and his followers went back to the model that Jesus gave to his disciples and began taking care of the poor first and letting the rich take care of themselves. 

            Later, when the great cathedrals were being built, the church provided for the poor by giving them ample work to do and providing a way for them to take care of themselves and their families by building the churches.  That lasted for a long time until the political forces began to repress religion and take over their buildings and their ministries.  We had  the Reformation and the Council of Trent, Roman Catholicism’s response to Martin Luther, and then a lot of wars between the various denominations.  So where are we today?  We have a plethora of denominations, of separate religions and sometimes it seems that they are all at war with each other.  ISIS uses threats and force to make people become some variety of Muslim.  Jews and Muslims and Christians fight over the territory that was the Holy Land.  We don’t really look very good when it comes to trying to show the world what God looks like.

            I spent over twenty years as a part-time chaplain in a penitentiary.  It was a voluntary job, I got no pay for it.  I had eight men in my group that met once a week.  All of them had killed someone and what they all wanted even more than food and sleep was forgiveness.  But how was that ever going to happen?  One of the men got a letter from the family of the woman whom he had killed telling him that they wanted to come and see him.  He wrote back to them and told them to come.  When the day of the visit arrived, he went reluctantly to the visiting room to see them.  The girl’s father said to him: “we have come to forgive you.  It is time for us to bury our daughter and to get on with our lives.”  He was stunned by this, but came back to the group and broke into tears.  It was a beautiful moment.  He remained in prison, but he had a gift that very few of his fellow inmates had.  Forgiveness is freedom; freedom for the family who offered it, and freedom for the inmate who received it.  That, I think is the essence of what Jesus taught us about church. 

            Jesus spent most of his life homeless.  He walked among the poor, healed them and made sure that the people whom he met had what they needed.  His disciples did the same thing.  After Jesus death and resurrection, they did their best to take care of the people in the community who were without even meager resources.  I know that we are called to the same ministry.  What often restricts us is our focus on ourselves.  We have to pay for our buildings, our clergy and all of the structure that we have built around our mission.  That’s not to say that those things are unnecessary, but sometimes we let them take us over.  I like to keep Jesus and his disciples in mind and think about how they were able to go about their work and take care of the people around them.  I know that it wasn’t easy, but it worked primarily because they put the needs that they found first and themselves last.  That is certainly what the Gospels tell us, and when we really do it we find that success multiplies.

             If Jesus was essentially homeless, then among the homeless is where we will find him and his incomparable love  When we find our Lord among the poor, we also find our mission.