HOMILY – 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Love in Action

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          Jesus is teaching us today how to pray. He’s also sharing a parable about how our creator hears and answers our prayers but reminds us to be persistent in our prayers to God. Don’t give up. On God. Or on ourselves.

“Father, hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.”

This weekend’s story is about answered prayers and the people we meet along the way. It’s also about how we should never judge a book by its cover, and how we can change the world one soul at a time.

My dear friend Dianah and her family first saw the homeless woman sitting on a street corner ranting and raving as traffic drove by while coming home from Sunday church service in their hometown of Spokane.  

           The woman clearly was dealing with some deep-seeded demons and appeared mentally ill. 

Most people would just look the other way and keep driving. 

Dianah and her family had done so several times before, but on one particularly cold day her now husband Mike just couldn’t do it.  He could no longer look the other way and keep driving.

He got out of the car, walked up to the woman, and said, “Is there anything you need?”  

The woman said, “I’d love a cup of coffee.”  

So, they drove to the corner gas station to buy the coffee and Dianah said, “We need to get her a sandwich, too.” So they bought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.   Turned out the woman “loved peanut butter and jelly” sandwiches.  She was so excited about the sandwich and hot coffee and said, “Thank you.”

“Father, hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread”

Dianah is someone I’ve known for 25 years.  

This would not be the last time Dianah and the homeless woman would see each other. Dianah would drive by every couple of days and ask if there was anything the woman needed.

This went on for months. Dianah found out the woman loved hot cocoa and warm banana bread with butter on it.  So, she brought her some on a regular basis. 

She would asked her, “Why do you keep stopping by?” Saying, other "people stop by, but you keep coming back.”

Dianah said, “I think God put you in my life for a reason.”  

           The woman told Dianah, “People like you don’t come back.”  

In other words, well-dressed, professional people like Dianah don’t come back.  

“Father, hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread

and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,”

Dianah would usually sit down on the sidewalk with the woman during their visits together to get on her level. 

One day during a visit, Dianah noticed the woman didn’t have any shoes. It was in the middle of winter. It was cold out. The woman claimed someone had taken her shoes. So, Dianah went and got her a pair. 

Dianah eventually learned the woman’s name was Marcella.

Due to city ordinances, Marcella was forced to move on a regular basis. This made it difficult for Dianah to find her. But Dianah always found a way to find her friend Marcella.
           I first learned of Dianah’s experiences with Marcella through Facebook picture posts from Dianah’s husband Mike, another dear friend and longtime homeless advocate.
           A friendship blossomed and Marcella began to count on Dianah to stop by for a visit. Slowly, her mood started to change. Dianah would see Marcella smile, joke and laugh more and more.

One day Dianah stopped by and could tell Marcella was crying. It was such a bitter, cold winter day that Dianah was afraid to get out of the car. Turned out it was the anniversary of Marcella’s father’s death a decade and a half earlier and Marcella was not in the mood for a visit. 

Dianah asked, “Are you OK? Do you need a hug?” 

Marcella looked at her and said, “I’m strong.”

Dianah told her “You are strong, but we’re still allowed to be hurting inside.” She got out of her car and hugged Marcella as the homeless woman cried in Dianah’s arms for a long while.  

Once Marcella told Dianah, “People keep telling me I’m on Facebook. I don’t even know what Facebook is.  But you’re making me famous.” Dianah said, “No, I think you’re making yourself famous.”

Soon, others would join in helping Marcella on the streets due to her Facebook fame. In fact, Dianah met a Spokane police officer who would check in on Marcella every night just to make sure she was OK.

Dianah realized Marcella had a heart that was not meant to be on the streets and started to look for ways to get her off the street and talking to Marcella about this. 

 Then Dianah lost touch with Marcella.  Dianah became despondent. Where was my friend? She disappeared from the streets. Had something happened? 

Weeks went by and Marcella was nowhere to be found. 

Dianah and her family attend Sunday services at a non-denominational church that does a weekly feed for low income and unhoused in Spokane.  

Actually, many experiencing homelessness attend the church service, too.

           One Sunday, just as the service was ending, Dianah caught sight of Marcella, all cleaned up and looking nice, sitting right across from her. Dianah screamed out in a loud voice, “Marcella!” and ran to her friend for an embrace. 

Marcella told Dianah that day, “You know, we’re kindred spirits.”

“Father, hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread

and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,

and do not subject us to the final test."

           Dianah even found out Marcella used to be a nurse. 

Both had judged a book by its cover.  Both had been wrong about each other.  Both learned to love each other just as Christ loved us and taught us to pray.

Many people like to talk about homelessness, but few actually do anything about it.

I pray all followers of Christ will look deep inside our hearts and question the assumptions and judgments that keep us at arm's length of sharing Christ's love. Learn to forgive others for not being like us. And ask God to write off our debts, make us whole again, and let his Kingdom come.

HOMILY – Pentecost – Following the Holy Spirit

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          I remember my first Dale Carnegie class as a young manager. The first lesson was: “Act enthusiastic and you’ll be enthusiastic.”

In other words, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”

           I was 29 at the time, had just moved with my pregnant wife from Seattle to Little Rock, Arkansas, to manage a newsradio station there, and didn’t have a clue as to how to lead people.

           The station owner was a former Navy Admiral. He knew how to lead people. He was the one to suggest I take a Dale Carnegie course to smooth out my many rough edges. 

           The word enthusiasm comes from a two Greek words: en and theos. These two words put together mean “God within”.

           In the ancient Greek world, enthusiasm was seen as “an arbitrary invasion of God into the psyche that filled the person with an indomitable energy.”

Or put another way, a person filled with “divine inspiration.”

           From a Christian faith perspective, enthusiasm means a person filled with the Spirit of God, filled with the Holy Spirit.

           For Christians, enthusiasm is more than just being energetic. Enthusiasm means being courageous, motivated, and committed.

           When we think of the Christian expression of enthusiasm, we can easily think of the Apostles whose lives we’ve been hearing about these past fifty days in our first reading each week from Acts of the Apostles.

How else would the Apostles have accomplished all they did without having “God within”?

As former Seattle Bishop Daniel Mueggenborg wrote in his book, Come Follow Me, “The gift of the Holy Spirit transformed their fear into faith. It motivated them from being self-preserving to becoming other-serving, and it changed the mission of the Church from merely a human organization into a holy endeavor.”

The power of the Holy Spirit transforms of lives and communities.

          We, too, experience the power of the Holy Spirit with our homeless street medicine nonprofit in Everett called MercyWatch.

Founded in the summer of 2016, this all-volunteer team serves on the margins of society by providing outreach, medical assistance, and serving as advocates to those experiencing homelessness.

          When I shared with the archbishop my plan to retire as pastoral leader of Christ Our Hope and St. Patrick, I knew God wanted me to spend more time with MercyWatch. But I didn’t know why.

A few weeks after notifying the archbishop I got my first answer. My second answer came just this past Friday.

          Days after I got this letter from Archbishop confirming my decision to step down here, we received our first good news.

The Archbishop wrote, “Dennis, I am pleased to hear that you are re-engaging with MercyWatch and believe this sort of ministry exemplifies the ‘Samaritan Church’ to which Pope Francis is calling us… I fully support your discernment (and your decision to retire).”

          Just a week after receiving this letter from the Archbishop, MercyWatch found out it was eligible for a portion of 35 million dollars of new state funding for the uninsured and underinsured.

MercyWatch has over a thousand clients and serves as one of the largest free clinics in the state of Washington. MercyWatch is the only nonprofit doing street medicine in Western Washington.

On Monday, we will find out how much we will be awarded.

          No matter the amount, it will be a blessing for our unhoused clients in Snohomish County and beyond. This funding will allow us to better serve their needs.

In addition, this past Friday MercyWatch was asked to help run a five-day a week day shelter for those experiencing homelessness in Everett. City and County funding will flow into that project to better serve our community.

          What a pair of Holy Spirit moments for our team! What a pair of Holy Spirit moments to add consolation to a decision to leave this beautiful community. God has big plans for our team.

MercyWatch enthusiastically serves the unhoused. Our team is courageous in its encounters with this volatile and vulnerable community.

MercyWatch doctors, nurse practitioners, nurses and outreach workers and others are motivated and committed because we have “God within” our mission.

This is where I will be spending my fulltime attention once I leave here at the end of the month.

          I ask for your prayers for our endeavors.

In Assisi, every year on the Feast of Pentecost, St. Francis would gather his many followers and pray to the Holy Spirit to guide them in their endeavors.

“The Holy Spirit is able to transform fear into courageous faith, anxious concern into peace, alienation into reconciliation, and disciples into missionaries.”

As we gather here today, let us pray for Sacred Encounters, St. Vincent de Paul, MercyWatch, Operation Nightwatch, Union Gospel Mission, Mary’s Place, and all the many ministries serving the “least of these” in our world; that the Holy Spirit will enrich their endeavors.

          May we missionaries move forward with enthusiasm, “God within,” and may our efforts be powerful work done through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And to that we say, Amen.

 

HOMILY – Fourth Sunday of Easter – Sacred Encounters

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          Over the years, I've been asked by friends what they can do to help a homeless person they've met on the streets.

I tell them the most important thing we can do is be a friend, walk with the person, continue to offer the ministry of presence. This is the best medicine for our ailing unhoused friends – to let them know they’re not alone.

We do this every Wednesday with Sacred Encounters.

          In the winter of 2005, L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez was searching of a good news story. He never expected that his life would be forever changed, or richly blessed, or that he’d have a new lifelong friend in a homeless man.

As he was sitting in a downtown Los Angeles park one sunny afternoon, he heard a homeless man playing a violin. The instrument only had two strings on it, but the music being played was remarkably beautiful.

          Lopez struck up a conversation with the man and quickly discerned he was mentally ill due to his rapid-fire speech making little sense and seeming completely disconnected from reality.

But the man did make a reference to once being a student at Julliard (Julliard is the nation’s premiere music school based in New York City).

Lopez thought, ‘Now that’s a good news story: A former Julliard student now living homeless on the streets of L.A. playing a violin.”

So after his brief encounter, the columnist contacted Julliard and found out that in fact Nathaniel Anthony Ayers had been a student there in the early 1970s, but dropped out after only a few years.

In his early 20’s, Nathaniel suffered a mental breakdown at Julliard due to the onset of schizophrenia.

          Since then, he’d been living on the streets, surviving day to day by raiding trash bins and living off the throwaways and scraps of our society of abundance.

No one chooses to be homeless.  It’s never a choice.  Life circumstances lead people to the streets: abuse in the home, addiction, mental illness, poverty.

Often, these people feel frightening to us. 

But every one of these people living on the streets is somebody’s daughter, somebody’s mother, somebody’s son or father or sister or brother.

They were not born mentally ill. They were not born addicted to drugs or alcohol. They were not born homeless.

          There’s a story behind each one of these human souls.  And their story will break your heart – if you take the time to listen and learn it.

Homeless people are the most disenfranchised and neglected people in American society today.  And they don’t have a voice.  

You could be that voice.

The problem of homelessness is huge here in the Pacific Northwest. Our region has the third worst homelessness problem in the nation.  And over 90% of the homeless in our area are native Washingtonians.

There are a million reasons why people live on the streets. There are no easy answers, no simple solutions to the problem. 

          Experts say the homeless crisis is not going to go away until we resolve as a society to provide permanent housing for our sisters and brothers living on the streets.  

Some experts say, “It costs just 16-thousand dollars a person a year to provide an apartment and social and clinical services. It costs 100-thousand dollars a year if we leave a person on the streets and they cycle through the public health system and jail. And when they cycle through they always land back on the sidewalk and there’s been no resolution to their long-term homelessness and no improvement to their health.”  

These experts say, “We can end street-dwelling homelessness in about two years with the right investment and in the short-run it will actually save taxpayer money.” 

          L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez ended up doing not just one story about Nathaniel, but a series of stories that touched the hearts of millions of people who have now seen the movie and read the book “The Soloist.”

In one touching scene, Lopez finds his friend Nathaniel as he’s bedding down for the night amidst the chaos of the night streets of Skid Row.

As he’s preparing to go to sleep, the unhoused man starts to pray for all the troubled men and women around him, the mass of humanity that occupy a few square blocks of downtown Los Angeles, “a lost colony of broken, homeless souls.” He prays a simple and poignant Our Father. 

Lopez wrote of this scene in one of his columns, “Every night my friend Nathaniel tucks his instruments away and lays his head among the predators and hustlers, among fallen drunks, sprawled on the streets, as rats the size of meatloaves dart out of drains to feed off the squalor.  I tell him this is no place for him.” 

A line from the second reading from Revelation was read at a Memorial Service for a homeless friend who died on the streets of Everett.  His fellow unhoused friends heard the Good Shepherd’s voice with the line, “and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

The promise of eternal life, a life free of pain and suffering is promised to us all, yes, even our brothers and sisters living on the streets of our community.

           In the end, Mr. Lopez and Mr. Ayers became good friends. And his friend Nathaniel, thanks to the power of their friendship, no longer lives on the streets, but in permanent housing.

Steve blessed Nathaniel with the ministry of presence and the relationship richly blessed both of their lives.

The ministry of presence is what we offer with Sacred Encounters, in addition to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, needed survival supplies, and socks.  Lots of socks.

          If you’re interested in finding out more, please ask one of our team members to share their stories.

The idea of joining us on the streets may seem daunting or overwhelming to you. That’s OK. There many other ways you can help us behind the scenes.

          You can help by making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Our young people can help by launching sock drives at their schools.

The day will come, my sisters and brothers, when we ALL will be joined together amidst “a great multitude, which no one (can) count, from every nation, race, people and tongue.”

          We all will stand before the throne of the Lamb, wearing our white robes, holding palm branches in our hands.

And "The one who sits on the throne will shelter (us). And (we) will not hunger or thirst anymore."