Sunday worship
10:30 am
Sunday School
9:30 am

Ministry with the Homeless

--Pastor James

Every Wednesday evening, we invite the homeless from a nearby shelter to come and join us for a prayer meeting and a modest snack. Many homeless people have responded to the invitation, and their presence has been a tremendous blessing to our church.

Anyone who has worked with the homeless knows that such a ministry is not to be carried out with naïve romanticism. On one of the evenings, I spent half an hour with a homeless brother who tenaciously tried to manipulate me and others into giving him money, telling a story about his emergency situation and reciting Bible verses, all the while exhaling intoxicating liquor from his mouth. Some of them come with no intention of participating in worship and prayer. Some of them are mentally ill and can be disruptive to worship. Some are morally questionable.

In spite of all this, when we are able to see beyond these uncontrollable and untamable aspects, we begin to encounter their humanity, their nobility, and their dignity. We might expect that the long years of living in dehumanizing conditions would have diminished their humanity. But they always amaze me with the vitality of their hope, the abundance of their praise, the dignity of their spirit, and the authenticity of their existence. Their incredible capacity for praise and thanksgiving in such impossible circumstances exposes my lack of praise in my abundance. Their unadorned humanity, their humble nobility, and their resilient dignity enrich my soul beyond easy description in words. Having known some of them through our weekly prayer meetings, I can affirm that my soul would be poorer without them.

But even more, it is the presence of God among the homeless that makes the prayer meeting a special time of grace. From the ancient time, the presence of God has defied our expectations. Two thousand years ago, in the first century Palestine, people expected to find the Messiah among the powerful, the prominent, and the religious, feasting in a sumptuous mansion. But that's not where they found Him. They found Him among the tax collectors and the so-called sinners. Jesus' fellowship with such questionable characters deeply offended the religious establishment, and they accused Him of being "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners."

We face the same question today: Where is Jesus Christ today? Where does the Spirit of Christ dwell today? Where would we go to find Him? The clue to this question comes from the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31-46. In this parable, Jesus the King says to the righteous who are gathered before the heavenly throne on the Day of Judgment:

For I was hungry and you gave Me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave Me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited Me in, I needed clothes and you clothed Me, I was sick and you looked after Me, I was in prison and you came to visit Me (Matt. 25:26).
In hearing the compliments of Jesus, the righteous are puzzled and deny that they did all this to Him. They were simply doing it to the hungry, the poor, the stranger, the sick, and the prisoner. They merely saw the faces of the hungry as they gave them food, they felt the loneliness of the stranger and invited them in, and they had pity for the prisoner and visited them. But to their surprise, Jesus reveals what was actually going on beneath their good deeds:

I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me (Matt. 25:40). Often, we interpret this parable primarily as ethics - giving aid to the needy and helping the lost. Our charity to these needy people is of such a noble quality that it is as if we are doing it to Christ. From this perspective, the needy are merely the objects of our charity.

However, I believe that this parable goes beyond such a patronizing interpretation. It is not merely about assisting the needy. It is ultimately about where Christ is and where His Spirit dwells. He is found in the least unlooked for places, in the abandoned corners of society. He is present with the least, the poorest of the poor, and the most despised. He dwells with the homeless. It's not that Christ is absent from the rich and the powerful, but that He chooses the least to make His presence most fully known to the world. It is not that He rejects refined vessels, but that He chooses broken and abandoned vessels to dwell in so that His glory may be revealed in the lowliest places. As the Apostle Paul says, "God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things - and the things that are not - to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before Him" (1 Cor. 1:28-29).

So when we feed the hungry, we are faced with a deeper reality beneath the surface. In bringing the food, we see not only the face of the hungry but also the face of Christ who is already there with them. We see the face of Christ in the face of a teenage boy recovering from drug addiction, in the sorrow-ridden face of a homeless woman who is also mentally ill, and in the wrinkled face of an old man left to the streets with no family. They are the very temple in which the Spirit of Christ dwells. They minister to us through Christ who dwells in them.

That is why I try to say "ministry with the homeless" rather than "ministry to the homeless," even though I often lapse into the latter. This change in the preposition may appear to be insignificant, but the phrase "ministry to" can have a subtle connotation that the homeless are the objects of our ministry, while the phrase "ministry with" lifts up the fact that the homeless are our partners in ministry.

For me, seeing the face of Christ in the homeless is not easy. But in one of those rare moments when my heart is fully open to the Holy Spirit, I am allowed to see His holy presence in the homeless. The truth is that I need them to know Jesus. Without their help, the Jesus I know becomes distorted, one-sided, and unreal - someone like a well-groomed, finely-robed, and nice-looking celebrity figure whom we see in movies. That is not the Jesus who came to save us. The Jesus of the Gospel is "despised and rejected by people, a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering" as Isaiah prophesied (Isa. 53:3). He knew the affliction and shame of being cast down to the most wretched place in the society - the cross. Yet through His suffering love, He brought so much joy to the least, the lost, and the left-out.

It would be appropriate to end this article with a prayer of Mother Teresa, who, perhaps more than anyone else, was able to see the true reality beneath the faces of the downtrodden.