Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time September 11, 2016
Luke 15:1-10
© Copyright 2016 Rona Kinsley

“Down to This”

About ten years ago, I traveled to Canada to visit a friend who was studying at the University of Toronto. While I was there, I spent a couple of happy hours browsing in the university bookstore. Intrigued by the title and the jacket photo, I picked up and bought Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big City Shantytown. It was written by a young Canadian named Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall.

Bishop-Stall grew up in a loving home, with all the advantages of a comfortable middle-class life. By his early twenties, he’d finished his college degree, written a novel, found a good job, and was sharing a nice Montreal apartment with a girlfriend he was crazy about. But then Shaun got into “recreational” drugs and his life fell apart. In short order, he lost his job, his girlfriend, and his home. He ran through all his resources and ended up living, for nine months, in a shack he built from scrap wood, in Tent City, a Toronto shantytown on the edge of Lake Ontario.

Tent City didn’t actually contain any tents. It was a place where homeless men and women had build whatever shelters they could cobble together, out of whatever materials they could scrounge. By the time he landed in Tent City, Bishop-Stall was clean of drugs. He decided to keep a journal of his experiences, and this became the foundation for his book. Once I started the book, I couldn’t put it down. Bishop-Stall is an excellent writer, and his stories are both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

Life in Tent City was rough. There were frequent fights and beatings, lots of drunkenness and drugs, prostitution and theft. But there were also many incidences of kindness and generosity. The people in Tent City took care of each other. These were people on the margins of society— mostly people who had gotten into trouble with addictions and therefore with the law. And these were exactly the kind of people that Jesus hung out with. In Eugene Peterson’s contemporary translation, The Message, the beginning of today’s gospel passage reads:

By this time a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently. The Pharisees and religion scholars were not pleased, not at all pleased. They growled, “He takes in sinners and eats meals with them, treating them like old friends.”

The Pharisees were very concerned with religious rules and regulations, and the scribes were the biblical scholars of their time. Why were they so unhappy to see Jesus hanging out with sinners? Well, sinners, by definition, were careless of the law. It was breaking one of the many religious laws that made them sinners. Contact with them was contaminating to the ritual purity of the Pharisees and scribes, who were trying to be the holiest of people. In their eyes, these men and women of doubtful reputation were the unholiest of people. They were the “lost,” who, the Pharisees and scribes believed, were beyond the pale of God’s concern.

Commentator George Arthur Buttrick notes that for Jesus to receive sinners was bad enough, but to eat with them was even worse, for that meant to choose them as friends: our word companion in its origin is (com-panis) “with bread.” When Jesus shared bread with those of questionable reputation, he shocked the religious leaders by demonstrating that he considered these sinners to be his friends. As songwriter Bruce Cockburn sings, in one of his Christmas songs,

It isn’t to the palace that the Christ-child comes, but to shepherds and street people, hookers and bums.

What was it that brought the shepherds, who were among the poorest and most-despised members of Jewish society, to Jesus, along with the street people, hookers, and bums? Why did they listen to him so intently? Perhaps because he told stories like this:

A shepherd has a flock of a hundred sheep, but one is lost. Wouldn’t he leave the ninety-nine and go looking for the lost one? And then have a big celebration when he finds it? And this: A woman has ten coins, and loses one. She turns her house upside down until she finds it. She, too, invites her friends and neighbors to celebrate, because she has found what she lost. (The Message)

If it wasn’t already plain to them — if the shepherds and street people, hookers and bums, didn’t already see themselves as the lost sheep or the lost coin, Jesus makes it very clear. He tells the crowd, which includes Pharisees and scribes and the people of questionable reputation, Count on it— there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner’s rescued life than over ninety-nine good people in no need of rescue . . . Count on it — that’s the kind of party God’s angels throw every time one lost soul turns to God. (The Message) What Jesus gives to the people who live on the margins — those we consider lost— is hope. He tells them something they may not have heard before even from their religious leaders. He tells them that God cares — about them.

There’s a broad streak in modern American society of the same kind of thinking that Jesus confronted in the Pharisees and the scribes. We tend to despise the people on the margins— the poor, the addicted,the homeless, those of questionable reputation— and we tend to see their problems as their own fault. Furthermore, their problems seem so intractable. What’s the point of trying to do anything about them? But if we listen to the people on the margins, as Jesus did, and if we hear their stories of how they got to where they are, and of what keeps them there, we can begin to see them as God sees them— each one a precious soul, each one worthy of the Shepherd’s anxious search.

When I worked as a Special Education administrator, my job included going out to the schools to review the files of newly arrived special education students. Some of these were children in state custody who had been placed in foster care. I remember reaching the safety of my car and breaking down in tears over what had been done to some of these kids, in their short lives, so far, and wondering how they could ever recover enough to have any semblance of a normal life. Bishop-Stall, with his happy childhood, was an anomaly in Tent City. In his nine months there, he discovered that every single one of the other residents had suffered pretty serious abuse as a child. They had grown up without hope, and had come to distrust the idea that anyone could care about them.

As a side-bar, I want to tell you that, yes, there were church people who got involved in Tent City, mostly by coming and giving out food. The Tent City residents were pretty quick to spot, and had little use for, those who were there because they thought it was their duty, or because it made them feel good to do good. The ones they respected were those who took the time to listen, to hear their stories, to treat them as human beings, and perhaps to do some small service that they really needed. Shaun’s time in Tent City ended when the shantytown was bulldozed and the residents evicted. Fortunately for Shaun, his family and friends were there for him. Slowly, he began to put his life back together — a “normal” life, a life like yours and mine. But he didn’t have much hope for his Tent City friends, even though the City of Toronto moved them all into subsidized apartments.

Six months after the eviction, the agency that placed all the Tent City residents sponsored a reunion. Shaun didn’t really want to go. He was afraid of what he would find. Sure, they had apartments, he writes. But I’d already decided that the problem wasn’t just a lack of housing. It was life, the cosmic humour and the daily horror and all those things that stack the deck against you. I was scared that my friends— although they weren’t officially vagrants anymore— might have gone down even further since Tent City.

But Shaun did go to the reunion, and, as he puts it, it was a great and glorious night. Contrary to his expectations, most of the former Tent City residents showed up, and many of them were doing okay. They’d gone back to school, taken jobs, and had developed a budding sense of pride about themselves and the new lives they were pulling together. One of the women told him that her boyfriend, Spider, wasn’t drinking anymore and had registered for school in the fall. She told me, Shaun writes, that during the first week in their apartment [Spider] flushed the toilet every hour on the hour, just to see it swirl. I’m glad I was wrong about the importance of city housing, Shaun continues. I never thought it would make much difference since the people in Tent City had their own houses— albeit precarious ones— and their battles seemed more with their demons than their environment. But now that they’ve got their own apartments it seems that at least half of them are doing better than they were.

Shaun’s conclusion is supported by the nationwide “housing first” approach to homelessness. This approach moves long-term homeless individuals— most of whom are living with mental illness, substance abuse disorders and other serious health problems— into subsidized housing and links them with support services. According to the “Housing First” website, Research studies have found that the majority of long-term street homeless people moved into “housing first” apartments remain stably housed and experience significant improvements in their health problems. . . In addition, the “housing first” approach is far less costly than emergency and institutional care, such as shelters, hospitals and correctional facilities.

Perhaps part of what made the difference, for Shaun’s Tent City friends, was that being given decent housing gave them hope. It gave them a sense that somebody cared— about them. It seems fitting that our gospel stories of lost sheep and lost coins should come up this month, because this is “National Recovery Month,” a time to raise awareness and understanding of mental and substance use disorders, to celebrate all those who have struggled with addictions and are now in recovery and to appreciate the dedicated workers who provide addiction services.

When I was at the Old Meeting House, I attended a workshop for clergy and church leaders on “Understanding Addiction and Supporting Recovery.” In that workshop, I learned some frightening things. I learned that one in four children in this country lives in a home with an alcoholic parent. I learned that the damage to children who live with an addicted parent is significant and often life-long, and that these kids are at much higher risk of growing up to become addicted themselves.

Alcohol and drugs were definitely issues in the families of the foster children, whose files I wept over, and they also figured hugely in the early lives of Bishop-Stall’s Tent City friends. In recent conversations with Lakeview School Principal, Eric Erwin, I’ve learned that the epidemic of opiate addiction is impacting children right here in Greensboro, too.

In spite of the frustration and helplessness we often feel, when faced with the widespread damage of addiction, there was a hopeful note in the workshop I attended. We were told that “no intervention is wasted.” And we learned that children in families that struggle with addiction can be greatly helped by having safe places to talk about their experiences— to know that they are not alone, that it is not their fault, that they have worth and value.

Given the prevalence of addiction, we must know kids, and our kids and grandkids must know kids, who are dealing with this problem. As long as they are going it alone, they are like the lost sheep or the lost coin. Jesus cares about the lost sheep— the Tent City residents, the children in foster care, the kids who live with an addicted parent, keeping silence in their own private hells, the addicted parents who haven’t yet found their way into recovery. These were the kind of people he liked to hang out with, the ones he shared bread with and made his friends, and he asks us to befriend them, too.

At the end of his book, Shaugnessy Bishop-Stall comes to this conclusion: Maybe it comes down to this: Very few of those who were not born healthy and well off, to a kind and loving family, can transcend the squalor without help— and for some it will come too late. I had every opportunity in the world. I have been to all sorts of places and done all sorts of things. But, when it came down to this, even I could barely make it through. So be good to people, be good to vagrants, beggars, winos, buskers, con men, tramps. They are like you, or else you are like me, and I am just lucky.

Like the shepherd who searches for the lost sheep, and the woman who searches for the lost coin, Jesus searches for the lost among humankind, and when they are found, all of heaven rejoices. Vagrants, beggars, winos, buskers, con men, tramps—shepherds and street people, hookers and bums— these were the people with whom Jesus shared bread, these were his friends. How can we make them ours?