"Invisible"
We have graciously been granted permission to post the sermon delivered at SFCC on May 28, 2017 by Pastor Jeffrey Logan of Grace Street Ministry. We are thankful for the words composed and the time given by Rev. Logan reminding us of a context for those less fortunate, the interface of the mortal and material with the sacred and eternal, the horizontal and vertical nature of the cross, and the power we have through Christ to be "midwives to the miraculous."
“I am a homeless man. Some might call me a bum, some don’t call me anything. They pretend not to see me as I may be napping on the sidewalk and they just walk over me like I don’t exist, like I do not matter. I was not aware that the mere fact I do not have a roof means I don’t have a soul. I did not know I do not matter, but I do. I have feelings just like you. I have dreams just like you and I bleed just the same as you. So you see we are not so different, you and I; we all occupy the same blue ball and live under the same blue sky. We all cry sometimes, we all laugh sometimes. We are, after all, only human.”
These words were written by Matt Coffey, a homeless man in his 30s who lived outside year ‘round in a narrow swath of woods behind the big box stores in a local Portland strip mall. I say lived, because after five years living outdoors in a shelter reinforced by found pallets, found lumber, found doors and windows – complete with a chicken coop and a garden – after five years too many other homeless people had found Matt’s raw-edged urban Eden and the property owners had had enough. When Matt was alone, he could fly under the radar, and those who knew he was there would turn a blind eye as long as he kept himself as close to invisible as possible. But that all changed when others moved in, and before too long they were all given a week to vacate their campsites by the police. Matt hoped to sneak back in after the deadline, but the camps were totally demolished. Not cleaned up, mind you, just destroyed.
The Portland Press Herald gave this situation prominent press, not because of the chronically homeless like Matt, but because a cute, five- year-old blond girl, whose parents had come north to Maine with the false promise of housing and employment, had gotten caught in the crossfire between the owners and the homeless and was in danger of being out on the streets and not safe in school where she belonged.
Matt is neither five years old, nor overly cute, so although he was quoted in the Press Herald article, he was not featured. But then again, that was probably his choice. Many of the chronically homeless want to remain unseen, camped at the edges of society, or temporarily inhabiting Old Port doorways until the first rays of sun ricochet off the brick storefronts and rouse the sleepy streets to the hustle and bustle of commerce.
It's one of the many contradictions with the chronically homeless – the desire to remain safely unseen when sleeping outside, but yet wanting to be acknowledged as a part of the greater community and not just some piece of errant flotsam to be discarded. I can’t begin to answer that contradiction. I can only try to sit as comfortably as possible in its dissonance, and hold it lightly enough that the dynamic tension doesn’t scorch my fingertips.
My name is Pastor Jeff Logan, and I’m one of the four co-pastors at Grace-Street Ministry, a homeless outreach street ministry in Portland, Maine. Our simple mission is to see – amidst the chaos, the pain and the exhaustive struggle for basic survival – to see not only the common humanity of the people on the street, but also the small glimmer of the divine that continues, in spite of everything, to find it’s way through the narrow cracks in the thick walls of the everyday.
In the two-plus years that I’ve been working as a street minister, I’ve had a very steep learning curve. Fortunately, I’ve had demanding, but inspirational teachers – and I’m not talking about the extraordinary pastors that are my colleagues. I’m talking about the homeless people themselves.
I remember one man in particular. When I first met him, he was outside in the day shelter courtyard sitting in a wheelchair, his body eroded by decades of physical labor, still hopeful that his disability will finally be approved and he can find housing. I remember him telling me about a woman at a storefront church he goes to down the block that has such severe Parkinson’s tremors that it has taken all the joy out of her life. And he said to me that if there was one thing he could do, it would be to take those tremors away from her and bear them in his own body.
Sadly, a couple of months later I facilitated his memorial service in the Wayside Soup Kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon. He’d just received his disability, but ironically and tragically – he died in his sleep in the Milestone Shelter at the age of 57, his heart having given out from years of drinking. Although I’m still heartbroken, I take comfort in the knowledge that he is free from the sufferings of a life on the street, and I find inspiration in the compassion and generosity he showed toward others when he himself had so very little to call his own. And I have begun to learn that in this world on the margins, where everything cuts so close to the bone, the lines between joy and despair, comfort and affliction, and even life and death are surprisingly thin.
Just a couple of months ago, I stood holding hands with a young man and his father, whose brother/son had died exactly one year ago, bleeding out on a bench outside the day shelter as his brother followed the 911 instructions to provide CPR until the ambulance came. The young man looked at his watch while his father and I stood quietly, and at exactly the moment of the young man’s passing a year ago, we held hands and prayed – all while the usual chaos swirled around us – the drugs, the drinking, the violence. It’s a world that prompted a woman at the shelter to ask me whether the fact that her Bible had fallen open randomly to Ezekiel 14, where God has turned away from his people because of their idolatry, meant that addiction was a form of idolatry that kept the addict apart from God. I said I didn’t think so. I said that addiction is a disease of the body, not the spirit, and that God was needed more for those lost souls than for almost anyone else. At least that’s what I believe. What I hope.
In order to understand the work Grace-Street does, I’m thinking it might be useful for you to know what we actually do week by week. Every Tuesday and Thursday, one of the pastors will walk the main street of Portland and talk to people who appear to be homeless, find out what small needs they may have and make sure they know what services are available. We then spend an hour and a half at the Preble Street Resource Center, the day shelter, talking to the folks there, and again trying to help with the small things that our modest means can provide. And then we have our street service, every Sunday on the street corner across from the soup kitchen where we share prayers and communion next to the sacred trash can and the holy chain link fence.
And although we do provide a clean pair of socks, shoes, a blanket, a coat – sometimes a tent or a sleeping bag, or the gold standard, the Dunkin’ Donut $5 gift card – the get-out-of-jail-free card on the street –the importance of what we do is really rooted in the fact that we are a pastoral presence in this very material world. We are not there to solve problems, we’re not there to pathologize and treat, we’re not there to unearth hidden assets and demand retribution – we’re there to see and celebrate people’s basic humanity, to pray with them and to give them a sense of the sacred in the midst of the noise and the drugs and the desperation. Some of my most personally rewarding moments have come, not when someone is pleased with a pair of boots or a hoodie, but when someone comes up to me to share a rare moment of joy – “Pastor, I’ve got housing; Pastor, I have enough money to go home; Pastor, I’m still sober; Pastor, they’re not going to take my child away; Pastor, I’m getting out of here.”
And in all these razor-thin moments that span the abyss, I have slowly begun to understand why Jesus spent his time with criminals, prostitutes and the poor. It’s because there are no distractions, no on-line buffer between the struggle of our mortal existence and our deep-seated desire to find meaning in our lives. Value on the street exists in very simple things – food, shelter and love. It can get perverted at times with the drugs that numb the senses and allow the worse angels to take control. But much of the time, the need and longing is so clear and so immediate that the face of the divine is all the more present – just beyond the veil at the edges of sight, or a little past the last existential bellow that cries out for spiritual comfort, but which gets someone kicked out of the shelter for the day.
The symbol that we all wear is this simple cross. This is the cross of Ecclesia Ministries, the umbrella group in Boston that unites all of the homeless outreach ministries across the country. As I have begun to grow into this ministry, the meaning of this cross has continued to evolve. It still reminds me of the other people around the country who are doing this work, work that can seem lonely when you’re in the middle of it and you’re faced with so much need and so few resources; and it will always remind me of a man who walked the earth 2000 years ago, an extraordinary man who was arguably the first street minister. He was a man who understood that God wanted us to build the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. It was not about pie in the sky, it was about the here and now, and the incendiary possibility of living a life based on the golden rule. And for that, this revolutionary peasant from Galilee, was arrested, tortured and assassinated by the Roman Empire.
And he was also a man who understood, along with the Buddha and countless others, that the truth of human existence is the search for meaning, and not the acquisition of material goods. It has nothing to do with the bumper sticker that says “he who has the most toys at the end wins” and everything to do with what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
But in addition to these important meanings of this cross, I now also wear it as a basic but powerful symbol of the interface of the mortal and material with the sacred and eternal.
At its simplest level, the cross is the intersection of two axes – the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal one represents the connection to each other in this material plane of existence, one that unites us in our collective struggle to find food and shelter and the love of friends and family. And then there is the vertical axis, our connection to the divine. And with this community, struggling on the edges, it is vitally important to remind people of the vertical axis, because it’s simply not part of the everyday struggle to survive when you’re homeless.
But in spite of its rarity, there is a beautiful simplicity to this imagery that is very powerful on the street, where keeping things simple is the only way to reach people were they are. And by reminding them of their relationship with God, it can bring us right up against that feeling of unworthiness that so many of us struggle with when contemplating a relationship with the Divine. “I’m a drug addict, I have mental illness, I’ve made terrible choices, I’m a lousy parent, why would God have any interest in me?” But as St. Francis said, “I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”
And with that reminder of our potential relationship with God and our absolute worthiness to enter into that relationship – regardless of our flaws – there sprouts that small flower of hope breaking gently through the concrete next to the chain link fence where we break bread with our brothers and sisters. “Maybe it will be all right. Maybe right now, this is enough”.
And with hope comes the dangerous and revolutionary possibility of being of use in the world – not in the standard sense of accumulating material possessions and wealth, but in the spiritual sense of walking through the difficulties of life with the divine perched on your shoulder, always aware of the vertical, of the direct line to God.
But it doesn’t end there. It ends with the day-to-day passion play of the horizontal, with our connection to each other and the search for love and meaning, with the ongoing work of building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I often end the street service with the words of St. Teresa of Avila,
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion into the world. Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which Christ blesses the world.”
And by this I mean that the changes that we need to make in the world will not come from on high. We can gather strength from our relationship with whatever manifestation of the divine speaks to us, but we must take those teachings and plant them in the fertile gardens of our communities. No teacher will do it for us. It’s up to us. We have that power. We are the living hands of the ineffable.
And if this all seems possible and as we stand in a circle on a wind-swept street corner, if it rings true even for just a few minutes or a day, we have made a small, yet fundamental and profound improvement in the lives of the discarded, the marginalized, the demonized, the invisible. And isn’t that just what we’re all charged to do? “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” And when we do it right, in a small way, with a pair of socks, a cup of coffee and a prayer for deliverance, on that street corner, on that day, we’re midwives to the miraculous.
And that miracle has nothing to do with some descending angel with a chalice of divine wisdom in her grip – no, it’s just the ongoing possibility of transcendence, and the undeniable truth that the flame of the sacred burns in some out-of-the-way places where many might not think to look. And some days, truth be told, it’s pretty hard to see it. But I’ve had the great and blessed good fortune to have a lot of those days when the sacred gets all in your face, kinda like a puddle splash from a passing dump truck on a busy urban street. May we all be so blessed.
Amen, Amin and Blessed Be
- Pastor Jeffrey Logan
-------------------
This Sermon is the sole property of Pastor Jeffrey Logan. Reproduction of its content in whole or in part is only possible by permission by Pastor Logan.
Thank you.
This webpage Copyright © 2017 South Freeport Congregational Church, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
South Freeport Congregational Church
98 S Freeport Rd
P.O. Box 46
South Freeport, ME 04078
We have graciously been granted permission to post the sermon delivered at SFCC on May 28, 2017 by Pastor Jeffrey Logan of Grace Street Ministry. We are thankful for the words composed and the time given by Rev. Logan reminding us of a context for those less fortunate, the interface of the mortal and material with the sacred and eternal, the horizontal and vertical nature of the cross, and the power we have through Christ to be "midwives to the miraculous."
“I am a homeless man. Some might call me a bum, some don’t call me anything. They pretend not to see me as I may be napping on the sidewalk and they just walk over me like I don’t exist, like I do not matter. I was not aware that the mere fact I do not have a roof means I don’t have a soul. I did not know I do not matter, but I do. I have feelings just like you. I have dreams just like you and I bleed just the same as you. So you see we are not so different, you and I; we all occupy the same blue ball and live under the same blue sky. We all cry sometimes, we all laugh sometimes. We are, after all, only human.”
These words were written by Matt Coffey, a homeless man in his 30s who lived outside year ‘round in a narrow swath of woods behind the big box stores in a local Portland strip mall. I say lived, because after five years living outdoors in a shelter reinforced by found pallets, found lumber, found doors and windows – complete with a chicken coop and a garden – after five years too many other homeless people had found Matt’s raw-edged urban Eden and the property owners had had enough. When Matt was alone, he could fly under the radar, and those who knew he was there would turn a blind eye as long as he kept himself as close to invisible as possible. But that all changed when others moved in, and before too long they were all given a week to vacate their campsites by the police. Matt hoped to sneak back in after the deadline, but the camps were totally demolished. Not cleaned up, mind you, just destroyed.
The Portland Press Herald gave this situation prominent press, not because of the chronically homeless like Matt, but because a cute, five- year-old blond girl, whose parents had come north to Maine with the false promise of housing and employment, had gotten caught in the crossfire between the owners and the homeless and was in danger of being out on the streets and not safe in school where she belonged.
Matt is neither five years old, nor overly cute, so although he was quoted in the Press Herald article, he was not featured. But then again, that was probably his choice. Many of the chronically homeless want to remain unseen, camped at the edges of society, or temporarily inhabiting Old Port doorways until the first rays of sun ricochet off the brick storefronts and rouse the sleepy streets to the hustle and bustle of commerce.
It's one of the many contradictions with the chronically homeless – the desire to remain safely unseen when sleeping outside, but yet wanting to be acknowledged as a part of the greater community and not just some piece of errant flotsam to be discarded. I can’t begin to answer that contradiction. I can only try to sit as comfortably as possible in its dissonance, and hold it lightly enough that the dynamic tension doesn’t scorch my fingertips.
My name is Pastor Jeff Logan, and I’m one of the four co-pastors at Grace-Street Ministry, a homeless outreach street ministry in Portland, Maine. Our simple mission is to see – amidst the chaos, the pain and the exhaustive struggle for basic survival – to see not only the common humanity of the people on the street, but also the small glimmer of the divine that continues, in spite of everything, to find it’s way through the narrow cracks in the thick walls of the everyday.
In the two-plus years that I’ve been working as a street minister, I’ve had a very steep learning curve. Fortunately, I’ve had demanding, but inspirational teachers – and I’m not talking about the extraordinary pastors that are my colleagues. I’m talking about the homeless people themselves.
I remember one man in particular. When I first met him, he was outside in the day shelter courtyard sitting in a wheelchair, his body eroded by decades of physical labor, still hopeful that his disability will finally be approved and he can find housing. I remember him telling me about a woman at a storefront church he goes to down the block that has such severe Parkinson’s tremors that it has taken all the joy out of her life. And he said to me that if there was one thing he could do, it would be to take those tremors away from her and bear them in his own body.
Sadly, a couple of months later I facilitated his memorial service in the Wayside Soup Kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon. He’d just received his disability, but ironically and tragically – he died in his sleep in the Milestone Shelter at the age of 57, his heart having given out from years of drinking. Although I’m still heartbroken, I take comfort in the knowledge that he is free from the sufferings of a life on the street, and I find inspiration in the compassion and generosity he showed toward others when he himself had so very little to call his own. And I have begun to learn that in this world on the margins, where everything cuts so close to the bone, the lines between joy and despair, comfort and affliction, and even life and death are surprisingly thin.
Just a couple of months ago, I stood holding hands with a young man and his father, whose brother/son had died exactly one year ago, bleeding out on a bench outside the day shelter as his brother followed the 911 instructions to provide CPR until the ambulance came. The young man looked at his watch while his father and I stood quietly, and at exactly the moment of the young man’s passing a year ago, we held hands and prayed – all while the usual chaos swirled around us – the drugs, the drinking, the violence. It’s a world that prompted a woman at the shelter to ask me whether the fact that her Bible had fallen open randomly to Ezekiel 14, where God has turned away from his people because of their idolatry, meant that addiction was a form of idolatry that kept the addict apart from God. I said I didn’t think so. I said that addiction is a disease of the body, not the spirit, and that God was needed more for those lost souls than for almost anyone else. At least that’s what I believe. What I hope.
In order to understand the work Grace-Street does, I’m thinking it might be useful for you to know what we actually do week by week. Every Tuesday and Thursday, one of the pastors will walk the main street of Portland and talk to people who appear to be homeless, find out what small needs they may have and make sure they know what services are available. We then spend an hour and a half at the Preble Street Resource Center, the day shelter, talking to the folks there, and again trying to help with the small things that our modest means can provide. And then we have our street service, every Sunday on the street corner across from the soup kitchen where we share prayers and communion next to the sacred trash can and the holy chain link fence.
And although we do provide a clean pair of socks, shoes, a blanket, a coat – sometimes a tent or a sleeping bag, or the gold standard, the Dunkin’ Donut $5 gift card – the get-out-of-jail-free card on the street –the importance of what we do is really rooted in the fact that we are a pastoral presence in this very material world. We are not there to solve problems, we’re not there to pathologize and treat, we’re not there to unearth hidden assets and demand retribution – we’re there to see and celebrate people’s basic humanity, to pray with them and to give them a sense of the sacred in the midst of the noise and the drugs and the desperation. Some of my most personally rewarding moments have come, not when someone is pleased with a pair of boots or a hoodie, but when someone comes up to me to share a rare moment of joy – “Pastor, I’ve got housing; Pastor, I have enough money to go home; Pastor, I’m still sober; Pastor, they’re not going to take my child away; Pastor, I’m getting out of here.”
And in all these razor-thin moments that span the abyss, I have slowly begun to understand why Jesus spent his time with criminals, prostitutes and the poor. It’s because there are no distractions, no on-line buffer between the struggle of our mortal existence and our deep-seated desire to find meaning in our lives. Value on the street exists in very simple things – food, shelter and love. It can get perverted at times with the drugs that numb the senses and allow the worse angels to take control. But much of the time, the need and longing is so clear and so immediate that the face of the divine is all the more present – just beyond the veil at the edges of sight, or a little past the last existential bellow that cries out for spiritual comfort, but which gets someone kicked out of the shelter for the day.
The symbol that we all wear is this simple cross. This is the cross of Ecclesia Ministries, the umbrella group in Boston that unites all of the homeless outreach ministries across the country. As I have begun to grow into this ministry, the meaning of this cross has continued to evolve. It still reminds me of the other people around the country who are doing this work, work that can seem lonely when you’re in the middle of it and you’re faced with so much need and so few resources; and it will always remind me of a man who walked the earth 2000 years ago, an extraordinary man who was arguably the first street minister. He was a man who understood that God wanted us to build the Kingdom of Heaven here on earth. It was not about pie in the sky, it was about the here and now, and the incendiary possibility of living a life based on the golden rule. And for that, this revolutionary peasant from Galilee, was arrested, tortured and assassinated by the Roman Empire.
And he was also a man who understood, along with the Buddha and countless others, that the truth of human existence is the search for meaning, and not the acquisition of material goods. It has nothing to do with the bumper sticker that says “he who has the most toys at the end wins” and everything to do with what Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
But in addition to these important meanings of this cross, I now also wear it as a basic but powerful symbol of the interface of the mortal and material with the sacred and eternal.
At its simplest level, the cross is the intersection of two axes – the horizontal and the vertical. The horizontal one represents the connection to each other in this material plane of existence, one that unites us in our collective struggle to find food and shelter and the love of friends and family. And then there is the vertical axis, our connection to the divine. And with this community, struggling on the edges, it is vitally important to remind people of the vertical axis, because it’s simply not part of the everyday struggle to survive when you’re homeless.
But in spite of its rarity, there is a beautiful simplicity to this imagery that is very powerful on the street, where keeping things simple is the only way to reach people were they are. And by reminding them of their relationship with God, it can bring us right up against that feeling of unworthiness that so many of us struggle with when contemplating a relationship with the Divine. “I’m a drug addict, I have mental illness, I’ve made terrible choices, I’m a lousy parent, why would God have any interest in me?” But as St. Francis said, “I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”
And with that reminder of our potential relationship with God and our absolute worthiness to enter into that relationship – regardless of our flaws – there sprouts that small flower of hope breaking gently through the concrete next to the chain link fence where we break bread with our brothers and sisters. “Maybe it will be all right. Maybe right now, this is enough”.
And with hope comes the dangerous and revolutionary possibility of being of use in the world – not in the standard sense of accumulating material possessions and wealth, but in the spiritual sense of walking through the difficulties of life with the divine perched on your shoulder, always aware of the vertical, of the direct line to God.
But it doesn’t end there. It ends with the day-to-day passion play of the horizontal, with our connection to each other and the search for love and meaning, with the ongoing work of building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I often end the street service with the words of St. Teresa of Avila,
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion into the world. Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which Christ blesses the world.”
And by this I mean that the changes that we need to make in the world will not come from on high. We can gather strength from our relationship with whatever manifestation of the divine speaks to us, but we must take those teachings and plant them in the fertile gardens of our communities. No teacher will do it for us. It’s up to us. We have that power. We are the living hands of the ineffable.
And if this all seems possible and as we stand in a circle on a wind-swept street corner, if it rings true even for just a few minutes or a day, we have made a small, yet fundamental and profound improvement in the lives of the discarded, the marginalized, the demonized, the invisible. And isn’t that just what we’re all charged to do? “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.” And when we do it right, in a small way, with a pair of socks, a cup of coffee and a prayer for deliverance, on that street corner, on that day, we’re midwives to the miraculous.
And that miracle has nothing to do with some descending angel with a chalice of divine wisdom in her grip – no, it’s just the ongoing possibility of transcendence, and the undeniable truth that the flame of the sacred burns in some out-of-the-way places where many might not think to look. And some days, truth be told, it’s pretty hard to see it. But I’ve had the great and blessed good fortune to have a lot of those days when the sacred gets all in your face, kinda like a puddle splash from a passing dump truck on a busy urban street. May we all be so blessed.
Amen, Amin and Blessed Be
- Pastor Jeffrey Logan
-------------------
This Sermon is the sole property of Pastor Jeffrey Logan. Reproduction of its content in whole or in part is only possible by permission by Pastor Logan.
Thank you.
This webpage Copyright © 2017 South Freeport Congregational Church, All rights reserved.
Our mailing address is:
South Freeport Congregational Church
98 S Freeport Rd
P.O. Box 46
South Freeport, ME 04078