To refuse to enter into relationship with the poor is to refuse to enter into God’s redemptive love.

Three mornings each week, I open the door of Manna House, a place of hospitality for homeless and poor persons in Memphis, Tennessee. Along with other faithful volunteers from a variety of faith traditions, I seek to welcome those who live on the streets or in shelters or boarding houses. We offer a place of sanctuary, and we offer showers and clothing and coffee and conversation. When I began this work two years ago, I had no idea how much suffering and how much more joy I was going to be graced to experience.

I should have known better. Jesus, after all, did invite each of us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit those in prison. (Mt 25:31–46) And in doing so, he identified with those vulnerable ones: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (Mt 25:40).

So I should have known that I was going to meet Jesus every day that I worked at Manna House. But I could not know that Jesus was going to appear crucified as a homeless man in a wheelchair covered in his own excrement, until he did. Nor could I know that Jesus was going to appear offering me redemptive love as a homeless mentally ill crack addict, until he did. In both of these ways, Jesus’ appearing to me in the poor has begun to teach me about resistance to evil and how wonderful is his redemptive healing love, both for the poor and for me.

One day at Manna House a man in a wheelchair was pushed up the ramp to our porch, and a few of our guests asked me if he could get a shower. My first response was that we did not have room for another person to shower, but then the smell told me that this man needed a shower right away.

After I brought him into the shower room, it quickly became evident that he needed more than a shower; he needed medical attention. Just one attempt by another volunteer and me to lift him from his wheelchair into the shower left the floor covered with a smelly mess and those of us helping him gagging. His backside was covered with a foul combination of excrement, urine, blood, and maggots.

An ambulance was called. When the paramedics arrived they advised us that a hospital really could not take him in this condition. He needed to have a shower. With their help we removed the rest of his clothing, and he was eased onto a small plastic chair in the shower stall. This left him shaking from pain, as his skin broke open further from the maggots eating him. The smell was so intense even one of the paramedics struggled to keep her composure.

After he was rinsed off, the paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher. As he was being wheeled to the ambulance several of us assured him that we were grateful he had come to Manna House, that we would be keeping him in our prayers, and that we would come to visit him in the hospital. Once he and the paramedics were gone, we turned to clean up the mess in the shower room. Only then did the intensity of what had taken place begin to sink into my heart.

I had heard the story of St. Francis embracing a leper, overcoming his repulsion to share God’s love. I had heard the stories of Jesus stopping to heal a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, and stopping to heal lepers, the blind, and the paralyzed. Now somehow it seemed that I was in those stories. I wondered if Francis had gagged at the smell of those rejected by society, or if Jesus had been repulsed by the ugliness of illness left untreated. I knew I had gagged and had been repulsed. But I also knew that God had shown me something of God’s redemptive work in our lives. To enter that work, I must confront the evil of a society that crucifies its poor and leaves them broken and bleeding and covered in filth, while also condemning them as unworthy of help. I will have to smell death, but believe in resurrection. I will have to both reach out to heal, and shout out about the injustice that neglects the poor and then punishes them when they are sick. I will have to recognize Jesus as the crucified poor man that he was and remains.

At the same time, to embrace the cross I will have to be open to and accept Jesus’ love when he comes as a poor man bearing the gift of God’s transformative love. Henry Lee had been coming to Manna House almost since we opened. He was a homeless mentally ill crack addict. For the six months I had known him he had been obnoxious, loud, rude, pushy, and a pain to work with when offering showers and clothing. But one day I was sitting at table with him. The morning rush of people in need had slowed. I began to talk with Henry Lee and I asked him if he had a favorite song. He immediately answered, “Lean on Me” and he proceeded to sing this old Bill Withers song in a horrible voice, but with a close resemblance to the tune:

Sometimes in our lives we all have pain, we all have sorrow.
But if we are wise, we know that there’s always tomorrow.
Lean on me, when you’re not strong and I’ll be your friend.
I’ll help you carry on, for it won’t be long ’til I’m gonna need
Somebody to lean on.

Since Henry Lee sang so badly, I found the courage to join in with him. This now made two people singing with horrible voices, but somehow my singing encouraged a few others to begin — maybe to sing over us and save the song, and so the song continued:

Please swallow your pride, if I have things you need to borrow.
For no one can fill those of your needs that you don’t let show.
So just call on me brother when you need a hand.
We all need somebody to lean on. 

At this point, Linda Faye, a homeless woman, also judged mentally ill and an addict, who had never said a word or smiled for the months she had been coming to Manna House, began to smile with the biggest smile I think I have ever seen, and then she began to laugh and laugh and laugh as we all continued to sing together:

I just might have a problem that you’d understand.
We all need somebody to lean on.
Lean on me when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend.
I’ll help you carry on, for it won’t be long ’til I’m gonna need
 Somebody to lean on. 

As we sang and Linda Faye laughed, I began to feel tears of joy coming to my eyes. I knew, somehow, that in the midst of our singing I had experienced the love of Jesus and together we had just tasted something of God’s kingdom: black, white, housed and homeless, supposedly sane and supposedly mentally ill, addicts and prostitutes and a seminary professor, all were bound together in this place where God welcomes us all in all of our brokenness, our sins, and our shortcomings. When the song ended, I could no longer look at Henry Lee or Linda Faye in the same way. They had become redemptive for me; they had become the very presence of Jesus and his love in my life.

Jesus’ loving presence in the love that the poor share with me is the most surprising and humbling experience I have had at Manna House. I did not seek it out and I did not expect it, but the love extended to me as I have tried to serve our guests is real and powerful and life-changing. This truth is certainly the hardest thing to share and convince others of about the work of hospitality at Manna House. When I speak with middle-class persons about those we welcome as guests, I often hear concerns about how difficult it must be or how dangerous or how discouraging to work with “those people.” And, yes, sometimes it can be all those things. But people find it difficult or even impossible to believe that it is at Manna House with our guests that I find the deepest joy of my life. It is at Manna House that I regularly experience God’s love.

Yet this is exactly the joy and the love that Jesus promised to us in joining with those who are poor. Jesus urged us, “When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your sisters or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Lk 14:12–14) We will be blessed because in such a banquet the poor gift us with God’s love. The willingness of the poor to welcome us into their lives and to share with us their strength and hope and love teaches us how to be human, how to live as children of God.

Together, the crucifixion of the poor that we must resist, and the redemptive love the poor share with each other and with those of us who are welcomed into their presence, bring us into the joy of God’s reign. To refuse to enter into relationship with the poor means to refuse to enter into resistance to evil and to refuse to enter into God’s redemptive love. It is in entering into relationship with persons who are poor that we enter into relationship with the gracious God who became the poor man Jesus. This is, I think, why Jesus taught that our very salvation hinges upon our relationship with the poor, as he concluded his story:  “Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me. And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Mt 25:45-46)