"Hey, Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar?

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 6^th of April, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
on this day of shorter hours
to worship, to celebrate our lives
in this difficult, tender world.
Blest are the men and women
who by their lives and words
paved the road of love and truth
on which we journey.
Now it's our turn. And so we pray

And at celebration's end, may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other, and true to those shared visions of what we can together become.

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

Spring, you have come despite the cold clinging of winter.
Forsythia and scilla,
magnolia and tulip
you all look like so many church bells, ringing the hour of some great festival. Maybe it's the exact birthday
of the cosmos itself so many billions of years ago.

You open your mouths
like singers in a choir
trembling at the edge of ecstasy.

Your colors are unashamed
and profligate.

You come up despite
the sandy wind in the distant desert.

You send up your joy despite the sad deaths in a distant land.

You take no notice of a strange illness in Asia and Canada.

You pay no attention to either
wealth or poverty, belief or unbelief,
politics or religion.

You simply open
under the powdery sky and say,

"Here I am for but a while.

Drink in my red and my yellow
my white and my purple as the medicine of life that suspends you
between yes and no,
sigh and silence.

Be refreshed by my dewy nectar
that was sweet long before sadness existed on earth,
and remains sweet in the midst of your deepest present resentment, and which will pour its sweetness out year after year without concern for either your worry or wonder."

Be blest, blossoms that rise from the earth. For you return us to that which is larger than our sorrow and our worry…the universe that is our common home, our shared shelter,
our heart's own hearth and health.

Before the wonder of the irrepressible spring, our silence…

{silence)

Remembering that human hearts are connected to each other as surely as pollinating bees are bound to spring's open flowers, we remember in this sacred time our brothers and sisters whom we love, and who have loved us till we reached this day.

We name them into the common air or in the silence deep within.

(naming 9 AM)

They live in us, the great multitude of those who brought us to this day.
With their power in us, joined to us,
may we come to believe that there is no mountain we cannot try to climb,
and no child we cannot try to save,
and that the spirit within us is
a spirit of compassion and strength.

(11 AM)

"God bless the child," the song says, and so it may be that each of us has our own blessing…the blessing of the spring, the blessing of our honest feelings, the blessing of overcoming struggles, the blessing of this music, the blessing of each other.

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is a moving poem by Berkeley California Poet Laureate, Julia Vinograd, who every day limps down Telegraph Ave greeting the huddled homeless, the sparechangers, the students at CAL, and their teachers as they walk down the tattered street. She almost always has a bubble ring in her hand, dipping and spreading soap bubbles down the street as she goes back and forth, back and forth.

SPARECHANGERS

20 on a block and by the time
you get to the end of the block
your innocence is gone.

You're a horrible miser
who lets people starve in front of you;
you're guilty of the hawking cough
and the plastic bag raincoat
and the broken shopping cart
packed with all that's left.

It isn't much and it's getting wet
and it's your fault it's raining too.

If you looked in a mirror
it would break with disgust,
you couldn't spare a quarter?

You were just walking down the street
minding your own business,
maybe thinking about someone you just met
and the light on their hair
and wondering if they liked you as much
when all of a sudden there's this empty hand
in your path and you're a mass murderer and there's no excuse.

You can buy spare parts of your self-respect
back from the spare changers
but the motor's broken for good.

You can call the garage and get them
to tow your conscience away,
it doesn't work anymore.

Nothing works anymore.

And you want your innocence back.

You have a right to the self you were
before you walked down the block,
you spent a whole life working at it,
it's yours.

And the homeless want their homes back,
they have a right to the selves they were before,
it's theirs. Whole lives broken. Whole lives blaming. One block.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is an authentic and difficult and strange story told by the historical Jesus, and found embedded in the gospel of Luke.

There once was a wealthy absentee landlord who employed an accountant, a steward (Gk.: ekonomikos) to manage his holdings. Someone accused the steward of squandering, and so the landlord said to him, "Close out your books by the end of the day, for you can't work for me anymore."

The steward said to himself, "What am I to do now that my boss has fired me? I am totally ashamed. I am not healthy enough to dig ditches.

Then he brightened up and said, "Oh, I know what to do! And if I do what I plan, doors will open to me once I leave this office."

So he called on a few folks who were in debt to his boss. "So how much do you owe my boss?"

"A hundred barrels of oil."

"Let's change that. Put down fifty instead"

He called on another debtor. "How much do you owe my boss?" he asked. The man replied, "A hundred bushels of grain." "Bring that number down to a mere eighty on your record," said the steward.

And when the landlord found out what had been done, even he had to admit that the steward was a prudent and most clever fellow.

Sermon: "Hey, Brother, Can You Spare a Dollar? [Next][back to top]

When I moved here from the West Coast, folks both here and there used to ask me questions. They would ask me about any differences I noticed that distinguished the two places… Central Ohio and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Now people asked me these questions in a way that made clear that they were not asking for the obvious. They knew very well the difference between a date palm and a maple tree, a corn-field and an ocean, or a road white with snow drifts and a road black without them No, when folks questioned me, they were clearly asking me questions of social culture. How does the social culture of Central Ohio contrast with the social culture of the San Francisco Bay Area?

I gave the matter some thought, and, after a time, offered three observations.

First, I noted that a full three times more people smoked cigarettes here than in the Bay Area. Clearly, the social norms and expectations around smoking were and remain quite distinct.

Second, I noticed a difference in attitudes toward urban traffic. Using a stopwatch to prove it, I noted that the signal lights at intersections here were two or three and even four times longer than what I was used to after 24 years in Oakland. I used to tell my Oakland friends that I could read whole chapters from Tolstoi's War and Peace, if I wanted to, while waiting for certain lights to change around here.

And third, and to my great surprise, I noted that there did not seem to be very many homeless people here in Columbus. Homeless people, you know, people in dark, tarry rags taking their shelter in just about every open doorway, as they do in the Bay Area, their arms outstretched, asking for a dollar. Julia Vinograd's poem, written about Berkeley CA, portrays the sober truth without the slightest exaggeration. Twenty on a block…yes, and sometimes thirty. And each of them asking for spare change, and most of them homeless. And there were ten gathered before each grocery store entrance, or around the doors of urban churches and synagogues. Consciousness of homelessness was a daily meditation for us out in the Bay Area. You always had to make a decision. There was always this philosophical self-questioning. Do I give money or do I withhold it? Why? Do I walk past and just pretend that I have not heard them? Do I get mad when I am walking with a companion, and say, "Why have you interrupted my conversation with my friend here? How rude!" Am I afraid that someone might get violent if I say No? Do I think a fistful of spare change will actually help make a difference, or only make things worse for the homeless person (even if it strangely "absolves" my own do-gooder soul)?

You would have all of these swift, inward conversations about responsibility and guilt and sadness when you walked down the street. Julia Vinograd makes that so clear in her poem…you would feel guilty, "like a mass murderer," she writes. Whew! Strong metaphor! But a pretty accurate description of the intensity of the sharp feelings, I'd say. When I would walk the streets of San Francisco, I would think of Katherine Lee Bates, who wrote the famous song "O Beautiful, for Spacious Skies…" Many of us know the first verse from memory, but fewer of us know the fourth verse, which has this elegant line "Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears." Katharine Bates supposedly wrote that line remembering a trip to Sausalito, California. And the "alabaster city" she saw from that shore was none other than San Francisco, pastel white above the turquoise crystal bay. However, other than her accurate description of the city, the rest of the line is simply false. San Francisco is simply filled with people numb from crying so much, in doorways, in city parks, and yes, even down city streets as they argue with themselves about whether to give a quarter…or a dollar… or not. Indeed, according to certain advocacy groups I checked out, San Francisco joins New York and Atlanta as one of the three "meanest" cities in the United States in regard to their homeless population.

But here in Columbus I was startled to see almost no homeless people on the streets…at least not any that my ill-adjusted, newly-arrived eyes could see.

Oh, I knew there were shelters and missions in town. I live only a few blocks from Faith Mission, after all, the institution for the homeless which members of this church support by cooking meals every other Friday. I knew enough about urban reality to know that there had to be homeless people in any United States metro area of more than a million population. But I just didn't see any visible homelessness here. And that made Columbus appear to be a much less painful city to live in than San Francisco ever was, both for those with homes and, apparently, for those without homes, since there seemed to be less of them.

But after a few months here, I remembered the truth, which some religions have preached for thousands of years is a fact in this case…just because something is invisible doesn't mean that it is not there. And this is certainly true about Columbus. Even when I could not see them, it remained that just under two percent of the population of Columbus as a whole was homeless…that amounts to about nine percent of the poverty population in this city. The poverty I am speaking about is destitution. I am talking about something very clear and even objective, based on income per person.

So invisibility really doesn't tell us a thing.

And frankly, I think you might agree with me that, in the last three years, there has been a lot more visibility. You can often see men standing at the top of freeway exits, often with scribbled signs explaining why they are homeless or why they are after a dollar or two. Some proudly claim to be Vietnam Vets. Others simply hold signs which say "Out of work." You can see these men even out towards the far suburbs.

And even if you don't drive the freeways, you can read the newspaper. There have been articles in the Dispatch recently about "pan handlers" downtown, and how local civil servants are looking to control their activities with various nuisance laws and directives.

And if you look carefully, you can see some of the same homeless realities that I used to see in San Francisco. For instance, at the beautiful beige stone Presbyterian Church, down on 3rd between State and Town, which I drive past every day to get to my own home, there is a homeless man crouched in the stone arch of the northside entrance. You can barely see him, because he's off the street a bit, and it's dark in the recess of the arch. He is never there during the day, only at night.

I see him there when it is 2° F outside, or when it's 78° and raining. He is there during ice storms and sleet and during blistering summer evenings. Every single night for two and a half years, however, I have driven past this man. I do not know his name. But I do know he has a life. And I have to assume that his life is just as important to him as my life is to me.

The same is true for every single homeless person. We are always talking about a human life with a story. A complex story.

The facts are these about homelessness in Columbus and its environs. These facts are emotionally distressing to any human being who hears them. First, families are now more typically homeless than single men. In the past, I have seen more men, but now families are homeless, too, in increasing number. In fact, family homelessness in Columbus alone was up 14% just this winter. Second, children make up a huge percentage of the homeless. For example, in the United States, the average age of a homeless person is only nine. Columbus is not much different than any other city in the States its size.

As Barbara Pratzner, a member of this church, who is the interim president and CEO for the YWCA, puts it: "A big part of the problem is the lack of affordable housing in this community. The Community Shelter Board has calculated that, in order to afford a modest two bedroom apartment here, a person would have to be earning $7.50 per hour---which is far, far more than the present minimum wage." This is why more and more women with children under the age of five are ending up on the streets. In fact, the typical image of the homeless person now is a young woman with a child, not a single middle aged man under a bridge.

Why are people homeless? Many reasons. Some claim relationship difficulties…they have left their own houses to find safety from a brutal boyfriend or husband. Others claim difficulties stemming from drugs and alcohol, as do so many who still have houses. Others simply do not make enough money working at minimum wage jobs to afford safe shelter, or they have been evicted for one reason or another. Young teens are thrown out by their parents for being gay or, as I heard one young man put it, for being "mouthy." Mental illness may be involved too, certainly, and that is something our culture has shown a remarkable reluctance to face.

Of course, homelessness is hardly a new phenomenon. The story from the gospel of Luke that I read to you earlier, is actually a tale Jesus told about how one man struggled to avoid homelessness in his day. Here is a fellow who is trying to support his family. He is a middle man, a steward, neither the owner, nor a slave. He's an accountant of sorts, a steward. He is not getting by very well…it's hard to put food on the table for his wife and the kids at his salary. Remember that in ancient times there were no benefits, no perks, just a non-negotiated salary.

And the economic situation back then was even worse than what we are seeing now in this country. So this character in the story has apparently been embezzling some money just to get by. And he is found out. And fired. Most would say understandably so. But remember that there was no social net of any kind in those days. No special funds to fall back on. So what does this fellow do? He admits shame for what he has done. But he knows that with his back problems, he can't be much of a ditch digger, the only minimum-wage work that will be available to him when he leaves his job. So what does he do? Amazingly, he plays with the books some more, in order that his boss's creditors will really like him and take him and his family in. He is in desperate straits, and he does some dishonest deeds, both before and after he is caught. And the strangest part of the story is that his former boss ends up praising him for his cleverness, appreciating the sly and manipulative approach of his former employee.

When Jesus told this story, he was telling it to people who would have recognized this fellow with a howl. All of them had grown up in an age when people had enough to eat, owned their own farms and businesses, and when poverty was rare. In a mere twenty years, due to government chicanery and irrational taxing structures, tens of thousands of families in the Galilee had gone from self-reliance into huge debt. Homelessness was everywhere. Folks slept in open fields. Jesus even said it clearly once…?Foxes have dens, and birds have nests, but human beings have no place to lay their head."

The Galileans who heard this strange story would have recognized at once the impossible dilemma of the poor chap. Every choice he had before him amounted to a "Catch 22." If he kept everything aboveboard, he and his family would have starved. If he complained, he would have been fired. He was caught up in a network of realities that required bizarre and uncharacter-istic decisions of him. What is there left to do? When you are desperate, you will do anything, including cheat and lie, so as not to go under.

I think this same reality is true of modern homeless people. I can't believe for one moment that women have been dreaming all their life to take their children and sleep in shelters, or that men, standing out on street corners in the rain begging with signs in their hands, consider this moment to be the joyous pinnacle of their lives. Rush Limbaugh and his smirking friends will try and peddle us stories that these men on the freeways are bringing in $30 grand a year and hoodwinking us all with their aggressive laziness, but I have yet to see the documented evidence. And anyway, if a homeless person was caught doing something dishonest to fight against a system that often seems like massed Catch 22's, then I wonder, what else should we expect? That they will just lie down in the streets and die? The boss in Jesus' story might praise them too for their shrewdness…their shrewdness in dealing with an impossible situation in such a clever way.

But as I have said, I have not seen any convincing evidence of these charges. I have only seen the old stand-by escape of the privileged of blaming the sufferer for their own suffering, and listing all the ways they deserve to suffer, with smirks of self-congratulation.

For some reason, this topic really gets to me. When I lived in the Bay Area, I used to talk to homeless people all the time. It was just too hard for me to walk past "twenty on a block" without talking to at least one or two a week. I got to know many of them, and I called them by name when I saw them, or bought them dinner or lunch sometimes. I listened to a hundred stories, all sad, all human, all amazing. I talked to those who had been thrown onto the streets by violence, and those who had been left there by layoffs and repeated downsizing at work. I talked to those who medicated themselves with drugs in ways not much different than many people with homes medicate themselves with drugs…to fight off depression, to be able to sleep, to be less fragmented. Sometimes I felt I had to do more. When my neighbor Oliver chose homelessness over the violence and chaos in his own home, I offered him my warm couch on cold rainy nights as a bed.

But clearly, although this is a subject that compels me, I am hardly asking anyone to do anything I have done, or setting myself up as some sort of example. My single life has its own freedoms and patterns, which would be fool's work in any other case. Nor do I have any recommendations to any of you as to whether you should offer a dollar or two in a cup extended toward you.

But there is no harm in being educated about this reality among us all. Educated so our eyes can see under the bridges and arches of churches to note one or two of the 9,000 odd homeless women and men in our community. And no harm in working to support our interfaith organization, BREAD, as they demand affordable housing for our community, using an often uncomfortable power to demand justice of the powerful for the powerless. And you can do no harm in finding out and supporting the work of all those local agencies committed to ending chronic homelessness in Central Ohio…the Interfaith Hospitality Network of the YWCA, the Community Shelter Board, and COHHIO, a coalition of organizations and individuals working on this reality. And if short-term concrete and savory contributions delight you more than social education, great, you can offer to be part of the team that cooks dinners for the homeless here at the church every other Friday. Or part of the team that picks up and delivers and serves the food.

My religious faith in the resourcefulness of the human spirit makes me think it's possible to go from twenty on a block to no one on a block, or no one at a freeway exit, or no one in an almost invisible shelter. No one.

But as Vinograd's poem made so clear, dealing with this issue is not just work for the mind, or the ethical decision, but depth work for the soul, or the deeper parts of our life, if you will. Vinograd reminds us that everyone, the homeless and those with homes, ultimately has a right to their own best selves, a right not to suffer blame and brokenness as our daily portion.

And if I can't make such a simple hope central to my religious faith, why would I be religious at all?

Prayer at a time of war [back to top]

One day, I pray, in clear and clean windows,
reflections of families at supper,
not mouths open in fear.

One day, I pray, in wide hot streets,
clean air, not belching oily smoke.

One day, I pray, on warm spring nights,
the sound of crickets, not wailing or gunshots.

One day, I pray, in human hearts,
a prayer of thanksgiving for a peace that
has lasted a hundred years;
not a truce, mind you,
but an Era of Peace full and rich and just.

May our children live to see such a world,
O love, may all children live.

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Last update: 04/28/2003