SHELTER THE HOMELESS

Trinity Church in Parkersburg, West Virginia, where I served many years ago, is located downtown. We always had a pot of coffee brewing especially in the winter months because the “street people”, as they were called back then, stopped in to warm themselves in the heated office space and with a cup of that coffee. Today, we simply name these people as “homeless” because that is what they were then and are today.

They are everywhere, living under bridges, in vacant homes, anywhere where they can find shelter. One of our frequent coffee guests was a man named Jerry. Jerry would be with us all year long until the snow fell or it got too cold to live outside. But Jerry always found warm shelter in the winter at the local jail. He would commit some offense that assured him that he was sentenced to at least three months in prison. Whatever works and that worked for him.

If anything, the problem of homelessness has only gotten worse, not just in this country but around the world. With it the Old Testament admonition that the Jewish people must take care of the aliens (read “homeless”) in their midst and Jesus’ command that we will be judged by how well we fulfill our responsibility to shelter the homeless has compounded the problem even more.

The response has not been very encouraging especially from those who insist that we are indeed a Judeo-Christian country. We are not, of course. Nations do not have religion. They have laws. People have personal religion. How well we, the people, fulfill our religious responsibilities is the issue at hand for us as when it comes to sheltering the homeless. We can ignore the problem or hope it goes away. But it won’t go away and ignoring it only makes it worse.

The problem becomes worse when our often gut response to someone who is homeless is to tell them to get a job. The street people who stopped in for coffee at Trinity would love to have been able to work; but the issue for them was not physical, being able to work, but mental, not being able to work. Instead of placing Jerry in a mental health facility, we closed them down and he and his kin became homeless. And still are.

So what do we do? Individually we cannot do very much. To adequately deal with and resolve the issue of homelessness in our country means that the system has to change. Where once the mental health facility in Warren, Pennsylvania, where I served at Trinity Memorial, used to care for over 3000 patients, it now only houses the criminally insane. The rest, like Jerry, were mainstreamed. Society is now paying for this foolishness.

If the Christian Church is serious about Jesus’ command that we shelter the homeless, it had better lead the way by speaking out as a unified voice and get the government to begin to address the issue full force. And we need to support that leadership.