iBelin

Ending Homelessness in Nashville

// December 31st, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Nashville

“Created by the Key Alliance, an initiative of the Metropolitan Homelessness Commission, this video advocates implementing the strategy of Housing First to end homelessness in Nashville.”

Click here to check out The Key Alliance. The Key Alliance is the website of the Metropolitan Homelessness Commission. The Commission was established to administer the city’s 10-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness as part of a national effort. Government officials, community leaders, and service agencies examined the many complexities of homelessness in Nashville. The plan’s vision is to eliminate chronic homelessness in Nashville by ensuring access to safe, affordable, and permanent housing with a comprehensive array of supportive services.

I WILL HELP.

// December 30th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Homelessness, Nashville

I took my parents to the Nashville Public Library Downtown because they wanted to get out of my house and it’s one of the nicest spaces in the southeast. When we entered, we stumbled upon an exhibit “art makes place”. Part of this exhibit included these fliers with tear off tabs much like the ones often seen in the environs of college campuses on bulletin boards and telephone polls. While these fliers are often advertisements for goods and services, these fliers sported a simple commitment: “I WILL HELP”. Help who? Help with what? That the flier provided no answer to my questions engaged me.

As we continued on our tour of the library, I smelled the unpleasant smell of uncleanness. That smell transported me back twenty-five years or so to the old downtown library I frequented when I was in high school. It was then I first had an inkling of what people have to do to survive when they are homeless. The public men’s rooms became their bathrooms of sorts where they could try to clean up as much as possible.

While we moved through the Courtyard, the Grand Reading Room, the Civil Rights Room, the Fine Arts Reading Room, the periodicals and the amazing children’s area there were men, women and children of all ages and hues who seemed to be at home in the library while on the computers, reading newspapers and periodicals, carrying on conversations (sometimes with invisible conversation partners), and sleeping…

My parents and I had dinner reservations and I was hurrying them along so as not to be caught at closing time and risk missing our reservation. As I kept looking at my phone to keep track of time, I was aware that closing time at the library meant something completely different to many people in the library than it did to me. While I was on my way to dinner with my family, many other people would be released onto cold wet streets with theirs.

Looking forward from the threshold of a new year, there are things I must put behind me. The smiles, the smells, the overheard conversations, the eyes of the people old and young in the Downtown Nashville Public Library are not among them. They are my answer.

(Click here for more on Ending Homelessness in Nashville.)

Not Perfect Yet Holy

// December 28th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Uncategorized

Luke 2:41-52

While reading this passage about Jesus in the Temple with the elders while his worried mother and father anxiously looked for him, I thought again about what a holy family is supposed to look like and how a holy family is supposed to function. One thing I’m convinced of is that a holy family is not a perfect family.

Perfection seems to suggest living mistake-free, and we know our flesh just will not allow this. Too, mistakes (failures, shortcomings etc.) do not render us incapable of being holy. Mistakes are often used to get us on task and to make us determined to constantly seek to discern the right path in prayer.

Holiness is living in the prophetic tension between what is and what God intends for us. It is a continual striving through the power of God’s Spirit to live more fully into our destiny. Mistakes can help with this…

Crisis. In Luke’s passage we really see a family in crisis. These parents have lost their child who, by most standards, responds in a classic flippant way. I call this snapshot a crisis because of the potential created by a parent’s feelings of worry, anxiety and stress when a child begins to stretch her-/himself out of the protective box in which a loving parent has necessarily placed them. What we are witness to is what happens when a child, a family discovers what God has deposited within them.

Discovery. Jesus is “smelling himself.” He has begun to realize the greatness of God within Him and desires to explore His powers. This is natural. This is holy. It is natural for a boy to try and test boundaries. It is an holy process because as Jesus pushing the boundaries of his childhood, he is inclining himself toward God’s intent for Him.

Space. All of us need space to stretch ourselves into the people God has destined us to be. Parents, teachers and loved ones of all sorts are charged with creating this space for those (of all ages!) in the process of discovery. This space is built on love, framed in forgiveness and furnished with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience (Colossians 3:12-17). The love that has sheltered and protected must also be love that releases those we love into their destiny.

Holiness. Families living through the negotiations of who they have been for one another and who they must be for the health of the family and individual members of it are holy families. Beyond the outer trappings, family makeup and illusions of perfection that many deem important is the real essence of holiness: trusting God enough to make us who God desires us to be and loving each other enough to let it happen.

Christ Is Our Peace

// December 21st, 2009 // 2 Comments » // preaching

Micah 5:2-5a

Micah was a prophet from a rural area between Jerusalem and Gaza called Moresheth-gath.  He was not assigned to the region where he prophesied.  He grew up there.  So, he knew the suffering and the oppression of the people.  Micah and oppression were intimate.  Yet, Micah was able to see not only a better and brighter future for the people of Bethlehem, he was able to see a more glorious future for the people of Israel because of the One coming out of Bethlehem.  This small, rural town would have go forth from it the One who would establish shalom, utter satisfaction, irrevocable truth, fullness, justice

Micah was a prophet. Micah, faced with challenges and oppression, was able to see “the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  The prophet has the ability to be grounded in the most adverse of circumstances and still be able to look up to the horizon and see the hope of God’s promise for the future.  It is this awesome capacity to look up into the heavens and see what God is doing that distinguishes the prophet from others.

Micah was a prophet.  Prophets recognize that the purpose and plan of God are already mapped out in the pattern in the universe, that the portents of the age are in the sun, moon and stars.  Prophets realize that seemingly insignificant places, people and decisions are of cosmic importance.  Prophets create tension between was it and what will be – this prophetic tension draws us up and out of what is often the unpleasantness of our living and into the purpose and plan of God.

In Advent, we are reminded to live prophetically. We must learn to look up.  No matter what our present condition is, we have a promise from God of shalom. Remember, Christ is here now and within us.  We have greatness within us.  The shalom you seek is within you… utter satisfaction, irrevocable truth, fullness, justice.  But, as with Bethlehem Ephrathah, the greatness of God’s shalom, of justice is not just to remain in us but must go forth from us in passionate words and committed action.

Know that:

• God chooses whom God wants
• Greatness is in you and going forth from you
• Obedience to the purpose and plan of God ignites the fire of God’s Spirit within you
• Your obedience to God enables your to draw down the power of God from the entire universe to accomplish what God has asked of you
• God’s Holy Spirit, who gives life to all matter, intensifies power in you when you lock into your purpose.
• Though small, nuanced and seemingly insignificant, your choices can take on cosmic proportions

“A Child My Choice”

// December 20th, 2009 // 1 Comment » // Uncategorized

This poem really bespeaks Christmas for me and I want to share it with you:

A Child My Choice

Let folly praise that fancy loves, I praise and love that Child,
Whose heart no thought, whose tongue no word, whose hand no deed defiled.
I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love are His;
While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.

Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired light,
To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.
He mine by gift, I His by debt, thus each to other due.
First friend He was, best friend He is, all times will try Him true.

Though young yet wise, though small yet strong; though man yet God He is;
As wise He knows, as strong He can, as God He loves to bless.
His knowledge rules, His strength defends, His love doth cherish all;
His birth our joy, His life our light, His death our end of thrall.

Alas! He weeps, He sighs, He pants, yet do His angels sing;
Out of His tears, His sighs and throbs, doth bud a joyful spring.
Almighty Babe, whose tender arms can force all foes to fly,
Correct my faults, protect my life, direct me when I die!

Saint Robert Southwell, S.J.