What does it mean for the poor to be blessed?
This was the phrase that Miriam Boone, our director at One Hope Tulsa, asked us to meditate on when she sent us out to take part in a homelessness simulation this summer. The simulation was a part of our internship, designed to give us a taste of what it is like to experience homelessness, even though it could never truly replicate it.
And I’m reminded of this phrase now, both as I reflect on Advent as I always do this time of year, and as I look towards the transitions that senior year brings. I find myself holding on too tightly to things that God calls me to hold loosely. I find myself feeling powerless in the face of sins and struggles and thinking that they will never change. I find myself looking at the future and feeling deeply inadequate to go into the work that I’ve felt for so long that God is calling me to.
But in the midst of these doubts, God is reminding me of what he offers in his upside-down kingdom, where the poor are blessed and the enemy is adopted and the slave is set free.
One of these reminders came at church this Sunday, when my pastor preached on John 12:20-26 and said that the gospel is Jesus’ call to follow him, because he has made it possible. Following Jesus is a road of death and glory. It means that we’re not slaves to sin, that our old selves have been crucified and we’ve been raised with Christ. It means dying to myself and finding life in him. And we are often called to places where we feel inadequate because those are the places where we lean on Christ the most, where he is glorified in our weakness.
Discipleship is also a call to both give and receive hospitality, as Jesus tells his disciples “I go to prepare a place for you.” Hospitality is at the heart of the heart of the gospel.
At senior social on Thursday, Brad Voyles reminded our class to start practicing generosity now, even when we have little. Generosity is worth the risk of poverty, and poverty causes us to lean on Christ and on others. I suppose Jesus’ disciples needed hospitality when he sent them out to do ministry because they only took one tunic each!
In Tulsa, on my homelessness simulation, God showed me grace in unlikely places. One was on the curb outside a Quick Trip the first night, where a few of us sat and talked with some of our unsheltered neighbors. They shared their stories and their Hi-Chews and offered a bottle of wine (which we had to decline). Though they had little, they were quick to share. Another was when on the bus and on the street, people gave us directions and advice, and I was struck over and over by the hospitality they showed us as we sought to enter their world for just a couple of nights.
One of the most stark examples of this came on the second afternoon when we sat hungry, exhausted, and unshowered in the shade outside our community building, and were approached by a couple offering us cigarettes. They had seen us in our odd assortment of donated clothes, with some of the cardboard we had slept on the night before strewn about, and had decided to stop. They both had been homeless before, and knew that cigarettes were one of the things that could take the edge off. Their generosity was born of compassion, which was born of experience, and even though we declined the cigarettes, I was struck by something very incarnational about the way they approached us.
There is so much about the Incarnation that speaks of hospitality. God dwelling among us. Jesus relied on hospitality throughout his earthly ministry. Jesus emptying himself and making himself nothing, in order to bring us home, offering a place at his table.
As I reflect on the blessedness of poverty, I am not idealizing it. I realize how crippling it can be and the traumatic effects that it brings. But I am reflecting on the way that Christ invites us to the end of ourselves to give us himself. Feeling inadequate as I look towards life after Covenant feels like a form of poverty, but I know that Christ is inviting me to follow him and empty myself that he might fill me, and that he will be glorified through it. By his kindness, I’m compelled to repent and rely on him, and as Chaplain Lowe said on Friday, I’m invited into eternal living now, to hold loosely to all else so that I can hold fast to him. And when I falter, he gives more grace.