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April 25, 2010
Psalm 23, Acts 9: 32-43

Our service today included reflections by Bobbie Beson-Crone about the Housing and Hope Project and by Dr. Cate Ranheim about providing medical care to homeless people. Pastor Phil offered these reflections in setting up each of their presentations.

Psalm 23

Before Bobbie talks to you about her experiences with the new apartments we are helping to provide for homeless families, I’d like to take just a moment to connect the words of Psalm 23 with what she is going to tell you.

We most often think of Psalm 23 as a psalm of comfort in the midst of hard times. It is a beautiful reminder that even when we feel most alone, most adrift, God is with us and God’s love and care surround us.  It surely is one of the best known passages of all sacred scriptures.

On this day, though, I’d like to invite you to extend these words out beyond the comfort they can offer each of us to the promise of comfort they hold out for others.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” If I am out there with no place to live, I am wanting in the most visceral way possible. I worry about my survival, about the fate of my children. The only green pastures I can see are in a park where I might take shelter. The only still waters I see are the pools of water from last night’s rain.

We can be God’s agents in leading people to new paths, to taking them from the darkest valley to a place where they sense a greater love because of what their fellow human beings have done for them instead of two them. They can gather around a table in their own dining room without fear of the enemies of homelessness and hunger and ill health.

That’s what we and others working with the Road Home have been doing.

Acts 9

If Psalm 23 offered us a comforting vision and the inspiration to make that vision a reality for others, this story we heard from the Acts of the Apostles is one of those stories that is as likely to leave us shaking our heads in bewilderment as to feel inspired.

Curing people, raising them from the dead? That’s not part of what we do in our everyday lives as followers of Jesus.

Well, actually it is.  We do that in many ways. Dr. Ranheim actually does cure people, sometimes bringing them back from the edge of death.  Her work with the homeless in Madison – along with the dedicated crew of medical professionals who are part of her project – make  a huge difference in the lives of others. So does the work of so many other health care professionals in our midst.

Let me suggest, though, that there are a few things this reading about the earliest followers of Jesus has to say to us before I invite Dr. Ranheim to share some of her encounters with the people we as a society often treat as outcasts. 

When Cate Proctor sang “God Help the Outcasts” at the beginning of our service, she was drawing on a beautiful song from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” It contrasted Esmerelda’s prayer for those cast out with the prayers of others in the cathedral for wealth and fame and glory shining on their name.

In our story today, Peter was reaching out to people who often would have been defined as outcasts in first century society. Aeneas, the man he cured, bore a Greek name.

Peter was expanding bit by bit beyond his world of Jewish believers to a broader world, but in doing so, he was going beyond the accepted social barriers.

And then he went to Tabitha, a woman, someone else who was part of a group who had no status in society. Yet the writer of Acts called her a disciple, using the very same word as he did for other close followers of Jesus. And when Peter called her back to life, he was showing all those other followers that this new band of people walking the way of Jesus could defy death and bring forth life in the world around them.

And then did you notice that last line? Peter went to stay with Simon the Tanner. Why did that matter? A tanner was doing work that was ritually unclean under Jewish law. Peter was staying with another outcast.

When Dr. Ranheim and the nurse for the HEALTH program, Barb Simonz, and the rest of their crew go out to the places in Madison where the homeless and dispossessed gather, they are showing how in our own era, we all can help defy death and bring forth life.