Yesterday Katrina and I went to the Rogers Park house church that has been meeting for the last few months at Charmer’s Cafe coffee house, a funky little corner shop that holds down one of the corners of the artsy community on Chicago’s far north side.
One of the guys that normally meets with us was already there. He was reading Richard Foster’s The Challenge of the Disciplined Life, one of my favorite books I’ve never read. In fact, I may decide not to read it until I find a copy of the book under its old title, Money, Sex and Power. Much better title don’t you think? Our friend is on his way to pursuing Christ and the Christian life after years of slowly neglecting God. Only a few weeks ago, he had begun to read Simply Christian by N.T. Wright. I’m super thankful and excited for the spiritual progress he’s made, and for the tangible changes I can see in his life. It’s another proof of Christ’s power. He, like all of us, are trying to discover how to follow Jesus in Chicago, 2009.
Anyway, we got our drinks and sat down together outside under a canopy and enjoyed the sunshine. We chatted and caught up on life, then we dove into our text for the week. Each week we’ll read through a section of Scripture, usually two or three times, then we’ll have another person try to retell the story in his or her own words. Afterwords, we’ll focus on listening to God, trying to discern what we’ll do in response to what we’ve read and discussed. Learning to incorporate obedience to God and his Word is an essential value of our house church network.
So we read Luke 4: 18-30 this week. The passage describes Jesus, after returning from his desert experience, is seated in the synagogue in his home town. As part of the gathering, he stands up and reads from Isaiah 61:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Right at about this point in the text, an overweight man with stained clothes and greasy hair approaches us and asks us if he can have some money to get something to eat. I’ve learned that this is a fairly common thing in Chicago, and I’ve come to a place where I make as few contingency plans regarding helping or not helping beggars as I can. It keeps me listening to the Spirit. We all stopped reading and focused on him. His speech was slurred and hard to understand. We took up a collection to get him some food inside the coffee shop and invited him to sit down with us for the rest of our gathering.
The rest of the story takes Jesus from a place of great favor with the crowds to almost being thrown off the cliff.
We each went around the circle and mentioned what stood out to us in the passage. Each of us had something meaningful and insightful to add to the discussion. One of the things that stood out for me was the turning point; when Jesus made it clear that the passage in Isaiah and the focus of Jesus’ ministry was not focused on rescuing the Jews from their oppressors, but rather in pursuit of being a light to the world.
But it was Chris who turned the conversation sideways. He didn’t wax eloquent on the meaning of the Scripture, or divulge deep secrets, he simply said how thankful he was for being able to eat today, and how he planned to give one of his blankets to someone else who needed one – like Jesus would. He smiled and squinted his eyes into the sun, with veggie hummus on the corner of his lips. With nothing more to say, I was stunned at how softened my heart was to Chris, a mentally handicapped homeless man who seemed to have the simplest and yet most tangible, obedient response to the love of Christ. I found myself as part of the angry crowd that dismissed Christ’s pursuit of the poor and the oppressed as being something related to me, a Gentile. Certainly with my skills, wit, training, heritage and more I am the focus of Christ’s mission. But then someone like Chris shows up – with a gentle spirit and a willing heart, and turns my paradigm and self-centered spirituality upside down.
With Chris sitting right there, we talked openly about how God saw it fit to introduce us to Chris, a homeless, poor man, who is exactly the person Isaiah writes about and Christ proclaims Good News to.
As I left the gathering, I concluded: If we want to hear the Good News of Christ, we have to listen to Chris.
Sometimes its easy to see the tree and lose sight of the forest. “Without oxen a stable stays clean,” the proverb begins. Just think of the owner of the stable – if he’s lazy, he might find himself relieved to see that his daily work of cleaning up after the ox is no longer necessary. If he’s short-sighted, maybe he’s more interested in a clean barn than in a harvest.
