Weekend to End Homelessness
Announcements
Debbie: We have a few announcements that I'm going to walk us through. Actually, we have so much life going on in this church. We had to cut a few announcements today because we have a lot going on. One of the things that we have committed to do each week is to highlight an area ministry for those who maybe weren't aware of it or weren't able to join us. But last Tuesday night, our friends and neighbors through the Park Place Ministry, they provide this unbelievable meal. For all of us, I think there were about 60-some table folks that showed up, along with all the Park Place families that created and provided the awesome food and meal. And the highlight was getting to know each other better, sitting in conversation, sharing a meal. I think for everyone, it was such a beautiful experience. And one of the things, I was talking with Becca and Clara, who run the Park Place program, and we decided we need to make this something we do maybe quarterly. So next time, Table family, we are going to be hosting a meal for Park Place. So we'll keep you posted on when that happens.
What else do we have going on? We have QT meeting at the Apple Orchard on the 17th. We have the Twin City Pride, Trunk, or Treat on the 25th. And Men at The Table, get your golf clubs out. No, you don't. You don't bring them. You actually just go. Men at the table, they are meeting on the 28th, and they will be doing top golf together. All of these things you can find on our website. And I encourage you to go there, because we have so many amazing things going on right now in the life of the church.
Right now, and what I really wanted to highlight today is, you know, we've been in this series that we've been calling woven. That idea that love of God and love of neighbor are woven together, you cannot separate the two of those. And when Justin and I were coming up with the sermon series, one of our thoughts was not just to talk about it, but how do we step more deeply into love of God and love of neighbor? We do that with our Park Place friends. And one of the things that really we were excited about was having Kevin Nye come and speak to us, because Kevin is the co-founder and director of the National Faith Coalition to End Homelessness.
And this weekend, we are partnering with churches across the country to make a stand on ending homelessness. Something we feel is really important for us as a church to be a part of. So I'll say a little bit more about next steps when I do the benediction, but would you please all welcome Kevin Nye as he speaks to us today?
Sermon
Kevin: Thank you, Debbie. Good morning, everyone. Thank you. As Debbie said, I am the co-founder, the director of the National Faith Coalition to End Homelessness. I've written some books on faith and homelessness. I also work here in Minneapolis, downtown at an organization called YouthLink, where I'm the housing director. But I would say more important to me this morning than all of those things is that I and my family are also members here at the table with our sons, Micah and Jordan. As a family that moved to Minneapolis here almost five years ago, it was a lot of years of looking for a church like this and not finding it. And we are so grateful that we found it. We're so grateful that this church exists, that you all exist, and that you have welcomed us as part of this church as well.
Today is a special day for me, as Debbie alluded to. I've had this idea on my heart and mind for about five years since I started writing and advocating around faith and homelessness. It was this idea that there could be some sort of gathering or coalition or statement by churches and people of faith and communities of faith all across the country to sort of speak with one voice and align themselves around particular ways of addressing homelessness. So that idea became the national faith coalition to end homelessness and then eventually the weekend to end homelessness, where congregations all over the country would be invited to say "I want to take the next step that makes sense for us."
And this is the first time that we're doing this. This is the first ever weekend to end homelessness. The table is in at the ground level of this and was actually one of the first churches to sign up and say yes and then invited me to step into the pulpit for it. But the table isn't the only congregation that said yes.
In fact, as of yesterday, the number of congregations across the country doing this is 112. That's an actual map of all of the congregations participating across 28 different states and believe it or not, 26 different denominations are represented. All saying yes to ending homelessness and agreeing to start discerning their role in doing that. But this weekend is not meant to be the end, but more of a beginning for what the national faith coalition is going to be doing across the country, but also what individual congregations can do. And at the end, I'll share a little bit more about what that means for the table and how the table is deciding to discern what their faithful next step is, what our faithful next step is.
But before we do that, I'm going to preach. Not just here to tell you about my organization or this weekend, though I am wearing our swag. I figured that if Pastor Justin can preach in an Eras Tour sweatshirt that I can get away with this. That's just both of us wearing something really close to our hearts.
But I'm here to preach, too. I have an MDiv, like I think a lot of people here at the table. I was once a licensed minister. I'll tell you that story another time. So you're going to get a real sermon out of me. And part of that is because I love to do it. I love to preach. But also because I truly believe that Scripture has a lot to say about this issue of homelessness. And especially in the light of this series that we've been in called Woven, where as Debbie said, we're considering what it means to be in interconnected and interdependent relationships with all of our neighbors. I truly couldn't imagine a better series to be part of for Weekend to End Homelessness. It's okay. If it wasn't your kid, it would be mine, don't worry.
So I'm going to read what is probably a very familiar text to you. It's called The Parable of the Sower. It's from Matthew 13. It's one of Jesus' most famous parables. And it reads like this:
A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow. And when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil where it produced a crop, 160 or 30 times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear.
So when I was in undergrad studying to go into ministry, I had an amazing preaching professor. And he gave us really good advice on how to approach a text, whether it was kind of a difficult text or even a very common text in the Bible. So he said that we need to start approaching texts with the right set of questions. That often we were guilty of bringing the wrong first questions to a text. Wrong questions like, "What is this text saying to me?" Or "Where am I in this story?" Which can do an injustice to the text, right? This is a text that was written 2,000 years ago, at least by an author, written for an intended audience, recalling, remembering, bearing witness to something profound.
And now that's not to say that the text doesn't have anything to say to me or that we can't locate ourselves in a story, but maybe that we've just skipped a few steps that we're asking too direct of a question.
Instead the questions that Dr. Green, my professor, suggested we ask were, one, what does this text say about who God is? Where is God in the story? And then two, if God is like that, how ought we respond to a God like that?
And these are really great questions to bring to a text like this, because I grew up hearing a lot of sermons on this parable, and most of them were pretty similar. And at the core of these sermons was a particular question. Sometimes this was even the title of the sermon, was, "What kind of soil are you?" Right? Tell me I'm not alone. Other people have heard sermons about this like that? Right?
And it's not to say that any sermon that asks that question or use a title like that was bad or misguided. But the way that those sermons then sort of took a turn with that is where it can go wrong. These sermons tended to emphasize that we need to make sure we know what kind of soil we are, that we are the good soil, that who can receive God's Word, we definitely don't want to be the bad soil or one of those kind of wishy-washy middle soils. Right?
But then where these sermons kind of even take a turn for the worse is that not only were you asked to say what kind of soil you were, but you were given examples and qualities of what those bad soil folks might look like. Right? And it's in that turn where that sermon starts to become about differentiating us and them, the good soil from the bad soil.
I fear this is the most ultimate temptation of people of faith. It's to believe that we're not actually woven together, but that some of us are part of this special in-group who worked hard and so we deserve all of the things that we get, all the good things. But then there's this other group, the bad soil, right, who hasn't worked hard or hasn't enough or isn't enough and so they deserve the bad things that happen to them. Right? They're just bad soil.
Now I'm going to suggest this morning that this story actually isn't about what kind of soil you are. The soils are not active characters in this story. No soil starts off as one kind of soil and then becomes another kind. In real life, soil doesn't have a lot of agency. Right?
Things happen to it and in this story, just like in a garden, things happen to that soil and the plants grow or they don't. So if Jesus were wanting to tell a story to challenge us to become a better kind of soil, he kind of picked a bad metaphor. Right?
Now I will say I've been known here and there to dabble in some heresies, especially if I ask the church I grew up in, maybe a little more than dabble according to them.
But I do tend to think that Jesus is a pretty good storyteller. Right? And that Jesus chooses metaphors and stories intentionally and with precision. So if that's not the message that Jesus had in mind, then what is this story about? Well, we can come back to the questions that my preaching professor taught me. First, what does this text say about who God is? Instead of trying to locate where we are, let's first locate where God is in this story. And what qualities that God exhibits. And we get a hint in the fact that we know this story as the parable of the sower, not the parable of the soils. Right? This is the story about a farmer who takes good seeds and scatters it across all kinds of soil.
Now, another title for this story might be the parable of the reckless farmer. Right? It's not exactly the most efficient gardening practice to throw good seeds all over every single kind of soil. But it does bring us to the heart of this story. That in a world full of all kinds of soil, God chooses to sow good seeds everywhere and waits in anticipation to see what will happen. Right?
And the reason this is so profound to me is because I do work in homelessness. And within the work of homelessness, there's this debate on how we approach the issue. What is the best way to come at and address and even end homelessness? There's what's called the treatment first approach. And there's the housing first approach.
And what's interesting about these two approaches is that they sound really the treatment first or housing first. It's mainly a debate on what comes first. But really at the core of the debate is not what comes first, housing or treatment. But it's about what you believe about homelessness and the people who experience it. Now, the traditional treatment first approach looks something like this.
It's also sometimes called the staircase approach, as you can imagine. And how it works is if you're a person experiencing homelessness, you hope to get a placement in a shelter, usually a very congregate setting. You've seen these bunk beds in a warehouse or cots on the floor of a gymnasium. But in order to achieve that sort of next level of housing, you have to start meeting some expectations. Right? Others will have rules about when you can come, when you can go, what it looks like to keep your bed, how to keep your bed well made, your level of behavior or sobriety, your level of treatment compliance that you have to meet with a psychiatrist and follow their treatment plan.
And all of these are sort of a way of testing folks and having folks have to prove their forgiveness, right, to keep moving up the staircase. And eventually, let's say you managed to stay in a shelter for a while and keep all the rules and prove that you're one of the good ones, then you can transition to transitional housing, which maybe you have a few roommates, there's a little bit more independence, but now more is expected of you, right? Maybe you have to submit a certain number of job applications every single week. If it's a faith-based provider, maybe there's this expectation that you have to go to a Bible study every morning. And if you, again, you prove more and more that you can follow these rules and take all these steps, then eventually maybe you might get permanent independent housing.
Now you can tell kind of by the way that I talk about this, that this is not my favorite model in terms of where I land on the debate is becoming obvious.
But part of why I am not a fan of this model is not only because of kind of the worthiness aspect that I described, but also because it doesn't really work. And actually, the folks who start out at the bottom of this, the percentage of folks who make it all the way to permanent housing is usually at best around 10%. And so in this debate, if it were really an argument about which came first, you would say, well, what lake does this group have to stand on when their success rate is not very high? Well, the reason that this still gets a lot of support is not because it's successful, but because it proves you right if you're of the belief that people who experience homelessness aren't really worthy of help.
What this model does is it sorts people into those who are good enough to make it to independent housing and those who are not. You can look at the failure of this model and say it's actually not the model that's failing people, it's people who are failing the model. They're just bad soil. The ones who succeed must be the ones who deserve to, the ones who are that rare good soil in the bunch. But God the Sower doesn't distribute resources that way.
Good seeds land on every soil when God is the sower. And so because of that, many prefer, like myself, a housing first model, which starts from the belief that no matter what kind of soil I think you are or even you think you are, we're going to give you what you need to be successful. A safe, affordable apartment, but that's not the end. That's just the beginning. We're going to keep cultivating, surrounding you with all the resources that you need to flourish. Instead of saying go get your life together to prove that you're worthy of housing, we say here's a safe and stable home. What do you want to do next? All soil gets seeded and then a chance to make something of it. And the cool thing is it works. The housing first approach leads to life stability at an 80 to 90 percent rate when it's practiced faithfully. Leading with dignity and unconditional love leads to better outcomes. It reminds people that they deserve good things regardless of what labels they carry.
I get to see this firsthand every day at my job in YouthLink, both the beauty of getting to offer good things, but also the way that young people internalize negative beliefs about what they deserve. A little over a year ago, I was staying late at one of our housing sites where we have 47 units of supportive housing. What that means is that up to 47 young people live there at a time who are between the ages of 18 and 24. They qualify for these units because they're either coming directly out of homelessness or directly aged out of foster care.
So I'm staying there late one night. I'm covering a shift. It's around five or six o'clock and I'm reviewing our budgets. I noticed that in one of our budgets, we're a little underspent. Miracle. In this particular line item for this budget, where I was underspent was on food. So I thought, "Hey, I'm here late. It's dinner time. Let's feed the building tonight. Let's get our spending back on track with some food in this lobby." So I start thinking, "Okay, what can I get last minute that's going to be enough, that they're not going to say we needed this order two days ago?" And so of course I landed on Jimmy John's. I ordered Jimmy John's catering. It came freaky fast. And everyone was so happy. I was letting people know, "Hey, Jimmy John's is going to be here any minute."
And people came and ate and they were so excited. They came back for seconds. They went upstairs and knocked on their friend's doors to come down and get some. It was amazing. I was like, "Except one thing that kept happening, nearly every single young person who came down asked me one of two questions. They said, "What's the special occasion? Is it a holiday or something?" Or they said, "Whose leftovers are these?" And it broke my heart, right?
Because what they had internalized is the message that our society had taught them about their worthiness. That they shouldn't expect good things to just happen to them just because they're bad soil. The most they could count on for something good to happen was when it's a holiday and so people feel a little extra charitable or guilty. Or the good thing that they had must have been from the abundance of somebody else's good thing.
Now, I'm grateful that the team that I'm part of at YouthLink gets to tell them a different story and I hope it's one that they believe a little bit more each day, right? That they are worthy of goodness and care simply because they exist. For me as a person of faith, because they're created in the image of God.
And so coming back once more to the questions that my preaching professor taught me, if God is like this, how are we called to respond? That's what's so exciting for me this morning that churches all over the country today are asking this same question and there are so many different ways to answer it.
There are churches in our network who are working on selling their building or part of their land to become the housing that people who are currently unhoused will come and live in. There's churches that will open up their doors in the winter for people to sleep overnight. There are churches who offer meals or a food pantry. There's churches that band together to create an eviction prevention fund so that families who are nearing entering homelessness can be helped and their homelessness can be ended before it even begins. There are churches who make a point to show up to city council and let the city council know that it's not okay to criminalize homelessness.
There are so many different ways that churches can show up. There's so many different faithful next steps. But just like when you're approaching a biblical text or trying to preach a sermon, you have a conversation with the right set of questions. Because if we start by asking which unhoused people are worthy and which ones aren't, sorting them into good and bad soil, then we will have missed the gospel entirely.
But instead, if we emulate the God of this story, God that reckless sower, and choose to offer good and robust and dignified things to people starting from a place of worthiness, then we get to participate in the kingdom of God. In doing that, we will achieve, we will reach, we will experience a wovenness that says none of us are home until everyone is home. And if enough churches do that across the country, if enough churches believed that together, believed and practiced what it means to love thy unhoused neighbor and committed to taking any faithful next step, I truly believe that we could end homelessness.
So what does that faithful next step look like for us here at the table? Well, we have an opportunity coming up in just a few weeks, the info session that is on Monday the 19th? Is that right? Yes, got it. So on Monday night, the 19th at 6.30 here, we're going to have an info session, but it's not just meant to be educational, right? Though it will be. I'm going to talk about what homelessness looks like here in Minneapolis, here in this neighborhood.
But really, it's meant to start a conversation of discernment, right? That if you were a person who's here this morning and this issue tugs at your heartstrings, right? And I understand we as a church are already deeply involved in so many issues. And so not everyone can be part of everything. But if something about homelessness or housing or eviction just really grabs you this morning or any morning, this would be a great opportunity for you to come and not just learn, but start that conversation around what does the table want to do about this? What is our faithful next step in this neighborhood? And we're going to figure that out slowly together.
I'm not coming with a predetermined answer. The pastoral staff has not said, "This is what we want to do. We just need to convince the church to do it," right? We're flipping that on its head. We want to figure out together amongst the people who are here who care about this and want to do something. We want to come up with what that faithful next step is together, present it to the church, and figure out how to take that next step forward. So I really, really encourage you, if you can, come on the 19th. If you can't make it for some reason but still want to be a part of it, you can let any of the pastoral team or myself know and we can get your information. This is the next step. This is what it looks like for the table to be part of ending homelessness.
Thank you all so much for having me. I'm going to invite Tami up to give the words of institution.
Words of Institution
Tami: Good morning. Thank you, Kevin. That really touches home to our family and I know so many people here. I'm excited for the 19th. That will be awesome to hear more about it. So thanks for all you're doing for the homelessness in our cities. Appreciate it.
Well, every week here at the table, we get to participate in communion together and I love that. I love that all are welcome to participate and for me personally and others, it's always a good reminder to come to the table and to remember all that God means to us and what he did for us. Before we start, I feel like a flight attendant again, but there are pink lines, our orange lines on the sides of your rows there and if you're behind the orange line, you're going to go to the back and receive communion which is gluten-free bread and juice and if you're in front, you're going to come forward and receive communion.
So the night before Jesus died, he met with his friends, his disciples and they broke bread together and as they were breaking the bread, he said, "Do this in remembrance of me." He then took the cup and he said, "This is my blood shed for you. Do this and remember how much you are loved by God." So today, before we get our communion, we're going to say the Lord's Prayer together and so if you're able, you can stand or you can stay seated. Our Father who art in heaven…