Hospitality and Dirty Hands

On Tuesday morning on my way into Manna House, I ran into Jermaine in the parking lot across the street.  He was banned from Manna House about two weeks ago for fighting with another guest, who was also banned.  He wanted to know when he could come back to Manna House.  I told him that he was to be gone for a month.  He assured me that he and the other guest are again on good terms, and he also told me that he really needs a place to shower and get a change of clothes.  His clothes were indeed dirty.  After a bit more discussion we agreed that May 17th would be the day he could return to Manna House.  This would be about a month since he got into the fight.
Thinking about how Jermaine and his need for a shower, made me think of “dirty hands.”  It is not that his hands are dirty, but that mine are.  Dirty hands in philosophical and theological circles refers to how our hands get “dirty” when we face a moral dilemma, in which to do something right we have at the same time to do something wrong.
Manna House is open to provide hospitality to men and women on the streets and other people in need.  Part of that hospitality is to offer showers and a change of clothes to men like Jermaine, who are in the midst of homelessness.  Given our conviction that it is Christ whom we welcome when we welcome Jermaine, it is only right that we open our doors to him, and invite him in for a shower.
But in order to keep offering showers and hospitality as a whole, we sometimes not only have to ask someone to leave for the day, but tell that person to stay away for a longer period of time.  The right thing—offering hospitality—sometimes requires denying hospitality—which is wrong.
I know some might argue (and do so with some moral depth) that it is not wrong to deny hospitality, that it is not wrong to deny Jermaine a shower.  And on one level I even agree with that argument.  Jermaine has to face the consequences of his bad action and he needs to be held accountable.  We can’t offer hospitality to him or to anyone if we don’t have some order, and fighting certainly violates both the spirit of hospitality and the order needed to offer it.  But faced with Jermaine and his need for a shower and his repentance, and then telling him, “No, you have to wait two more weeks,” there is in my gut and in my heart the sense that continuing to ban him is wrong.
And this reminds me that Manna House is itself both a sacrament—a sign of God’s presence—and a sign of moral failure.  The God’s presence part is easy enough to see:  after all we’re welcoming people with dignity and respect and meeting some basic human needs.  The moral failure part is a little harder to see, but it is there.  Our hospitality is needed because there are people on the streets and people are so poor that they don’t have the resources to take showers, to get a cup of coffee, to have a place where they can relax and rest with friends with a few hours.  The moral failure is that there is homelessness and poverty in this land with all of its abundance and wealth.  And our little hospitality three mornings a week is not fundamentally altering this horrible injustice nor the human suffering that results.  Manna House will not end poverty in Memphis, and not even in the little neighborhood around Claybrook and Jefferson.
Yes, Manna House offers something good to our guests.  But Manna House is also a place in which the hard truth of dirty hands lurks about and occasionally surfaces.  The dirty hands can be personal, like telling Jermaine to stay away for two more weeks even when he needs a shower, and societal, we're still part of a "filthy rotten system" and implicated in its injustices.
I think we keep going, I know I keep going, because of a belief that the love offered, the respect and dignity offered, is more enduring and more powerful than our own failures, than our dirty hands, and that to do little is better than doing nothing.  And even more, I know the truth I have learned over and over again, that the love offered is grounded in God’s love that can redeem even people with dirty hands.