Guests at
Manna House are always waiting when I arrive in the morning to unlock the gate. I’m there to start the coffee. They are waiting so that they can be first in
line, or nearly so. Montrell is the most
faithful of these early morning “waiters.”
He is there almost every morning, and I think I have only arrived before
him once or twice.
There is a lot of waiting in the
Bible, and there is a lot of waiting in the lives of our guests. Waiting requires hope. Psalm 33, “Our soul is waiting for the
Lord. The Lord is our help and our
shield. In God do our hearts find
joy. We trust in God’s holy name. May your love be upon us O Lord, as we place
all our hope in you.”
On the
mornings I start the coffee, I usually get to Manna House around 6:40a.m. The guests who are already there are
joined by others and they will form a line and keeping waiting until around 7:45a.m.
That’s the time when some of us volunteers will come out of the house to
“take the list” for the day.
Whoever will “work the list” that
morning will write in a notebook the names of the guests who are signing up either
for a shower or for “socks and hygiene.”
Imagine waiting an hour or more just to get on a list! Once we open, guests will wait in the backyard
for their names to be called. From time
to time the person “working the list” will be asked by a guest, “Where am I on
the list?”
As the
morning at Manna House goes forward, guests often have to wait to use the
bathroom. With the amount of coffee that
is consumed, it is no surprise that the bathroom is needed early and often.
Away from
Manna House, guests wait in line to enter soup kitchens and get a meal. Guests wait in line to get into a night
shelter. Guests wait in line at the
Social Security Office. Guests wait at
the Unemployment Office. Guests wait in
lines when there is an “employment fair.”
Guests wait in line at labor pools, hoping for a job. Guests “take a
number” and wait at emergency rooms or at the pharmacy at the Med. Guests even wait at jail. There is a lot of waiting there; it takes
five or six hours to get processed into the jail. And, of course, they also wait to get out. Waiting in all of these places can be a time
of frustration or a time of hope.
Sometimes it might be a bit of both. The Book of Revelation describes the
challenges disciples of Jesus faced in the Roman Empire (and we face in the
U.S. Empire), and several times it urges endurance, “Here is a call for the
endurance of the holy ones, those who keep the commandments of God and hold
fast to the faith of Jesus” (Rev 14:12, see also Rev 1:9, 2:2, 19, 3:10, 13:10). Paul and the early church like this “endurance” word too, as he writes in his
letter to the Romans that “endurance produces character, and character produces
hope” (Romans 5:4, see also 2 Corinthians 6:4, Colossians 1:11, and Hebrews
10:36).
For Revelation and for Paul, this
endurance is sustained by an apocalyptic hope, not in the sense of awaiting the
destruction of all, but in the sense of having a better world in view, in which
we see “a new heaven and a new earth… the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:1-2).
In this apocalyptic hope we wait for that time when God will dwell among
us, and God “will wipe every tear from [our] eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying
and pain will be no more” (Rev 21:3-4).
This is the hope of the Beloved Community in which there will be no
lines, and no waiting.
We get a
little taste of this Beloved Community each morning at Manna House as that
first line our guests wait in to get on the list is transformed into our circle
for prayer. The line is no more as we open
Manna House and we gather together to hold hands, guests and volunteers alike. We welcome each other as we face each
other. God’s holy presence is felt as we
reach out our hands to touch one another and be touched. God’s holy presence is
felt in the breeze that reminds us of the Holy Spirit coming close to enliven
us.
Our prayer in this circle is
outside the lines. We envision and wait
for a world in which everyone is housed, has health care, meaningful work with
a living wage, food that is nourishing, and each person’s dignity is affirmed. No more racism. No more war.
No more poverty. No more death
penalty. Meanwhile, we ask God to bless
our coffee and make it hot, bless our sugar and make it sweet, and bless the
creamer that it may take all life’s bitterness away. “We trust in God’s holy name. May your love be upon us O Lord, as we place
all our hope in you.”
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