The Simple Way

More oft than not i believe we don't really believe that people can live lives like Jesus details in the Scriptures. I had my paradigm of that thinking rocked this last weekend back in Houston. I go to a lovely church there called Ecclesia (www.ecclesiahouston.org) which is very intentional about being hands and feet of love to a community in Montrose that many churches have completely forgotten about.

They a guest speaker who was from a similar Ecclesia-like experiment church in Philadelphia called the Simple Way. They are loving/being/engaging in life with the homeless and down and out community up there. He told some of the most amazing stories of the power of reckless, God-like love and its ability to triumph so many things/measures which get in the way of change. Lest we forget that Jesus himself was homeless. "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head" in Matthew 8:20. As many of you know Austin has just passed some city ordinances similar to the ones this man described from Philadelpiha which prohibit men and women from sleeping, loitering, panhandling, etc on city property.

He told an amazing story of a group of homeless individuals who had gotten together amidst the frustration of trying to find housing there and ending up squatting in an old catholic cathedral in downtown philadelphia. The church was upset and tried to come kick them out for trespassing. Outside the cathedral the men and women inside had erected a banner that said "How can you worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?" Needless to say the church put off the eviction for a while and you then see a whole community rally around these down and out families who have nothing to call their own. The love of Christ appeals to these real life orphans in the form of real-life Christians not escaping to buildings on sundays but entering into the affliction of the men and women around.

James, the half brother of Jesus in his letter to Jerusalem Christians
"Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."

Maybe our paradigms need to change drastically....