Jesus In The Garbage

In recent weeks a friend in my neighborhood called me to process some pain. That makes it sound more like a therapy session – calm, professional, measured – than what it was. It was “therapy” how I’ve learned to engage it over the years. A spontaneous phone call, crisis, gushing anger, curse words flowing, rage boiling over, threats of violence, frenetic jumps from one memory to another recent tragedy to another broken relationship, a story written in overdoses and abuse. I’ve been part of so many of these conversations. It’s always an honor to listen. I often don’t know what to say. I often wonder how all this has affected me over the years.

I think a lot of churches don’t want to engage their communities because deep down we don’t want to know what’s actually happening in our communities. The depths of the injustice, the stomach-turning pain – it’s just too much to look at once we start listening to the stories. And if we have enough wealth and privilege, we don’t have to look at it, or so we think. Looking at it also reminds us of our own trauma (because wealth and privilege might hide brokenness but not rescue you from all of it), and we’d rather not face that either. We’ve learned to act neat and nice in church. It can feel like if we start grieving the pain, it might never stop. It feels like it isn’t our problem. Better to just go to church, hear a sermon, and go home.

I can’t even explain the dissonance I’ve felt over the years that comes from getting off a phone call like that and then being involved in church life the next minute. Two worlds ignorant of each other.

I have an older friend at The Gospel Tabernacle who has often been a support to me named George Steffey. I think many of the leaders I serve with wish they had more older friends on this journey, so George has been a gift to many of us. He’s now in his 70s, and he spent decades serving neighborhoods that were experiencing poverty and injustice. He’s been involved in recovery ministry, healthcare ministry, youth ministry, street ministry, homeless ministry – embedded in the neighborhoods he’s served and loved while doing the full spectrum of community development work. He’s been an activist and evangelist.

And he’s also done church ministry. He’s pastored and preached and counseled; he's done ministry within the walls too. One time he quoted to me the prophetic preacher and theologian Tom Skinner and said he “went to seminary to get credentials to sabotage the Church with the Gospel.” I knew what he meant. After you see the pain in the neighborhood, there’s no going back. And then you find yourself among the Church thinking, “What exactly are we doing here anyway?” The sound of Jesus’ voice calling us to wake up just becomes too much to bear.

So George has become a friend to me and many in our movement. Sometimes after a phone call like the one I recently received, I’ve met with George and let my own anger out. I’ve even cursed a few times in his presence. He’s been a safe place for me to process my own feelings of pain and helplessness as I’ve tried to serve my community and also serve the Church.

One kind of pain I’ve processed with George over the years is the pain of too often not finding solace in church environments after witnessing the pain of my community. Especially when I was a younger leader, I’d experience the open wounds of my community and then want to tell the Church what I was seeing. I’d want them to be in it with me.

“Do you know what it’s like out there? Do you know the pain that exists? Do you know how systems are crushing people? Do you know how the devil is destroying people? Do you know?”

“Do you care?”

But if you’re out there doing the stuff, you know all too well the blank stares, the silence, the suspicion, the fear, the bigotry that can come back at you when you ask these questions. From the Church. From your brothers and sisters. Mission can be an alienating, lonely experience. There’s a temptation to stop asking the questions, to stop trying to explain. There’s temptation to either give up on the mission or give up on the Church. It can be hard to believe that being in both worlds is possible.

Early on, this would really make me angry. It still can, to be honest, although I think my emotional capacities to remain resilient in these tensions have grown – capacities to be honest, to release, to trust, to forgive, to move on, to fight the right battles and ignore the wrong ones. But I still feel the tensions. Apparently, George knows the complexity of these emotions too, which is why I like hanging out with George. I don’t feel so crazy around him.

Recently, George shared with me a series of poems he wrote as a young man in ministry on the theme of “garbage.” It was a gift for him to share these with me, and I asked him permission to share one of the poems with you here. Let me give you some context.

George wrote this poem in 1971 toward the beginning of his ministry in neighborhoods in the south end of Boston. These were African American, Puerto Rican, and Syrian neighborhoods. Wealthier white suburbs surrounding the city largely ignored these neighborhoods while white people in these neighborhoods might openly express bigotry and violence. He was working for a youth organization that was trying to reach teenagers for Christ, but when he got involved in the evangelistic work he quickly realized he couldn’t ignore the issues of poverty, hunger, housing, and education that were affecting the teens with whom he was building relationships. Soon, he realized that many of the dynamics that were playing out on the street – including gang violence (George eventually saw a teen stabbed in front of him) – were ultimately being exasperated by powerful white people who lived in the suburbs but whose decisions exercised influence over the conditions of poor people living in the city. In George’s words, “Some of these white people belonged to social clubs in the suburbs called churches.”

You can hear the emotional edge. Here was George, not only being an eyewitness to the way empire oppresses people but also being an eyewitness to the way Jesus was present in these neighborhoods. He found Christ there (because where else would Christ be, after all?) – right up in the pain with or without the Church. And it was frustrating that portions of the Church couldn’t see any of it.

Man, do I get it. There’s something prophetic that rises in you when you become an eyewitness to the way people are suffering at the hands of systems out of their control and the way Jesus is present among this suffering. It makes you want to scream to the Church, “Do you see what’s happening? Do you see the pain? Do you even realize who Jesus is and what He’s like?”

In the midst of this, George decided to go to seminary to begin his mission to “sabotage the Church with the Gospel.” This meant he was driving weekly from the suffering neighborhoods he had grown to love into a tidy, neat seminary culture that felt clueless and detached from what was happening in nearby neighborhoods and how Jesus was actually at work in that world. Again, I get it.

George said to me, “Joel, when I wrote this poem, I was angry.”

Today, I know George to still have enough of that emotional edge to remain prophetic – to say the things people don’t want to hear, things the Church needs to hear. But I also see a leader who figured out (and is still figuring out) how to keep loving and serving the Church while also loving the neighborhood. I know that’s an intense, plodding emotional journey into the interior lives of our souls. I feel like Jesus has called me to something similar – to both of these worlds – so I’ve admired George’s journey and patient presence in both the Church and the world. I want to be like George.

I’m sharing this hopeful, pensive poem because maybe you, like George and me, are trying to resolve some of these same emotional tensions as you follow Jesus on mission. I don’t know if they’ll ever resolve, but I think if God has planted your feet in the sanctuary and in the street, God can do some powerful stuff with the angst of that leadership space when the tension is offered up to Him. He probably won’t take it away. But he will use it for both the Church and the world. It’s stuff that’s deeper than despair and bitterness on one hand or ignorance and emotional detachment on the other. It’s angst that produces hope. It's frustration that produces prophetic imagination.

I guess I’m sharing this poem so you can feel what I felt when I read it: “I’m not alone. Other people have felt these things. And God can do something with these emotions.” Maybe you can’t travel to the hopeful part of the poem yet. That’s ok. Sit in the painful part. Hope can only come when we don’t pass over the pain too quickly.

Or maybe you've experienced the kind of joy George describes here - joy given by Jesus in the midst of the pain. Let it resonate with your soul.

Or maybe you don’t “get” this poem, can’t relate to it, and it makes you uncomfortable. Then I’d encourage you to humbly sit with it. Because it represents an emotional space that many people on mission experience. Stay humble. Don’t assume. Just listen. And maybe in these words you'll hear Jesus calling you out to the places where He's extending His love to the world's pain.

Notice in this poem how George sees garbage in his own neighborhood – unspeakable pain that’s hard to even describe to others – and then sees garbage in Church culture. But he also discovers that Jesus works among garbage – both the religious and non-religious kind.

Jesus better. Because we’re drowning in garbage out here. He’s our only hope.

One time I went to Senegal to visit some mission partners with a team from the Gospel Tabernacle. We brought with us twigs tied into crosses. An intercessor from our church felt like we should take these crosses with us and leave them in places where we prayed in Dakar. We stood on top of a hill that overlooked the city holding one of the crosses - thinking of all those people and all that pain, praying, listening. And then our eyes were drawn to a dumpster on top of the hill where we stood. It didn’t feel like Jesus to triumphantly plant that cross on top of that hill, claiming the city. We left the cross in that dumpster. Because that’s where Jesus can be found – in the garbage. Humbly serving. Gently loving. Grieving with us in our pain.

If that sounds irreverent, maybe we haven’t yet discovered the kinds of places Jesus spends His time, the kinds of places His Presence makes holy.

Here’s the poem.

_________________________

Garbage
by George Steffey
Winter 1971

Dr. King was shot helping garbage collectors.

Not a day went by that I didn’t have to step over garbage when I walked out my door.

I used to see the same wino in the same condition in the same gutter or in the same doorway, every day, winter, summer, spring and fall.

Bars sell: numbers, drugs, women, queer people, and company. There was a bar on the corner and sometimes ten-year-old girls go drunk and young men would take advantage of their bodies.

Kenny was 14, small and black. Frankie, Rickie, and the others were in their twenties, big and white. They, the four of them, stabbed Kenny with their swords while we all watched. I reported them to Station 4, but Richie’s dad is a big man around there. I told the Feds too, but Richie still drives a Caddy and hangs out at clubs all day. Kenny lived, thank God, I think.

Freddy was 20, but his mind was 12, so they teased him with wine and girls. One night they stripped him under the flood lights of the playground and laughed at him.

The shadow of the Prudential falls on the old people, and they have been thrown out by the mercy of real estate and the government and the cold and the bag snatchers and the man and death.

Did I mention the addicts walking fast, looking for a fix? Or the bootlegger across the street or the night that all the parked Cadillacs let you know Larry B had a big card game on or, or, or….

I have so many, why?

I noticed, too, some people tried to care, and they gave band aids and asprin.

And then I went to theological seminary.

And I was shocked by the long drive up the hill to a neon cross.

And I was shocked by the view of large homes nestled among rolling, forested hills.

And I was shocked by the green grass and trees.

And I was shocked by the quiet and the thinking.

And I was shocked by sporadic good intentions, superficial respectability, and the business of the Christian community.

And I was shocked by the whiteness, and niceness and rightness.

And I was shocked by the God talk.

They told me I was angry and hostile, and I was.

There was Pomp and Circumstance as the highlight of the school.

The dignitaries came from all over and we praised the Lord.

Chuck Miller, Advance, and Black Emphasis Week were our links with humanity, but they were tokens not taken for reality.

And then my brother was booed as he spoke for God.

And the growing institutional complex cut the budget, affirmed the machine, and fired a man.

And I could smell the garbage.

And Dr. King died.

And Jesus died.

But my brother said, “Relax.”

And God said, “Be still.”

And the wise white-haired man smiled out of the corner of his eye.

And Elward, a black man from Newark, asked me to be his brother.

And Arif, a Christian Pakistani, laughed heartily.

And Lou, who had been there too, sang freely.

And I remembered who my brothers were.

And I remembered who our Father was.

And I knew that the sun was shining and that the wind was blowing.

And I said Father forgive me.

And I said God forgive us.

And we set our face.

And the Lord danced.

And I found hope.