10/21/2026
We’re street preachers, I guess.
There’s something more than a little freeing about sitting on a sidewalk, bible open on a concrete pulpit, and talking about Jesus with your sisters and brothers.
That’s particularly true for a community that has no real home.
And that’s the reality for many of our parishioners who live without housing.
It’s also our reality as a congregation.
We’re grateful for what we’ve got, of course: a place to gather on Sundays, two places where we store the goods we use serving our community, and a place we gather our partners once a month.
But this is also true: we don’t have what we used to have.
There’s no safe, sheltered space to gather our community daily, somewhere with enough permanence to begin to put down roots, a gaggle of rooms that seems enough like ours that with a little audacity we could call it home.
But two years on, I’m not writing to lament that.
Instead, I want to rejoice in the fact that the gospel, like the mischievous little mustard seed Jesus said it was, grows anywhere and anytime—wild and untamable.
You don’t have to have a building when you can find a street corner.
You don’t need a cathedral when you’ve got a sidewalk.
And how joyously righteous is it to be able to sit with your community, many of whom have no place to lay their heads, and to talk about the one who saves the world—but had no place in it to lay his own?
How wonderfully grace-filled is it to study the lectionary-appointed parable Jesus told about the wicked tenants who greedily exploited the fruits of the vineyard?
While sitting beneath the sparkling towers of wealth we ourselves have built?
Beside neighbors who must scramble in the shadows of those same buildings for their most basic needs?
It’s an amazing grace indeed.
And it turns out the wilderness—even an urban one—is an abundantly fruitful place to proclaim the good news.
Seems like John the Baptist and Jesus might have been on to something after all.
