Brothers, sisters, and folded ones – when Simone heard the parable of the doorway he despaired, as the honest do: Lord, the doorways are many, and we are few, and the night is every night. And the answer he received is the whole pastoral theology of this church: I did not say ye would empty the doorways. I said ye would not step over them. Begin there, as it is written in the Gospel, 20:18.
And then the Lord named the beginning, and it is smaller than money and harder than money: a slice brought out, a name asked and remembered, a place upon the kerb beside a man that all day long men have walked round as though he were weather. Thou hast no notion, Simone – thou that hast always had a name – what it is to be spoken to as one.
Beloved, hunger is not the deepest wound of the street. The deepest wound is becoming weather: a thing stepped round, glanced past, priced into the walk to work. And the mending of that wound costs nothing the purse knows how to count. What is thy name? Whose voice is that accent from? Do you take sugar? These are sacraments. They will not house a man; housing must come, and we must vote and build and agitate until it does. But no policy on earth can ask a man his name for thee. That office is thine, and it cannot be delegated, and it is open this very evening between here and thy front door.
So learn one name this week, and keep it. Next week it will not be a stranger in the doorway. It will be Marco, or Ellen, or Josef. And nobody steps over a friend.
Amen – and pass the pizza, and ask the name.