The 5th Wed of the month are usually the most unusual, we’ve found.  With disability checks and food stamps having to stretch further, in addition to freezing nights and days of rain…Haywood St becomes, many have said, the only place folks can come and be welcomed even with all the frustration and worry they carry.  As we continue to be a community where no one is asked to “check their baggage at the door” before entering, we are called into the ministry of accompaniment.  Jesus recognized the healing power of walking alongside, a gentle hand on a shoulder, a listening ear…and at Haywood St – that’s the model we struggle, stumble, and joyfully try to follow.

Once again, over 300 folks gathered for a hot bowl of soup and scrumptious grilled cheese sandwiches.  One fellow who walked in near the end of the meal shared that he doesn’t “do grilled cheese” yet after one bite…he came back 4 times!  Yep, 4 times! 
And as you can imagine, folks are lining up earlier and earlier to get into our clothing closet.  We are so fortunate for the donations we receive and for the volunteers who spend hours organizing and hanging them.  If anyone is feeling called to welcome folks into our closet at 10:00am – just let me know.  I’m told the items we most need are:
coats and sweatshirts (hoods are a plus)
men’s jeans
socks
thermal underwear
shoes/boots
Blankets, tents, sleeping bags, tarps

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it would be like to worship God through an Elvis song – or with a pastor wearing an Elvis collar; if you’ve ever wanted to attend a worship service where the congregation acts out the Scripture; or if you’ve ever wanted to share Eucharist with others yearning to strip off the masks and facades culture encourages us to wear… join us at Haywood St.  There is always room at the Table for one more.

For this ministry – and for you – we praise God. 

Rev. Shannon Spencer
Volunteer Coordinator at Haywood Street

Said a Hobo, just off an eastbound rail, “There are no homeless Jews. Crisscrossing in every direction this country pushes freight; the trains have revealed it all.  The urine stained shelters, the asphalt bridge overpasses, the gutter trench campsites… the depots and dives may morph, but the Christians don’t.  Christian churches in Christian towns full of the Christian poor.”

God’s chosen extend hospitality, take with biblical seriousness the widows and orphans and strangers among them.  The displaced of today, just as the Israelites were in the Diaspora of slavery in Egypt yesterday.  Because Yahweh liberated a homeless nation, followers too should offer an exodus to homeless brethren.

For a religion that claims a homeless Savior, who spent his temporal days with the scorned, who said, “blessed are the poor,” we Jesus folks spin off onto negligible biblical side roads.  Referenced in the thousands between Genesis and Revelation- far more than prayer, sex, or sitting in the pews- God doesn’t speak an inspired Word in muted grays, with ambiguous opaqueness.  No, the text, and our discipleship response, is literally spelled out in black and white.

As one Christian living on the street prophesied, “With two hundred chronically homeless brothers and sisters in Asheville, and two hundred area Christian churches… I can do even that math.”

Click here to visit GRACE website.

NOTE:  Participants are asked to write their honest and anonymous response on a piece of paper and leave on the lunch table or put in the offering basket.  Answers below are typed exactly as they appear on the paper.
“What does memorial day mean to me.  It means that our soliders fought for our freedom.”

“A time to remember those no longer with us.  For me it’s the memories of family gathering will all the family.  A time to get together with friends and family and enjoy a 3 day weekend.”

“Memorial Day means to me to remember our vets that lost family and lives”

“Freedom!”

“Freedom – N Thanks To those who gave their Lives For us to have It.”

“Beening Free For my Life and before God
Jesus Whelp!”

“ A Day to observe vertan’s”

“Proud of my dad, military Police in Army Airforce base in England WWII, Althoug he was only 115 Lbs. Got Bombed Many Times, but came home afterward to hall all of us kids.”

“To me it is a day we should set aside for our love ounes who has passed on be for us, to honer the memory of Love ones, past on.”

“Soldiers & Vertierns Fight in War For Our Nation.”

“Over 200 years of service to our nation by many millions of great Americans”

“To remember all the fallen soldiers who fought for our freedom.”

“God Bless All the Men and Women that has Made Are Life’s Free”

NOTE: Participants are asked to write their honest and anonymous response on a piece of paper and leave on the lunch table or put in the offering basket. Answers below are typed exactly as they appear on the paper.

“My parents so that I could find out my heritage and what runs in my family.”

“Jesus And My Father in Haven”

“My Father because my Father got killed when I was real young I have not had a father feger in my life and I did not no how to be a father to my son. But we are still close but I wish he would have been here to teach me how to be a man. I really miss him very much.”

“It would be my Grate grandfather, and I would learn all that I can from him.”

“Tyler Perry”

“Jesus. I no he is not dead but he is alive to me because he is my saviour. He is the son of the Living God he is my best friend.”

“Taj Mahal”

“Jesus”

“Macheal Jackson – Because he was a famous person, who could dance and sing. Helped a lot of people around the world. He was sweet and nice person. Would love to meet him.”

“Teddy Pendergrass, and marvin gale they was famous. Could sing very well.”

“I would like to meet my real dad. he was my role modle.”

“Jesus, Lord of Lords, King of Kings of Course and Why Simply to say thanks as I Bow at his feet.”

“Alan Jackson. I’m a country music fan I sing kareoka at different places, and I sing his songs a lot I just love his music.”

“My Grandmother is Heaven I wood love to see her a gain.”

“God. I love Him.”

“Myself – why not?”

“Jesus. To Blessed Everlasting.”

“Mary, mother of Jesus because I need her advice on how to let my son go his own way using his own judgement and ideas. I raised him in Christ, taught him right from wrong and gave him plenty of love and protection. Now I need to let go of the apron strings and I need help.”

I was struggling with a heavy container of silverware, preparing for another Wednesday meal at Haywood Street, when the hand-made sign caught my eye. HOMELESS PLEASE HELP. My first thoughts were of sympathy for the person who must have accidentally left the one thing that might get them noticed on the side of the road. I decided to leave it hanging on the wall beneath the collection of crosses, in hopes that the owner would reclaim it at the next meal.

The next week, waiting in the dining room for a meeting, I noticed the sign still hanging in the same place. Not knowing to whom it belonged, I began speculating about the story attached to that piece of cardboard. Is the owner still looking for it, disappointed that his chance of buying a meal or a cup of coffee is lost? Is it easy enough to find a marker and an old box to make another sign? Was the sign left behind for another person to use? Or, was it simply forgotten? I clung to this last thought as I stared at the nearly camouflaged sign tucked into a corner of the wall…a wall covered in crosses and art. That wall is a symbol of hope at Haywood Street. The crosses are obvious symbols of forgiveness and unconditional love. The paintings (created by Haywood Street friends during Art Day) represent the gifts and talents that lie just below the surface of stained, tattered clothes and the dark circles of exhaustion. They represent moments of peace, refuge, and fellowship where the struggles of the day and the looming night are temporarily forgotten.

Did someone simply forget their troubles as they gathered around the table, filling their stomachs and their souls with nourishment? Is it possible that the moments spent sharing a meal and connecting with friends (old or new) relieve folks of their burdens, even if only for an hour? I’d like to think that whoever walked into our dining room with that plea for help found what he was looking for and no longer needed to cry out. Someone reached out to him, perhaps, and allowed him to leave the church with a sense of hope.

Wren
Haywood Street Volunteer

“Beloved Community,” sisters of justice and brothers of grace, let us pray.

Because of our contented vista on the mountaintop, our opulent altitude above the clouds O’ Lord, we so often pose before you brandishing the dull edges of complacency, lauding the laurels of yesterday’s half attempt.

Yet, on mornings like this, when the sharp light is young and the breath of possibility is crisp, when M.L.K. pleasantries are cast off for Martin’s prophesy, we are invited to rekindle the urgency of our lives.  To provoke a “crisis of creative tension” on the city streets below.

From the water fountains of Montgomery to the motel in Memphis, the pulpits of Atlanta to the Y.W.C.A. of Asheville, the ministry of today’s anniversary is always out ahead of us.

We pray for the holy “sacrament of imprisonment,” that we may have the fortitude to face the iron bars of injustice, locked in solidarity with the innocent criminals on College Street, until not just voting rights and civil rights, but human rights become law of the land.

For the yoke of “redemptive suffering,” that we may tread the Exodus wilderness, trampling the sands of individual gain in a tourist town of abundance, keeping in step with the corporate sacrifice of a people crossing over into the Promise Land.

For the blight of poverty, that we may be confronted with the calamity of homelessness, the loitering masses downtown still waiting for their “birthright of freedom,” waiting for the disease of status quo to be cured by a “love that leads to direct action.”

“Beloved Community,” the Dream is only realized when the people of this fair city are wakeful to Martin’s ministry, when we trade the plush of this mountaintop for the push of the valley below. So as we traverse down O’ God, may the food before us provide sustenance, manna for the work of mercy as we are made low.  Amen.

Blood transfusions, bodily fluids, sexual orientation, female genital mutilation, intravenous drug use, condoms and intercourse are gritty realities silenced in the Sunday morning lexicon, believed only dealt with beyond the pulpit.  But the forced hush must stop.  And as a United Methodist minister, my spoken task requires giving voice to the unspoken.

I stand with you because my faith informs my action; my Christian vocation calls me to seek out the tracks of holy ground.  Like this one- a wintry downtown come alive with hand scribbled signs and soul glowing supporters and proudly public clients- where God is in the midst.  I also join on this day of awareness because the results are in and the test came back positive. 

“The Church has A.I.D.S.”

While the community of believers have been muted, at best, and complicit, at worst, in this pandemic.  Let me be as clear as my clergy collar: This modern day medical plague, the worst in 700 years, has not been ordained from above.  HIV/A.I.D.S. is not punishment from God.

Infectious disease was my wing as a hospital chaplain, the quarantined unit where sisters and brothers with full-blown A.I.D.S. straddled the deadly chasm between sky and grave.  Stopping at door number 33, I remember the required smack of sterile gloves on my outstretched fingers, the stiff gown wrapping my hunched torso, and the surgical mask shielding my open mouth and flared nose.

Entering his womb of a room, Jeff was gaunt and frail, his body covered with sores, his immune system compromised with Tuberculosis, his soul ready for release, for return.  Grasping hands in the changing light, his last wheezing breath upon us, family and friends too terrified to visit, he spoke with certainty,

“the challenge has not been preparing to die with A.I.D.S., but rather the discriminatory struggle of living with it.”

We aren’t here today to raise money.  Because dollars and cents won’t end the stigmatization, finances won’t settle the shame, currency won’t change the judgment, and black bottom lines won’t erase the blame.  What will, however, is the steady shuffle of shared footsteps.  All of the great causes have this in common: they began with a march.  Gandhi organized a movement of protest to the salty shores of the Indian coast for independence, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped in mass down the southern streets of slavery for freedom, and we here in Asheville have walked up Patton Avenue.

We have gathered to let the people of Western North Carolina know as we rub elbows with one another, share stories, and commit to a common vision that we have all been indelibly crafted as holy people.  No matter the T-cell count, disease can never taint the blessedness of life. 

Our sisters and brothers are always more than a diagnosis.

Beloved community, as you go, may your feet continue this march of consciousness, may your heart continue to unfold with acceptance, may your words continue to be bold in proclaiming that everyone is a person of sacred worth.  Get tested, be safe, and love your neighbor as yourself. Go in peace.