Identification

Church this week was light.  There were fewer people than normal, (not that we are ever a large church), due to the fact that it was Memorial Day weekend and many of our folks are traveling.  Despite the smaller than usual attendance, we still had 22 of our Off-Grid members present.  The atmosphere was very tense.  When something is bothering my house-less friends, we know it.  Most of them wear their hearts on their sleeves.  Many a sleeve was in pain this Sunday.

It seems that Kansas City has passed a No Camping city ordinance.  It's a pretty simple law that does nothing but forbid open camping in city limits.  It affects very few people and passed with no fan-fair.  After all, the only real people hurt by this ordinance aren't exactly showing up to city council meetings to voice opposition.  If you do a Google search of the 10 Most Ridiculous Anti-Homeless Laws (which you can also find here) you'll see that Kansas City made #4 with this little piece of legislature.  The law has been in effect for a few years now, so basically, anytime the KCPD needs to (or wants to) they can empty homeless camps and apparently confiscate camping gear with nothing but the No Camping ordinance behind them.  The city has planned a few of these camp-clearing parties for this week and my Off-Grid friends were hurting pretty badly over the whole deal.

It was pretty amazing to watch several homeless folk from a "safe" camp volunteer to help those living in targeted camps while a group of Johnson County residents made arrangements for driving people around and moving as much gear as possible.  We've learned to use words like "house-less" instead of homeless because many of these people have lived in the same dwelling, in the same camp, for several years.  They have a home.  To grasp the emotions of the city bulldozing (literally) a homeless camp you'd have to imagine learning, two to three days in advance, that your house is slated to be bulldozed and smashed with a wrecking ball, and you only have a day or two to get your stuff out of the way (I'm picturing the opening scene from the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).  Oh, and don't forget that you have to move your stuff when you don't own a vehicle.

I have to admit that a couple years ago I wouldn't have known, or cared, about the fate of bunch of homeless camps by the river.  It's not that I was mean or uncaring, it's that my world was far from there.  I honestly didn't know a single homeless person and wouldn't have known where to find one if I had tried.  I had a Hollywood picture of homelessness that involved a person living next to a dumpster in an alley, sleeping in a cardboard box while all of their earthly possessions rested in a shopping cart nearby.  I had absolutely ZERO reason to care about a camping ban in Kansas City. It is different now.  Now it's not an obscure law in the city.  It's not something concerning the homeless issue.  It's not even something that affects homeless people.  It is something that hurts Greg and Gary and Crystal and Mike and more.  I now have real names and real faces and real lives to place in front of the proverbial societal bulldozer.  The No Camping law does not affect my life at all, but it does.  Because of who I have chosen to identify myself with, it affects me greatly.

I asked my pastor, Tim, several weeks ago while reading a biography on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, how a Christian knows where to draw the line between our Christian identity and our Nationalism.  His answer, in the context of Bonhoeffer's rejection of the Nazi party and their Aryan discrimination, has been rattling through my head since I heard that my friends' camp is getting bulldozed.  Tim said, "One of the keys to subverting the systems of the world is the act of standing with the marginalized - to make their problems our problems. We do this so that when all the powers, really the very nature of evil, attack the vulnerable, they attack us, too (we are not actually vulnerable, but make ourselves so for the gospel)."  This is not my favorite part of the Gospel.  It is very inconvenient to have my world disrupted because Kansas City is abusing a small handful of defenseless people.  Identifying with the vulnerable and therefore becoming vulnerable means opening my life up to the point that something as little as a Camping Ban can rock my world.

My sons and I are going to go down to City Hall tonight where a small ragged bunch of our house-less (and now unfortunately homeless) friends are staging a little protest.  It won't be grand and probably won't be effective, but we'll identify ourselves with them.  We will be counted among their numbers and we will be hurt by what hurts them.  I don't think it is right to deal with "issues".  I don't want to vote on how to handle "situations".  Underneath those words are people.  I don't know how to handle homelessness.  I'm not that smart.  I don't know what to do about situations like property-value, waste-management, and scenic-beauty.  Those are also above my pay-grade.  But I know that Crystal will always give me hug and tell me about her dog.  I know that Mike always has a book and loves to talk literature.  I know that Gary does his best to look out for his house-less neighbors and tries to take care of everyone.  And, I know that Greg needs a friend, and I'm proud that he picked me.