The housed, the homeless, and the right to be somewhere
Faced with someone trying to deny me shelter from the rain, I thought, are you kidding?
On Maundy Thursday, four of us from the Open Door, an intentionally interracial, residential, Christian community in Atlanta, stretch out in Woodruff Park, attempting to warm up under the rising sun. At the edge of Georgia State University, nestled among downtown skyscrapers, the park marks contested space that business professionals, college students, and homeless people daily navigate. Recent beautification projects are noticeable, like the fountain framing one end of the lawn, but there are subtle renovations as well, architectural details intended to make the park inhospitable to people who are homeless: benches with center divides obstructing attempts to lie down and flowerpots lining the marble wall where homeless people once sat.
These details are particularly apparent this day to those of us who spent the night on the streets just hours before, celebrating the Open Door’s Holy Week sacrament of following the vagrant Christ, a practice that allows us to glimpse the hell of homelessness. We gather in this contested space now to rest and to reflect on our night in light of the lectionary reading—Peter’s confession of faith, denial of Jesus, and bitter lament.
In a 1933 sermon on this text, titled “Peter and the Church Struggle,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks of the one whom Jesus addressed: “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” Who is this Peter? Bonhoeffer asks. Peter is the one who confessed his faith. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” he says in response to Jesus’ pointed question, “But who do you say that I am?” And Peter is the one who “denied his Lord,” indeed on “the same night Judas betrayed him.” But Peter is also the one who “went out and wept bitterly.” Thus, Bonhoeffer concludes, “Peter’s church is not only the church which confesses its faith, nor only the church which denies its Lord; it is the church which still can weep.”
