When I was in high school, my sister found Jesus. She was in college, and Jesus was homeless. I wasn’t particularly insulted by her newfound faith; my parents had recently gone back to Church and while I was a long way off from my own moment of conversion, I had enjoyed writing and directing plays with friends from my mother’s youth ministry program at St. Joseph’s in Bogota. What made my sister’s particular faith annoying was its seemingly radical approach, the Christian music on the radio and the Jesus Loves You sticker on her red Bug were a little much for me.
It was just past midnight in February, when I was visiting my sister at Seton Hall University. Being a high school kid on a college campus was always so much fun and exciting, but imagine my surprise when around 12:15 a.m. my sister and her friends decided to jump in a friend’s van and go to New York City, past midnight! This was the height of “cool.” Were we going out to a party? Were they going to sneak me into a bar? No, they decided to go to the university’s cafeteria, use their meal cards to buy a bunch of sandwiches, and then hand them out to the city’s homeless. I was less than thrilled. I grew up in a house where service was always appreciated, but sometimes you just want to be a 16 year old.
The day my sister found Jesus, I was freezing and a little freaked out. Jesus was a man huddled with fellow homeless in the doorway of the stunning Congregation Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The homeless man, the one who embodied Jesus, made a passing comment. “I was born without feet, but I always wanted shoes,” he said. I was chatting with some of my sister’s friends and other homeless, trying to look cool and not cold, when I looked over and there was my sister, taking off her shoes, then socks, then rolling the man’s filthy jeans, the ones tied like Tootsie Roll candies, exposing his blackened, bruised legs, slipping on her socks, then her shoes onto his legs. The man was crying. My sister silent. Her small pink feet exposed underneath her legs.
It was at that moment that I realized this was worship, like the silent, nameless woman in this Sunday’s Gospel reading. This was worship, not just “service,” like the secular service I grew up around, but this was true worship. What else could it be? The man without feet did not need shoes, my sister’s offering was as ridiculously unnecessary as Jesus’ need to be anointed and yet this severe act of humility was the first time I wanted to know this person Jesus who had so affected the lives of three of my family members. It took a while, it took maybe too long before I gave my heart so seamlessly on another cold night in Metuchen, New Jersey. Writers are notorious exaggerators: There’s what happened, what didn’t happen, and how you tell the story. For a second there, if just for a second, I thought I could hear the Lord saying, “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot