I Hear Hope Banging at My Back Door: Writings from “Hospitality”

 

Chapter 1. Who Is That Knocking on My Door?

 

 

Listen! I stand at the door and knock; if any hear my voice and open the door, I will come into their house and eat with them, and they will eat with me.

—Revelation 3:20

 

The Open Door Community is a residential Christian community in downtown Atlanta, at 910 Ponce de Leon Avenue, about a mile and a quarter from the Fox Theatre on Peachtree. A group of some thirty of us lives together in an old apartment building that is owned by the Open Door Community and by the Greater Atlanta Presbytery, which consists of all its supporting churches. In those rooms, within those walls, we struggle together to live a life of obedience and servanthood to the call and gift of Jesus Christ in our lives.

 

We are a community of diversity—a lot of different kind of folk coming to live together: joyful and grumpy, short and tall, mainline and marginalized, black and white and brown, formally educated and street- or prison-educated, artists, poets, singers, crossbearers, brothers and sisters. Even our grumpy ones laugh a lot. We’ve all been mighty hungry, and we are learning how to eat together. Recently we were honored to open our door to a knock, a knock to which we have listened several times over the last years, and in came a man named Amos Jones. He is also an embodiment of Jesus Christ. When we listen and open the door, Jesus comes in and lives with us; he eats with us, and we eat with him. Amos has cancer in both of his legs, and it is spreading. Amos has AIDS, and it is full-blown. Amos has just come to us from one of the holy places in this city—Grady Memorial Hospital—one of the most important institutions for those who are poor and marginalized. I plead for your support and help for Grady Memorial Hospital. It is a place under attack.

 

We are a community that lives with Amos, and Amos lives with us. We live with Jesus, and Jesus lives with us. We’re a community that is Black and white; we are strong and weak; some of us are highly educated, and some of us are unable to read. We have women and we have men. Sometimes we have children—not all the time. We have a number of us who are aging. And we are young people. We have people whose hope and energy is fierce and feisty and ready. And we have people who are despairing, who think America doesn’t give a damn about the poor, who think the church has turned its back, who think that Jesus doesn’t knock on the door, but that Jesus is busy, off doing something else—like playing golf—and has forgotten about the cry of the prisoner, or the hunger of the hungry. So we are shaped by the goodness of God, by the cross of Jesus Christ, to live a life in community with diversity.

 

We are a community of worship. Each morning at 5:50 those journeying to the wonderful Butler Street CME Church to feed two hundred men and women and a few children gather in a circle to hear the Word. After serving the awesome breakfast of coffee, cheese grits, a boiled egg, three-quarters of an orange, and a multivitamin we sweep and mop the floors. We clean the toilets and lavatories. We pick up trash and sweep the sidewalk in front of the church and along the sidewalk on Coca Cola Place. Then we sit for our own breakfast. “The grits have God in them,” Leo promises us! We reread the scripture lesson and then reflect on the morning’s activities. Did you see Jesus today? How was our hospitality and welcome? What public policies must be changed to harness the devil and roll away the stone from the tomb of Christ? Who are the leaders and what are the values that create and sustain hunger in the midst of plenty? Then we beg Yahweh to get us going toward the wilderness, and head home to 910.

 

Every day we feed hundreds of people, and after our soup kitchen at 910 we clean up. Then we gather, before we eat, for a time of listening and remembering those who have knocked on our door. We read the word of God, reflect, and pray. On Sunday afternoon at 5:00 p.m. we have a worship service with the Eucharist followed by a yummy meal prepared by Adolphus or Leo. Four times each year while on retreat at Dayspring—a farm near Ellijay, Georgia, several hours north of Atlanta—we celebrate the sacrament of foot washing. We are “fools for Christ and wish we were more so,” Dorothy Day teaches us as she sits amid the clouds as a witness.

 

We speak, sometimes softly, sometimes shouting out (Isa. 58:1), of our life together. Out of the hunger, desire, and the need to build a Christian life in the center of the city, out of a call to be witnesses and to give testimony, out of the thirst to say “Yes, yes!” we proclaim to those who are hungry, “There’s plenty of food!” We stand in jails and prisons promising “Yes, yes!” to those who are in prison: “There is a promise of liberty to captives!” “Yes, yes!” to those who work and cannot earn enough to pay both room and board: “There is an abundance at this table! Enough for all. Our God is a God who keeps promises! Yes, yes!” Out of this vocation we move into a mission—a love in action—for we have been taught by Jesus and Martin and Willie Dee Wimberly: “The only solution is love.” That is what we’re all about!

 

Most of us in the community would not be here if we didn’t need the community. The difference between a church and a business corporation, the difference between a Christian community and a university, is that we are shaped, sustained, and made deep and powerful through our brokenness and sin. So many other organizations are sustained through success, power, and strength. It is our weakness that God uses for God’s glory.

 

There is no one who lives at the Open Door who doesn’t have to be here. We are addicted and yearning for sobriety. We are broken and yearning for healing. We have learned that the way to get to the foot of the cross and to touch the hem of the garment, to move into the empty tomb and to see the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is through our knowledge of death in our lives. So it is that we move to love in action. We have learned from the long loneliness that the only solution is love, and love is found in community, as Dorothy Day teaches us.

 

We go into prisons to put our love in action. Recently the Atlanta Constitution had an article on Billy Neal Moore, a former death-row inmate who is now in ministry in Rome, Georgia. We were in ministry with Billy on death row for a number of years. In the hellhole of prison, Billy was able to organize Bible studies, and to bring peace into one of the most heated furnaces in our culture. If there’s any place where the Christian life is difficult, it’s prison. People like Warren McCleskey, Billy Neal Moore, Jack Alderman, and other people of faith live and shape a Christian life on death row, and they witness time and time again that no one is outside the purview of God’s love and redemptive purposes. We’re opposed to the death penalty because we believe that no one is beyond God’s grace, that God can save Adolf Hitler or Ed Loring.

 

Listen!

 

“I,” said Jesus, “I stand and knock. Will you open your door? Will you open your door? Will you open your door?” Jesus is knocking. Can you hear him? “If you open that door,” said Jesus, “I’ll come in and eat with you, and you will eat with me.”

 

We do a lot of eating and feeding at the Open Door and downtown at the Butler Street CME Church. We understand that every meal we eat is related to the Eucharist, to the eschatological banquet—that promise by which we live that there is enough for everybody, and that when we obey God’s Spirit who is moving across the earth there will be no hunger.

 

Sometimes children, hungry children, knock on our door. We’ve had a couple of six- and seven-year-olds coming to eat breakfast with us recently. They go to Cook Elementary School near Interstate 20 in Capitol Homes. They eat with us at 7:00 a.m. They are clean, dressed, and with their daddy. After they eat grits, an egg, and some oranges, they go to school. Part of the heartbreak of our lives is that people come and people go. We decided to send them to school in a taxi on the days when the weather was bad, and they haven’t been back since. Did the rain run them away? Was the cold too much? Is it easier just to bypass the breakfast? Did we not listen while they were knocking on our door? God, forgive us. Forgive us when we claim your call in our lives to feed the hungry, and then we don’t do it.

 

Another person who knocks on our door is a man I deeply love. I have known this man for ten years. His name, mysteriously enough, is Isaiah. In Hebrew, one of God’s favorite languages, Yeshua or Isaiah means “God is salvation.” He is exceedingly lame. He is crippled. He walks with a thump and a thud, with his right shoulder bobbing up and down like an Olympic swimmer doing a slow-motion crawl. He comes into our house and he mystifies me and loves me. I can see Jesus healing me in him because he is always joyful. He is hungry, and he gets to eat, and I become joyful. Isaiah comes day after day, rain, snow, or heat, to eat with us. It is so wonderful to have an Isaiah in your life. The poet-prophet Isaiah, as you may remember, is always promising that God is going to heal the halt, that God is going to take the weak limbs and make them strong. How wonderful it is to share breakfast with Isaiah.

 

There is also a man named Joseph at our door—Joseph, the panhandler. The biblical Joseph was Jacob and Rachel’s son. Joseph was sold into slavery by his envious brothers, demonstrating again the profound and uncomfortable answer to Cain’s guilt-ridden question of his Creator: Am I my brother or sister’s keeper? My wife, Murphy Davis, has had a big bout with Burkitt’s lymphoma. We thought we were going to lose her, and we found out recently that the doctor feels like she’s made it up the rough side of the mountain. Joseph didn’t know Murphy when she started going to Grady Hospital to the oncology clinic. He would come down and eat breakfast with us, and he would see Murphy and shout, “Hey, don’t you have a dollar for me?” And we built a loving relationship with him. “Thank you, Joseph, you ragged beggar, for untying the bag of grain and feeding us with companionship as frightened disciples we walked into the stormy sea. Your gift of the silver cup rattling before us was a sign that five loaves equals five thousand, that Jesus is ever near.”

 

Another person who comes to our door hungry is Deborah. Her name means “bee,” and she has a mean sting. Deborah is demented; she is insane; she is mentally ill. Her anger is beyond what we can endure. We let her come in, but we refuse to feed her. She curses us. I look at her, and I see Jesus or the great woman prophet of the days of Israel’s confederacy in the strangest of guises—a Black woman, who on one level is an enemy. We do not feed her. We can’t handle her rage. We can hear her knocking on our door, and we don’t open the door.

 

That is the hardest part of our lives. We can’t always say, “Yes.” We distinguish, discriminate, and make decisions. We say, “Yes,” and we say, “No.” We say, “Come in,” and we say, “Go out.” We say, “You are welcome,” and we say, “If you don’t move and stop what you’re doing we’ll call the police.” It is harsh and dreadful. It is cross and finitude. The decision is filled with forgiveness, grace, and love. We become urgent in our patience. We want justice and we want it now!

 

We believe that something keeps bringing Deborah back; God is working in Deborah’s life, maybe even through our “no.” We pray for Deborah. We cry for Deborah. We tell Deborah’s story. And we hope someday we can open the door and invite her in, and we can be more faithful as people of the cross.

 

Believe me. Jesus the Christ is knocking on our door. He asks us to listen. He asks us to step into hospitality, to welcome, to answer the door and invite people in, to eat together and discover in the breaking of bread the presence of Jesus Christ. Through eating, through visitation in the prison, through volunteering at the Open Door, through honoring our Lord, we can hear in the cry of the poor the cry of Jesus Christ. He leads us into a life of solidarity with our God and the poor and marginalized. And what a glorious life! Full of energy and friendship and community and all you want of everything you need! The road is hard; the gate is narrow. But the journey toward justice is the journey to life, to salvation and healing.

 

In the movie Amistad there is a moment when Cinque, chained and shackled as a slave, stands up like a Black Jesus, like Amos, like Isaiah, like Deborah, like Joseph, like the little children, and says, “Give us free! Give us free! Give us free!”

 

Who is that knocking on my door?

 

Who is that knocking on your door?

 

 

 

© 2000, The Open Door Community