The Realm Where None Go Missing

Dismas

Among all the people we saw on the street last Sunday, hers is the face that I remember clearly. Seated in her motorized wheelchair, she was moving quickly toward us on the sidewalk of West Pender Street in Vancouver, Canada, headed in the direction from which we had come.

I only had fleeting seconds to see her face; gaunt, lined with creases and worry lines, with a slight concavity around the mouth suggesting a history of poor dental health. Notwithstanding all that she displayed a face of classic beauty in form and symmetry. The eyes left the most memorable impression. There was suffering in those eyes, visible pain, the unmistakable indication of a daily struggle to live. I thought I detected a degree of desperation. What errand was she on? She was once someone’s beloved child, I thought. Or was she? As Sharon remarked that day, there are those who in their first five years of life never get what they need, being born to parents who themselves are desperate.  Once they are older there’s no going back to supply what was lacking in those years. Was this her story?

The walk we were taking, after church and after a lunch of Lebanese food, was a return from an exploration on foot of  Chinatown. There we enjoyed seeing the food markets with their displays of exotic vegetables and fruits and fungi and spices, cuts of meat behind glass and fish on ice, their labels and signs in a script we could not decipher; the murals depicting the history of the neighborhood; the shoppers bringing their folding canvas carts to the shops to fill them with items for their kitchen routines, other people busy walking somewhere, a few visitors like ourselves, and in almost every block, people who looked like they had a rough life on the streets. A man approached us and related a long story about wanting to get back to his home in Squamish, his difficulty with a return bus ticket, his MS, and his being cold. We left an offering with him and moved on. We saw a couple who appeared to us to be helping each other get high, a man lying prone on the street, with another man leaning over asking “Are you breathing, man?” As we watched, the prone man got up, whereupon I stopped reaching for my phone to ask for help.

Church that morning was at Vancouver’s Christ Church Cathedral’s Choral Eucharist, celebrating the last Sunday of the liturgical year, the Feast of the Reign of Christ, known otherwise as Christ the King. The preacher that morning was Matthew Johnson, the street outreach priest of St. James’ Anglican Church in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Fr. Johnson focused on a line from the appointed reading from the prophet Jeremiah, a text in which Jeremiah excoriates the shepherds (read “kings”) of Israel for their neglect of human need and abuse of their power. In that text the prophet the prophet delivers a word from the Holy One: 

“I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord.”

This, Fr. Johnson asserted, was what the reign of Christ looks like.  Christ’s reign does away with fear and dismay, counts everyone in, and no one is missing. All are present. This line became a refrain throughout his sermon, and the final words from the pulpit.

The preacher told us that conditions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside have never been more desperate. He told us what I hope we already knew, which is that homelessness, addiction and mental illness are the scourges which destroy the lives of his parishioners on the streets around St. James’ Church and through the neighborhood. “We have the resources to deal with this,” he asserted repeatedly. He stressed the lack of affordable housing, the lack of state-of-the-art and affordable addiction treatment and recovery resources, and the lack of proper care for those people whose mental illness renders them both vulnerable and occasionally renders them dangerous. He urged us to prioritize these concerns in their dealings with their representatives in city, provincial, and national law-making bodies.

In the prayers of the people we were led in a long litany of biddings that held up before God the needs and concerns of the society around the cathedral. Toward the end the woman leading the intercessions led us in a prayer thanking God for Fr. Matthew Johnson’s message and asking “that we not forget these concerns as we leave this place.” That made me aware, looking around me at the congregation, that I was surrounded by people who looked like me; that is they looked well-fed and cared-for.  And I thought to myself that yes, it would be quite possible to forget about the people Fr. Johnson was talking about; the people he meets every day as he walks the streets of the Downtown Eastside.

The people we prosperous ones (and I count myself among this company) are able to forget are everywhere, of course. Our Bellingham home is in a comfortable and safe neighborhood, and the people we meet on the street as we walk are generally as prosperous, or more so, than we are. A short walk away, however, the southern stretch of Cornwall Street in Bellingham is lined with makeshift housing consisting of parked campers, aged motor homes, and beat-up travel trailers, with the occasional tent surrounded with various belongings.  

The people who inhabit lower Cornwall Street also deal on a daily basis with the poverty that comes with being homeless, the temptation to mask pain with addictive substances, and various forms of mental illness which torture the minds of some among us, robbing them of peace and pleasure and rendering them ill-equipped for gainful employment. In our city, as well as in Vancouver, we have neighbors who suffer in these ways. In our city, as well as in Vancouver, it is possible for people in my privileged position to put these people out of mind. It’s possible for them to go missing in our consciousness. But as a baptized person, vowed to allow Jesus’ mind to be formed in me, I’m not free to exercise that option.

I appreciated Fr. Johnson’s focus on the Jeremiah text, making us think on the truth that the Reign of Christ means that no one goes missing.  And that got me thinking about the Gospel text from Luke that we heard in the service.

In that text we heard the story of Jesus being crucified between two criminals. Crucifixion was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Roman authorities to make people go missing. The intent was to banish the crucified to ignominy, to non-existence, to be forgotten.  It was the ultimate act of exclusion. Jesus and the two criminals on either side share this fate, this designation by the authorities.  They are to be forgotten. So it is poignant to me that one of the criminals, rebuking the other for joining in the mockery, asks to be remembered. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Tradition assigns the name “Dismas” to this criminal, who hears Jesus respond “truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Rome was unsuccessful in banishing the name of Jesus. His fame abounds, a fame that spread after the announcement of some followers that he was risen from the dead. He did not go missing after all. He lives in the hearts of countless throngs, and in my tradition of Christianity we believe that he’s teaching us through the Spirit that none are missing to God, and that none should go missing to us.

We don’t know the woman who moved along in her wheelchair toward us last Sunday, marked with signs of struggle and suffering. But God does, and I pray that she has those near her who bring some warmth and pleasure to her days. As she sped by I simply offered her up to God to care for, knowing that in this life or the next, she is God’s own. She is not missing in God’s eyes. She will not go missing in God’s eyes. The question is, will we remember her?

Fr. Johnson, the preacher that day, goes out among the people our society seems to want to forget, and he wants us not to forget them, but to address them as Christ among us in disguise. I think of his words to us: “We have the resources to deal with this.” I don’t know how anyone could seriously challenge that statement. Human beings have the knowledge, the ingenuity, the creative capacities, the stores of wealth to accomplish the goals of safe and supportive places for those among us who are unhoused and untreated, dismayed and frightened. Because in Christ’s realm none go missing, we cannot allow each other to go missing. The Great Commandment, Jesus affirmed, is to love God and our neighbor, and this love is worked out in the political dimension as well as the private. The resources are there, but the political will is always the issue.

In the cathedral liturgy last Sunday, the offering was taken up and presented at the holy table along with the bread and wine for, and in the prayer for that moment we said:

“Receive all we offer you this day,

And lead us in those good works

For which you have created us.”

None are missing in Christ’s realm.  Am I present to this truth? Do I have a part in works which assure that none go missing?  That’s the question that remains with me after Sunday.

Art note: Mims, Thomas Puryear, 1906-1975. Dismas, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46047 [retrieved November 22, 2022].