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Hospitality to the Homeless ˜ 83
those of us who are homeless. We’ve got to get blacker. We need to be as black
as Butler Street. We need to be as black as the bowls into which we pour those
white grits.
On the other side of the church, down Coca-Cola Place, is the morgue.
Across the parking lot and beside the morgue is the municipal market, and in
the other direction is Grady Hospital. And just past Grady Hospital is the police
department. And just across from Grady Hospital is the Fulton County
Health Department, where many spend the night and sleep. If you go to Grady
Hospital after dark, you’ll see people stretched out in open spaces. Beside the
Butler Street CME Church is the Hughes Spalding Hospital. And there is the
Butler Street CME Church.
This church is composed of members who perhaps at one point belonged
to Mr. Butler. It was in South Georgia that a group of African American former
slaves, in the midst of Reconstruction, were still told in church to go up to the
gallery: “You can’t worship down here with white flesh. Our social location is
good. We love Abraham and Sarah with all those camels and goats and sheep.
We’re going to bring our nephew Lot over here and have a bigger steeple next
year than we’ve got this year! I don’t know about those people up in the gallery,
but we’re going to have comfortable pews down here. We don’t want you down
here with us! The next leader in our church is going to be stronger than Robert
Edward Lee!”
And those former slaves said, “We don’t want that. We don’t want that kind
of God. We don’t want this kind of place. We don’t want this kind of gospel. We
don’t want this kind of social location. The one we want to follow is the one for
whom there is no room in the inn.”
There was born a new denomination. It is now a national denomination,
and in the early 1870s was called the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The
name was changed from Colored to Christian in the early 1950s. And there that
black church stands on Butler Street to witness for another way. And we praise
God for that place. We praise God most especially because it has a basement.
And because it has a basement, they let us go down those stairs to serve this
meal. We need to be aware of and thankful for how good it is to meet our Jesus.
Two thousand years ago he was born in a barn and laid in a manger because
there was no room for him in the inn.
It’s a lie to say that Jesus has changed. It’s a wish. There’s no question about
it: we’d really like to have the gospel’s social location somewhere else. Wouldn’t
it be nice to go north of the city And take our grits to an air-conditioned place
To have all those businesspeople come in and eat our grits
But I’m convinced that God is on Butler Street, and that’s where God calls
this community. God sends all of us on journeys. For those in seminaries, maybe
you haven’t yet discovered the Butler Street in your lives: Seek it! Knock! Ask!
Shout! You’ll find it where people are turned away; where prisoners languish;