A Good Friday Homily
John 19:25-27

“This man is now your son. She is now your mother.” From then on, that disciple took her into his own home.

These are practical, personal words spoken by Jesus concerned about providing for his mother: the love and care Jesus had for her shown even from the cross in his moment of greatest suffering. He was thinking of her loss and her need to be cared for after he was gone. At the same time Jesus was responding to the loss experienced by a beloved disciple. John was losing a friend, rabbi, and mentor. Jesus provided him a new role and responsibility, a new relationship in a new family. Jesus from the cross created with Mary and John, a new home.

Jesus on the cross, outside the city, the forsaken Son of God, living at this moment without family in heaven or on earth, this homeless one, calls all of us to be family and opens the way for all of us to practice hospitality. Mary, a widow and sonless, represents the most vulnerable for whom the church has always taken special care. John, the beloved disciple finds in his own loss a way to new love. Out of death has come life, out of their shared loss, they have created a new home.

We know the brokenness of our own community; we remember today our own personal experiences of loss: the corporate and individual crosses we bare. We know the need is great for us to act as family toward one another, to seek life out of death and to heal the pain we feel. Jesus is calling us to take the widows and orphans, the poor and homeless, into our homes. We who are widows and orphans, poor and homeless, desire to know again the warmth of home and family. For all of us in our various forms of poverty, isolation and loss we long to find a new way of being at home with one another.

On the Yakama Indian Reservation there is still a strong sense of family that is a part of the cultural strength of this community. “Attowetotikwat,” is a Yakama word that means loving family and has within it a sense of extended family that includes all our human relations as well as all the animals and plants and the land and sky itself, all are family, all my relations. On a practical level it is a tribe of 10,000 members and everyone is related, but in a larger spiritual sense they understand this connection with everything.

And yet on the reservation there is incredible brokenness, homeless youth move from relative to relative escaping family situations, lost and adrift, struggling to find their own identity. A high suicide rate that speaks of a huge sense of hopelessness among many, family dysfunction, drugs and alcohol, a decimation of culture: all this has its root in more than 150 year history of domination by another alien race.

I have heard again and again the stories of Yakama women who have opened their homes to take in children and youth. “When they show up at your door step you have to take them in because they are family,” someone said to me recently. Grandmothers are raising grandchildren. Youth have many aunties who take in lots of far flung nieces and nephews. Over and over again the words of Jesus are repeated, “This is now your son, this is now your mother.”

Several years ago it was my wife, the Rev Sheri Noah, who stood before you and preached a Good Friday homily on one of the seven words of Jesus. My own cross that I bear, the death of my wife, and the journey of grief that I have been on the last two years has also opened me up to a new solidarity with others who are in transition, new relationships, and a new sense of family and home especially among the homeless.

A year and a half ago we began Noah’s Ark Drop in Center and Shelter in Wapato run by an organization called Generating Hope, and I have also turned to a new job of placing the homeless into housing. For many moving out of homelessness, like all transitions, is similar to the grief process, saying goodbye to an old life, and finding a way to claim and embrace a new life. Now in a real way I can say these are my brothers and sisters, my sons and daughters, my mothers and fathers. We are united in the cross we bare together, in the loss we know, in the loss of home and family, struggling once again to claim a new hope in the future. It has become a part of my own spiritual journey to walk with them and welcome them home.

Hear once again the words of Jesus, “This is now your son and this is now your mother.” Let us find the community that is formed in our common suffering, and know that as Christ is lifted up on the cross, he draws the whole world to himself, and we all are welcomed home.

The Rev Sheri Noah, my wife, died two years ago, March 3rd, 2007 after an 18 month struggle with cancer. There are many friends and family who survive Sheri, many who were touched deeply by her life. Over 400 were at her memorial service and a slide show of her life touched on all the various ways she has served her God among a diversity of poor in many lands. There are many pictures of Sheri that I cherish. One is of her in a black satin dress at the Walk for Life awards ceremony, another of her in shorts and a butterfly t-shirt arms outstretched in triumph after climbing to the top of a mountain. My own story over the last couple years is one of saying good bye, allowing her to make her journey and finding a way to claim the new life I have to live now.

Since 2001 Sheri and I lived and worked at the Campbell Farm, a mission station, small conference and retreat center and working farm here on the Yakama Indian Reservation a ministry of the Presbyterian Church. For six years we brought over two thousand young people from across the county to do mission camps, hosted many conferences, retreats and educational events at the farm, and served the community in countless ways together as community ministers. We were growing a ministry of hospitality at the cross roads of a diversity of cultures with a vision of the reconciling love of Christ for all of Creation. But that all ended for us and for me when Sheri died and I left the Farm in May of 2007.

My three children and I began, what was for me to be a Sabbatical Year of rest, with a trip around the world. We took Sheri’s ashes to Thailand, India, Nepal, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and England and left a little bit of her in sacred places, cultural landmarks and beautiful gardens around the world. Sheri now is literally one with all of creation and all the diversity of cultures she loved so dearly. In August of 2007 when we returned Sheri’s mother also passed away and in December of that year my father died as well. 2007 was a year of death, quiet, tears and pain and lots of reflection. I worked part time as an Adjunct at Heritage College, did books for the Yakama Christian Mission, volunteered on some community projects and did a few other odd jobs.

But the first step I needed to take was to find a place to live. Many of us had been exploring ways to meet the needs of the homeless in our community and when I returned I purchased a building with some of the funds I had received at Sheri’s death, and offered it to Generating Hope, a local non-profit, to operate a drop in center and shelter we called Noah’s Ark. My son and I live upstairs and for over a year now the first floor has been an all volunteer run labor of love serving hundreds with three meals a day, a warm place to stay and many other services. I also established the Noah’s Ark Donor Advised Fund with the Presbyterian Church with donations that had been received in Sheri’s honor. This fund has already helped to provide several small donations to the kind of every day lay ministers, who serve the poor with little income or recognition that both Sheri and I have tried to honor and support throughout our lives.

One of Sheri’s requests before she died was for us to do a give a way, a traditional Yakama Native custom, on the year anniversary of her death. We gathered many of her belongings, friends cooked a tremendous feast. We once again celebrated her life and everyone got a memento of Sheri. The traditional Yakama custom is to not say the name of the deceased for a year and then on this day of release the family can once again speak her name. One of the ideas behind this is to make sure the departed can make their own journey to wherever they are headed without those left behind holding them back. This was a powerful cathartic experience for all who attended as we marked this time when Sheri had made her journey and now it was up to us to make our own journey into the future.

My own journey into my future has continued along the path of helping the homeless. I am newly employed with Yakima County as the Housing First Coordinator. I work with Homeless Outreach Specialists in six different agencies in the Yakima County Homeless Network and with willing landlords to place the homeless into housing through a program that guarantees rent for 18 months and case management to help clients make this transition successfully. What we have discovered, in the words of one experienced homeless worker, is that for many people the movement from homelessness to housing is, like all transitions, similar to the grief process and it takes time. For many it is a long process of saying goodbye to an old life and finding a way to hope once again in a new and different future.

I have just begun to make my journey into my new life by honoring Sheri and her ministry, and by making room in my life for many others who are on a similar journey. I have begun to attend a new faith community, Christ Episcopal Church in Zillah, WA, and am contemplating a call to the ordained ministry someday. Though there are still tears and an abiding sense of loss, there is also a whole new future of possibilities opening up for me. My hope is for all who go through this grief that we can find ways to experience the new life that comes out of death.

If you knew Sheri and would like to make a contribution in her memory to the Noah’s Ark Fund you can do so by sending it to Generating Hope at 117 E 2nd St, Wapato WA 98951. If you live in the area, the Homeless Network is collecting all sorts of furniture and house hold items to make a house a home. Many homeless people move into apartments with absolutely nothing and your gift can be a part of bringing new life.

A shorter version of this article appeared in the March 2009 Wellness House newsletter