This house is for sale. That is not news. This house is for sale, right now… for $1,900. On www.realtor.com there are actually 76 homes for sale in Birmingham for $10,000 or less. “Yes”, you might ask, “but who would want to live in a house you can buy in full for one of our average monthly mortgage payments?” You see, we ask that question and then assume the answer is that no one would want to live there, because many of us are looking through our comfortable, protectionist, evangelical, suburban glasses. But indulge and dream with me just a bit.
What if, for just a moment, we take those glasses off and put on the glasses of the single mom with three children sleeping in the local women’s shelter at night because the wage she earns from her housekeeping job at a local motel barely pays for the combined cost of her groceries and her son’s asthma medication? What if we put on the glasses of the young man who wants to provide a stable home for his wife and newborn, but is facing eviction from his apartment because the warehouse he worked at downtown just shuttered its doors? He now realizes that, because he dropped out of high school several years back, he is basically looking at having to resort to homelessness or “hustling”, neither of which are great options. A slight shift in perspective can be a truly valuable thing.
What if there were a group of individuals who were just crazy enough to pool their resources and buy a house for $1,900 in downtown Birmingham. What if this group of individuals was then unwise enough to put $10,000 (admittedly a large amount of money, until we begin to add up what we spend on a combination of cable TV, personal ringtone downloads, Bruster’s ice cream, cool applications for our i-phones and spa treatments for our toes) into needed repairs to bring this house up to livable standards. What if this group of individuals then sold / gave this house to one of the people through whose glasses we recently gazed?
Have you ever read the children’s book, “If You Give a Moose a Muffin”? It is a great story about how one kind action by an unsuspecting mouse leads to a swirling mass of chaos and of snowballing needs and requests. I have a confession to make. That kind of sounds cool to me. Sometimes I think that we could really benefit from a grace-filled dose of chaos. Maybe I am a little biased. After all I am a calm, orderly Southern boy who married into all of the chaos that is a Puerto Rican family, and is actually better off for it.
If you give a house to an unemployed father, then how does he pay for the upkeep that will inevitably come? What if, along with giving away the house, men in this group began to enter into a relationship with this young man, discipling him both in faith as well as in life skills, aiding in his employment search?
If you give this family the house, then the flop house down the street becomes a safety issue for the kids living there. What do you do? What if another group of individuals catches the vision for what is going on and then buys that flop house to do the same thing?
If you allow this family to move in, the children begin to grow older and the pressing issue of where they will attend school grows larger. Does the father who dropped out of school want his children involved in an educational environment that is clearly failing them? What do you do? What if this growing group of individuals then catches a vision for starting a grace-based, Christ focused school in this neighborhood that offers to meet the spiritual, relational, emotional and academic needs of the children who live there?
By now you kind of get a glimpse of where I am going with all of this. Before long you have an entire neighborhood that has been renovated, a school built, a church planted, and the fog of countless generations of poverty, abuse and hopelessness have begun to be burned away by the clarity and heat of the gospel. A community influenced by the transforming power of Christ is born from the ashes that once existed. Drug dealers and prostitutes that once frequented the street corners move away. Or better yet, the woman on the corner finds hope in Christ through the hands of faithful individuals who are able by the grace of God to see past her “profession” into the heart which Christ cares deeply for. What if, because of this care and attention, she begins to sell chips and soda at the corner gas station rather than peddling her own flesh?
What if we believed the gospel could do such a thing? Then we begin to see a community that looks suspiciously like the one Phil drew our attention to this past Sunday from Acts 4:32-37. Wow.
What if………
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