touching Heaven

Last night, I was minding my own business at a Starbucks in Lakeland (Lake Miriam) when I was approached by a homeless man who just began to talk to me. He said that he hoped I didn't mind if he spoke with me, that he was lonely and sometimes just needed to talk to someone. So I asked him to sit with down with me at my table and I began to listen to his story . . . a pitifully tragic story of repeated failure and defeat, of loneliness and dejection. From the heavy smell of alcohol emanating from his breath (along with all sorts of other scents), I could deduce that he had tried to numb the lifetime of pain that he had endured and was taking nearly two hours to tell me about. More than once he stopped and wept . . . a pathetic man in a pathetic condition. In fact, if this man had lived in first-century Palestine, he would be called cursed and not only avoided by choice but it would be a legal mandate to stay abreadth of his uncleanness. The poor and destitute were counted as nothing and had no place in society. So it is no difficult thing to understand that Jesus (who might very well have been a student of the great Pharisee Hillel) faced certain shame and ostracization for ministering to (touching) the shameful and ostracized ones in Galilee. He even proclaimed the cultural blasphemy that these unclean wretches were the greatest of the blessed membes of the Kingdom of Heaven. Obviously he wasn't speaking literally . . . these people would never enter into any real palatial inheritance. He was making an important societal metaphor concerning priority: how can a nation stand before its God or even stand at all if it forgets and even curses its less fortunate and destitute?So I put forth the same question in our context: How can we stand before God or even exist as a community of faith if we don't take the time to touch and declare blessed the cursed of our community?