PREACHING ABOUT POVERTY
'Do You Do Windows?'
A sermon by the Rev. Marcia B. Bailey
Pastor, Central Baptist Church, Wayne, Pennsylvania.
Text: Matthew 10:16-31
If and when you come to my house, I ask you, please don’t notice the windows!
Oh, well, of course you would notice that we have windows and I don’t care that you
notice their size or shape or even how many but if you come, particularly on a sunny day,
don’t notice them too closely. I don’t particularly like to “do
windows”. Now don’t get me wrong-I love it when they are done! But doing windows
requires a lot of hard work and intentional effort. I have yet to hear of a self-cleaning
kind.
“Doing windows” means assembling the simple but appropriate tools, taking down
that which covers them, 
moving things that stand in the way, sometimes reaching beyond my height,
sometimes stooping below my comfort level. “Doing windows” requires close
examination of the pane inside and out, not once but usually several times, switching
stances and changing angles in order to get a good look at them in every light.
Doing windows” is often a different job, depending on which window you are working
on. Some are straightforward and simple; I always do those first. Others require climbing
up on something and still others-like those on the second floor-require hanging out. In
our house, the bottom part tilts in, so cleaning the lower half is easy, but the top part
doesn’t and that means getting into uncomfortable positions and reaching farther than
I think I can possibly extend.
In our last house we had a stained glass window. Its beauty obscured the
view. “Doing it” was difficult; the window was made of many, fragmented panes
all held together by lead and, in some places, iron bars. It was interesting to look at
but in reality it hid more than it revealed. And what you could see through it was colored
by whatever angle you happened to take at that particular moment, through that particular
pane, in that particular light.
I usually have to talk myself into doing windows and when I’m finished I’m often
really not because, when I get some perspective and dare to take another look, I realize
that it’s not so neat as I thought it was, or I’ve gotten a different angle, or
seen it in a new light. So I confess that I don’t do windows very often. It’s
time-consuming and uncomfortable; it’s hard work and it’s risky. But I must
admit that when I finally see through a glass clearly it’s as if I have a whole new
outlook on the world.
I’d like to think that the image of “doing windows” is a helpful
one to use in challenging ourselves as individuals and as the church of Jesus
Christ in this day and at this time to respond to the call of true discipleship-to be in
dynamic relationship with both Christ and the world. It is at our windows-windows that
look out on sculptured middle-class lawns and neighborhoods, windows that view the sand
and water, windows that face the city streets, windows that open onto the crime and
poverty and violence that confronts our society, windows that welcome us into other
cultures and economic realities-it is at these windows that we come face to face with the
intersection of our faith and the world, where that which we believe has the power to be
transformed into that which we do, where Christ and the cosmos meet. “Do we do
windows?” is the question of faith that confronts us each day, whether the view is
the pounding surf or the pounding pavement. To fully live out our discipleship, to become
what we believe, we must act, we must look, we must see ourselves-and the world in which
we live-in a dramatic new way. “Doing windows” is a metaphor for opening up a
new way of thinking about the world, about our responsibility, about God.
Do you do windows? Are we, as followers of Christ, willing and prepared to embrace a task
that requires determined effort and challenging risk? Can we begin to examine the
structures and choices that both connect us to and distance us from the world in which we
live? Will we be able to stand seeing ourselves and our work in a new and different light?
Can we bend farther than we dare to reach? Can we reach higher than we thought we’d
climb? Dare we pull down the assumptions and move aside the fears that have clouded our
vision? Can we adapt our efforts to the contour of the challenge before us? Do we work
together? Must we work alone? How is our vision sharpened as a result of our efforts? How
often must we “do windows”? Or is it a task that is never completely done?
Sixteen-year-old David Lane spent five hours in the waiting room of Caritas,
an emergency assistance agency in Waco, Texas, trying to see through the windows of men,
women and children who are poor. He met Mrs. Hernandez, who had come to get food for her
husband, her mother and her three children. They have a home; her husband works. But
sometimes they are unable to eat; they don’t get enough assistance. David met Bill
who lives in a halfway house, working part time and struggling to shake his substance
abuse. He met Danita, a single mom at 24, living at a project. She needed help.
David writes, “This is not my first experience with poverty.” He’d
helped out at the Salvation Army, served in a soup kitchen and led worship for a group of
homeless folks. “Before this experience I would have told you I knew poverty,”
he continues. “I didn’t. I hadn’t met Mrs. Hernandez. I hadn’t spoken
with Danita. I hadn’t seen Bill. I hadn’t spent five hours sitting with them.
Once you see the faces behind the percentages and numbers, you will never forget. I was
given the assignment of finding and writing about the face of poverty today in my
community. I found it. But there is something else that I also found: my own personal
responsibility to relieve poverty. And I am reminded of something my Sunday school teacher
keeps saying: “The poor do not exist for us to save them; the poor exist for the
salvation of us.” (Baptist Peacemaker, Winter 1997)
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves,” Jesus said. “Be on your
guard. … A student is not superior to the teacher; the follower is not above the
leader. The student should simply be glad to become like the teacher, the follower like
the leader.” (Matt 10: 16a, 17a, 24)
The invitation to discipleship is an invitation to the difficult task of
the transformation of the world-beginning with ourselves. Jesus is very clear that those
who seek to follow him commit themselves to a dangerous, difficult journey defined by its
risks and fulfilled by its costs. Nowhere does he promise that there will be safety, but
over and over again he tells us not to be afraid. What David Lane saw through his window
were people. He understood for the first time that behind all the “issues” that
bombard the church and the world are children and women and men-people for whom he had a
responsibility as a result of his relationship with Jesus Christ. Responding to the
question of “doing windows” is responding to the invitation of self-examination,
the challenge of honest evaluation. The risk in “doing windows” is confronting
what one uncovers when the haze and film of societal self-fulfillment is wiped away, when
we dare to see ourselves and others in the brightness of a new and different light. Over
and over again Jesus clearly spells out what an incredibly difficult task this will be.
And over and over again he says, “Do not be afraid.”
There is so much outside our windows that we do not want to see, that we are afraid to
see, that we neglect to see, that I am amazed sometimes that we see much at all. And sadly
enough, it is often through the stained glass windows that the world is the hardest to
see. But I believe that that which is a challenge to us is also a blessing to us. That
“doing windows” allows us not only to see what’s out there but also
what’s within. The call to discipleship isn’t simply a call to save the world,
but I believe that it’s a call to be saved by the world, through the world, as we
encounter God’s truth and life and hope and grace as it is lived every day by those
who seem so different, so distant from us.
Stokely Carmichael says this: “Our politics are shaped by what we see out our
windows.” What is outside your window? What’s outside mine? Quite
honestly my view is quite pleasant in the suburban, white, middle-class neighborhood I
call home but I don’t need to go far-a train ride into Center City Philadelphia-to
get a whole other view. How does what we see-or don’t see-shape not only our
politics, but also our faith? Our view of the world? And our responsibility as Christians
within it?
So I invite you to think about doing windows! What’s it like in your house? What can
you see and what needs to be washed away in order that new light can come streaming
through? Can I risk what I’ll find, coming face to face with the images of God’s
creation reflected in the pane (pain)? Be not afraid, Jesus says. That which is covered
will be uncovered; that which is unknown will be made known. Dare I do windows? Do you?
