Meeting The Street Sweeper

Preached August 26, 2001

Every time I drive to Resurrection, I pass a small stone church on the crest of a hill. In front of the church, at the crest of the hill, where every driver who passes by can see it, is a message board. Last week the message read "You are not alone. Signed, God." This week the message reads "The ten commandments are not multiple choice. Signed, God."

Of course, I don’t know what you might think and feel if you drove by and saw these messages. I’ve smiled.. and I’ve wondered about which commandments I would choose, if I DID have a choice…I’ve felt a kind of grudging envy that this little church was smarter than I was, and came up with something clever, and catchy to capture people’s attention …and finally, I let that go as I began to recognize a longing and wishing, a longing and wishing that our God was indeed the kind of God who spoke in simple, pithy, clever sentences that fit neatly onto a message board. But that’s not really how our God communicates with God’s people.

Listen, today. Today, God clearly wants us to listen. We hear God speaking through the prophet Isaiah, letting the scoffers know that it’s time for them to start paying attention…and in the letter to the Hebrews, there is a dire warning to "see that we do not refuse the one who is speaking". And just in case we missed God’s first two atempts to get us to pay attention, the Gospel presents Jesus telling us that there are plenty of people who hear what he has to say and get it all wrong, with disastrous consequences. And because I don’t want to be one of those people who gets the door slammed in their face on judgment day, and you probably don’t want to be one of those people, either, especially when its Jesus who’s doing the door-slamming, it occurs to me that we might really appreciate a daily checklist from God to let us know we’re on the right track.

But God is a better teacher than that. Our God doesn’t send "to-do" lists, because God loves us no matter what we have done in the past and will love us no matter what we will do in the future. So instead of sending us "to-do" lists, our God sends people. There’s a reason God sends us people. The reason is that God wants us all to learn how to be truly human, truly alive in Christ. People can teach us how to do that., so God sends us people. God sent Jesus to everyone. And God sent a street cleaner to me.

It was during the heat wave, on a day when it was 97 degrees at ten in the morning, and there was a red alert in place to let people know the air wasn’t good to breathe. But the city, in its wisdom, chose that day to send a crew of five men to clean out a storm drain on Linwood Avenue. I went outside to tell them that there was cold water in here, and invited them to come inside for a cool drink when they were finished work.

One by one the first four came in, drank the water, and went back outside shaking their heads and talking about how they were heading back to get their paychecks at 11. Then the fifth street cleaner appeared. You’ve seen him yourself, or others like him, every day, doing the heavy lifting on construction sites, or directing traffic around road repairs. Kind of short. Kind of squat. Not much to look at. Not, as they say, the brightest porch light on the block. As far as the world is concerned, definitely one of the least and the last. But when he came inside, he caught his breath, looked around, drank some water and asked if I believed in the Lord Jesus Christ. I decided not to point out that I was sitting in a church office, after all, surrounded by Bibles and books about God and a poster about baptism, because he was right, just because a person is sitting in church and wearing a cross and surrounding herself with saints and angels doesn’t necessarily mean she trusts Jesus with her life. So the street cleaner forged ahead.

"You know," he said, "if you just believe in the Lord Jesus, you’ll be saved." I told him that I hoped I was indeed saved, and reached over to pour him another cup of water. This was not the most graceful move I"ve ever made, but it seemed to be called for under the circumstances, seeing as how this man – on the hottest day of the year, when he certainly had other things on his mind -- was offering me, a women he’d never met before in his life, a gift from his heart and his soul.

But he had more to give. As I reached to pour the water, he said "Don’t do that" "You’ll wrench your back."
"S’okay," I told him. "I’ve done worse things to my back than this."
He shook his head. "Shouldn’t do no worse things," he said. "The Bible tells us how to take care of ourselves." Then he poured himself another cup of water, thanked me, and was gone.

Now, I’m not saying that God sent this street cleaner, one of the last and the least, to me in order to hand-deliver a prepared, pre-packaged script for evangelism. That would be too easy. But I do know that whenever I am tempted to scoff at the kind of simple, straightforward witnessing he shard with me…whenever I am tempted to turn deaf ears to God’s clear command to go and share this faith with others…whenever I need to remember what it means to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I will remember that street cleaner, and what he had to say. I will remember the care and the courage with which he said it, and I will remember how it touched my heart. And I know, on judgment day, that I will find that street cleaner – who is, in the eyes of the world one of the least and the last – I know that I will find him among the first in the kingdom of heaven.

Amen.