Break Down The Wall

Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19

The youth from our church are at the beginning stages of planning our annual Penny Carnival. I would tell you how many years it's been going on, except that I can never remember. I do know it's somewhere between 15 and 20, maybe a little more than 20. Either way, the Penny Carnival is something the community has come to expect as an alternative to walking door to door on Halloween night.

Every year we select a non-profit organization to whom we will donate the proceeds from this community event. This year our youth have chosen the Youth Outreach program at Hale Kipa. This program helps teens and pre-teens who are living on the streets. The youth who use their program are mostly runaways who come through the foster care system. Not all of them are runaways, though, there are those who have been kicked out of their homes because of one reason or another.

To listen to the stories of the youth who call Hale Kipa family, is to understand how the walls of division really need to come down. One young man told me that he was kicked out of his house simply because he wanted to stop lying to his family about his sexual choices. The courage it took for him to tell his family he was gay was met with the hatred he never believed existed in his home.

This young man was immediately kicked out of the house at the age of 16 and forced to live a life of prostitution and drugs on the streets. As he sarcastically said, "Because that's so much better of a life than being in a home where those you expect to love you don't even want you around."

Today's Psalm is written in response to the destruction of Israel. Some of the people in that city were living with the same kind of un-love the young man felt in his own home. If one wasn't a part of the upper societies within Israel, they were treated as a lesser member of the community. Maybe this forced separation is why God "tore down the walls" of that great city; to bring the people together and to help those who built the walls to see what really lives on the other side.

I haven't seen the young man I spoke about for close to 4 years now, but I do know he was part of a community who believed in him regardless of the person he chose to be. He was already clean and sober and no longer prostituting on the streets by the time I heard his story. In fact, he was building up the courage to talk to his family again. Somehow I have the feeling that the walls in his home had come down and he would be together with a family who would be, at the least, willing to talk things through.

Restore us O Lord God of hosts, let your face shine, that we may be saved.