A liturgy for walking the streets
Following a homeless, itinerant rabbi into the church's neighborhood
Jesus is one of the great walkers. Theologian Nicholas Wolterstorff reminds us that Jesus is, after all, “a homeless itinerant rabbi who lived on alms.”1 That calling and circumstance seem to keep Jesus on the move.
Walking is also part of Jesus’s greater calling:
“I must give the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, for that is what I was sent to do.”2
“The Son of Man is en route,” Joseph Fitzmyer says; “he lives the life of a homeless wanderer . . .”3 Fitzmyer’s commentary here involves an instance of Jesus on the street. Jesus tells a would-be disciple who has stopped him there that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”4
Sometimes walking almost seems part of Jesus’s point. I doubt Jesus would have stopped walking if someone had donated a car—or even if the areas he walked through were built for cars.5 Even if he walked streets in areas zoned for a single use—residential zoning in suburbs, say, or commercial or agricultural zoning6—zoning that typically makes cars indispensable—Jesus, I like to think, would still have made connections with people.
One of Jesus’s parables seems to compare what I might call automobile and pedestrian mentalities. In the parable of the big dinner, three people refuse the host’s invitation because they’re in the middle of things. These three are the automobile people—on the move, and sealed off from changing plans. The host ends up sending his servant to pack out his party with street people.
What does the dinner party threaten to interrupt? Nothing inherently bad:
One after another they all sent excuses. The first said, “I have bought a piece of land, and I must go and inspect it; please accept my apologies.” The second said, “I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out; please accept my apologies.” The next said, “I cannot come; I have just got married.”7
These people are in their zones—commercial, agricultural, and residential, respectively. And they’re all, as Wolterstorff points out, “in the middle of some incomplete project.”8 They won’t be interrupted, so they never enter God’s public kingdom.
Cars prevent interruptions to one’s private or commercial pursuits. One can travel in any public area with windows raised and doors locked. And drivers must look straight ahead; a driver noticing the public life around them might, after all, draw a citation for failing to pay full time and attention.
Hannah Arendt, the last century’s great champion of public freedom, thought that the scariest moment of freedom is crossing our homes’ thresholds into public space.9
Susan Etherton with Arlington Presbyterian Church in Virginia would agree. For many years, abetted by the automobile, her church avoided crossing their collective threshold into their neighborhood.
Susan describes Arlington Presbyterian’s former self-understanding as a “destination church,” one that members drove to attend, and one that had no sense of its place in its neighborhood:
We were happily introverted as a congregation, and happy to stay behind the closed, red doors.
But when some church members, including Susan, got a vision to sell the church’s building to make way for affordable housing, those members realized that they didn’t know if the neighbors even wanted or needed affordable housing. These members needed to meet their neighbors to find out.
I was actually afraid to do it. I didn’t have any idea how. I didn't talk easily to strangers, and I didn't want to.
But Susan was willing to help lead the congregation into their neighborhood streets, two by two, to help its members get to know their neighbors and their needs.
Over time, we recognized that . . . it wasn’t scary after all. It was a beautiful thing to be able to have a simple conversation with someone and talk to them about things that you love and get to know them.
These itinerant pairs regularly told the stories of the people they met to the rest of the congregation. Those stories about their previously unknown neighbors helped to persuade many church members that God wanted them to sell their building.
Now that Arlington Presbyterian holds services on the ground floor of the new affordable housing building, the congregation routinely meets with their neighbors. They do it for a few reasons: to inform their annual budget process about neighborhood needs, to create and maintain community partnerships, to find out what’s going on around them, and to help out with whatever.
When Jesus sends his disciples to walk in pairs, he permits no provision but sandals and walking sticks. Maybe he wants them to walk as he walks—with an openness both to give and to receive along the way.
Such openness can make a single walk into a series of anecdotal experiences. I think Jesus’s walks account for a lot of the Synoptic Gospels’ structure. I read Mark’s Gospel the other day for how Jesus gets from place to place. His movements read like this:
After some days he returned to Capernaum . . .10
Once more he went out to the lakeside . . .11
As he went along . . .12
When Jesus was having a meal in [Matthew's] house . . .13
One sabbath he was going through the cornfields; and as they went along . . .14
On another occasion when he went to synagogue . . .15
Jesus went away to the lakeside with his disciples.16
Then he went up into the hill-country . . .17
He entered a house . . .18
These quotes cover Jesus’s movements just in chapters 2 and 3.
If Jesus were purpose driven, he might have driven a car. But he’s Spirit driven. When he’s not up some mountain praying, he’s walking (or sailing), and he’s initiating and responding. He leaves lots of room for life to come to him.
Cars and single-use zoning ordinances aren’t alone in making us alone in public. Society also gives us labels involving our work and family life that limit our curiosity about others, and limit others’ curiosity about us.
As Jesus walks around, though, he always seems to be discovering strangers’ stories, some of which belie their subjects’ labels. A poor widow gives more to the temple’s treasury than everyone else combined.19 A tax collector gives half of his possessions to the poor.20 A Roman centurion turns down Jesus's suggestion that he visit his sick servant, and he turns out to have more faithfulness than anyone else Jesus meets in Israel.21
Without these discoveries, the disciples may have never learned anything about these people beyond their societal labels (poor widow, tax collector, soldier of an occupying army) and the stigmas those labels carry.
Jesus’s disciples know that their Master is more than the societal labels he comes with, such as itinerant rabbi22 and carpenter.23 Most of Jesus’s followers today see beyond those labels, too.
But Jesus makes plain that he is the Other, including the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned.24
And those street people in Jesus’s big dinner parable carry stigmas, too. The servant finds “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” and takes them to the dinner.25 Wolterstorff explains that Jesus’s audience of Pharisees would expect the poor to come to God’s messianic banquet, which the Pharisees understand Jesus to be talking about. But they wouldn’t expect the presence there of “the crippled, the blind, and the lame,” who were “excluded from full participation in society because they are defective, malformed, or seen as religiously inferior.”26 With these street people, Jesus challenges his audience to see past societal labels.
I wonder, though, if cars put distance between us and any of Jesus’s parables about public life. There’s this other street in another parable where robbers leave a guy half dead. At least the priest and the Levite notice the injured man before crossing the street to avoid him.27 If they were driving, they might not have seen him at all. Would their cars have made the injured man any less their neighbor?
Feel free to revise the following street liturgy for your and your congregation’s situation and needs!
A liturgy for walking the streets
O Lord of heaven and earth,
You are everywhere
but we're still inside this building.
You have blessed us here.
You have met us here many times.
You have inspired us here,
taught us here, and comforted us here.
We love it here, but we've been content
with being only here.
Now you are calling us from here
to learn your public ways
from the Gospels' pages:
ways of hospitality and healing,
discovery and acceptance,
justice and the joy of finding new friends.
May this building now serve
as the disciples' upper room
where they prayed and waited expectantly.
You send us out, two by two.
Be in the midst of each pair
walking in your name
to learn our neighborhood and
to meet our neighbors.
Show us things to love and appreciate
among the landscapes and streetscapes we walk.
Make us denizens of our public world
as we have been of this building.
Teach us how to talk to strangers,
as we remember that we were strangers
once to your covenants and promise.28
Help us love our neighbors
as we naturally love ourselves.29
Surprise us. Give us boldness to act on
your Spirit's nudges
and to speak outside of our comfort scripts.
Let us return as Jesus's first disciples returned,
sharing our surprises, learning new lessons,
and gaining new perspectives.30
Make your public "there" our new "here."
Here we go, Lord. Watch over us
and everyone we meet.
Amen.
Possible discussion questions after a walk
What observation, experience, or interaction stood out?
Does our neighborhood have a predominant demographic or use? What things in our neighborhood serve that demographic or that use?
What was our neighborhood like 5 years ago? 50 years ago? 500 years ago? Did you see any evidence of these pasts?
Did you see or hear anything that you think someone didn’t want you to see or hear?
How much of what you saw appeared to be designed for a pedestrian’s perspective? What was it like to walk by things you saw?
Was there a shift in the neighborhood’s tone somewhere as you walked?
Whom did you see? How might society label them in the setting in which you saw them?
How does our neighborhood accommodate or encourage various forms of transportation?
How did the time of day, the day of the week, or the season or the weather affect what you saw or heard?
Zillow gives neighborhoods a “walk score.” With 0 being the worst and 100 being the best, what score would you give our neighborhood, and why?
If you were a city planner, what would you have put in place years ago that might have led to a different neighborhood today?
How can we serve our neighbors? How can we help to make our neighborhood feel more like a neighborhood?
The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 124.
Luke 4:43 REB.
Fitzmyer, Gospel According to Luke I-IX, 834.
Luke 9:58 REB.
“ . . . the automobile has mostly been given free rein to distort our cities and our lives. Long gone are the days when automobiles expanded possibility and choice for the majority of Americans. Now, thanks to its ever-increasing demands for space, speed, and time, the car has reshaped our landscape and lifestyles around its own needs. It is an instrument of freedom that has enslaved us.” Speck, Walkable City, 75.
Jane Jacobs famously observed that mixed uses tend to bring people together in public places. Single uses, on the other hand, tend to empty public places. Jacobs, Death and Life, 151-76.
Luke 14:18-20 REB.
Wolterstorff, 126.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schoken Books, 2005), 122.
Mark 2:1 REB.
Mark 2:13 REB.
Mark 2:14 REB.
Mark 2:15 REB.
Mark 2:23 REB.
Mark 3:1 REB.
Mark 3:7 REB.
Mark 3:13 REB.
Mark 3:19 REB.
Mark 12:41-44.
Luke 19:1-10.
Matthew 8:5-13.
Mark 9:5; 11:21 NNAS.
Mark 6:3 REB.
Matthew 25:35-45 REB.
Luke 14:21 REB.
Wolterstorff, 126-27.
Luke 10:30-37.
Ephesians 2:12.
Leviticus 19:18.
Luke 10:17-20.