The issue comes to mind a bit of traumatic experience from last night on the streets, and the complicated nature of life for those who construct homes without walls or roofs on the streets. It is the end of the month, so numbers are escalated -- we made 140 sandwiches, which was adequate for those in our little two-block "parish." With darkness coming earlier and it getting colder (for San Diego), I'm trying to get us out on the streets earlier -- but we've not quite had the numerical strength we need from the congregation and friends. Three of us distributed the sandwiches and 150 bottles of drinks in the area.

I had exhausted my supply and was talking to two persons who live there who really have become my friends -- Ron and Anthony. Suddenly I was directed to an event about 30 feet away to my back where I saw two young men facing off. Someone told me that one had a knife and I walked to intervene (I know, dumb middle aged white guy in a clerical collar -- but what was I supposed to do). Ron and Anthony suggested calling the police, but I asked not to as I walked and stood just to the right, between the two men.

As I listened what was going on, B.Lee. had grapped the cross of Mark and wanted to take it from him. B.Lee is a young, African American who was not regularly part of the neighborhood, but had recently and occasionally taken to protecting Norma -- a young woman who lives "down the road" there. Mark is a white member of the Navy, stationed in Coronado, who attends the Rock and sometimes by himself goes downtown to give small "treats" to those who live on the streets. Apparently (and this is my reconstruction based indirectly on what I heard, not necessarily what happened), Mark had shown Norma attention and used some more aggressively evangelical language and B.Lee had felt it necessary to intervene. Seeing a large crucifix around Mark's neck, he had grapped it with this right hand at arms length and then put his left hand on a pocket knife in his left pocket.

When I got there, Mark had his eyes shut, praying focally, and B.Lee was staring at him waiting, occasionally speaking. I spoke with both the men to discern what was going on. I offered to buy B.Lee a crucifix or Mark a new one; Mark did not want to give his up because it had been given to him in Texas. I gently but firmly rebuked B.Lee about scaring people and trying to take something that wasn't his. He told me that if he had taken the crucifix, he would have destroyed it. I apologized for any wrong done to him in the past by the church.

Eventually B.Lee stood down and I encourage Mark to leave, and if wanted to join us on Tuesday nights, and shared briefly some wisdom about not being alone on the streets but as part of the church (again, I didn't see the interchange that began the interaction, but I don't think Mark realized that he was a guest in others homes; for him it probably looked like "public space" where "poor people" lived). B.Lee stood stoically on the sidewalk which had cleared out around him.

As I walked back to Anthony and Ron, they rebuked me. "We should have called the police. It's fine for you; you get to go back to your home tonight. We have to stay here with this guy with a knife still around us." Ouch. I walked back to B.Lee to encourage him to move on. Meanwhile, one person called the police, some words were exchanged, and a brief fight broke out with a friend getting a nasty bump on his head from the sidewalk. I tried to intervene with another man, a friend of B.Lee yelling, "Preacher, this ain't your fight". B.Lee took off running, and the police pulled up 15 seconds later to talk to the person (name withheld for protection) who had called, who got in the police car to go look for B.Lee -- as three or four more police cars pulled up.

As a Christian who believes the non-coercive, non-resistant authority of the church is the first option over temporal authority, I did what I thought was correct. Yet I also recognize I complicated things for the poor who live there, who have set up their own patterns of dealing with conflicts, who live life between the coercive violence of the streets and the coercive violence of the temporal authority. I pray for B.Lee -- with whom I developed a respect for -- I don't think that he was threatening to knife Mark, but had his hands on it to cut the shoe strings that supported the crucifix around his neck. The knife's presence surely made people uneasy -- and understandably so. I also pray for those who were most affected by my intervention -- when I could go home, they had to sleep with half an eye open in case B.Lee had vengeance on his mind.

The layers of tragedy and ambiguity caused by the presence of someone like me there on the streets has made me pause. I obviously have much more to learn. I know that those on the streets live caught between the irrational violence of the streets and the reactive, impulsive irrational violence of the temporal authority. I guess we all do. It's just that walls and roofs give us physical barriers that mask the vulnerability in which we all live.

Language works -- including the language of the presence of the church in the form of a middle aged white guy in a clerical collar and a young naive white male evangelical -- in very embodied contexts that are dynamic and changing and complicated. One muddles through, confessing one's sins, amid the complexity and fragility of such contexts, praying that God preserves others from the harm of one's good works.