Down the hall from me that same day was another staff member, Everett, who was laboring away to pull together a funding proposal to build 114 single family homes for low-income people over the next three years. As he hammered out the numbers and tried to figure out how we could bridge the $50,000 gap between what it would cost us to build a house and what a low-income person could reasonably afford to pay, the tape on his adding machine cascaded to the floor and his brow creased with concentration. Occasionally, as I passed his office, I would hear him laughing to himself, chuckling at the sheer absurdity of the numbers staring back at him. How could he make it all work? How could we realize our vision to help meet the desperate need for affordable housing post-Katrina?

Just a few steps away from Everett’s office was our lobby, where Monday’s normal mayhem reigned. Long before the doors opened at 9 a.m., people had lined up for help outside, and when the Mission opened they filled up that lobby to wait their turn with the caseworker. The caseworker, Mary, bustled up and down the hallway as she met with them, one by one. They needed the basics of life, the kinds of things you and I usually take for granted: food, clothing, life-saving medications that doctors prescribed. Some were homeless. Most were working poor. They all had stories and troubles that boggle the mind and tear at the heart. By noon, Mary had seen twelve cases with more still ahead that day.

One office that day was empty, as it most usually is, the office of our housing recovery staff. Construction managers Craig and Scott were out on work sites, overseeing 40 UCC volunteers from five congregations and four different states. Five projects were lined up…five homeowners whose lives and homes had been ripped apart by the waters and winds of Hurricane Katrina. In one home, volunteers labored to build a new sub-flooring, the homeowner working at their side. On another project, people caulked windows and bathtubs and did other finishing work, the home just days away from being occupied again. Down the street from there, a group framed a new house, a bare slab being all Katrina left to that homeowner two years ago.

While all this was going on… Dena, our community organizer on staff, was frantically putting the final touches on the Mission-sponsored second annual Affordable Housing Summit scheduled for next week and Scott, our outreach worker to the homeless, was quietly building relationships with persons who’d called the streets home for years on end.

All of that was on Monday….plus a few other hundred things I haven’t mentioned. So it may come as no surprise to hear that by the time staff meeting on Tuesday rolled around, there was plenty for all of us to talk about. As is our practice, we had a time of prayer before any business was discussed, and as staff began to share their joys and concerns, we felt again together the heavy privilege of doing what we at the Mission are called to do in a context still so desperate for healing and hope. “Battle fatigue” was what one staff member called it; others dub it “Katrina fatigue”. By whatever name it is called, it is real and it hovers constantly at the fringes of one’s spirit, sometimes creeping in and taking up residence.

“Fatigue” itself is a good word, for despite our enthusiasm and passion, we often get tired….Tired of policies that make no sense. Tired of bureaucracies that slow progress and delay help. Tired of barren neighborhoods and nearly lifeless streets. Tired of stereotypes and attitudes that make nearly impossible our efforts to develop new affordable housing for the working poor. Tired of leaders who lack vision and ignore possibility. Tired of what Katrina left us with and the recovery that takes so long.

But here is where our story intersects with the story of another of long ago….the story of one woman made tired by her circumstance, a story written down at a time when many had also grown exhausted. When the Gospel of Luke was recorded, the early Christian church was weary with waiting. Remember that the Church at that time was not the Church as we know it today. In essence, it was a movement, mighty in faith but small in number. The great majority of the time believed Christianity to be a momentary blip on the radar of faith, an insignificant cult that would quickly die away. For those few who professed the Christian faith, their hope relied not just on what Jesus had already done, but on their belief that Jesus would come again…and soon. But that didn’t happen. So they continued to wait, persecuted and beleaguered, growing increasingly tired and disappointed.

This parable of the widow, then, would have been balm for their souls. “In that city,” the parable read, “there was a widow who kept coming to [the unjust judge] and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’” We’re not told who the opponent was, nor are we told the nature of the injustice she suffered. We do know that women in general and women without husbands even more were treated with little esteem or value by the society of that time. We know her life, then, as a widow would likely have been a daily hardship. We can appropriately assume that no one wanted to hear her litany of complaint, that she would have routinely been ignored and considered unworthy. She had to have been exhausted by the sheer nature of her station in life. But still she found the courage and the strength somewhere within her to make her voice heard, to come back again and again to this uncaring judge, a person of power who likely had little interest in her plight. And the parable tells us that in the end her courage wins its reward; the judge hears her and grants justice.

There’s probably not one person here this morning who doesn’t relate to this widow and her dilemma. All of us have times in life of desperate need and desperate hope, times when we may feel that our search for help and perhaps even our prayers to God have gone too long ignored or unanswered.

Certainly I’ve been asked many times since Hurricane Katrina…”What keeps you going? Where do you find your strength?” It comes from many places… places like this church and other churches across the UCC, you who send gifts to sustain our efforts, you who send people to join us in our work, you who lift constant prayers to God on our behalf. One learns also, to take joy in the smaller steps forward, when the larger steps you long for continue to evade. So we gather strength from one house finished, from one homeowner returned, from one client served, from one despairing person consoled. And when our efforts to advocate for social change and greater justice seem to fall on unhearing ears, we gather strength from those who share our thirst for justice, companions we can trust on the long journey ahead.

These things keep us going, keep us stretching beyond our weariness to a place we can’t yet see. But for me, and for all of us at Back Bay Mission, there is something beneath these more tangible sources of strength and of hope that is the foundation of all else. We believe --- I believe --- that out of this chaos and world of hurt bequeathed to us by Katrina, God can bring new life. We believe God can make a way out of no way, that God is constantly re-creating even when our own creativity feels numb. We believe God walks with us on this path toward healing and recovery, that God’s justice for the “least of these” and the lost will at last prevail. God is able, even when we feel utterly unable to make a difference. And so we work…and we try and try again…and we lift our voice for justice..and we dare to envision what seems at times impossible… and we pray endless prayers for strength and guidance…hoping against all hope that what we do God has called us to do, that what we long for, God longs for too.

Years ago, while serving as a missionary in the Philippines, a leathery-skinned old gentleman who’d seen much of both joy and suffering in his life, shared with me a Philippine folk tale that I have never forgotten. It was about a farmer, whose land was in a valley. Every year, the farmer was faced with the same problem: two big mountains always deprived his crops of sunlight, and therefore hindered what he could produce for his family’s consumption. And so one day he decided to do something about it. He picked up his shovel, marched to the summit of the mountain, and he started digging, with the goal of eventually leveling off one of those mountains so that his crops might receive sunlight. One day one of his neighbors came by and asked him what he was doing. When the farmer explained, the neighbor laughed and told him he was crazy. But the farmer insisted, saying that even if he did not finish the job himself, his children and his children’s children would continue the work he’d started. Someday, he firmly believed, the mountain would be leveled, and the sun would finally nurture the seeds, and the harvest would be bountiful for those who would come after him.

This is the kind of perseverance I hope we embody at Back Bay Mission, a perseverance that to others may at times seem foolish but a perseverance that nonetheless clings to the boundless possibilities of what might yet be. It’s the same stubbornness and tenacity the widow in the parable had. It’s the fundamental behavior of those who believe in a God of redemption and hope. We keep the faith. We stay the course. And we carry on, whatever may come, knowing that God carries on with us. As the Psalm promises: “The Lord is our keeper; the Lord is our shade at our right hand. The sun shall not strike us by day nor the moon by night. The Lord will keep our lives.” Such promises are balm for our souls, and I pray they are also healing words for your lives.

Amen.