Sunday Sermon

On the busy corner of Perkins and Bluebonnet, with cars stacking up and pulling out, a man stands in sandals and a brown hoodie like a monk’s habit. He calls to passers by in the name of the Lord.

He carries a sign that reads on one side: “Will you feed me today?” And on the other, he asks if we will act like Jesus.

He gestures both to us and to the sky. He smiles and waves. He holds his sign aloft and walks joyful in the noon heat beside the column of idling cars.

This is every Sunday, when Dad and I go to coffee.

We tried once to offer him money, but he wouldn’t take it. He told us it’s about repentance. He’s just getting The Word out and needs a way to get us to stop and listen.

Today we’re first in line at the red light. From our left, a boy rolls past across six lanes, toeing at the ground from the seat of his bike. His fishing pole is balanced across the handlebars, like something out of Andy Griffith, except for the cell phone gripped in one hand.

He looks about twelve.

Something’s going to happen.

The penitent man on the sidewalk notices the boy approaching, and the facts assemble on his face—a kid in traffic, obviously wobbling. So he backs a step into the road, making space for the bike to pass on that pitifully narrow pedestrian corner.

But instead, the boy stops and tucks his phone into a pocket and pulls out a couple of bills, extending them in his hand to the man.

“He won’t take it,” I tell Dad, who like me was riveted to the scene.

It was alarming just to see two people unprotected with so much steel passing fast around them.

But it was also such an obvious lesson, kicked up into the realm of parable, that I bet none of us in our cars, on either side of the intersection failed to see it underway.

The man put his own hands together at his chest and shook his head. The boy’s shoulders dropped.

I could imagine him making this decision some yards before the two wide roads converged. Prior to seeing the preacher, he was only thinking of catfish in Dawson Creek, the nearest place to drop a line.

The money in his pocket was for snacks at Perkins Rowe. His phone was for emergencies.

This decision was his own.

The evident embarrassment in those small shoulders reflected in the eyes of the man with the sign, who changed the day’s sermon with a sudden, seamless grace and took the two bills with a little bow.

Then after watching the boy stand on his pedals and pilot himself away, the man raised his face and pointed at the sky.