In my experience, I have found that in spending time with those who are visibly on the boundaries–in spending time with those who cannot hide their brokenness–it is in these moments that I am able to travel more honestly to those places in my life where I feel deep pain.  This past August on the trip that some of us made to the Mexico/United States border, we encountered a man named Luis Ernesto Sanchez.  He was a man, probably in his twenties, from El Salvador.  He told us of his journey from El Salvador by train and by foot, leaving his family behind, in the desperate search for work.  We met Luis Ernesto at the migrant center in Altar about sixty miles south of the border–a place where many who are considering crossing the border congregate for a meal and a night’s rest.  We had the pleasure of eating beans and rice with Luis Ernesto that evening.
I remember Luis Ernesto’s smile above everything else we encountered during the course of our trip.  I remember Luis smiling all the way through as he shared with us his story of his travels northward.  He spoke of riding in a boxcar through Mexico.  He told us how he was robbed of his shoes while on the train.  The next night he went to sleep hugging his backpack, and he awoke to find that someone had placed a pair of white sneakers next to him.  The shoes were too big for his feet, but still they were shoes.  Luis Ernesto told us that the night before his shoes were replaced, he had gone to sleep hugging not just his backpack, but hugging also the Bible in his backpack that he had brought all the way with him from his native El Salvador.  God was watching out for him, Luis believed, and the white sneakers that came to him during the night only served to more deeply confirm this in his heart.

Luis pointed to a tattoo of a cross on his bicep, and said to us that he felt protected.  Luis did not know for sure if he would continue his journey beyond Altar into the Sonoran desert and into the supposed Promised Land, where the promise was a minimum wage job if he was lucky.  He didn’t know if he wanted to cross because he did not know a single person on the northern side of this boundary.  He had no connections, and was disoriented as to what to do if he was able to elude the Border Patrol and the citizens’ militia, if he wasn’t killed by robbers or drug smugglers in the desert, if he didn’t die from ailments that accompany sun overexposure and blistered feet–what would he do then if he was able to overcome such enormous hurdles?  But what would he do if he returned to El Salvador?  He had a family back home whom he loved, but no way to bring in an income. 
Luis Ernesto left us the next morning, still contemplating his next move, leaning towards not going any farther north.  The last image I have of Luis is of him reading a poem off the wall of the migrant center that was written in memory of those who have died in the desert searching for a better life.  As he read the poem, I watched him.  He looked at me, his eyes filled now with tears, shaking his head, yet still smiling at the same time…he looked at me and “sadness”. 

I felt at that moment more viscerally than I have ever felt before that Christ was before me, and oh how I wanted to sit at this man’s feet and ask him to teach me about his struggle, teach me about where he found that hauntingly glorious smile in the midst of the hopelessness that seemed to pervade his life, and teach me about a faith that was so strong that this man would travel thousands of hostile, joyless miles carrying almost nothing but a Bible. 
The irony was as thick in my encounter with Luis Ernesto as in any story in the Gospel.  He was a man who had virtually nothing, but he exuded in his material poverty and in his displacement a liberation that I do not know.  In the simplicity of a faith that sleeps hugging a Bible at night, he showed me how weighed down my own faith and relationship with Jesus can become.  He reminded me of what can become for me the trappings of “Progressive Christianity” –the arm’s length distance from which I can keep Jesus.  Though he never made such a movement, I felt as though Luis was leaping and bounding after Jesus, like the beggar from the Gospel reading for this morning, following Jesus, holding on to the hope that Jesus was with him.  Luis was asking me to not only journey in solidarity with him in his struggle to find work, but he was asking me to journey with him downward, into the long hallways of my pain, of my “poor” places. 

It is in these “poor” places where we encounter Jesus, the one whose own wounds prove to us that our wounds are a source of life, the one who has proven to us that it is through going to the places of suffering, both our own suffering and to the places where others suffer, where redemption is found.  This is the heart of why we follow the crucified one.  By coming to know our wounds, by not letting shame overpower our longing to cry out for mercy, this is where we meet the wounds of Jesus, this is where we find healing, and this is where we are liberated to give life to others.