Three years ago, I donated to the “Homeless Jesus” statue that sits at the Missouri United Methodist Church (MUMC), on Ninth Street across from Shakespeare’s, diagonal to the Mizzou campus.

It’s a life-sized bronze sculpture by Canadian sculpture Timothy Schmatz depicting Jesus as a homeless person, sleeping on a park bench. Of course, that would be unlikely nowadays because of anti-vagrancy ordinances and the bench dividers that have been installed in many cities across the U.S. to prevent people from having a place to rest.


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