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Our Bishop called a meeting of our diocese's clergy earlier this week. Like many of our diocesan clergy, he’s been hearing from a lot of folks expressing growing dismay at the news coming out of Minneapolis. Recent events in Minnesota have shone a spotlight on current immigration enforcement strategies that have tested our norms and assumptions about life in the United States. Many feel uncomfortable with what they have seen illuminated by that light, including those who are supportive of the efforts to remove undocumented persons from our shores. It was helpful to get together and share concerns and strategies for being faithful in the midst of trying times. It’s an age-old theme for the church, managing trying times, although the issues at hand shift from season to season, decade to decade.
I don’t want to be another voice wading into the political fighting that immigration has personified as of late to score some points. I do want to find a way to say something helpful to those who wrestle with a faithful response to a complex and often heartbreaking season. The Christian Church and our Jewish roots are very clear about how God’s people are expected to treat foreigners and aliens in their land. Those teachings transcend the political tactics of any particular country, leader, era, or mindset. We forget that sometimes; our faith and its teachings always transcend politics. We have been too easily persuaded to bend our faith to fit our politics, rather than the other way around.
The Episcopal Church has named the second Sunday in February as Migration with Dignity Sunday. This designation was made at the last General Convention, chosen nearly two years ago to fall on a Sunday in the season after Epiphany. It is NOT a direct response to recent events. It is and was a growing response to the way policy and engagement were already shifting in this country and around the world. It has been clear for some time that assumptions and attitudes about migrants, asylum seekers, immigrants, and refugees have been in flux, here and elsewhere. The trend has been towards cruelty, scapegoating, and increasingly violent rhetoric and action. That should grieve the Body of Christ and all of its members.
Calling for migration with dignity is NOT a suggestion that borders should be open, or that undocumented workers should not be held accountable. It’s simply a reiteration of thousands of years of our moral foundation that reiterate the care that is to be shown to “aliens” in our midst, even as we detain and deport them. Those processes can be managed with dignity for the individual and in accordance with traditional values that honor the rights all people have by virtue of their humanity, let alone the rights granted to those in this country.
Few among us want to live in a repressive society where anyone can be stopped at any time and forced to produce papers to avoid arrest. Most of us aren’t enthusiastic about masked paramilitary forces on our streets as a matter of course. I also think it’s safe to say that we generally support those who enforce our laws, and that we can do so while also seeking accountability. The Archbishop of Canterbury once told all the bishops in the world (attending the Lambeth Conference) that they should be “unreliable allies” of their respective nations and empires because our true allegiance is to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven. We support earthly structures like government where they are just and healthy, and we speak truth when they err and stray. We are not allied with kingdoms of this world without critique; if we love any institution, our love compels us to perfect it and reform it where it is broken.
There are spiritual matters that will always transcend the simple politics of our lives. As I mentioned in Sunday’s sermon, we have the lenses of the Kingdom of Heaven through which to measure what is good and what is bad, what is just, and what is unjust. We learn what mercy and love look like from the teachings of Jesus and the church, and we are called to put them into practice every day. Jesus is the one to whom we look for interpretation, not politicians, pundits, or the press. One of the comments from Monday’s Zoom call that has stuck with me was, “The forces that feed hatred are out there working to make us its food.” Whenever a group of persons is spoken of with vitriol or with dehumanizing language, let alone when they are treated that way, Christ is among them, and we must be careful who we choose to follow and serve. We may become the very food that hatred devours.
There are signs that the current hot spot in Minneapolis may be blessedly, finally seeing some de-escalation. I hope that Christians across our nation, and the world for that matter, can also find ways to de-escalate the growing tendency towards contempt, scapegoating, and the twisting of the Gospel to pretend it proclaims that might makes right. These are trying times, times that every generation faces in one way or another. The kingdoms of this world will always test our allegiance and pull us this way or that. God’s kingdom keeps us grounded, oriented towards love and dignity for all.
To love our neighbor is to want for our neighbor the things we want for ourselves – and then work to make it happen. Our neighbors include asylum seekers, immigrants, green card holders, and people with brown skin or who speak different languages. Our neighbors include politicians, pundits, ICE agents, protestors, and those who drive us crazy. We don’t get to choose who we love, but we do get to choose how we love. We can choose to love and to ask for forgiveness when we fail to do so, trying again and again to choose rightly. Love manifests things like dignity for all, a tenet of our Baptismal Covenant. If this generation doesn’t make choices for love, we aren’t serving the one we claim to follow, and we’ll all be devoured by hate.
