Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
John 12:20-23Max, a Mennonite pastor in Iowa City, was snatched from his home in the early morning hours of March 3rd, while his wife Gloria was in the shower and his four children were still asleep. He was not abducted by criminals nor was he arrested by a local police force for some egregious crime. Max Villatoro was arrested in immigration sweep aimed at deporting undocumented immigrants who were, officials said, the worst of criminal offenders. What was Max's crime that brought the INS to his door? He had applied for an Iowa drivers' license. The consoling reassurance offered to his four children who are now between the ages of 7 and 15, is that if Max applies for legal immigration status and stays in Honduras for the next eight years, he may be approved to return.
20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. 21They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, 'Sir, we wish to see Jesus.' 22Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. 23Jesus answered them, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
All that Gloria has to do is support those four American children here in the USA for the next eight years while they grow up without a father. Every case of undocumented immigration is not like Max and Gloria and every case of deportation is not as silly and unfounded as this one clearly is. And I understand that no government can have totally open borders and still manage their economy and their crime rate.
I'm not saying that illegal immigration is not an issue, in fact, I'm saying that it is an issue... it is an issue that impacts crime, unemployment, school systems, taxes as well as families and that to this point our nation has not responded to the real issues in either a compassionate or a realistic manner.
There really are very few ethical issues about which our Jewish and Christian heritage is more clear than the issue of immigration. In the early portion of Deuteronomy, in the giving of the law to the nation of Israel, it says in Chapter 10 that God is a defender of the weak and that the people of God are to be kind and generous with the aliens who live among them because, and this shouldn't be hard to understand, they had also been aliens in their heritage.
That really ought to translate easily for Americans because with very few exceptions, our families were once aliens in this nation. I believe that my first patriarchal ancestor fled to America to keep his head on his shoulders after Cromwell fell out of power in England but, like most white people in America, I am certain that my family tree is made up of all kinds of northern Europeans who came to these shores to escape economic hardship in England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Holland and Eastern Europe. Our black sisters and brothers generally have a much more ghastly tale of surviving the journey here in chains but as Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, we came here in different kinds of ships but we're all in the same boat now.
Our Latino sisters and brothers have a more complicated tale. Most of them carry both the blood of indigenous tribes and the blood of southern Europeans. We tend to talk about them as if they are all immigrants but, in fact, most of the southern United States was once northern Mexico. We occupied and took Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and Colorado.
In the mid 19th century, our federal government often tried to buy these territories from Mexico but they refused to sell at any price. Abraham Lincoln was in congress when he bemoaned the fact that President Polk decided to use our army and navy to take what we could not buy. Lincoln said: "...the president unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced a war with Mexico....The marching of an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property to destruction, to you may appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, un- provoking procedure; but it does not appear so to us."
A hundred and fifty years later, white Americans look around in these former Mexican states and ask, "How did all of these Mexican's get here?" It may not be possible to simple create a unified North America in the way that the European Union seems to be coming together but something that recognizes the fact that there have not only been 19th century land grabs and deportations but we have been a player in the perpetual poverty and violence found in much of Central America.
It is the drug trade that is fueling the civil war in Mexico in which more than 40,000 Mexicans have lost their lives. The drug money comes almost exclusively from the United States and almost all of the weapons and ammunition comes from the United States. There are six thousand gun shops along our border with Mexico and there is only one legal gun shop in Mexico.... So when I say, "do the math" on that one, there is not much doubt.
We export sweat shops and prop up banana republics to keep fresh fruits and vegetables coming our way and we give them our used military equipment and ask them to stop their drug cartels and then we sell weapons to the drug cartels. We are playing both sides of fence and then insisting that poor working families stay there because we don't want them bringing their criminal conduct here.
And even in that there is no small amount of hypocrisy. We talk about e-verify and do sweeps to gather up and export undocumented workers but we always manage to turn a blind eye when migrant farm labor is needed to move up the west coast and the east coast when it is harvest time.
And even in our little entertainment Mecca of Branson that mothballs itself after the Christmas holidays, you don't seriously think that there are hotel maids and cooks that can afford to just take off from December to March on the salaries they earn there do you? Branson is all white on stage and all brown behind the scenes.... Brown and undocumented. And the farmers and business owners don't want the situation changed. Otherwise they would have to pay a decent wage and have to comply with employment laws that they now conveniently ignore.
Xenophobes in the Tea Party and right wing talk radio talk about how the undocumented get on welfare, use up tax payer provided services and threated to cast Democratic votes....but, of course, the undocumented actually pay into Social Security and Medicare but they cannot draw benefits, so they are being forced to subsidize our tax system. And they cannot vote without first obtaining citizenship no matter how long they live here in the shadows, mowing our grass, nailing in our roofing shingles, making our beds, cooking our food, and harvesting our groceries.
Behind all of the yelling about building a fence and blocking citizenship is just smoke and mirrors for insisting that no one change the status quo. So we keep a cheap labor force that cannot go to court to protect their rights, have access to services, or even have a voice in the government they serve and support.
The most common trick of a stage magician is to get you to look at Bambi, his scantily clad assistant, or to watch the pigeon flying out of his hand while he is setting up his real trick with the hand you are not paying any attention to. The most common trick of politics and the media is to get you to be mad at someone who is no threat to you so that you don't realize who is really robbing you blind.
I resist making references to Nazi Germany because unless the think you are comparing it to rises to the level of murdering 6 million people then you are wearing the analogy out. But, if you will allow me in this instance to reference the fact that the Nazi's needed someone to blame for the social and economic woes of post WWI Germany and the Jews were a target made believable by constantly telling and retelling the same lies over and over again.
The real villains of society are always looking for someone to scapegoat to keep the sheep-people bleating about all of the wrong things. Last summer, my second favorite economist, Robert Reich, said:
"The moral crisis of our age has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion (and I would like to add, "illegal immigration"). It's insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street's gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy."
It is like the current conservative sand storm about wanting access to what Hillary Clinton wrote in her private e-mails but they don't want to accept responsibility for very publicly writing a treasonous letter to a foreign government that most of them signed.
I began today by reading a rather peculiar couple of verses from the gospel of John. I don't think that this text accurate describes anything that Jesus actually said but rather it is an example of John's literary way of helping to transform the historical Jesus, who was likely a painfully sectarian Jew, into a more ethnically inclusive religious figure.
In this narrative, some Greek speaking Romans asked to have a conversation with Jesus, a request that had to be handed up the chain of command from Philip, to Andrew, to Jesus. Jesus does not even reply directly to the request but, again, in this fictitious account, says something that seems to our ears to be entirely off topic. Andrew says, "There are some Greeks who want to talk to you," and Jesus replies, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified."
In the Roger Ray's literal translation this reads, "Andrew says to Jesus, 'Hey, there are a couple of white guys who want to talk to you.' And Jesus replied, 'It must mean that this is the end of the world.'"
The fear, xenophobia, paranoia, that keeps the world divided into racial, national, tribal, class, and religious warring tribes needs to come to an end. That can only happen when we consistently refuse to be drawn into prejudice against whoever the real abusers try to scape-goat and we make a conscious effort to understand one another across racial, religious, class, national and even political divides. Then the world as we have known it will come to an end and we will have a chance to see all of the sons and daughters of human kind glorified.
