The Bible and Immigration

The Bible and Immigration              Feb. 17, 019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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Leviticus 19:34              

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

 

 This is a map of North America, it uses color codes to identify the lower 48 states of the United States, and Alaska, separated by Canada, with Mexico to our south, and the several Latin American states of the southern tip of Central America: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Columbia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.     

But contrast that with a simple photograph of North America. Both images represent a certain reality. The photograph shows no boundaries, no national borders. It shows the earth, a singular planet, which is host to humans, mosquitos, various forms of marine life and birds. But both images represent certain truths. All of North America is not the same. Most people up here in Greenland speak Danish, in Quebec, most people speak French. English is the majority language in most of the rest of Canada and the United States, with Spanish being predominant in Mexico and south. There are pockets of Inuit, Sioux, Cherokee, and other indigenous and ethnic tongues. 

But a political map is little more than a portrait of a moment in history. Before Columbus landed on a Caribbean Island, North America looked more like this,

With more than 90 distinct tribes claiming agricultural and hunting grounds across this part of the world.

When we learned American history in public school, most of our teachers viewed the growth of the United States from a European political perspective. When our nation was very young and Napoleon was cash starved by his European wars, we bought the “Louisiana Purchase” from France. This is the territory that becomes Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, the Dakotas, part of Texas, and Wyoming. 

The truth is that the French claim on the territory was tenuous at best. They traded there but not many lived in what was Sioux, Cheyanne, and Crow, Native American territories. Admittedly, Small Pox had dramatically reduced the native population but to call this region French is absurd.

Shortly after the Louisiana purchase, the territory to the west and south that had been controlled by Spain, fought several wars to establish Mexican Independence, both against Spain and to repel an invasion of Napoleon’s forces. 

Again, many of us were given the impression that the western movement of the United States was a matter of European decedents fighting off tribes of Native Americans. Obviously, that fails to tell the whole story. Mexico claimed control of what is now New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, California, Texas, and western Colorado. Some of that land was purchased, some taken in border clashes and wars, and a great deal of it was just stolen at the point of a bayonet by our military. 

When Abraham Lincoln was in Congress, he vociferously fought against these border wars with Mexico and decried the use of soldiers to steal farms from Mexicans who were literally harvesting their crops. Much like Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric, James Polk would claim that Mexicans had killed Americans and Polk proclaimed that American blood has been spilled and we must retaliate. Lincoln knew he was lying, and he kept asking, “Show me the spot where American blood was spilled.”  He raised this objection so often during the war that newspapers of the day started to call him “Spotty Lincoln.”

We took the northern half of Mexico and made them a part of the United States and now scream about how many Mexicans live “illegally” in territories that were illegally taken from them. All of that without even mentioning nearly 50 years of efforts to annex Canada in the early days of our union. 

Please forgive me for taking so much of your time to review something almost everyone here would already have known but I want to make the point that, in the end, we have only one planet, national boundaries are fluid, and people move, immigrate, resettle, or migrate all during every page of history. 

 Again, I have obviously just been talking about North America. The same is true of other parts of the world. This was the Middle East a century ago, and this is what it looks like after the British and Americans said, “Here, let us help you.” Turning four or five major regions into dozens of chronically warring states.

It is more than a little pretentious of me to boil modern demographics down into this nut shell in the presence of several history and geography professors but what I really want to talk about is more in my wheel house. 

I advertised this message as a biblical perspective on immigration and I did so, as a rare tip of the hat to the revised common lectionary that is used in most mainstream Protestant denominations, which quotes this passage from the 19^thchapter of Leviticus which says: The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

This passage makes it clear that there is no such thing as an “illegal alien.” There is just “someone who is new to the neighborhood.” The passage turns on a kind of historical compassion:  We used to be immigrants ourselves, we have no right to be abusive of the next wave of immigrants. I love that line in Michael Franti’s song, Hello Bonjour, where he sings: 

I don't need a passport to walk on this earth
Anywhere I go cause I was made of this earth
I'm born of this earth, I breathe of this earth, and even with the pain I believe in this earth

But the Bible is not so simple. You should always beware of anyone says conclusively that the Bible has a clear message on any ethical issue. The fact is that the Bible is a collection of religious literature written in several languages, over several centuries, in several countries. It is more like a leather-bound cultural debate than it is a solitary word from God. 

If you look for racial prejudice and militant views towards foreigners and immigrants, you can find that in the Bible too. We liberals who claimed that the core of the Christian message is radical compassion, always gravitate to passages like this verse from Leviticus but it is not the perspective you can find in the Bible.

The 23^rdchapter of Deuteronomy says clearly that Moabites are not allowed to live among God’s people. But then, the whole book of Ruth is about Ruth the Moabite and her immigration into Judah and she later appears in the genealogy of Jesus.

Jeremiah was willing to declare the people of Uz as being pure evil. But then, the favorite book of wisdom literature, Job, is named for a faithful man of Uz. 

The book of Deuteronomy clearly condemns all eunuchs, but then the book of Acts describes the baptism of a eunuch as one of the first converts to Christianity, and the whole of the reconstruction era literature in the Hebrew Bible condemns Samaritans but then Jesus keeps telling stories about how Samaritans are more righteous than his peers who are Jews.

So, who are you going to believe about these foreigners? Jesus or Donald Trump?

Like Ezra and Nehemiah, Trump wants to build a wall and keep foreigners out, and like Jesus, we don’t want ‘no stinkin’wall and we choose to take a more kind approach to immigration. Even though I do not consider myself to be exclusively Christian, it always feels better to be on Jesus’ side of an argument, especially when it is an argument between Jesus and Donald Trump. 

I was in Mexico last week and was pleased to see that most people are keeping a pretty good sense of humor about this horrible period in American history, so far as our immigration policy goes. But the truth behind most of immigration is rarely very funny.

The debate we see in the pages of scripture are not much different from the debate we see raging in American politics today, though our much more densely populated globe complicates everything. There were times in the history of Judah that their primary concern was for doing what they had to do to protect and preserve Judah. The more xenophobic and paranoid passages of the Bible come from those times. 

But there were prophetic voices, and some of them also were to be heard during challenging times in Judah’s history, but the prophets kept trying to get people to raise their ethical standards, to try to see the world more compassionately and more fairly. Frankly, our own treatment of the Bible is that, for generations, we have picked and favorite passages and ignored the pro-slavery, anti-feminist, polygamous, classist, racist passages that are, I assure you, abundantly present in the Bible. As progressives, we can feel fully empowered to say flatly that those passages are just wrong. They are not the word of God and they don’t even sound very good when those sentiments are expressed by a low browed racist like Donald Trump. 

Any rational read of current events makes it plain that this xenophobic fear of brown people is irrational. We have serious things to be afraid of: domestic gun violence, deaths from drug over doses, and fatalities on our crumbling roads. 

Just those three add up to more than 100,000 preventable deaths per year so, clearly, the declaration of a national emergency to build a wall along the border with Mexico is economically stupid and morally tragic. 

Trump recently claimed that more than 60,000 Americans had been killed by illegal immigrants since 9-11. A truth claim that has no basis in fact and is traceable only to the ranting of the clearly racist Republican Congressmember from Iowa, Steve King. Not that murders have not happened, they have, it is just that illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to commit any crime than native born citizens. King’s numbers are inflated by several thousand percent. You are about as likely to be killed by lightening as you are to be killed by an illegal immigrant and, frankly, many who are killed by lightening were playing golf in a thunderstorm, so, if you consider holding a lightning rod up in the air during a thunderstorm as entertainment, I might be persuaded to see your death as a part of Darwin’s natural selection. But I digress…

Immigration, in our complicated time in history, is not something that can be managed with a open borders policy, even if that is what Jesus might have done. But as spiritual people, what I am imploring of you, is to strive to take the most compassionate view of immigration that you possibly can.

I will not wade into the weeds about how many times we have invaded our neighbors to the south, or assassinated unfriendly political leaders, or bribed and threatened our way into creating the Banana Republics that have empowered cruel dictators and corrupt governments which have impoverished the people of Central America and left them vulnerable to the violence of drug cartels and civil wars. 

America is not the cause of every unstable government in the world but when you are the elephant in the room, it is difficult to say that you don’t have some influence over everything else that is happening in the room. Our foreign policy and our trade policy have been designed to keep wages low in poor countries and to keep our military empire beyond local threats. As such, our policies have been profit-driven and stupidly short sighted. 

An intelligent, long range view for the Americas must acknowledge that successful governments and economies in Central and South America are ultimately good for the environment, for our national security and theirs, and probably for the economy because we need markets more than we need slave labor. And, trust me, when living conditions are bearable in Central America, they have little or no desire to immigrate north, legally or illegally. Remember to be mindful of the ice on the parking lot when you leave today . . . and that is something you will never hear in a church south of the border. 

A friend of mine, Javier, works in a Microsoft call center in Nicaragua for $1.25 an hour. We were talking last week about their efforts at unionizing for better wages, hours and working conditions. He told me that his managers at Microsoft, one of the most-wealthy corporations in the world, told them that if they unionize, they will move the shop to India where they can pay less than a $1 an hour for college educated workers. 

So, when Augusto Sandino warned Nicaraguans a hundred years ago not to trust the Gringos, you can’t say that he was wrong! Javier, nosotrous en la lucha por la paz y la justica, mi amigo.

Americans voters have elected a monstrous government because they were vulnerable to manipulation by fear and prejudice. I have one point to this sermon that though it comes with Uncle Sam pointing his finger, my listeners in England, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand need to know when the shoe fits as well:

I want you to stop being afraid, afraid of other skin colors, religions, sexual preferences, gender identities, and especially of immigrants. For God’s sake, I can’t end with a “thus sayeth the Lord” but clearly: The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were too were once aliens and you are better than prejudice and fear.