Welcoming the Stranger

Leviticus 19: 33-34 & Matthew 25:34-45

Roger Lynn

June 24, 2018

(click here for the audio of this sermon)
(click here for the video of this sermon)

When I left for Conference Annual Meeting ten days ago, the bulletin for today was ready to go to press, and I knew what I was going to be preaching this morning. But then I arrived at Conference Annual Meeting and that pesky and unsettling Holy Spirit showed up and did what the Spirit often does – unsettle our plans. And so it was that when I arrived back in Helena on Sunday afternoon I didn’t go home and take a nap (which is what I really wanted to do). Instead I came to the church and developed a new worship experience for this morning, and a new sermon. And I thought that it was more or less settled. But over the course of this past week even more developments unfolded. And so it was that when I arrived back in Helena yesterday afternoon, after spending this last week in Santa Fe, this sermon received even more modifications. Following the path of Spirit is seldom straight and linear. 

The truth is that this issue has been nagging at me for several weeks, but it wasn’t until the Rev. Bill Lyons (Conference Minister, Southwest Conference United Church of Christ) stood up at our Conference Annual Meeting and read what I am about to share with you that I was suddenly struck with the notion (a not so gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit?) that I needed to re-think what today’s worship experience should look like.

My friend Tracy was telling about a bar in Columbus that has a message written on the big mirror behind the bar that reads, “Strangers Welcome!” She said it occurred to her that a bar shouldn’t be the only place where such a message is proclaimed.

The news which has been coming to us from our border with Mexico is tragic and heartbreaking – children being separated from their families, with apparently little forethought and planning as to how they might eventually be reunited. Even the news which unfolded earlier this week that President Trump has signed an order putting a stop to the policy of separating children from their families does not end the overwhelming devastation of this situation. Thousands of families have still not been reunited. And even if and when that occurs there will be traumatic emotional scars that will last a lifetime. And I am convinced that as people of faith we are called to rise up and speak out on behalf of the marginalized who find themselves in precarious and frightening circumstances. I know that there are those who feel that we should refrain from being political in church. And I agree that we should refrain from partisan politics. But there are times when our faith calls us to step up and speak out in the spirit of love and compassion. If that is being political then so be it. 

What Rev. Lyons read last week in Great Falls was an article he had just written a few days before. It includes some of his own reflections, but centers mostly around the words and experience of the Rev. Randy Mayer, who, as many of you know, is the son of our own Florence and Dick Mayer. I found these words to be challenging, and sobering, and powerful. The situations he describes are still occurring, even with the recent Presidential directive. I invite you to hear them in the spirit of compassion with which they are being offered.

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The Rev. Randy Mayer made the familiar trip to the Comedor near the Mexico/US border last week. The pastor of Church of the Good Shepherd, UCC in Sahuarita, Ariz., and his congregants are among church volunteers at the Comedor, a small hillside compound where Jesuits, Sisters of the Holy Eucharist, Samaritans from Green Valley, Sahuarita and Tucson, No More Deaths members, and helpers from both sides of the border provide migrants with morning and evening meals, clothing, medical care, phone calls, legal advice, and psychological services. There Guatemalan, Mexican, Honduran, and El Salvadoran Consulate officials cash deportee’s checks issued by U.S. detention facilities that can’t be cashed in Mexican financial institutions.

That morning Mayer was assigned to do intake interviews. “In my 20 years here being engaged in frontline immigration work, this was probably my most difficult and hopeless day,” he wrote to me. “There were probably 120 migrants looking for support. Most were coming from Guatemala and Honduras, wanting to seek asylum. There were a lot of women with children who were fleeing horrible domestic violence situations where their ex-husbands are trying to kill them. They had no idea that Attorney General Sessions has changed the laws and that they can’t even apply, or if they do, they will be separated from their kids. It was so painful to see them process this news and they are so far from home.”

There is no deterrence in what people don’t know. People with nothing to lose can’t be deterred. These migrants have nowhere to go. “They can’t go back home because the cartels and gangs are waiting for them,” explained Mayer. Undocumented detainees learned gang life in U.S. prisons and took it with them when they were deported. Today those American-born gangs in Latin America demand payments from families in exchange for loved ones’ lives.

Mayer and his congregation at Church of the Good Shepherd now care for two asylum-seeking families who entered the U.S. before the current administration changed the rules. A gang demanded payment in exchange for one of their teenager’s lives; relatives who couldn’t pay had already been murdered. So the family fled. “But now they would be turned away and most likely won’t be able to qualify for asylum,” said Mayer. “A beautiful caring family that is experiencing pure evil.” Even now they fear being hunted down by the gangs. And if Mayer is right they face deportation and certain death.

The border situation is overwhelming available humanitarian resources. Mayer and the team from Good Shepherd also went to the DeConcini Port of Entry, in Nogales, Ariz., to support the families that are waiting in line to present themselves for asylum. “There are so many now that there is a list of over 90 families on the wall so they won’t lose their place in line,” Mayer wrote. “It used to be that Border Patrol could process these asylum claims pretty quickly, 20 or more a day at the Nogales port of entry. Now they are doing 3 to 5 a day. Just so that people can suffer.”

On Thursday, June 14, Attorney General Sessions quoted from Romans 13 in an attempt to defend the U.S. policy responsible for what Mayer and others on our Southern Border are witnessing. Attorney General Sessions, let me quote from Isaiah regarding your terrorizing of migrants and their children. 

Woe to those who make unjust laws,

to those who issue oppressive decrees,

to deprive the poor of their rights

and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,

making widows their prey

and robbing the fatherless.

What will you do on the day of reckoning,

when disaster comes from afar?

To whom will you run for help?

Where will you leave your riches?

Nothing will remain but to cringe among the captives

or fall among the slain.

That’s what the Bible says about current U.S. immigration and border enforcement policy, about separating children from their parents and warehousing them in detention facilities, about denying asylum to people being hunted down by gangs and cartels, about telling women that domestic violence is not an asylum-worthy life circumstance.

For the past three years the Good Shepherd United Church of Christ has helped more than ten families present themselves at the border and make their way into the asylum process. Four Southwest Conference congregations offer hospitality to sanctuary guests. All of them go to church with us, and this summer, in the hope of healing and with a prayer for protection we are taking their kids to camp with us. “But the current crisis at the border with parents and families being separated and the tragic changes in the asylum laws immigrant families are beating our spirits down as we watch the most vulnerable migrants barely clinging to life,” Mayer said. “It is difficult being in the eye of the storm, bringing Jesus’ compassion to an evil situation in which our current administration is purposely seeking to inflict pain and cruelly destroy people’s lives.”

The work is too big for one church or one UCC conference. We need your financial support to Keep Families Together. Help to continue assistance to asylum families who are prohibited by law from working. They need to rent apartments. We need to distribute toothbrushes, travel size toothpaste, shampoo, razors, towels, wash cloths, sleeping mats, coloring books and crayons for kids.

- click here for the reflection as it was originally posted -

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The Hebrew scriptures invite us to welcome the stranger, and care for the marginalized among us. Jesus invites us to welcome the stranger, and care for the last, the lost, and the least among us. The circumstances which we are facing in these days can seem overwhelming. We must remember that we are not alone. We stand with God. We stand with each other. We stand in solidarity with those who need us to stand with them. I implore you to dig down deep inside yourself. Find the core of compassion that was placed there by God. And then allow that compassion to inspire you to rise up, speak out, and take whatever action you feel led to take. May this be the moment when the blazing glory of God’s justice-filled love shines through us and begins to bring healing to the world.