Christianity and Immigrants

(with thanks to Stephen Mattson for his article)

Many of the tenets and stories of the Christian tradition are difficult to believe. Hell, they’d be rejected out of hand as scripts for movies if they weren’t so embedded in our culture. Samson killing a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass – yeah, ok. Changing water into wine—yeah, ok, maybe. But a person who is fully God and fully man – how’s that work? Serpents and an apple resulting in eternal suffering –please. An afterlife where you’re reunited with all your loved ones—preposterous. Don’t even start trying to understand the Trinity. Your head will implode. Yet we accept these stories as explaining God’s work in our lives, the reason for the human condition, and we want to believe that everything will be alright. We want to believe these stories because they’re comforting.

I suppose it’s no surprise then that we struggle so much with other things that the Bible tells us (Matthew 22:35-40) Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. I guess Jesus foresaw our short attention span spirituality and decided to shorten the Ten Commandments to two.

In Luke a lawyer asked Jesus to define who a neighbor was. He responded with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This was radical. The Samaritan was the neighbor, the hero, of the story and Samaritans were loathed as unclean by the Jews of Jesus’ time but there the Samaritan was—the example that Jesus held up as being the good neighbor in his story. He then told everyone to go and do like the Samaritan. Outrageous!

Jesus also said radical things like “But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you (Luke 6:27) and “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets (Matt. 7:12).

We struggle with these concepts even more than with the stories of jawbones and apples because these stories aren’t comfortable or comforting. It’s not natural to love those who hate you. Putting God first means accepting for our lives what He wants and not necessarily what we think we want. It’s constant work to even come close to what’s expected.

The problem is that it’s a package deal. Do you want the comfort provided by the idea of miracles? You have to put God first. You want to think that you’ll enjoy eternal life in the presence of God? You’d better stop trying to get Jesus to be on your side and start getting yourself on his.

I bring this up because of the immigration issues in our society. We need to start working at the hard things as well as accepting the easy ones that make us feel good on Sunday morning.

There is absolutely no spiritual basis for being anything but kind and accepting of these immigrants.

And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ (Matt. 25:38-40).

Whatever political, economic, or barbaric reasons there are for criminalizing people fleeing persecution it is a Christian’s duty to fight for these people. I would never advocate violence but remember that even Jesus flipped over a few tables when he was confronted by evil. There’s no sin taking action against a den of thieves like the currently elected and appointed officials who have acted in a way that goes against common decency and the very core of Christianity.

This issue isn’t resolved and it won’t be fixed by an act of Congress that establishes immigration policy. Root causes won’t be affected by how immigrants and their children are detained at the border. Until we resolve these broader issues we will always have immigration problems. Let’s pray that we find solutions that don’t involve the jawbone of an ass.