As You
The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
August 3, 2014
As You
Genesis
12:10
Now there was a famine
in the land.
So Abram went down to
Egypt
to reside there as an
alien,
for the famine was
severe in the land.
It was an angry crowd that gathered.
They were ready to take a stand.
Suddenly the leader of the group shouted out,
“Here they come!”
A yellow school bus rumbled toward them,
a bus filled with children.
The group was determined to stop the bus,
send the children on the bus
back to where they’d come from,
send them back as illegal immigrants,
aliens who had no legal right to be here;
Aliens who should be deported.
The bus managed to weave its way around the
group,
and drive on by.
As it went past,
a reporter tapped the group’s leader on the
shoulder
and asked him,
“Did you know that the children on that bus
were local children returning from a YMCA
outing?”
The reactions we’ve been reading about and
seeing
in response to the news that
tens of thousands of children
have crossed our country’s borders
over the past year
have been overheated, to put it politely.
Tens of thousands of children,
almost 60,000 since last summer
by one government estimate,
have made a long, dangerous journey
from the Central American countries of
Nicaragua, Honduras, and
El Salvador.
These children have become the target of
rage, fury, and fear.
“Stop them!” has been the cry.
“Close the border, lock it up tight;
Do not let them into our country;
Send every one of them back
to where they came from.
They are illegal immigrants.”
The fury has touched our own community
as word spread that some of the children
might have been sent
to the Youth for Tomorrow campus in Bristow,
to be looked after and cared for
while a determination of their fate was made.
Cooler, calmer, more dispassionate heads
have determined that most of these children
have been coming from three
Central American countries
notorious for their grinding poverty,
and for their violence,
countries overrun by drug gangs
that sweep up even the youngest.
An article appeared on the front page of
today’s New York Times detailing the
chilling experience of a pastor forced out of
his
church, his home, his life by vicious drug
dealers.
Life in those countries can be brutal,
dangerous, short.
We’re beginning to learn that
most of these children
have been sent by their families
to escape the violence,
escape the poverty,
escape the hopelessness
that would fill their lives in their home
countries.
The United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees
has urged our country to assume these children
are refugees and not criminals.
Status as a refugee at the very least
provides
each child with a hearing to determine
whether they should be allowed to remain
here.
In all the arguments, all the rancor,
all the shouting and posturing,
about what to do with these children,
children who have,
no one disputes,
entered this country in violation of federal
laws,
the voice that seems to have been shouted
down,
drowned out,
shunted aside
is God’s voice.
Where is God’s voice in all this?
What does God call us to do?
What does our Lord teach us to do
to respond to a situation like this?
Time and time again,
the written word of the Lord
we find in the Bible teaches us:
welcome the alien.
Welcome the alien,
welcome the stranger,
welcome the immigrant.
It is a lesson best summed up in the book of
the law
we call Leviticus:
“When an alien resides with you in your land,
you shall not oppress
the alien.
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.”
(Leviticus 19:33-34)
“The alien shall be to
you as the citizen among you;
you shall love the
alien as yourself.”
Why?
Simple: because aliens are our neighbors,
and what does Jesus teach us
about our responsibility to our neighbors?
It doesn’t matter that they might
have come from another country,
speak a different language,
look a little different.
It doesn’t even matter that they
entered this country illegally.
They are our neighbors.
“…do no wrong or
violence to the alien”
says the Lord God through the prophet.
(Jeremiah 22:3)
Moses, speaking for the Lord God
stood before the people and said,
“Cursed be anyone who
deprives the alien…of justice.’
[And] All the people
shall say, ‘Amen!’
(Deuteronomy 27:19)
Do you see the pattern here?
Do you hear what God wants from us?
One scholar counted 36 different admonitions
in the pages of the Bible to look after the alien.
Abram was an alien everywhere
God called him to go
once God called him
from his own land in Haran.
He and his family had settled as aliens
in the land of Canaan,
but as we learned from our lesson,
famine struck the land
and Abram was forced to move yet again.
To have remained on the land
would have meant death,
but to move,
move further south into Egypt,
meant he would enter yet another foreign land
as an alien,
he and Sarai and Lot
and all his servants
and all his livestock –
all living as aliens in the land of Egypt.
The teaching from Leviticus
comes from a part of the book
we call the Holiness Code,
the life we are called to,
captured when God says to his children,
“You shall be holy,
for I the Lord your
God am holy.”
(Leviticus 19:2)
This is the standard we are called to
as we are called to new life as children of God,
and disciples of Jesus Christ.
Jesus reminds us of that call when he says to us:
‘be perfect, …as your
heavenly father is perfect.’
(Matthew 5:43)
No, none of us will ever be perfect,
anymore than any of us will attain God’s holiness,
but we are called to a higher standard of living
grounded in grace, and love,
welcome and acceptance.
“To be holy is to imitate Christ
as best we can.
To be holy is to roll up our sleeves
and to join in with whatever
God is doing in the world….
If you want to be holy,
love your neighbor,
show hospitality to the stranger,
and be a person of justice….”
(S. Ballentine)
In the letter to the Hebrews we read,
“Pursue peace with
everyone,
and the holiness
without which
no one will see the
Lord.”
(Hebrews 12:14)
That’s what the word of the Lord teaches us:
pursue peace and holiness,
not judgment and anger.
Children on a bus,
far from home,
hoping for a new life.
Scared, not knowing whom to trust.
Yes, they’ve entered this country
in violation of federal law;
yes, some of them may turn out to be troublemakers.
Still, what do we do?
What does God call us to do?
What has Jesus taught us to do?
Do to others as you
would have them do to you
says our Lord Jesus Christ.
(Matthews 7:41)
Love your neighbor as
yourself.
The children on the bus,
the man, the woman crossing the border
in the dead of night,
aliens,
….neighbors.
AMEN
posted by Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson @ 11:00 AM
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