Canadochly Lutheran Church marked "Refugee Sunday" on June 22, 2014. This is the sermon preached that day.
Scripture texts: Genesis 18:1-8, Leviticus 19:33-34, Mark 7:24-30
Imagine for a moment you are at the Galleria. You’ve been shopping for a few hours and you’re starting to get a little peckish. You’ve got a 5-spot in your pocket, so you decide to hit up Taco Bell for a burrito. Quick snack on an ordinary day. But while you’re standing in line BOOM!!! A suicide bomber has just exploded over at Subway. There’s smoke, fire, bodies everywhere. Your ears ring, but somehow, by some miracle, you’ve escaped injury. You run. You flee. Out to the parking lot. You rush to your car as the emergency responders come in. Then BOOM again. A drone strike, a missile from an invisible plane miles away, just hit the car across the lot from yours. Fire, smoke, bodies everywhere. It’s the third time this month. How long before one of these near-misses doesn’t miss?
Your boss calls you into his office. We’ve made a decision. The companies we work with overseas have demanded we cut our costs, so from now on, you’re going to be making $0.10 an hour. Ten cents? You can’t feed your family on ten cents. Too bad, say your bosses. Decide which one of your kids you let starve. You look around, only to discover the other factories in town are now only paying $0.10/hour as well. No help. Oh, well, there was the one guy who said you could send your wife or daughter into prostitution and maybe make some money that way. You start to wonder. How long before the hunger pains begin?
The word has come down. The preachers have spoken. The radio personalities are all talking about it. Blue eyed people are an abomination, sub-human mongrels unworthy of life. It’s your holy duty, they say, to hunt them down like animals, to rid the world of their scourge. Your husband has blue-eyes. How long until they come knocking on the door for him? How long before they come for you for daring to betray the brown-eyes by marrying him? How long?
These three stories are fictional, but not all that far removed from the reality that is faced by millions of people across this world everyday. You may think them an exaggeration, but they really aren’t. I would not be surprised I’ve understated the nightmares many of these people endure day in and day out.
Today is Refugee Sunday, a day the ELCA has set aside to remember the stories of the suffering across the world. I could quote statistics and figures, facts and data, but one simple and very unpleasant truth lies behind all the numbers: These people exist because of the unmitigated malice, greed, and cruelty of human beings. You want to see the dark side of humanity? These people can tell you. They’ve faced it. They’ve lived with it. And every minute of every day, they’re trying to escape it.
Every refugee faces a choice, but it’s not a real choice. I can stay and be murdered. I can stay and become a slave. I can stay and be raped. I can stay and starve. Or I can take my chances out there, out in the wider world. There’s no guarantees. No certainty that what I’m going to run into out there is any better. But to remain is death. Millions of people have chosen not to stay and for the vast majority of them, they have found no better fate where they’ve gone than where they came from.
I first encountered this when I was a young teen. St. Paul, Charleston had become involved in a Refugee relocation program through the then-ALC, one of the predecessor synods of the ELCA. And we brought over to the United States the Tran family. They were refugees from Vietnam. He was Vietnamese. She was Chinese. To his people, that made him a traitor. He dared to fall in love with one of them. And if they’d stayed, they would probably have been murdered, the two of them and their five children.
I haven’t seen any of them in at least 25 years. They eventually settled in Los Angeles, opened a chain of Chinese restaurants, and became an American success story. They were one of that tiny percentage that escaped the nightmare. So many others don’t.
And we don’t make it easier on them. Here’s another ugly truth. For a nation that prides itself on its “Christian” bona-fides, we do very little as a nation to help these most-desperate of peoples. If anything, 21st century America is as hostile to the immigrant and the refugee as it has ever been, proving sadly our own hypocrisy about what it means to be a Christian nation. It’s not about what kind of monuments you can build or what you can demand of schoolchildren. It’s about how you help people who are in true and genuine need.
Abraham was a desert nomad. He understood the necessity to show hospitality to all who crossed his path. When three strangers came to him, he welcomed them, brought them in, gave them water and food on a hot desert day. When God Almighty set down his law from Sinai, he told his people in no uncertain terms how they were to treat the alien and stranger in their midst. Jesus, in his encounter with the Syro-phoenician woman, revealed the idiocy of bigotry by showing to his disciples the sheer magnitude of faith that can be found in the least likely of peoples. God knows the stranger has worth. God knows the alien is precious. Do we?
Not if the rhetoric spewed by our political class is any indication. Here’s the third unpleasant truth of the morning. These people are lying to us. They’re trying to exploit a simple reality of human nature: that we all want simple answers to complicated questions. No, they tell us, our economic troubles in these times is not the result of complicated and arcane economic and financial realities. It’s not about our greed or our voracious need to win by having the most toys. No, it’s because there are too many of “those people” around. They tell us that, knowing it’s a lie. But we believe it and we vote for these liars and we listen to their programs on the radio and TV and they get what they want. But the people who need our help the most, what they get is hate. This is not the Christian way.
The Christian way is to see people the way God does. To remember that he is love and that love has no limits and boundaries. It loves “those people” as much as he loves us and he calls us, as his followers and disciples, to show that love to them. Christ came to this earth to live, die, and rise again for them as much as us. I’ve said more times than I can count from this and other pulpits because it’s true. God’s love is universal and we as his children are called to express the same.
We talk a lot in America about our blessings and indeed we have so much. More than enough to go around. More than enough to share with the millions of displaced and desperate people around the world. But to do that, we have to take seriously what it means to live in response to the overwhelming love of God for us and for everyone. We have to say no to hate. We have to say no to greed. We have to tell those who lie to us that we will no longer heed their words. We will instead listen to God, who tells us time and again to welcome, to embrace, to take care of, and to love. Amen.
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