"Life Together: Welcoming the Stranger"
May 3, 2009
Rev. Douglas S. Long
Umstead Park United Church of Christ

Today, May 3, the United Church of Christ is observing its first Immigrant Rights Sunday. Although the UCC has been a long-time advocate for just immigration policies that guarantee legal rights entitled to every person living in the United States, this is the first time a Sunday has been designated in the UCC to recognize immigrants.

Welcoming the Stranger.
Why? Well… There are the famous words of Jesus, for one.
Matthew 25:35 “for I was a stranger, and you welcomed me…”

Do we pause to gather that message in? (I included in my sermon a couple of weeks ago a story about recognizing Jesus in the least of those around us… the marginalized, the outcast, the imprisoned.
Do we believe it? …that the spirit of Jesus is more closely harbored in those our society of socialites, our world of war craft, our culture of consumerism, our places of power most routinely reject?
As much as we would sometimes like to ignore this fact…. Jesus wouldn’t have fit in well at the country club, or the military, or day upon day at the shopping mall for that matter.
Jesus would be most at home on the streets, escaping occasionally to the wilderness, hanging out with the common workers. He’d be at home, I believe, in the migrant fields.

But put that on hold for a moment if you will (I’m sure a part of us… let’s say our conscience, our spiritual center… would like to put it on hold indefinitely.)

I was a stranger and you welcomed me…

I'm going to ask a few questions this morning and the first one is this-
…Have you ever been a stranger?
Who in this room did you know 5 years ago? Or 10, or 2…when you first entered this community?
We all were new to this community at some point.
Strangers all, brought in to “life together.” (Have you welcomed the strangers today?)

I remember it well-
I was standing in a group of men almost 20 years ago. The task before us was to build a small ‘test’ building from some handmade blocks… using no electricity for our tools and no gasoline powered tools or vehicles for our labor. The foundation and roof would be poured concrete, which would be mixed by hand. The pressed and sun-dried blocks had already been fashioned by others in the group.
So I was standing in this group of maybe 15 men in rural Mexico, 600 miles south of the US border, in a field to the side of a village called La Union. The Union, the community. With skin more pale, little ability to speak the common language and standing a foot taller than most of the others… My Mexican friends were somewhere else. I was known to none of these in the circle… and I was definitely the stranger.

I had a small tripod in my hand, to set a camera on and one of the men commented on its usefulness. He asked me how much it cost and I tried to explain that it wasn’t expensive and only cost about 10 dollars… but in my fledgling Spanish I said diez dolares… (Dolar is the word for pain…Ten pains!)
"10 dolares sounds like a lot to me!" he responded.
And all the men laughed. I felt they were laughing at me, and my face flushed.
To which the one who commented on my gaff smiled broadly at me, stuck out a pack of gum and asked “Chicle?" …which translated is pretty much "Would you like a piece of gum?"
It was the most simple of offerings, but it drew me in.

Lucio, it turns out, was the mayor of a neighboring village even more remote, Tenanguito. He was the president, as well, of the 12 villages that had come together for this “capacitacion” this training session…and we spent the rest of the day in common labor, learning to fashion shelter from the stuff of the earth.
Was I a stranger… yes… but was is the operative word.
If I were to trek to Tenanguito now,a journey that would necessitate air travel to Mexico City, and then a bus trip to Le Ceiba some 4 hours away, and then hopping on the back of a pick up to La Union 45 minutes through a mountain pass and fording a small river… and then a tortuous further ride for 90 minutes on whatever vehicle could make the bumpy, rough dirt road through farm land carved on magnificent hillsides to Tenanguito where phone lines and electricity still have not reached…
If I were to make that trip to Tenanguito, Lucio would this very day greet me as a brother.
Once a stranger, he took me in.

It is a ‘strange’ thing, actually, how we assume ourselves so different from others.
We are all strangers, but we are all brothers and sisters.
It does not change at human made borders or constitutionally contrived political allegiances. We do not become intrinsically different by creed or country or clan.
We all belong to the kin-dom of God.

The kin-dom. I first heard the term when some creative and wonderful women introduced it to me. It’s not the Kingdom we belong to, they explained… God’s realm, the realm that embraces us all is not a Kingdom (though I understand the metaphor at its best) … the realm of God, to which we all belong is not a hierarchical and domineering, autocratic male oriented realm of power…
But a kin-ship… A kin-dom… A welcoming community of equality and equal commonality… The kin-dom of God.

We are all kin… yet see each other as stranger, refugees, wanderers from this realm of kinship.

Wanderers… refugees…
It’s the Biblical story of our ancestors of faith…
Deuteronomy 26:6 (A wandering Aramean was my father…)
I began thinking about refugees and strangers in the Biblical account…...
There’s Ruth and Naomi, the whole Hebrew people in exile to Babylonia… and what about the seminal story of the Exodus?
…a people in Egypt crossing the desert in search of “a Promised Land.”

A plethora of stories of exile, of stranger, of refugee… let’s call it immigration…
Once you slightly open your eyes to the theme and it’s the lens you look through you begin to see that the Bible, indeed, is full of such stories, full of such lives.
Even Mary and Joseph sought political asylum shortly after Jesus’ birth… they were fearful that Herod would kill the child. No small fear as Matthew says all male children were wiped out at the time. [Matthew 2:13-14]

Today, political exiles live around us… some are legal, some are not.

So I have another question for you?
If you were in real danger, if your infant child was in real danger… would your first thought be to get all the paperwork in order?
Would you wait to place the child into a safe place until you received the permission of an unknown bureaucrat who may or may not believe your story, and may or may not care?
I doubt it.
Are the immigrants around us so strange? Not really… Really they are just us, born in another set of circumstances… just us, just like us, fashioned of the same earth and spirit, blood running red just as ours does… Mary and Josephs of this era.

“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 a citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19.33-34).

Yes, the Bible is full of stories of exile.
It occurs to me that it begins that way… Adam and Eve, archetypes for all of humanity for all of time. Exiled from the garden and always, forever more, in search pf that Promised Land.
The Promised Land… Maybe it’s called Nirvana, perhaps Shangri-Laa; name it heaven or oneness with all creation…
Beulah land ... Promised Land… a place of belonging. Beulah land, I’m longing for you…

We're all wanderers and refugees. We're all searching. I am and you are and so is every other human being even born or ever will be born… deep within looking searching for connection.
Maybe some are too angry and jaded to admit or know it… but it’s there.
The promise of belonging.

Who is a stranger?!!
Only those we have not yet bothered to meet, to know, to sit with, to hear their story and then connect it with our own.
We are all crossing the desert to the hopeful land.

Delle McCormick is a UCC minister who lived and worked in Mexico for eight years and is currently the Executive Director of a bi-national organization in Tucson, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora.
She takes groups now, looking for clues of persons desperate enough to trek northward across the Sonoran Desert, searching for the Promised Land and she says:

I have been to the desert many times and witnessed evidence of many lives left behind. The once pristine paths through the desert are now littered with the precious “stuff” of people’s lives.

I recall one desert visit with some professors from Chicago, when we came upon what is known as a lay-up site, where migrants who have crossed the desert must leave behind anything that identifies them as a “walker.” We sat and wept as we were confronted with tons of “trash” – baby bottles and diapers, women’s make-up, toothbrushes, bibles, bikes, high heels, clothes, and love letters.

Even the most tender and private possessions lay open to our stranger’s gaze. …One day, while on a Samaritan Patrol in which volunteers search for migrants hurt or left behind and provide food, water and medical supplies, I found a Dora backpack with a soiled pair of child’s panties inside. What had she gone through, out there in the middle of nowhere? In the smaller pocket, I found her Mom’s make-up and perfume. I wondered if they even made it to the “Promised Land.”

Another day a Samaritan volunteer found a worn walking stick with chord attached and two little nooses at each end, perfect to fit the tiny wrists of a child. The desert is a dangerous place and the pace that migrants must keep in the dark of the night is brutal. This was one woman’s way to keep her children safe in the unsafest of circumstances.

Temperatures in the desert can vary over 100 degrees between morning and night. Perilous terrain, snakes, wild animals, sharp thorns, shallow underground tunnels all make night travel a nightmare. Women carry a shawl or plastic bag to shield them from the elements, but far too many have died there, unable to keep up, lost, dehydrated and hot. Their bones are all that are left after a few days.

Yet they keep coming because, like the women at Jesus’ tomb, they know that life must go on. Women who migrate are incredibly creative, resourceful, and tenacious.

So… I have yet another question for you?
How far would you walk to feed your child?

Rev. McCormick was asked to submit a reflection fro “Conspirando Magazine” of Chile last year. Here is what she wrote:

La Ruta de las Mujeres (The Women’s Route)

I walk the path that you took
hours or days ago.
Stones and slope and thorns
threaten each step with
danger.

I see where you slept
under the mesquite tree
home to spiders, snakes, ants -
familiar to coyotes, Gila monsters,
God knows what.

A piece of plastic,
grass woven into the branches
for shade against the merciless sun,
a tuna can, toothbrush,
tortilla cloth, used bus ticket -
all part of your story,
your life lost in this desert.

Nearby a tiny silver spoon
engraved, a love letter,
your bible, a pair of panties,
birth control pills,
breast cancer medicine,
a baby bottle, diapers,
one chancla, perfume bottle,
a pair of pants with
a name and number written in the inseam.

O, what you leave behind
haunts me
I know you
Sister, mother, friend,
Lover, aunt.

Some day
we will all be held
accountable for your
your suffering, your loss.
Some day, we will
celebrate your courage,
your story, your making
your way to the Promised Land.
Some day we will name this Exodus
and thank God that
some of you make it
across.

So I ask again… How far would you walk to feed your child?

And one final question… who do you think God would consider a stranger… to the kin-dom?

I’ll let you ponder the answer on your own… but I want to take the opportunity of inviting you to the next roundtable, on May 24th, to consider how this place, and we, might be more welcoming.

Amen.