Remembering Jesus as an immigrant

Matthew 2:13
“After the wise men were gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream.‘Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,’ the angel said. ‘Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’”

Last week my church, the Brookings United Church of Christ, hosted an “Observer Training” which was led by executives from the SD Voices for Peace organization. At this training, the people who attended learned what the rights of citizens and non-citizens are in reference to interactions with law enforcement, including ICE agents. Participants also learned how to properly observe and document these interactions if the opportunity arose within our community of Brookings.

This training was precipitated by the announcement that governor Rhoden’s “Operation Prairie Thunder” would be focusing on our community at the end of last week. This “operation” has been described as an increased presence of highway patrol officers, in an effort to catch drug offenders, DUI perpetrators and those with outstanding warrants. But in various communities around our state, it has also resulted in dozens of undocumented individuals being turned over to ICE officials.

This increased presence, and just the threat of it in our community, has caused many family members (both documented and undocumented) to stay home from work and from school in fear of such encounters.

And since our Supreme Court has recently sanctioned racial profiling in one of its rulings, some U.S. citizens are being swept up in these operations, simply because of the color of their skin.

Having said all this, I want to focus this clergy article on how our faith should inform our view of this broader subject of immigration. As you are reading this article, we approach Christmas Eve day. And as such, it represents an opportune time to revisit this story of a young Jesus — within the first two years of his life — who was taken to Egypt by his father Joseph and mother Mary. They did it because an angel had warned them that Herod was bent on killing Jesus. So it may be easy for us to believe they were warranted in what they did because they were doing the will of God.

But what if an angel hadn’t come to Mary and Joseph, and they found out in some other way that Jesus’ life was in danger? Would they have still gone to Egypt in an effort to save his life? I believe the answer is yes. But here’s the thing. In that time, there weren’t the formal boundary lines and border crossings that we have today. And there weren’t immigration laws and procedures to go through before entering the nation of Egypt.

However, even if there were, from everything we know of Mary and Joseph through the gospel writers, we should surmise that they would have done anything it took to save the life of their son; whether legal or illegal. And isn’t that the same thing the vast majority of us would do if faced with a similar situation?

Yet many in our nation find it politically convenient to demonize and ostracize those who have come to our country simply seeking a better life, or, at the same time, those who have come into our country because they and their children are fleeing dangerous and deadly violence. And in the same tired old tropes, the immigrant community continues to be cast as “murderers, rapists, drug dealers, gangmembers, and insane.”

But every legitimate and objective analysis over the decades has proven the immigrant community (both documented and undocumented) to comprise a lower incidence of these negative identifiers than the general U.S. population.

So some of you reading this right now may be thinking, “well then, you must be in favor of open borders!” To which, I would respond in this way. In our modern day society we have become so enamored with our man-made laws, that we have elevated them above God’s laws. Time and time again, in both the Old Testaments and the New, we are instructed to welcome the stranger and the “alien” among us. These phrases don’t just refer to the person across town that we don’t know, or a person from outer space. They refer to individuals from another nation we encounter in our midst, such as Joseph, Mary and Jesus, who were strangers and aliens to the people in Egypt. In fact, I have visited the Fifth century Abu Sarga church in Cairo which was built above the cave that the Holy Family is said to have hidden during their sojourn to Egypt.

And I thank God that instead of being rounded up and detained, or even disappeared; they were welcomed.

Because the Holy Family was welcomed, Jesus lived to grow into an adult who said, “whoever has welcomed the stranger has welcomed me” and “whoever has not welcomed the stranger has not welcomed me.”

These words were spoken without qualification. And they represent a higher law of God than any of our man-made ones.

So may we who claim to be believers, take these scriptural imperatives to heart. And in doing so, may we truly indwell the Christmas spirit of welcome into our own hearts, as well as the heart of our nation.

Blessings,
Pastor Mark Johnsen
Brookings United Church of Christ