Two weeks until I go to camp. This might be the last scripture we give any real attention to at camp, because if we take the scriptures in order, it will come on the last full day of camp.
There is one more scripture, which we’ll hear next week, for the very last day of camp, the day campers go home. But this is our story for today, and it’s a long one. Thanks for sticking with me.
Now, I had originally prepared a nice long opening to this sermon, setting the scene and all that, mostly to show off my homiletical skills.
But the other day, something happened that I feel God is calling me to address.
A colleague of mine, a Disciples of Christ pastor in southern California named Tanya Lopez, who I had worked with on several occasions when I was in California, and whose church in Downey, California, is not far from the church I was pastor of in Long Beach…
The other day, five men in masks and carrying guns came on to her church’s property, uninvited, unannounced, with no warrant. They arrived in an unmarked van with tinted windows. They were in the parking lot, and started harassing a local man walking through the parking lot. They didn’t ask him who he was. They didn’t ask to see any form of ID. They just grabbed him and were attempting to take him away.
This man was not a member of the congregation, but like us here at First Christian Church, the Disciples church in Downey tries to be a good neighbor to those in the community. It’s like how we have developed a sort of protective attitude toward those who visit our helping shelf.
So Tanya went out to the parking lot, introduced herself as the pastor, and asked these masked gunmen who they were, and what they were doing.
It took a lot of guts for her to do that, I’m sure. I’m nervous just telling you this story. I don’t know how you’ll receive what God has placed on my heart to say today. But Tanya’s bravery in that moment inspires me to tell this story, even though my voice is shaking a bit.
When she asked the gunmen who they were and why they were there, they refused to answer her. They refused to show her a warrant, or present their IDs, although it seemed apparent that they were ICE agents sent by the government.
Tanya told them that they were on private property and that they were not welcome there, but they ignored her.
She then started asking the man they were taking away what his name was, what was his date of birth. Once he was taken away, she wanted to be able to find his family and let them know what happened to him—otherwise his family would never know.
That’s when the agents pointed their guns at her—my friend, the pastor. She was not physically interfering. She was not in any way using violence. She was asking questions, and she was demanding that these men respect her rights and the rights of the man they were taking away. She was demanding justice, just like the daughters of Zelophehad, who we heard about last week, demanded justice.
While this was happening, Tanya’s young daughters, on summer break from school, happened to be there; and they watched all this, horrified. They thought they were about to watch these masked gunmen shoot their mother. They are now traumatized by the event.
What’s particularly troubling about this is that the masked gunmen wouldn’t say who they were or why they were taking this man away. There was no due process, and this man’s family would never know what had happened to him, had Tanya not intervened. (I don’t know if she was actually able to get his name and contact info, or if she was able to contact his family, so they may still not know.) If Tanya hadn’t been there, he would have just disappeared.
Now, I know we don’t all agree on the status of undocumented immigrants in this country. I don’t want to get into the politics of it all. But I hope we can agree that every person should be treated decently, no matter what, and that any action taken against people should be done with transparency, according to the law, and respecting both human rights and constitutional rights.
Even if you think it's right to capture and deport someone who is undocumented, there is a right and a wrong way to do it.
Having masked gunmen come uninvited onto church property, and even threatening the pastor of the church, without identifying themselves or saying why they are taking individuals away by force, is immoral.
One entry in the Diary of Anne Frank reads: “people are being dragged out of their homes…Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”
It’s scary how similar that sounds to what is happening today.
And I’m trying to figure out how God is calling me to respond. I’m praying. And I’m listening for God to guide me.
Some of that guidance, I believe, has come to me as I’ve studied the story of Peter and Cornelius.
See, Peter, like all Jews of his time, believed in the separation of clean and unclean, pure and impure. Certain animals, certain foods, certain occupations, and even certain biological occurrences were considered unclean.
If one could avoid what was unclean or impure, one should try to avoid it.
If it couldn’t be avoided, then one needed to go through a ritual cleansing in order to restore one’s cleanliness and purity.
As a faithful Jew, Peter lived by these rules. He believed that they were rules given to the Jewish people by God, through Moses.
Yet, in his vision, God appears to Peter, presents to him a bounty of foods that are unclean, and tells him to eat up.
Peter, perhaps thinking this was a test, says: “No way! I never eat anything that is profane or unclean!”
And then we come to understand that God is talking about more than just food. God is talking about people. People like Cornelius.
Cornelius was not a Jew. Cornelius was not a follower of Jesus. Cornelius was a soldier in the Roman army. For many reasons, he was a person to be avoided, just as anything profane or unclean was to be avoided.
But how is it that we decide who is unclean, and who is clean? Cornelius, as a soldier in the Roman army, was the oppressor. So that kind of makes sense. The Romans were against the followers of Jesus, so it made sense that the followers of Jesus would be against them.
But it didn’t make sense to God.
God told Peter: “Go to Cornelius.” So Peter did.
And throughout all this, Peter learned that the boundaries we make as humans, between who’s in and who’s out… between those who are good and those who are bad… between people who are clean and who are unclean…
God is always trying to erase those boundaries. God is always working to overcome the divides we’ve set up between groups of people.
Neither Gentile nor Jew, slave or free, woman or man. In the kingdom of God, we are all one.
Even soldiers in the Roman army, if you can believe that.
I imagine that Peter’s first response to this was: What is God thinking?
Because it contradicted one of Peter’s deeply held beliefs. It contradicted what Peter thought he knew about God. After all, the laws about keeping things clean and unclean came from God. Didn’t they?
What was God thinking?
Yet, whatever God was thinking, God seems to have been thinking it a lot. Even though the laws about clean and unclean came from God through Moses, it also seems that God has been working—throughout history—to overturn those laws… or, at least, overturn the way they’ve been interpreted.
Because even in the Old Testament, God can be seen doing what we see him doing today: taking the enemy, the person placed on the other side of the line that separates the good from the bad, and bringing them over to the good side… effectively erasing that dividing line altogether.
God called Moses, an adopted member of Pharaoh’s household, to be the one who rescues God’s people from Pharaoh’s oppression.
God chose Ruth the Moabite to fill an essential position on the family tree of King David, the family tree of Jesus himself, even though Moabites like her were considered evil.
God recognized the goodness of Job, even though Job was from Uz, a place where, it was thought, no good people lived.
God even chose to have his son be from Nazareth, a place where even some of Jesus’ own disciples thought nothing good could come from.
But Cornelius really takes the cake when it comes to all this. Everything the apostles believed told them that a line must be drawn, and a Roman soldier like Cornelius must certainly be on the other side of that line.
Yet God sent Peter across that line, to welcome Cornelius in.
Because of this, I think of what happened to my friend Tanya in her church parking lot. I think of the man who was taken away by ICE agents. I think of all those who have been deemed “illegal,” those who our government has decided don’t belong here, aren’t welcome here… they are unclean in the eyes of many… but are they unclean in the eyes of God?
And I think of the ICE agents themselves. The terror they are inflicting on individuals and on communities… it really isn’t all that different from the terror that Roman soldiers inflicted in the first century.
Cornelius, a Roman soldier, a centurion in the Roman army, is an ICE agent. He’s a leader of ICE agents.
So whether you believe that undocumented people like the man in the church parking lot don’t belong here, or whether you believe that the ICE agents are the ones who don’t belong and who shouldn’t be welcomed…
What does God think?
And how do we follow Jesus’ lead in proclaiming release to the captives and freedom to the oppressed? How do we follow Jesus’ lead in welcoming the stranger AND loving our enemies?
This is hard stuff.
It makes us wonder: What is God thinking?
Part of the challenge, I think, is that we have in our minds that there are only two options: whether we’re talking about Roman centurions or undocumented neighbors or ICE agents, we see only two options. Either they are good, or they’re bad.
Either they are for us (and we should be for them), or they are against us (and we should be against them).
We kind of classify everyone that way, don’t we? We’ve become so divided in this country… that we see everyone as either on the right side (meaning, the same side we’re on), or on the wrong side, the side our enemies are on.
But time and time again, we see God do away with sides completely. God doesn’t choose either of the two options that we think are our only options. God chooses—or creates—a third option: doing away with the sides completely.
And bringing all people together, in one humanity, rooted in love. Bringing all people together in one humanity, rooted in love.
It’s as simple as that.
And, it’s as incredibly challenging as that.
