|
Home
Peace & Justice Activism
weekly
updates
Worship
Schedule
Sermons
weekly
updates
stART
Contact
History
Directions
Info
Judson House
Links
|
|
A Sermon for Judson Memorial Church
March 25, 2007
Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper
Who's the Illegal, Pilgrim?
Based on the story of the Good Samaritan and Moses being picked up in the reeds
I go to the gym and ride my bike next to a man whose flesh spills out over the bike he is riding. He is very large, easily 300 pounds. He motivates me. When I go to get showered, I see him in the lounge, still sweating, eating a large bag of Doritos.
I attend a large meeting about the impact of technology on book editors and book writers. The room is packed, standing room only. The people from Microsoft drone on and on, but no one is listening; everyone is playing with their Blackberry, doing e-mails. While being informed that technology is everywhere and taking over everything, no one can even look up to hear the message.
These small disconnects take me to the larger one which I want to address today. (Some) Pilgrims are calling immigrants illegal. Native-born people of a few hundred years are calling new arrivals illegal, as though their own passage had all the papers it needed.
That's like eating a bag of chips after a bike ride at the gym. That's like getting out of your pajamas to hear a lecture about the hegemony of technology and never leaving your hands off your Blackberry - or "Strawberry," as a wonderful woman once said to me, erroneously, but at least she was trying to get her identifiers correct. She wanted me to think she was the kind of woman who would never leave her homeless shelter without her "Strawberry." That fiction relates to the other ones. For now, let me focus on the illegal and the pilgrim.
For a long time I have been concerned about the stories under the stories about my country. I know the ground floor line: we came here, worked hard, manifest destiny brought us, we are a new city on a hill, and wow what a great people we are. Then there is the cellar story of stealing the land from the people who were here. I think the word "native" is so polluted that I don't even want to use it, as in "native Americans". I have no idea who was here first and I do not think it matters. Being here first in a world of immigrants is a drag. Being here is what is important, not being first. But we don't say very much about being people who found people here when we got here. We act like we were the firsts and we flatter ourselves with that first-ness every chance we get.
This letter to the University of Chicago alumna magazine helps me say what I want to say:
My family came to America at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1609 and at Plymouth Plantation, Massachusetts in 1620. As old immigrants, we offer the following credo to the new immigrants from then, to the present, and into the future. No matter where people come from, if they behave themselves, work hard, and respect our culture and history, they are Americans. And if we behave ourselves, work hard and respect their history and culture, we are Americans too.
James A. Rogerson, A.M. '69 and Ph.D. '80, written from Charlotte, North Carolina
With all due respect, I think Mr. Rogerson is all wrong. His story is on the ground floor of the narrative. It lacks depth. It oozes superficiality. I like where he comes out, but he gets there for the wrong reasons. Behaving ourselves, working hard, and respecting culture and history are not what makes us "American." Or Good. Being a person who can fish a baby in a basket out of a stream, especially if that baby is not yours or even yours ethnically, makes a person good. Stopping by to assist a fallen Samaritan, especially if you are not a Samaritan, is what makes a person good. The scripture is pretty clear about these crossovers: nationalism doesn't seem to impress God the way it impresses people. If you want to be an American - after being good - that is fine, but nationalism is not what makes people good; nationalism often does just the opposite. Scripture loves to tell stories about people behaving in transnational ways, like the Good Samaritan or Pharaoh's daughter.
Furthermore, Mr. Rogerson implies that lazy immigrants or disrespectful immigrants or immoral immigrants should not be let into the country. That implies something even more diabolical. Would it not mean that bad long-term residents might not be able to be true Americans? In other words, what about my grandfather who drank too much? Does he have to leave because he didn't behave himself?
We get a lot of compliments about our three children. So far not one of them has disappointed us in the do-gooding terms of Mr. Rogerson. I keep hoping for at least one gay child, like all my friends have, but I don't think I'm going to get one. When people make these compliments, they say, "Ah, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." I always object, strenuously. While I love the compliments, I also know the story under the story here. That story is that many good parents have had bad apples. If you want to take credit for your children, you will also need to take blame. I would just as soon lay a bet that one or more of my children will disappoint me. I just know too many people who were better parents than we have been, who have had so-called unsuccessful experiences. There are fewer links between parenting and offspring than people think. Likewise, there is less of a link between good behavior, hard work, and respect and citizenship than people think.
I have similar queasy feelings when people tell me how long they have been friends: "We go way back," they say. I always feel like chopped liver. Can we still be friends or at least connected, even if we only have a few days' history? In other words, what is it with this value of the long term and tested over the short term and gracious? What role does the future play when past is so glorified?
Grace gets short shrift in all these stories, starting with Mr. Rogerson's letter. We don't earn citizenship. We receive it. We don't earn good children. We receive them. We don't earn good friends. We receive them. You may be old and may have outlived all your old friends, but that doesn't mean you are condemned to be alone or lonely.
Which brings me to the story under the story under the story. Grace abounds. Grace is the reality for pilgrims and immigrants. I would so prefer to hear Mr. Rogerson of 1608 and 1620 pedigree say, "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."
I do understand that there needs to be some limits on immigrations, some management of borders. I don't want every green space in this country turned into housing projects. My preferred long-term strategy is to end immigration, restore local markets, and resist globalization that disturbs cultures and families. I'd like to see a stronger provincialism coexist with a stronger globalization. I love what the New Museum just did on "Location, Location, Location", advocating the rise of regional culture in the wake of globalization. I did learn from Microsoft at the little breakfast meeting of Blackberries that the higher the tech, the higher the touch we are going to need. I've heard that before, and it always reminded me of Pharaoh's daughter's hands touching that basket hidden in the reeds.
But until that larger reversal happens, I believe Americans should behave like Samaritans and like Pharaoh's daughters: we should stop by the side of the road and lift abandoned babies out of the water.
I want to emphasize these meanings of grace and their quarrel with the self-justifications. The pilgrims who dare ask another if they are legal are not making a social comment so much as a personal one. Immigration is not a political or social matter at its core; it is spiritual and personal at its core. If you believe the lies of nationalism and self-righteousness, if you believe that you deserve good children or good papers, then you have another think coming. It is just a question of time when you will stand in the need of grace yourself, when you will find that your good behavior and hard work is not enough to keep Alzheimer's or MS or guilt or anger from your door. It is so much easier to live early into grace than to go crashing into it later. It is so much easier to practice grace towards others as a rite of initiation into its power for yourself. When the lies and deceptions catch up with you, you will find your flesh like that of your nation's, spilling over its bicycle, eating a bag of potato chips, wondering how it could ever have become so obese and so self-afflicting.
By the way, there is lots of evidence, particularly from California, that immigrants do work hard, do create wealth for others, don't take jobs from the "native-born," start their own businesses, and own their own homes. In other words, immigrants, like Pilgrims, do work hard. Mostly they behave themselves. But for us, these ground floor issues matter less than those in the cellar and in the penthouse and attic. What matters is the penetration of the entire house with the grace of God for all people: fat people, skinny people, Blackberry and Strawberry people, those who arrived in 1608, and those who will continue to arrive in 2008.
Amen.
|
