Dear Antioch Family,
As you know, Bend made national headlines this week when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol were deployed to the Crane Shed Commons parking lot where a large group of local protesters were blocking the path of a bus in which two Latino men who had been seized by federal immigration agents were being detained.
There is much that is still unclear about the events that led to the protest so I don’t claim to know all there is to know about these two men or the policies and procedures that were in play on Wednesday. I do know, however, that this is a significant moment in the story of Central Oregon and one that is eliciting a variety of responses from within our community. I want to take this opportunity to share some truths from Scripture that I hope will help us, as a church, respond faithfully in these kinds of moments. Specifically, I want to share some thoughts about what the Bible has to say about immigration.
I know that many Christians see immigration as a political issue and therefore not something that pastors should speak to or that churches should be involved with. I don’t see it that way. I would contend that for Christians, before thinking about immigration from a political perspective we have to consider it from a biblical perspective. A survey from the Pew Forum on Faith and Public Life found that just 12 percent of white evangelicals say their faith is the biggest influence on their views on immigration. You have heard me preach a variation of the following statement in almost every sermon for the past two years: “Our first allegiance is to Christ and his kingdom.” We are Americans, but we are Christians first. So how does our kingdom citizenship transform the way we think about immigration?
I will be the first to admit that the questions and challenges surrounding immigration policy are complex and that faithful Christians can and do come to differing conclusions about the best way to improve our immigration system. I’m okay with that. But Christians don’t just differ on immigration policy; we actually differ on immigrants themselves.
A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that most groups of Americans agree that immigrants are good for our nation and for our society. There’s only one group that disagrees: white evangelicals. At 57%, white evangelical protestants are the only religious group in the country to hold a majority belief that immigrants are a threat to our society and way of life. I’m not okay with that.
We may differ in our views on immigration policy, but the Bible is pretty clear about God’s view toward immigrants and how he desires his people to view the foreigners, sojourners, or aliens in their midst. (In Generous Justice, Timothy Keller argues that the Hebrew word gare, which appears 92 times in the Old Testament, is usually translated as “foreigner,” “sojourner,” or “alien,” but is best translated as “immigrant”.)
In short, God’s heart is for the immigrant. The specific command to go out of their way to care for immigrants is the second most frequent command in the Old Testament of God to His people. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, immigrants are repeatedly referred to with two other groups – orphans and widows – as uniquely vulnerable and worthy of special care and concern (see Psalm 146.9, Zechariah 7.10, Ezekiel 22.7, Malachi 3.5, and Jeremiah 7.6). The first mention of this trio of the vulnerable, to paraphrase Nicholas Wolterstorff in Justice, occurs in Deuteronomy 10 when Moses is reiterating God’s law for his people.
Deuteronomy 10.17-19: For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.
In this passage, Moses gives two reasons that God commands his people to love the immigrants among them:
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- God loves immigrants.
- Given their former slavery in Egypt, they ought to know better than to mistreat foreigners.
While I’m not proposing that God’s laws for the Israelites apply directly to modern Christians, these two reasons given for loving immigrants are threaded into the New Testament and are still relevant today.
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- God’s love for orphans, widows, and immigrants is unchanging and part of being formed into the image of Christ is growing to love as God loves. In the New Testament, followers of Jesus are commanded to love their neighbor as themselves (Matthew 22.39, Luke 10.27, Romans 13.9) and to practice hospitality to strangers (1 Timothy 5.10, Hebrews 13.2)
- Furthermore, as American Christians, our own story is one of immigration – two times over.
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- First, except for the First Nations people among us, we are all descendants of (willing or unwilling) immigrants to the US.
- Second, as citizens of Christ’s kingdom, we recognize that we, too, were once aliens and strangers, outside God’s family, slaves to sin, and without hope, but that in Christ we have been brought near and adopted into the family of God (see Ephesians 2.12).
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So while 57% of white American evangelical Christians have an unfavorable view of immigrants, the Bible has no category for an anti-immigrant Christian. We would do well to repent of failing to love as God loves and ask the Holy Spirit to show us where our hearts are yet to be conformed to the heart of Jesus.
There are, of course, still plenty of questions about what it means to love our immigrant neighbors. Again, immigration is a complex issue. One of the most common questions I’ve heard is, “What about those who came here illegally?” A study by Pew Research Center estimates that 77% of the 44.4 million foreign-born U.S. residents migrated here legally, while almost a quarter (over 11 million) are undocumented. What does it look like to love our immigrant neighbors who are undocumented? (Speaking of which, I would argue that the Christian doctrine of Imago Dei calls us to affirm the dignity and humanity of all people, and that describing a human as “illegal” is dehumanizing and unloving and therefore unChristian.)
Isn’t it illegal to welcome and assist undocumented immigrants? The short answer is, “no”. In their book Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion & Truth in the Immigration Debate, Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang write, “We can love, serve, and welcome immigrants regardless of their legal status, and still be in full compliance with the law… There is no legal requirement or expectation that a citizen report someone they suspect might not be lawfully present in the country.” They go on to quote Pastor Rick Warren: “A good Samaritan doesn’t stop and ask the injured person, ‘Are you legal or illegal?’ – and the state should not expect them to.”
But what about those situations, like Wednesday in Bend, when protesters, many of them claiming to be Christians and even clergy, were interfering with ICE and Border Patrol’s efforts to extract the two men from the bus? Aren’t Christians supposed to obey the laws of the land? The passage of Scripture that is frequently cited to make this case is Romans 13.1-5, which begins:
Romans 13.1: Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.
To be sure, this instruction given by the Apostle Paul to the church in Rome has bearing for Christians today, but its meaning and application have to be considered within context.
First, we have to consider the fact that Paul wrote this letter to the Romans while he was in prison for breaking the law! He had been illegally proclaiming the Good News that Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord. So clearly Paul doesn’t intend for his readers to prioritize obedience to civil laws over obedience to Christ.
Next, we have to consider this passage within the context of the greater canon of Scripture. Does this single injunction by Paul to submit to civil authorities somehow outweigh and negate the dozens of commands (of Yahweh and Jesus) to place the welfare of the immigrant among us ahead of our own welfare? Throughout church history, Christians have understood that if a government forbids what God requires or requires what God forbids, Christians cannot submit, and some form of civil disobedience becomes inescapable.
Of course, this isn’t a license for Christian lawlessness. As our friend Eugene Cho writes in Thou Shalt Not Be a Jerk: A Christian’s Guide to Engaging Politics, Paul’s exhortation in Romans 13 can be summarized, “Always obey the law, most of the time.” Until Christ returns to once and for all right the wrongs of this world (and of our nation), as his church we are called to demonstrate his love, mercy, and compassion to the immigrant for whom God so repeatedly declares his love and commands us to do likewise, and there may be times when that requires us to choose obedience to Christ over obedience to the law.
In sum, I would argue that one of the most Christian things we can do today is to welcome and love all the immigrants in our midst without regard for how they got here.
Finally, dear church, I want to extend to you an invitation to examine how closely your heart aligns with God’s. We have a phrase to describe the deep, inherent bond of love that a mother has for her child: a maternal instinct. I’d like to suggest that God has a “migrant instinct” and he wants us to have one too. Like a mom’s instinctive energy and intuition to protect and care for her kids, Christ’s heart within us ought to beat for the immigrant. When you hear of an event like Wednesday’s – acknowledging that we may not have the whole story – what’s your first instinct? To whom is your heart most easily drawn? Is your first thought toward our migrant sisters and brothers one of affection and admiration? Or are you among those who see them as a threat to your comfort and way of life? I am not aware of a single place where Scripture suggests God would have his people side with the dominant economic, military, or political powers, but dozens upon dozens that say we are to defend and care for the migrant, the powerless, the poor, the vulnerable.
I long for Antioch to be a church where the lordship of Christ is unopposed; where our allegiance is pledged to Jesus alone. So we repent of our adulterous affairs with the anti-Christ forces of white supremacy, nationalistic idolatry, and radical individualism. We inhabit this world as visitors from the future – citizens of an already/not-yet kingdom. We bear witness to the new world that’s sprouting up beneath our feet and we don’t fit nicely into any of the boxes this one wants to put us in. We are Americans, but we are Christians first.
I’ll close with this word from Religion and Politics in America’s Borderlands by Latino theologian Orlando Espín: “Welcoming the stranger (the “immigrant,” as we would say today) is the most often repeated commandment in the Hebrew Scriptures, with the exception of the imperative to worship only the one God. And the love of neighbor (especially the more vulnerable neighbor) is doubtlessly the New Testament’s constant command… Whatever the cause of immigration today, there can be no doubt as to where the Church must stand when it comes to defending the immigrant.”
Yours in Christ,
Pete
Click here to see videos of various Antioch speakers addressing issues related to immigration over the years.