Here’s a sermon I gave at the seminary today, drawing from my experiences on the border over J-term:
Sermon – Matthew 25:31-46
Seminary Chapel, 2/4/08
Matthew 25:31-46
[Jesus said,] “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
This is the gospel of our Lord.
Praise to you, O Christ.
In May of 2001, twenty-six Mexican men tried to cross the border into the United States through the desert in southern Arizona. After getting lost and enduring days of 110 degree heat with no water, they were abandoned by their guide. By the time the Border Patrol found them, only twelve men were left alive. Fourteen had died in the desert. The book, The Devil’s Highway, records the testimony of one of the survivors:
“We were in the trees, trying to hide from the sun.
And they would yell to me, there’s a guy dead over here.
By Monday we were all dead.
Out there, I saw people in despair.
I saw them without water.
Some of them just died of desperation.
Some of them lost their minds.
You could hear them screaming.
Some fell all alone.
I heard one guy screaming, daring the Border Patrol to come find him.
Stupid things like that.
He was desperate.
He started singing.
We were drinking urine.
We were ripping open cactus.
Some of the boys were saying you could cut the thirst with a cactus.
The majority of them died that day.
I was going to die this morning.”
Pause.
Friday morning two weeks ago, the Border Patrol search, trauma, and rescue team found a five-year-old Mexican girl alone, lost, and crying in the mountains southwest of Sierra Vista, Arizona. Her stepfather, who was trying to cross the border illegally, was caught by Border Patrol agents the day before, and he told them that his daughter was with the guide, who had escaped arrest. When they found the guide alone, they realized that five-year-old Candy Gabriela Barranco-Gonzalez was alone in the wilderness. They eventually found her by following the sound of her crying. Deserted by her guide, Candy had survived a night with temperatures dropping to about 20 degrees and she was suffering from the initial stages of hypothermia.
Pause.
Every day, the main plaza in Altar, Sonora is filled with people getting ready to cross the U.S./Mexico border somewhere in the desert. It is here where they wait for their guides, or coyotes, who are their only hope for crossing safely. These people don’t want to leave their homes, their families, but in a country where minimum wage is five dollars a day, cost of living is often higher than in the United States, and the combination of a corrupt Mexican government and opportunistic American businesses exploiting the conditions in Mexico make it impossible for them to provide for their families, to stay on their land. In the United States, where there is a constant demand for cheap labor at jobs that Americans won’t do, these folks can earn in an hour what in Mexico they would have earned in a ten hour day. If they were to cross the border legally, they would have to wait about fifteen years for their documents. Since the crossing is becoming more and more dangerous, they often have to sell everything they have, take out loans at high interest rates just to be able to afford the services of a coyote who will abandon them in a second if they start to lag behind the group.
Since September of 1998, more than three thousand people that we know of have died in the desert, trying to cross into the United States. Because of the desert conditions, the heat, the dryness, the animals, there are likely to be hundreds more we have never found. U.S. strategies like Operation Gatekeeper, designed to keep undocumented people from crossing into the United States, steadily close off the safer urban routes into this country, leaving only the desert. As these strategies have been put into practice, more and more people have died trying to cross the desert. This country’s border strategy planned specifically for these deaths to happen, for the only path into the country to be one of “mortal danger,” so that human suffering and death might act as a deterrent, keeping people out. And it hasn’t worked. Meanwhile, authorities are beginning to arrest and detain humanitarian aid workers, saying that by preventing the deaths of undocumented people in the desert, aid workers are encouraging others to cross.
Pause.
Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you?
Pause.
It’s late morning in the Baboquivari Mountains in the desert of southern Arizona. Mike Wilson, a member of the Tohono O’odham Nation, drives along a dirt road that cuts through the reservation. The back of his pickup truck is filled with old milk jugs full of water, a large wheelbarrow sitting crookedly on top. By law, humanitarian aid workers who are not members of the tribe are not allowed on tribal lands, so as a member of the tribe himself, Mike is the only one putting water out on the reservation. He stops at one of his water stations, replaces the empty jugs, gets back in his truck, and drives to the next one. Sometimes he finds that members of the tribal government have slashed his water jugs, protesting the aid he gives because it might encourage more migrants to cross tribal land. If you ask Mike why he does what he does, in the face of all the opposition, he will tell you that no one deserves to die because they lack a drink of water. And then he will say, “I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.”
Pause.
What stops us, we who are far north of the Baboquivari Mountains, what stops us from learning about and acting on situations like this? What stops us, as Christians, from recognizing Jesus in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger? Jesus’ meaning seems so crystal clear in this passage—why, then, did so many of the people we met down on the border say, “Where is the church?”
The sad truth is that our culture teaches us to be goats. In the fear after September 11, 2001, our culture tells us not to welcome, but to fear the stranger, especially if that stranger has brown skin, or speaks a different language, or prays to a different god. In its striving for the American Dream, our culture teaches us to feed ourselves, not the hungry. In all things, corporate culture tells us to go to sleep, to narrow our focus to our own desires, to ignore our natural and God-given capacity for genuine self-giving love, care, and concern. And the church is not immune. Fear of negative reactions in the congregation keeps pastors silent on controversial topics like immigration. Building programs and the relentless focus on numbers keep the church preoccupied with its own well-being, not the agony of God’s children as they struggle for a life of dignity, both in southern Arizona and right here on our doorstep. The church in the United States sleeps soundly through violence, upheaval, ecodestruction, militarization, and human rights abuses on a global scale.
I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me.
Friends, we can’t afford to sleep. It hurts to see evil on this scale, it’s scary to think of confronting it, and we feel so small in the face of such complicated and horrible things, but if we are to be faithful to Christ, we must see those members of his family that are suffering.
The problem feels so huge, but I think that Mike Wilson has the right idea. There are people dying in the desert, and although he may not be able to make huge global changes to fix the reason they cross, he can fill his truck with gallon jugs of water and drive them out to the places where they will be needed, and so that’s what he does. Jesus doesn’t tell us to wave our magic wands and make it all better—he tells us to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, and visit those in prison. I think that’s something that we who are the body of Christ can handle, don’t you? It may not be glamorous, we may not see immediate results, but it’s the only way these things get done.
On the south side of Tucson, Arizona stands the Casa Maria, an organization run by Catholic workers. On a vacant lot scattered with cactus sits the soup kitchen, a tiny building surrounded by picnic tables and packed with people who spend a few hours a day making soup and packing free lunches for anyone who needs them. Around the corner is the free clinic, two rooms staffed by nurses who give of their time and knowledge to people who are afraid that if they go to the hospital, they’ll be deported.
On a dusty street in Altar stands CCAMYN, a shelter for migrants that provides them with food, a place to sleep, and education about the dangers of the desert. The staff there documents human rights abuses and tries to convince people to stay in Mexico. Every week they fend off coyotes and drug traffickers who try to sneak into the shelter, and every day they walk the plaza in Altar, getting the message out that there’s help for people who are desperate.
These are the things we do to keep the darkness at bay. These are the things we do to welcome Christ in every stranger. This is the response of faith to a world that is broken. May we all have the courage to make that response with all of our hearts. Amen.
