The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
May 16, 2010
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
This sermon was transcribed.
Introduction to the
Scripture:
The scriptures I’ve chosen have to
do with the theme of immigration. Let me
say just a word about how immigration gets treated in scriptures. Beginning with the Old Testament, the story
of the Israelite people, the Jews, their story is one of constant
back-and-forth across national borders – times when they are exiled from their
land and times when they have land. One
early story of immigration in scripture, of course, is of Moses leading the
Israelite people out of slavery, where they had been enslaved in Egypt. They go on a 40-year journey, where they
still have no land of their own, and finally arrive in the “Promised Land;” but
they don’t get to keep that land. The
Old Testament is full of stories where they’re exiled in the Babylonian Empire and
they go back and forth in their struggles.
Because of that, it makes sense that there are many teachings in those
Hebrew scriptures around “kindness to the stranger.” They often go like the one you’ll hear from
Leviticus today, one of the oldest readings you would hear along the lines of,
“remember that you were an alien;
remember that you were a stranger in
a strange land in Egypt,” or often, “remember that you are,” using the present tense.
This was directed at people for whom this was a distant memory, but the
idea was that because this happened to your ancestors, it is still happening to
you – you are still a stranger – and,
therefore, show compassion.
From the New Testament, Jesus,
obviously, was raised Jewish, and would be familiar with all these scriptures,
and continued to push that topic in his ministry, and spoke often of
hospitality to the outsider or to the stranger.
In this passage, he speaks about the way in which, when you do things
for others, you do things for Him.
Interestingly, Jesus himself had his childhood begin with an immigration
story. After his parents register in
Bethlehem, word comes out that King Herod is going to kill all the newborn baby
boys, so they flee to another land, and Jesus begins his childhood as an
immigrant, himself.
Lastly, another reading from the Old
Testament, the prophet, Isaiah, on the subject of “just and unjust laws.”
Scripture: Leviticus 19:33-34; Matthew 25:35-36, 40;
Isaiah 10:1-2
Leviticus
19:33-34
If
a stranger lives with you in your land, do not molest him. You must count him as one of your own
countrymen and love him as yourself—for you were once strangers yourselves in
Egypt. I am Yahweh your God.
Matthew
25: 35-36, 40
...for
I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a
stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me; sick and you
visited me; in prison and you came to see me.
...I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of
these brothers of mine, you did it to me.
Isaiah
10: 1-2
Woe to
the legislators of infamous laws, to those who issue tyrannical decrees, who
refuse justice to the unfortunate and cheat the poor among my people of their
rights, who make widows their prey, and rob the orphan.
Sermon:
This is often the
case in families, that there will be one side of your extended family that you
will know more about or be closer to, than the other side. This was the case in my own family. On my father’s side, was the Daniel family,
and we just didn’t know much about their genealogy or where they came from before
Tennessee.
On the other side,
was my mother’s side, the Calhoun family – and we knew a lot about that family,
the Calhoun family of South Carolina. Indeed,
we were descended from and related to the Vice President, John C. Calhoun, who
is well-known in American history for succeeding from the Union at the time of
the Civil War, and for his support for the cause of slavery in the South. This family history so shaped us that it took
me a while before I realized that the rest of the world didn’t see history in
quite the way that I did, as a result of my family. For example, I was taught that only very
ignorant and uneducated people ever referred to the “Civil War.” That was an oxymoron in my family, because,
of course, John C. Calhoun had already succeeded from the Union, therefore, it
could not be a civil war because they were already two separate nations. It should be called by people of education
and distinction, the “War Between the States.”
It was a long time
before I realized that everyone else in the country saw it very
differently. Because of that, as a girl
growing up, I came to resent that family heritage. I was not proud to be descended from John C.
Calhoun, who is the standard bearer for supporting slavery – not pleased to be
on the wrong side of that moral issue in our history. Because of that, my mother really desired me
to see the good in our family tree and all the contributions our family had
made. She organized this trip all the
way to Scotland for our extended family to trace our roots in the Calhoun
clan. You can picture this trip in this
big van filled with cousins, aunts, uncles, all from Anderson, South Carolina,
ready to travel to this remote town of Luss in Scotland, which was our
ancestral seat. I naively assumed that
if we came all this way, that family would be waiting for us, and they would
invite us into the manor house, and there would probably be a dinner of some
kind, or at least coffee and cookies. Of
course, we arrived and the manor house was this huge palatial estate that was a
museum. We were greeted with the news
that we could pay our money like everyone else; and of course, Scotland is full
of people who are related to the Calhoun clan, and we were nothing special.
My mother did such a
good job of creating excitement about this trip. We got to see gravestones of our relatives
who we had traced and realized that their graves were marked with dates from
the 1600’s. That was very powerful and
moving. My mother also tried to educate
us about the family and the traditions of Scotland, and had done a considerable
amount of research on the Calhoun clan – finding our tartan and all this kind
of thing. She discovered that our clan
motto was something that sounds like “conocolation,”
which translated to “gather up on the hill.”
So whenever this group of about 15 relatives was gathering anywhere, my
mother would say “conocolation,” and that was
our rallying or gathering cry.
When we
arrived at the ancestral seat, we asked about the rallying cry, “conocolation.” They
told us that it was the phrase our clan was known for, because the Calhoun clan
was the most cowardly clan in all of Scotland; not only that – they were
scoundrels, who made their profit most unethically. It turns out that our clan’s prosperity came
from the fact that they would forge letters in the names of other clans,
driving them to have battles in these valleys, while our rallying cry was
“gather up on the hill,” and hide while these clans battled. The Calhouns would then swoop down and take
the spoils. My mother was very
disappointed in this and kept looking through guidebooks, when finally, I found
that one of our relatives was a member of Parliament. My mother said, “That’s what I’m talking
about – read what it says!” I said, “But,
Mama, what does it mean to be expelled for sexual indiscretion?” My mother said, “Just give me that book!”
I mention this
because, of course, we are all immigrants, no matter how long our families have
been in this country – we were all once strangers in a strange land. Even if you are Native American, scientists
now believe that there was an immigration or migration back then. People are always moving from one place to
another. We have African Americans in
our country today who were forced into immigration by the cruel trade of
slavery. Others came here seeking
economic prosperity. Others came here
fleeing political oppression. Whether
you got here from Ellis Island, or came over on the Mayflower, in a truck, on a
plane, or on a long, hot walk through the desert, everyone in this country has
been an immigrant at some point in the generations. In fact, our church, in the Congregational
tradition, founded by the early Pilgrims and Puritans, who also shaped this
country’s history, came here from England in search of religious freedom,
escaping oppression – the original American immigrants, back in a time when
there was no such thing as a “legal” or “illegal” immigrant.
We’ve entered a much
more complex day in age since then. The
current issue of immigration is perhaps one of the more confusing and baffling
to us in our society. One of the biggest
issues that comes up in immigration is the question of undocumented
immigrants. Often what we forget is that
most immigrants – perhaps three-quarters of them – are here entirely legally
with visas, or on the path to citizenship.
The one quarter who are undocumented, are estimated to be around 12
million. Of that 12 million, five
million of those are children, who are also undocumented. Add to that the fact that if an undocumented
immigrant has a child in the United States, that child is, of course, a
citizen. So there are millions of
children connected to those families as well.
Of those, they estimate that 56 percent of the undocumented immigrants
come from Mexico.
There is an obvious
issue of the burdens that this places on social services and on our already
convoluted and confused healthcare system.
Often the question of taxation comes up, but when you read about this,
it turns out that most undocumented workers are paying taxes. They may, in fact, be using a fake Social
Security number. The irony is that they
may be paying Social Security and paying into Medicare that they will never see
or benefit from. When given the
opportunity, many of these workers who cannot get a Social Security number will
request a tax I.D. number, wanting to pay into the system.
We also have in the
mix, an American economy that absolutely depends upon the undocumented workers. Employers get caught in the middle. This is the dirty little secret that does not
get talked about very much in the debate back and forth, but many of you know
of folks who work in industries that would absolutely collapse if it were not
for the presence of undocumented workers.
They play an integral role in the American economy, whether we admit it
or not.
Add to the question,
the issue of children. Children who are
born here, have citizenship, but if their parents are undocumented, their
parents can be deported and the families broken up. When a mother is deported, she faces the
horrible decision of what to do. Does
she allow her child to stay in the United States and be raised by others, in
hopes of having the American dream, but living separately? Or does she take the child back with her when
she is deported? You can fully
understand why a mother in that situation would come back into the country
again and again and again, risking everything in order to be with the child
that she wants to raise in a better life.
Children who are not
born here, but raised here, often had no decision-making in any of that. They grow up in this country and get to the
point where they want to go to college, and they can’t get any financial aid,
and they’re stuck in a rut of low-wage jobs, unable to make it into the next
level through education. All of this
through decisions they had no part in.
There are a lot of
terms that come up in the debate. Some
people will call undocumented workers “illegals” – taking an adjective and
making it into a noun. In human history,
when we take an adjective and turn it into a noun to describe people, it’s a
way of dehumanizing them – of saying they’re not really people – taking the
people word out of it. Most people who
care about these issues prefer the term “undocumented worker” because no human
being is by nature “illegal.” People do
illegal things, but “undocumented worker” is more respectful to the common
humanity that we all share.
There is the
question of “What is the difference between a ‘migrant’ and an ‘immigrant’”? Migration, or the term migrant, is generally
used to describe someone who makes a move in order to find work on a temporary
basis and plans to move again – often within national borders. In many of our histories, we probably have
family members who were migrant farmers in various places in Europe or in
America, who moved where the work moved.
An immigrant wants to make that one move into a new nation – not on a
temporary basis, but on a permanent basis – to make an entirely new life.
With 56 percent of
the undocumented workers coming from Mexico, the issue of “migrant” versus
“immigrant” is an interesting one, when you stand back and look at this from
the perspective of history. This morning
we were reading texts that are over 10 thousand years old, and we recognize how
fluid national borders are. For the
folks coming over from Mexico, much of America – Nevada, California, Utah,
Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas – were once a part of Mexico. These borders have always been relatively
fluid in terms of commerce, when you take the long view of history.
Add into the mix the
immigrant backlash after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. After that, in our pain as a nation, and in
our terror that this might happen again, I think we slipped into a level of
comfort with racial and ethnic profiling that we would not have tolerated
before that incident. Suddenly, it
became OK with us if someone who looked Arab was pulled aside for extra
questioning at the airport because we were in a state of terror. I think we have allowed that state to let us
become sloppy in our original values as a nation.
Add to the issue the
fact that undocumented immigrant workers provide very cheap labor in this
nation. There is no question that one of
the dilemmas before us is, how do we protect the native-born worker from unfair
competition in this very uneven playing field?
An undocumented worker will accept a substandard working condition and a
much lower wage.
Add into the mix,
the so-called solution of the “guest worker,” which seems to create even more
problems. The guest worker is given a
visa to come into the country in the way of a migrant worker, who will come in
and then leave. Their visa is attached
to working in a particular place, which would be fine – but what if that
employer is an unethical employer? What
if that is an abusive workplace? In that
case, the worker is not able to leave the abusive workplace because the visa is
tied to that specific job. This is an
opportunity to create a substandard position, because no one is going to blow
the whistle on this situation because the worker doesn’t have full protection
under the labor laws. There is the
additional question about the “guest worker.”
If we didn’t have these workers willing to work in these substandard
conditions, might these become better full-time jobs that even had benefits?
The path to
citizenship is the other quandary we find ourselves in. So often people will say, “I have nothing
against immigrants, I just want them to come into the country legally.” I would challenge you to research what it
takes for a Mexican to enter the United States legally and gain
citizenship. It is like the smallest
chance it will happen, even if you do everything right and win the lottery
system. It is almost impossible.
There is the issue
of human capital in American and the way in which the immigration debate affects
our prosperity as a nation and our ability to keep jobs in our country. It’s not just a situation in America where
low-wage jobs are going overseas, but many of you work for companies in which
your R & D department might be moving overseas and leaving the United
States because your company can’t get the visa for the engineers in China that
they need to be part of this program.
It’s not just low-wage jobs that are moving, but high-end jobs as well.
Isaiah
wrote, “Woe to the legislators of infamous laws, to those who issue tyrannical
decrees, who refuse justice to the unfortunate and cheat the poor among my
people of their rights, who make widows their prey, and rob the orphan.” Woe to the legislators of infamous laws.
People
will often say that America is a nation of laws, and we have to respect the
laws that we have in place or everything will unravel. People say, “I don’t mind if people immigrate
to the United States, but they just have to do it legally.” Inherent in that statement is the unstated
assumption that our immigration laws are just and worth following – that our
immigration policies are fair and worthy of that respect.
If
you look at our history of immigration as a nation, it gives us a much-needed
perspective as to what the American people were capable of accepting as fair
and just in their laws related to this complex topic.
Take,
for example, the Indian Removal Act of 1838, that resulted in the “Trail of
Tears,” where 70 thousand Native Americans were uprooted from their homes and
their land at gunpoint. That was the
law.
There
was the Slave Fugitive Act of 1850, where helping a slave find their way to
freedom was a violation of the law. If
you helped a slave, you were violating a law that, clearly, the majority of
Americans accepted and just and fair.
The
Page Law of 1875 is an interesting one.
It prohibited Asian women from immigrating to the United States. Why wouldn’t you want Asian women,
specifically, to come to the
United States? The economy was really
riding on the backs of male Chinese workers, who were coming over here and
doing these jobs for very low wages, and they didn’t want these men to be able
to settle here and form families and have roots. When they didn’t need these Asian workers
anymore, they had the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred any Chinese
people from emigrating to America. That
was repealed as late as 1943, under pressure from our relationship with the
Chinese during World War II. So, up
until 1943, Chinese were not allowed to emigrate.
Meanwhile, the
Executive Order 9066, signed in 1942, gave the U.S. Army the power to arrest
every Japanese-American on the west coast.
In that time period, 120 thousand men, women and children of Japanese
descent were sent to internment camps in isolated regions and kept under armed
guard in one of the saddest stories in American history.
All of this, of
course, was legal.
So often, political,
rather than humanitarian, concerns shape our laws.
When you look at the
very small number of people from Iraq, who have been able to emigrate to the
United States, it is absurd. But the
theory is that if we allowed all those folks to come in who want to come in, we
would have to admit what a mess it was over there.
“Woe
to the legislators of infamous laws.”
Now
we have the situation in Arizona – a place I know is near and dear to many of
the “snow birds’ ” hearts in this congregation.
In that recent law, suddenly, immigrants are supposed to be arrested –
without warrant – if they appear to
be undocumented. Arresting someone for appearing to be undocumented. How can a person appear to be undocumented?
There’s really only one way – and that would be by the color of their
skin. In the interviews around this law,
people said crazy things like, they’d recognize them by their shoes. This was an example of racial profiling being
condoned as legal and by law. This
raises tremendous ethical issues for people of faith. If you’ve got 12 million undocumented
immigrants, and five million of those are children, and it becomes the law that
you are supposed to turn each other in – are we asking our children to turn in their
parents, or family members to turn one another in? We have many states now proposing similar
laws around the country.
When
we criticize immigrants for not following the law, I think it’s important to go
back in our history and see what our record is on some of these laws, and ask
ourselves how history will judge us in this present day.
Furthermore,
I want to go back right now to a time in history, to a time in our country,
when there were no immigration laws – and that’s the time of the Mayflower.
I
told you about the ways different parts of my family got different amounts of
attention. My side of the family on the
Daniel side, we never paid that much of attention to. There was no one famous on that side of the
family, but then our church member, Linda Davenport, as a gift, did my genealogy of the Daniel family, and we found
out that a member of that family came over on the Mayflower. I was thrilled to get this news, partly
because of my spirit of petty competition with my husband. My husband has long known that he is related
to the Captain of the Mayflower, William Bradford, and mentioned this many
times. I was thrilled to say, “Lou, I’m related
to someone on the Mayflower, too!” “His
name is John Howland, and he was born in 1599, and he was a cabin boy. Lou responded, “Well, that’s the last time
anyone in my family got to tell anyone in your family what to do.”
There
is some great documentation, where William Bradford is quoted as speaking about
this particular cabin boy, John Howland, and he called him “a lusty young
man.” John Howland came over here, like
many young men on the Mayflower, if you were a cabin boy or a servant boy, you
were essentially a young man with no encumbrances, no family, no nothing. You agreed to come over, but you had to sign
your life away as a servant until the age of 25. He would come over on the Mayflower, work for
someone until he was 25 as an indentured servant, and then would get his shot
at what we would later call the “American Dream.”
I
want to read from the last will and testament of John Howland, that young cabin
boy, and from the will and testament of his wife. People in the Puritan ages, by the way, lived
almost as long as we do now, just a few years less – they would live into their
70’s and 80’s. They drank beer for
breakfast; but they did a lot of walking, too; at a lot of protein. John Howland, writes his will and testament
in his own hand, and I want you to listen to this excerpt and see the
priorities that he has and what he is focused on.
“Know
all men, to whom these presents shall come, that I, John Howland, Senior, of
the town of New Plymouth, in the colony of New Plymouth in New England in
America, this 29th day of May, One Thousand, Six Hundred and
Seventy-Two, being of whole mind, good and perfect memory, and remembrance, praise
be God, being now grown, aged, having many infirmities of body upon me, not
knowing how soon God will call me out of this world, I do make and ordain these
presents to be my testament, containing herein my last will in manner and
following: I will and bequeath my body
to the dust and my soul to God that gave it, in hopes of a joyful resurrection
unto glory. And as concerning my
temporal estate, I dispose thereof as following...” He goes on to list what he’s going to do with
his fields and his property, and he ends by saying, “I will and bequeath my
dear and loving wife, Elizabeth Howland, the use and benefit of my now dwelling
house in Rocky Nook, in the township of Plymouth aforesaid with the outhousing
land, excepting that meadow and upland that I have given to my sons, Jabez and
Isaac, and during her natural life I wish her to enjoy and make use of and
improve of that land for her own benefit and comfort.”
After
his death, his wife, Elizabeth, wrote her own will; and again, listen to how
her priorities are arranged. “In the
name of God, Amen, I, Elizabeth Howland, of the county of Bristol, in the
colony of Plymouth in New England, being 79 years of age, but of good and
perfect memory, thanks be to Almighty God, call in to remembrance the uncertain
estate of this transitory life, that all flesh must yield unto death when it
shall please God, and do call and constitute and ordain and declare that this
is my last will and testament... First being penitent and sorry from the bottom
of my heart for all my sins past, most humbly desiring forgiveness, for the
same I give and commit my soul unto Almighty God and my Savior and Redeemer in
whom and by the merits of Jesus Christ I trust.
And now for the settling of my temporal estate.” She goes on to list her properties, and
finally concludes in this way, “Item: It
is my will and charge to all my children that they all walk in the fear of the
Lord and in love and peace toward each other, that they endeavor the true performance
of this, my last will and testament, in witness thereof thus said Elizabeth
Howland, have here unto set my hand this seventeenth day of December, One
Thousand, Six Hundred Eighty-Six.”
Elizabeth
and John Howland wanted exactly the same things that we want. They wanted the same things that every
immigrant today wants in that first generation:
to add to the land in spirit and prosperity, to see their children and
their children’s children thrive. They
knew that we are all loved by God as precious, by a God who does not see
national boundaries.
In
this church, the American flag stands below the cross; the denominational flag
stands below the cross – a reminder that one day, when we meet our maker, we
will be rewarded not for how well we patrolled our borders, but how gracefully
we crossed the divides that separate one group of human beings from
another. For in Christ, there is no
Greek or Jew, nor male nor female, nor slave nor free.
We
will be judged not for how well we followed the temporary and sometimes unjust
laws of a temporary nation-state, with borders that will, from the perspective
of eternity, seem awfully fluid and moveable.
No, we will be judged on how well we followed the laws of Jesus Christ.
“...for
I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a
stranger and you made me welcome; ...in so far as you did this to one of the
least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.”
This
is the law to which we must swear our allegiance. I believe that the power of the human spirit
that compels a young Englishman to sign up for duty as a cabin boy, and cross
the ocean for a better life in 1630, is the same spirit that compels a college
graduate from Mexico to work as a hotel housekeeper, cleaning toilets and
making beds, to send money back to her family.
I believe that is the same spirit that led Moses to take the Israelites
out of slavery in search of a promised land.
It is the same spirit in which Mary and Joseph swept their son, Jesus,
into a better and safer life.
That
mighty human spirit is a gift from God that is distributed equally and without
partiality in the hearts of all God’s children.
It will always triumph, ultimately, over cruelty and division, as long
as we who believe in it are willing to stand up, not just for ourselves, but
for our brothers and our sisters, for their dreams, for their families, no
matter the color of their skin, the appearance they make, the town of their
birth, or the road they have travelled.
“Do
this to the least of these and you do it to me.” Let freedom ring. Amen.