Bible Facts and Thinking Biblically

Several years ago I had just returned from spending about ten days in Guadalajara, Mexico teaching indigenous preachers for Seminary of the Nations. It was a great trip where I was privileged to teach a great group of preachers.

The Sunday after I returned, I was scheduled to speak at a church for a special occasion. In the sermon that day, in an almost aside comment, I said, “It amazes me that people will pat me on the back for giving up time to go teach in Mexico, but the loudest anti-immigrant voices I hear are from people who call themselves Christians.”

From the comments at the door that morning, you would have thought I had desecrated the communion table! Every one of the stereotypical complaints about immigrants you can imagine were said to me. By the way, I’ve never been asked back! That day continues to haunt me – not in any sense of embarrassment over what I said, but in wonder about how followers of Jesus could be so anti-immigrant. After all, we were “strangers and aliens” but in Christ have been adopted into the commonwealth of the people of God. (Read Ephesians!)

The first Huxford to come to the New World was Samuel Huxford (great name!) who was a ship’s captain who apparently made frequent journeys to the northeastern area of what would become our country. In 1682 he married a woman in Massachusetts. Their grandson, Samuel III eventually made his way to Charleston, where he died in 1785 and was buried in St. James Goose Creek Parish Cemetery. Samuel I and his wife Esther Norton were immigrants – and I would guess dreamers.  No one ran them out of town – Massachusetts or South Carolina.

I understand that things today are greatly different than they were almost 350 years ago when Samuel I came to the New World. Our constitution and federal government didn’t even exist at that time. But there were people here and my ancestors coming changed things drastically for those who were already here.

The politics of immigration is an issue that equally bright people will see differently. I have friends who are all but “open borders” in their approach and other friends who can’t wait for the wall to be built, assuming that means the flow of immigrants from Central and South America will stop. I am also comfortable with the idea that the federal government has a role in establishing border security, immigration policy, and the execution of whatever policies we create.

But as a follower of Jesus I can’t be comfortable with the unjust, nonhumane, and otherwise moronic way immigration policy seems to work right now. In recent decades, no president, regardless of party, and no congress, regardless of which party controlled the agenda, has done anything significant about immigration. The extremists on either end of the spectrum have been playing hard ball in a way that says “my way or the highway” and we end up with what is said to be 800,000 young adults who are caught in the DACA nightmare. We elected those presidents and those members of congress. We are, ultimately, responsible for their decisions!

You might say “well, their parents shouldn’t have come with them illegally in the first place.” Perhaps. But, we allowed it to happen and most of us have benefited from the hard work for limited wages the parents of most Dreamers did to make ends meet. There is a reasonably good chance that the parents of some of these Dreamers picked the fresh vegetables and fruit I love having available at Kroger or Publix. There is an equally good chance some of their parents helped build buildings I enter every day and the list could go on. How hypocritical I would be to adopt the hard right’s “send them home” point of view.

That of course doesn’t even bring into the picture the fact that God has commissioned me to love Him and love my neighbor! I guarantee you that the attitude Jesus’ Jewish listeners had toward that Samaritan who helped the man left for dead was not that different than the hard right’s attitude about immigrants. This is, remember, the story where Jesus defines who might be our neighbors.  Try retelling that story with your congressman being the priest, your state senator being the Levite, and a Dreamer being the Samaritan. Do that and you might get a sense of how the first hearers felt about the story. This is a good lesson in how dangerous it is to sanitize the gospel to suit our political party’s platform.

Even to Israel, living under the Law, God demanded concern for the sojourners among them. (Deuteronomy 10:18, 19 for example) God’s reminder to Israel as He instructed them to care for the sojourner was that they too were once sojourners. In the biblical concept of grace (both from the Old and New Testaments) there is this sense of not forgetting the place from which we were rescued. It is that sense of grace that can help better shape our responses to those around us in need. “Don’t forget that you were once sojourners . . .” changes everything!

In Romans 9-11, some of the more challenging words in Scripture from my understanding, Paul makes it pretty clear that as a Gentile, I am grafted on to a stump that I could not accomplish without the grace of God being made real in my life through the gospel. God forbid that I should ever forget that or fail to allow that to be a controlling principle in how I behave in Christ. Contrary to what some would suggest, there is no place in Scripture where what we believe can be separated from how we behave!

The “Exodus-oriented God” of the Old Testament came to us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and we learn His story in the four gospels as the model of what God calls us to be in Christ. In John’s version of that story Jesus reminds His disciples that He was sending them out into the world in the same way God had sent Him to Israel. (John 20:21) In Matthew’s story, it is that we are to make disciples of all the nations. (Matthew 28:18-20). What if, instead of viewing immigrants as curses, we chose to thank God for bringing them our way so that we could more effectively fulfill His commands to be Jesus to the world and make disciples? He has been moving people around since at least Genesis 3 – we shouldn’t be surprised that He might be bringing people our way right now!

Jesus all but ignores government. He is unwilling to seek to overthrow Rome, deny Rome’s role, or even create a Jewish version of Montana militia men out in the wilderness. Paul is comfortable telling Roman believers to respect the role government has. A one sentence summary of Romans 13:1-7 might be “stay under Rome’s radar and be Jesus to others.”  Nothing here is to suggest government doesn’t have a role – but rather to suggest government can’t define my role. I’m grateful I live in a nation where I can object without fear of being executed. 

But followers of Jesus cannot let government dictate our behavior. For Paul, the very person who tells us to respect government, that ultimately meant dying at the hands of the very government whose role he says respect. That’s not contradictory – just reality. 

Most mornings I do a forty minute walk in our neighborhood before leaving for work. About a mile or so into the walk, I pass a house that has two flags. One is the flag of the United States. It is on a pole probably 25 feet or so tall. The other is a Christian flag, hanging at an angle on one of the posts of the front porch. Now that it is dark when I walk, I’ve noticed that the US flag has a spot light shining on it and the Christian flag doesn’t. It looks like the Christian flag has bowed down to worship the US flag. I don’t know this person, but from the political signs he puts in his yard, the decorations on his SUV and the trailer with a huge US flag he often pulls behind the SUV – I’m confident he wants a wall. That image speaks loudly to the unfortunate place so many evangelicals seem to occupy right now. 

That’s what happens when our faith comes in second to our patriotism. It is in that kind of mental place that we can be rabidly anti-abortion on the one hand, but not concerned about young adults whose presence in the US was no more their call than it was their call to be conceived. It’s in that kind of mental place that we can say the Jesus story is about redemption, but insist that district attorneys and judges send as many people to prison for as long as possible in the name of justice. It is in that kind of mental place that we can get comfortable thinking that our confession of Christ is second to our pledge of allegiance to the flag of the US. It is in that kind of place that we can routinely judge homosexual misconduct as somehow worse than heterosexual misconduct. It is in this mental place we can talk about Bible facts and forget our pastoral role as royal priests in the kingdom of God.

Being in that place should make us very uncomfortable. We can change that uncomfortable place for the kingdom of God by making sure that Jesus trumps the flag, the law, the political party we choose, and every other choice we make. Every single time.

That’s the difference in knowing Bible facts and thinking biblically.