Sermon Calls for Repentance for Anti-Immigrant Sins of a Nation
By Chuck Poole
Chuck Poole, a long-time Cooperative Baptist Fellowship pastor, recently wrote a sermon about the way our country has sinned against immigrants and calls for our repentance, after connecting with Elket Rodriguez, the immigration policy expert at Fellowship Southwest.
Chuck Poole retired in 2022 after 45 years of pastoral life, during which he served churches in Georgia; North Carolina; Washington, D.C.; and Jackson, Miss. Chuck has served as a “minister on the street” and as an advocate for interfaith conversation and welcome. He and his wife, Marcia, now live in Birmingham, where he serves on the staff of Together for Hope.
Cruelty is a sin. That such a self-evident truth might need to be said out loud had never occurred to me until my own nation’s recent actions concerning migrating persons.
Our nation is currently conducting a campaign of cruelty against immigrants. From the intentional deportation of undocumented immigrants to third countries where they have no family, to the revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of persons who came to the United States seeking refuge from danger, to the deportation of immigrants when they appear for their Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) appointments, to the effort to annul birthright citizenship, to the ruthless creation and gleeful celebration of “Alligator Alcatraz”, our nation has embraced a campaign of cruelty against migrating families; a campaign of cruelty to which people of faith need to say a clear and united, “No.”
Immigration enforcement committed to public safety would focus its resources on detaining persons who commit violent crimes. But, “rounding up” law abiding undocumented immigrants at worksites, clinics, houses of worship and parks is clearly not about public safety. Rather, it is about intimidation, an institutionalized campaign of cruelty intended to intimidate. One small but painful example of the human cost of this is a church in the border region of Texas (which I learned about, literally as I was writing these words), which, in the past few weeks, for the safety of their congregation, had to cancel their Vacation Bible School for fear of I.C.E. detentions.
What can people of faith do in the face of this campaign of fear against our immigrant neighbors? Here are a few possible responses to this critical moral moment; a moral moment when the soul of our nation is at stake:
1) We can carry with us, everywhere we go, on a small card, some of the verses of scripture which speak to God’s concern for, and our responsibility to, migrating persons. Verses such as Exodus 23:9, “You shall not be cruel to the immigrant”; Leviticus 19:34, “You shall love the immigrant as yourself”; Leviticus 25:23, “Because all the land in the world belongs to God, in the eyes of God we are all immigrants”; Deuteronomy 24:17, “You shall not deprive an immigrant of justice”; Zechariah 7:9-10, “Show kindness to one another, and do not oppress the immigrant.”
2) Those who are able can go to the nearest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) office and register their opposition to the current I.C.E. operations at worksites, schools, parks, clinics and houses of worship. I have made a handful of such in-person visits to the local I.C.E. office, never in a loud or dismissive way, but in that way the Quakers call "gentle and plain”, with words which strive to be as clear as they are kind and as kind as they are clear. There may be many ways to have that conversation. For me, it has been to say that our nation’s current approach to immigration enforcement is a campaign of cruelty against millions of our immigrant neighbors, and it needs to stop.
3) As a small act of solidarity with our Hispanic immigrant neighbors, we can learn at least one important sentence in Spanish. For example, Amaras al inmigrante como a ti mismo. (You shall love the immigrant as yourself.) Or, No oprimiras al inmigrante.(You shall not oppress the immigrant.) Or, En el nombre y espíritu de Jesucristo, hacemos un llamado al gobierno de los Estados Unidos para que se arrepienta de su pecado anti-inmigrante. (In the name and spirit of Jesus Christ, we call upon the United States government to repent of its anti-immigrant sin.)
In the face of our nation’s institutionalized, weaponized, militarized xenophobia, such responses seem so small. But doing nothing is not an option, even if the little we can do feels like standing in an ocean dipping with a thimble. To go about our ordinary church life, saying nothing and doing nothing concerning this moral crisis, would be, to borrow an overused colloquialism, to “fiddle while Rome burns”.
If we wait until we can do something big before we do something small, we will never do anything at all. And in this moral moment of crisis, doing nothing is not an option.
If any corner of our nation has reached the point at which a VBS is cancelled for fear of detention and deportation, then it is time for people of faith in every corner of our nation to call on our government to repent of our present national sin; to say, in words as kind as they are clear, and as clear as they are kind, “En el nombre y espiritu de Jesucristo, hacemos a llamado al gobierno de los Estados Unidos que se para arrepienta de su pecado anti-inmigrante.”
