I am sometimes asked why so many
of our Methodists have actively opposed Alabama’s controversial Immigration
Law. Many of our leading educators, law enforcement personnel, and business
persons have criticized Senator Beason’s law. From what I’ve seen, the
motivation of many Christians in opposing the law arise from our own experience
with Christ; we were aliens from the love of God, lost, then we were found.
One reason that Christians tend
to move toward those on the boundaries, tend to feel responsibility for the
hungry and the dispossessed is because we worship the sort of God who has moved
toward us while we were famished and out on the boundaries. God looks upon us
all, even us fortunate ones, as the hungry and dispossessed who need saving.
This is just the sort of God who commands, “when you give a banquet, invite the
poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed” (Luke
14:13-14). Here is a God who, for some reason known only to the Trinity, loves
to work the margins inhabited by the poor, the orphaned, and the widowed; the
alien and sojourner; the dead and the good as dead in the ditch. It is of the
nature of this God not only to invite the poor and dispossessed but also to be
poor and dispossessed, to come to the margins, thus making the marginalized the
center of his realm. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it unto the least of
these . . . you did it unto me” (Matt 25:40).
The story “I once was lost but
now am found” is the narrative that gives us a peculiar account of lost and
found, a special responsibility to seek and to save the lost. If we want to be
close to Jesus—and that’s a good definition of a Christian, someone who wants
to go where Jesus is—then we’ve got to go where he goes. Christians go to
church in order never to forget that we were strangers and aliens out on the
margins (Eph 2:19).
“You know the heart of an alien,
for you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exod 23:9). We were lost and then
found. That continuing memory of the dynamic of our salvation—lost then
found—gives us a special relationship to the lost, the poor, and anybody who
does not know the story of a God who, at great cost, reaches far out in order
to bring to close embrace.
- Adapted from The Best of Will Willimon,
Abingdon, 2012.
1 comment:
Bishop: I hope you are following the story--I heard it on NPR--of the President of Fl State defending an undocumented fellow from Tampa who has finished law school and now seeks admission to the State Bar.
When Senator Shelby was in a Town Hall in Leesburg a few weeks ago, I asked him if he had had a chance to discuss the easily googled Mother Jones article Self Deportation featuring Kris Kobach, had had a chance to discuss with Coach Nick Saban's wife. A Devout Catholic, I think she could come into a role as a signature force in this conversation.
I hope you will have a chance to talk to Mrs. Saban before you leave Alabama. Just ride Down US HWY 11 to Tuscaloosa and with divine imagination see if you don't see Bonhoeffer coming the other way.
Post a Comment