What Faith Requires

Reflecting on the ongoing national debate over the influx of immigrant children from Central America, columnist and political commentator, George Will, who will never be mistaken as a bleeding heart liberal, said on Fox News Sunday, “We ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America. You’re going to go to school and get a job and become American. We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.’”
Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts proposed that his state offer shelter to a thousand of these children. Massachusetts once sheltered refugees from Hurricane Katarina in military barracks on Cape Cod. Governor Patrick proposed that the state offer the same shelter to the children.
Accompanied by local leaders of Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities, the governor held a news conference in which he explained his decision to bring the children to Massachusetts as a response to the demands of his faith. He quoted lines from the Hebrew Bible in which God commands us to welcome and give shelter to the stranger. He then reminded us that in 1939, the United States refused to shelter Jewish children from Europe, to our lasting shame.
And then he said, “I don’t know what good there is in faith if we can’t or won’t turn to it in times of need.”
Turning to our faith. … What do you suppose it means to turn to faith? Does it mean to gather with those who believe and look like us and bar the door against all else? The Hobby Lobby case and recent efforts by some religious leaders to exempt faith-based organizations from federal laws forbidding hiring discrimination, make faith sound, in the words of Professor Stephanie Paulsell of Harvard Divinity School, “frail and fragile, something that requires protection and exemption, a border that needs patrolling.”
Is religious faith just a way of confirming our prejudices and pre-conceived notions? That’s what it sounds like when I hear people speak of their fear of the Affordable Care Act or their fear of these children, who seem to be viewed as criminals, terrorists and threats, rather than as children who have been victims of unspeakable horror.
Or, as Governor Patrick seems to think, could turning to our faith mean moving beyond our fears and prejudices? I think of Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Jesus’ disciples, the Apostle Paul, all being turned inside out and then set on unexpected paths by their faith.
Could faith actually be a force challenging us to take the risky move outward, to cross boundaries and open doors? One just never knows how far faith may ask us to go.
In reaching out to these undocumented children, we just might hear the call to change our lives and our world in such a way that we can care for all our children. Love and compassion and justice, honoring the dignity of all, is not a zero-sum game in which caring for some means we cannot care for others.
Concerning our need to welcome of these immigrant children, leaders in my denomination have said, “We must have courage in the struggle for justice and peace. Now our resolve is being tested. It is with a good deal of hope and courage that we face this injustice. Let the actions forged by our compassion silence the voices of hatred and fear that ring right now in the ears of these precious children of God.”
Rev. Gene Nelson is the pastor of the Community Church of Sebastopol.