Immigrants and the Bible | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

1:38 At this time, I'd like to invite you to take out of your bulletin your Grow, Pray, and Study Guide, your GPS. You're going to find that our scriptures are there, and then there's a place to take notes and write down the things you'd like to remember and reflect upon in the coming week. Today, I'm going to be sharing with you a number of statistics and a little bit of history, as well as a focus on a couple of scriptures. I'd love for you to write down the things you'd like to remember and reflect upon. On the back side, there are daily scripture readings. They all tie back into today's message. I'd like to invite you to read the Bible daily on your own. If you need a Bible, we'll provide you one for free. Out in the narthex, stop by the connection point, and we'll be happy to give you a pocket testament or a full Old Testament and New Testament. Well, we're studying the issues that divide. Last fall, we sent out an email to the congregation. We asked, what of the 17 issues that people are thinking are going to be key in the next election year, what of those issues are most important to you? Which ones would you like to hear? A sermon in which we'd ask, how does the Scripture and our Christian faith speak into this? And by the way, when we take critical issues, moral issues or public issues, societal issues, and we ask how does our faith tie into those, what we're doing is Christian ethics.

2:40 And so we asked you this. We had room for four. And of the 17, the top four are the ones that are the subject of our sermon starting this week and the next three weeks. Today we're going to talk about immigration and the Bible. Next week we're going to include refugees in our sermon on radical extremism, or excuse me, Islamic extremism or radical Islam. And so next week we'll talk about refugees, because most of the talk about refugees today has revolved around Muslim refugees. We'll focus on that next week. We're going to focus today on immigration reform, and specifically we're going to talk about the key issue related to immigration reform, at least the one that comes up most often, is the undocumented immigrants in the United States. So we're going to be talking about this today, and then how our faith might shape our response to these things. NPR recently noted that immigration is shaping up to be one of the most contentious and emotional topics in the 2006 presidential race. And as I've watched the debates on both sides, but particularly as I've listed the debates where this issue has come up, it's as though for some of the candidates, we're looking at attracting voters by being as hardline as possible on the issue of undocumented immigrants in our country.

3:46 And so even the candidates themselves in the same party, well, you supported this measure in immigration. Well, you didn't support this measure. And so really, even among the people in the same party, you know, there has been what's considered a deficit for some who supported immigration reform in the past and others who are championing the idea of taking a really hard-line stance on immigration. So I want us to spend some time trying to understand this issue and then how our faith might speak to this. Where you've heard about this most recently is in the debates, there's talk about building a wall or a fence across the 1,989 miles of the Mexico border with the U.S. There was last year President Obama who issued an executive order on immigrants, in particular one that would postpone the deportation of families, immigrant families, and then that was challenged in the courts and that was held up in the courts for a long time, and I'm really not sure how that resolved itself except I think that the executive order was stayed permanently or indefinitely at this point.

4:43 Then there was conversation about perhaps changing the constitution so that people who were born on American soil were no longer automatically citizens, but instead they would have to have parents who were citizens in order to become citizens. So these are some of the kinds of conversations that have gone on, as well as sort of characterizing who these illegal, undocumented, or unauthorized immigrants are in our country. So let's think about this for a few minutes, and just a bit of knowledge that we already have, just a question I guess I'd begin with. If you are here and you are not from immigrant stock, would you please raise your hand?

5:20 Okay, I see one. Now, as you probably know, virtually everybody who's here in America is from immigrant stock, right? Including the Native Americans who traveled here 13,000 years ago on a land bridge. They actually came from across the Bering Strait. This is a copy of Google Earth. And during the last ice age, of course, the waters receded as the ice began to pack, and people came across the Bering Strait, traveled on into North America sometime around 13,000 years ago, give or take. And so really, even our Native Americans are people who were immigrants from another place going back to the last ice age. But most of us, our forebears came over in the last 300 years. 1620, of course, was the Mayflower in the Plymouth Colony. But after that, hundreds of thousands came over in the 17th century, the 18th century, millions in the 19th century. How many of you come from Irish backgrounds? I learned this week that 10% of all Americans have Irish background.

6:16 There are more Irish Americans than there are Irish Irish in Ireland. And how many of you are from German background? French? Italian? Russian? Mexican? Spanish? I see a few hands going up here or there. You know, all of us came from somewhere. Our forebears came from someplace else. We know this. We're a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants. We are a melting pot that has brought together all of these various peoples into one new people, right? This is who we are and who we've always been. This was reiterated for me this last week. My mom turned 70 on Thursday, and she'd never been to New York City, and that was a dream of hers to go to New York City. And so my siblings and I took mom to New York for a few days. We did the things you normally do. We went to a couple of Broadway shows. We went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We went to the 9-11 Museum, and I'm going to talk about that next week and show you some pictures from the 9-11 memorial. And then one of the things my mom really wanted to do was to go to the Statue of Liberty. How many of you have been to the Statue of Liberty?

7:11 Right? It's iconic. I mean, it represents America in so many ways. And so, you know, the day it was about, I think it was about 20 degrees. The wind chill made it about 5 degrees. And we get out on the ferry to go out to Liberty Island. I started shooting this video on my camera as we were going out. And what I was thinking of as I was looking at this was all the people who approached on steamships, starting in 1886 when Lady Liberty was completed. and this was their first thing that they saw of America, was the Statue of Liberty. And these people had risked and given up everything to come for a new life in America. What did that mean to them? You know, it moved me to tears thinking about these people seeing Lady Liberty standing there. And as we got off on the island and we began to walk around, I was reminded of Emma Lazarus' poem that is etched inside the Statue of Liberty, right? It's words, at least some of them you're very familiar with, the New Colossus. And she wrote this poem in 1883 to fund the building of the pedestal. You see, the French gave us the Statue of Liberty, but they didn't give us the pedestal to mount it on.

8:06 And so we had to raise money for that. There was a capital campaign, and Emma Lazarus wrote this for the campaign. But it became so associated with the Statue of Liberty, it was placed inside Lady Liberty and shows up on a plaque outside as well. And you remember these words. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. What a beautiful ideal of who we are as Americans, what we stand for and who we've been. But we have these great ideals, but how we actually feel inside is sometimes a little different from the ideals. And that's always been true for Americans. Every generation who was already here was a little nervous about the generations who were coming here, right? Starting in the 1700s, probably in the 1600s, but certainly 1700s. You got into the 1800s And you begin to really see this as the Irish are coming. So in the middle of the 19th century, the 1850s, the Irish are fleeing Ireland because there's not enough food to eat in Ireland.

9:05 There's a famine going on. You remember this in your history classes. And so they came to America. And you know when the Irish showed up, of course the journey itself was perilous so that many of the people died on the way over. They called the ships from Ireland coffin ships because there were so many who were already dead on the ships when they arrived here. And when they arrived, many of them were uneducated. They were of the lower classes. they were hungry. And what they did is what immigrants have always done who came over like this. They took the hardest jobs anybody had to offer, right? The jobs no one else would take. They're building the sewer systems and these other kinds of things in New York and in the Northeast and other parts of America. But people were a little nervous about the Irish. And you know, there were some people who began to call them names. They began to talk negatively about the Irish. They began to be concerned about so many of them coming. Some even came to believe that this was a plot on behalf of the Pope to take over America by Catholics. And so there was a party that was formed about that time. They called themselves the Native American Party, which meant anybody was born. They didn't mean real Native Americans. They meant people who were born in the last century here in America. Or later on, they just called themselves the American Party. But the commonly used term for them was the Know-Nothing Party. The Know-Nothing Party was intent upon making sure that Catholics did not get elected to office. Because if Catholics got elected to office, this was the step towards taking over the primarily Protestant country with Catholics. You see what this looks like, and we have a word for what this is. We call it xenophobia, from the Greek word xenos, which means stranger or alien or foreigner, and phobia, you recognize. This is a fear of strangers, and we begin to assume the worst about them.

10:37 So they took the hardest jobs that you could take, but there was still a great fear about the Irish as they were coming over. Then it was the Chinese. So the Chinese were welcomed with open arms to begin with. I mean, people were nervous about them because they looked different. They spoke a different language, but they worked hard. And you see, people were fleeing China because of the regime in China in the mid to late 1800s, and they were welcomed in America. In fact, there was a special envoy to invite Chinese to come to America because they would take the jobs no one else wanted, and that included building the railroads. And so the Chinese were building the railroads across America, but when the railroads were finished, people weren't so excited about the Chinese being here anymore. 14 million had come to America during that period of time. And so by 1882, there was a great fear of Chinese, and this is true in America and in Europe, and they began to be known as the yellow peril, the yellow peril. This is one of the signs that was posted for an event. Chinese? No, no, no. Come to 10th and A Street at 730 Monday evening and express your opinion on the Chinese question. Shall we have Chinese? No, no, no. And the government listened, right? We talked about this last week that what happens in Congress is often a reflection of what's going on in our own hearts back home, right? Because Congress people need to get elected, and they represent us.

11:49 And so Congress went back and they voted in 1882. The Immigration Act of 1882 was called the Chinese Exclusion Act. And the Chinese Exclusion Act, this is the first time that I recall in American immigration policy. See, before that, anybody, if you've made it here, you could stay here. Suddenly, we were going to restrict certain groups. And in this case, Chinese were not allowed to come to America anymore, except under extenuating circumstances. And that law persisted for 60 years. For 60 years. Now, in the 1920s, it wasn't the Chinese that were feared, or the Irish. At this point, it was the people from Russia who were fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, and what happened in the aftermath of that, the Soviet Revolution. And so there were masses that were coming up from Russia. They didn't speak our language, but the great fear was, what if there are Bolsheviks who want to lead revolution, who are among these people who are coming here to America? What if they're really coming to take over our country and to turn it into a Soviet state?

12:50 And so this was called the Red Scare, and Americans were really afraid of many of these Russians who came, and not just of Russians, but also of other people from Eastern Europe and then of Southern Europe. And there was a whole class of immigrants that were now called undesirables. And so American policy was put in place in the Immigration Act of 1924 to limit the number of undesirable aliens from coming into the country. Among the undesirables were Greeks, Italians, Czechs, Spaniards, Jews, and of course those coming from Russia and the Ukraine. Now it's interesting, one of the senators, and this was supported by both parties and passed by a majority in Congress, it was deemed to be the appropriate immigration policy of the time. One of the senators, Senator David Reed, noted that the aim in this law was keeping the American stock up to the highest standards. He wasn't talking about the stock market. He was talking about the genetic pool in America and keeping it up to the highest standards by eliminating or limiting, it was a severe limiting and constraining, of these undesirable immigrants. The ones who were welcome with open arms continued to be the Germans, the French, and the British. They were welcome because they looked like us. Well, in 1965, President Johnson eliminated this, and not just President Johnson, the Congress recognized that having quotas based upon or limitations based upon someone's race in coming to America was inappropriate. And so the Congress voted, and both parties and both houses of Congress approved a legislation, a 1965 Immigration Act that would remove race from being the contributing factor towards deciding who got to come into America or not.

14:30 So important was this bill and so tied into immigration that Congress and the President met on Liberty Island to sign the bill into law. This is a picture of the meeting there when President Johnson was making his speech about this. And I listened to his speech this week as he was talking about this. And part of what he said about the 1924 law and what he was doing now, he says, we are now correcting a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American nation. But you see, in 1924, it didn't seem like a cruel and enduring wrong. It seemed like the right thing to do in 1924, only in hindsight did people say, what were we thinking when we acted in this way? Johnson then noted that while the days of unlimited immigration, where anybody could come to America, were over with, there was a fear that there wouldn't be enough jobs for everybody if you continued to allow everyone who got here to stay here. They did change the way in which people were allowed to stay, the issuing of permanent residence status, And it became the policy that we still have to this day.

15:25 And that is that people who came here had to already have a family member who were here as a U.S. citizen or a legal resident. And so we would allow family members to come over. We would allow people with special skills or who were willing to work in jobs that you couldn't find Americans to fill those jobs. They could come, and they had special permission to come. And also those who are refugees are seeking asylum. And to this day, those three are the categories and the ways in which we determine who is allowed into our country and who is not allowed into our country. I want to just say again that part of the reason why I think this is an important topic for us to talk about when it comes to Christian ethics is that today the way we talk about immigrants, the natural fear that we have of those who want to come into our country, the fear that we have that there's not going to be enough jobs for all of us, and in particular when we talk about undocumented immigrants, the possibility that we might, with a broad brush, say, well, all of those people are like this, or to speak in harsh terms, or to have harsh rhetoric about people who are living in our midst, working in our midst, whose children are living in our midst.

16:20 this does not strike me as a Christian ethic, regardless of which party you're a part of or how exactly you come out on immigration reform. Now, here's part of what I also understand about immigration, is I thought I knew a fair amount about this, and then I spent 40 hours in the last month reading about immigration reform, and I realized how little I knew. And I think that's true probably for most of us, and even people who are experts in the field say it's complicated. The laws are really complicated, and immigration reform is about figuring out how to make sure our laws line up with our heart and our character and what needs to happen today, and also how we treat the people who are already here, who are here without authorization. So let's talk about undocumented aliens for a few minutes. Who are these people, and how many are there? And what we think today is there's about 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the United States today. And let me just mention to you that that number has been declining for some time. This is a chart from the Pew Center, and showing that the rapid increase in the number of immigrants up through 2007, and then starting in 2007, the number of immigrants actually began to decline.

17:17 So today, we have, we think, 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in this country. Who are they? Well, among those, you can bring that down, among those undocumented immigrants, we have maybe 40 percent who came here legally. These are people who had a work visa, they had a tourist visa, they had a student visa, and they overstayed their welcome, and they continue to stay here. Now, part of the challenge is if you overstay your welcome by six months, the penalty is that you're deported if you're caught, you're deported, and you can't come back for three years. Now, why does somebody stay after, you know, after their, you know, visa's expired? Well, I talked to somebody in our congregation who stayed after his visa had expired. He was a high school student who was over here. And, you know, part of it was his friends were here. Part of it was he didn't want to go home. Part of it was he'd fallen in love. And he probably wasn't going to win the lottery when it came to getting a resident card. You see, there's more people who want to come to America every year than we have the ability to issue or the willingness to issue green cards to. And consequently, there's a lot of folks, you enter a lottery, and once the lottery is pulled and you don't get it, you've got to wait another year, and then maybe another year, and another year, and another year. And so, you know, for some people, it takes years and years, maybe a decade or more to finally get over here if they want to. If you're a young person, it's just easier to pretend like that little card isn't that necessary, and most people probably aren't going to notice. And so there are a lot of people who stay as a result of that. Or maybe they came over to work and their work, the job they came over for is no longer here, but they took another job.

18:42 And by the way, if you stay for a year and you continue to stay for a year without filling out the paperwork or without getting permission, the penalty is you get deported and you can't come back for 10 years. See, these are the kinds of things that if you're in love or maybe you had a child while you were here with somebody and now you're going to get deported for 10 years, suddenly it's more challenging to think about whether you leave or whether you just continue to do what you're doing and hope you never get caught. That's about 40% of the immigrants. About 49% of the immigrants that are undocumented here in the United States came here from Mexico. That's our best guess. And that number has been declining too. Let's put this up on the screen if you would. And what we see in this chart is the number of immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at 6.9 million and it's come down to about 5.6 million today, give or take. That's our best estimate today. And so why did these people come to America? Well, they came for the same reasons that your forebearers came to America, right? And you've heard the stories of how hard it is to come here from Central America, from South America, but particularly from Mexico, these countries, as people are coming and they get to the border, and once they get there, they end up paying a coyote, that's what they're called, what, $5,000, $6,000, I think is the going rate.

19:48 If you live in Mexico and you're poor, that's like everything you got. And 70% of the women who are coming over from Central America, by the time they get into America, have been sexually assaulted. You've got people in the last few years, you've got people from Honduras, where we have ministries going on, Guatemala, El Salvador, who have brought their children to the border and dropped them off and hoped they paid somebody to take their kids across the border. What would it take for you to take one of your kids to the border of another country, pay money to somebody you knew there was some risk, they might get arrested when they get to the other side, to drop off your kid who's 13 or 14 years old at the border. What would it require to be your home situation for you to do that? And I think for most of those people, these are people who are saying, I'm desperate for my children to have a future with hope, a future different from my future. And so, you know, you've got a whole, I mean, it's a complicated situation. You've got people who are coming over and they violated the immigration rules. They're doing what our forebearers did without worry of consequence, but they're doing this today.

20:45 And so 11.3 million of them living in our country now, well, they're doing the same thing when they get here, they're doing the same thing that the Irish did and the Chinese did. They're doing the work that most of us don't want to do, right? So we know the fields that they're working in. They're working in construction, a lot of roofing companies, a lot of sheetrock, drywall. We find people working in the meatpacking industry. We find them working in agriculture. We find them working in landscaping and in housekeeping. And so across America, there are many of these people. They come here, and I was reading economists talking about this, and economists have an interesting perspective on this. Both the conservatives and the progressive economists look at them and say, well, this is just human capital. I mean, it's very crass, but these are human beings, they're human machines, they're human capital, they produce and they consume, and that actually means they're economic engines. And so most of the economists that I read weren't suggesting that they be deported. They're saying that would actually harm our economy. This is, you know, they're producing, and yet currently, because they're undocumented, unless they have a fake Social Security number, most of them are not paying taxes.

21:42 Social Security, they can't get driver's licenses, they can't get insurance necessarily, So we've got this group of people who are sort of in the shadows. Now, it's hard to know if you've actually run into somebody who's undocumented or not. Here in the schools, there are a number of undocumented children in our schools in Kansas City. I was driving down Metcalf a couple of years ago, and I witnessed an accident that happened at 167th Street, and there was somebody who pulled right into, wasn't paying attention, and smashed right into the side of a car that was going by in front of me. And this person pulled off to the side of the road, and the other pulled off to the side of the road, and this person was really rattled, and I went up to tell the person who was hit, I saw the accident. I can testify to what happened. Are you okay? Is everything all right? I checked with both parties. Are you all okay? Let me call the police. Well, the woman who's driving the car didn't speak any English, and she was scared for me to call the police. I don't know. Was she undocumented or not? I have no idea. But here's somebody who's afraid to report an accident in their car when they were wrong, because they may be here, and they may not have papers. Anyway, this is part of the kinds of situations. What do the jobs look like? What's the job situation? Now, as we think about this, you know, in order to be able to stay here in America, you've got to have a green card.

22:50 Now, a green card, I'd never seen one, so I went online to see what do they look like. They look like a driver's license. This is what a green card looks like. This is one from several years ago. They change them, I think, every couple of years. But it has your picture, has your thumbprint or your fingerprint, and it's a permanent residency card that allows you to stay in America. And again, there are more people that want them than have a chance to have them. There's a lottery system in order to be able to get one. It may be years before you'd finally get one if you're applying to come into this country in this way. And that works out okay for some people and for other people. You know, their hopes and dreams for their kids or their situation, life situation. You know, you find that there are going to be people who are going to come here in the hope that this is a place for a better life for them. Oh, by the way, I was thinking about jobs and the job situation. And I've been curious about this too. President Johnson said we can't have unlimited immigration. And that makes sense to me. And I actually think I agree with that, but I don't know if I have a good reason for agreeing with that. I think I do. But I was wondering, in the United States in 1965, there were 195 million residents in the U.S. in 1965. Today, there are 319 million residents. So we've grown by 125 million people in the population. That's an increase of 65%. In 1965, most women didn't work outside the home, and today most women do work outside the home. So we've absorbed 125 million more people in our population, plus a host of women who are now working that weren't working before, and the unemployment rate today is the same as it was in 1965.

24:08 So I don't know what those numbers are, but often we have an idea as to this is going to threaten our economy, and in fact, it doesn't seem to have affected us too severely up to this point, this growth in the number of people in our country. By the way, most of the immigrants who live here undocumented have lived here for 13 years or more, which means that they have children who have probably grown up here, maybe they've gotten married here. After the 745 service, I had a woman who came up to me and she said, I'm from Chicago. I'm moving to Kansas City to help my parents. They go to this church and I thought I'd come this morning. She said, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your sermon today. She said, I'm a teacher in the inner city schools in Chicago. And she said, so many of my kids are undocumented. And she said, you know, a couple years ago there was a boy who stood up. It just changed my perspective on things. One of our kids who was 14 years old stood up and gave a speech before the assembly at school. And he said, I came here against my will when I was three years old. and he said I've grown up in this country and this is my country I don't know anything about the country I came from I've never been there I don't know anything about it but this is my home and he said my hope and dream if I'm allowed to stay here would be to make a difference in our community and in our world and he said my dream is I want to go on to nursing school and I want to become a nurse someday and this woman caught me after 745 and tears streaming down her face and she said I couldn't listen to this little boy who was a student of mine and think of immigration in the same way after that, the undocumented anymore. This is a human being.

25:31 This is a person. And this is the only land he knows. And it causes me to want to work for a compassionate solution for this little boy. Now, 72% of Americans, according to the Pew Research Center, agree that arresting all of the undocumented immigrants and deporting them somewhere else is not a reasonable solution. 72% of Americans, it crosses a majority of both Republicans and Democrats say that this is not what we would favor. Instead, what we would favor, 72% of Americans would favor, is finding a way for there to be an appropriate path for these persons to be able to, maybe there's a penalty to be paid, maybe there's some other requirements, but eventually to have some kind of legal status here in America. That's the majority of us. And 76% of Republicans said that deporting all unlawful immigrants would actually be an unreasonable solution.

26:24 It would be unrealistic. The immigration reform is what this is about in part, is resolving this particular issue. Now, I want you to hear from somebody. In the last week, I interviewed five different people to try to learn more about this from different sides of the equation. And one of the people I interviewed was a man named Roger McCruman. Roger McCruman, one of you recommended him. He's an immigration lawyer. His whole practice is focused on this. He went to NYU Law School. After law school, he worked in corporate law. And then he began feeling called to use law to make a difference in the world. And he answered a call to go to seminary. He went to Princeton Theological Seminary, became a Nazarene pastor, and then went back into law focusing on immigration law. And I asked him, would you just help me and our congregation understand the problems and why we don't have a solution after 25 years of debating this? And this is what he had to say.

27:10 The issues of people that are here without any legal status. And we estimate about a little over 11 million people here. of that group, about 40% came in legally and then overstayed or somehow violated their status. What do you do with those? A very high percentage of them, like I said, have these relationships, we would have said, warrant green cards, like they're married to U.S. citizens, but they've done something overstayed or come in illegally and it's created some bar to them getting their status regularized. In the past, 2001 and earlier, they could pay a fine and get their status legalized if they had that relationship. But they can't do that anymore. Congress eliminated that provision, so it's created this underclass of people who have relationships here but can't get legal. And so one of the solutions, the Senate bill had them come forward and register, come out of the shadows, which I think is a much more secure situation for the U.S. if we're worried about security, to know who they are and they have to go through background checks and all of that kind of thing, get registered and wait in line because we have these quotas. And we had estimated at the time that it would take about 17 years for lot of them to actually get to the point where they'd have permanent residence in the U.S.

28:45 That bill, but that was still a good thing. I mean, because it's anything that gets them regular status then helps to keep them from being abused by employers, you know, keeps them from being deported and family separated and all of that. The Senate passed that bill. The House wouldn't take it up. And so it failed. A few years before that, the House passed a similar bill, and the Senate wouldn't take it up. And in both cases, the president said they would have signed the bill. In one case, it was President Obama. Before that, it was President Bush. They both would have signed a bill for immigration reform, but we can't seem to get Congress together on it. You know, the only time when our Congress people are going to say, we've got to do something, I think, is when we, the people, say, this really matters to us. And when we practice our faith when it comes to our politics, I'm not telling you which party to vote for, even which solution to take.

29:40 I asked Roger McCruman, what's the solution? If you were president, what would you do? He said, it's really complicated. I'm still not sure on some of these details what I would do. But there are certain things that we need to fix, and part of what we've got to, I believe, if we take into account our faith, look at when it comes to undocumented immigrants, is we've got to look at them through the eyes of God. How do we look at these people? There's some tension there for us to figure out, okay, these are people who are living not according to the law. At the same time, these are human beings who are living here. Their children have lived here for a very long time. What do we do with these persons? By the way, I spoke to another man, Bill Gordon, who is a member of our church. He runs a signature landscaping. And I asked Bill, I said, you know, you've got a lot of folks who are employees who you bring in from Mexico on documented work visas, and you've testified before Congress on this issue. What are your perspectives on this? And he has about 150 the employees, about half of whom are employees from Mexico who have a work visa to come up every year. And by the way, in order to give somebody a work visa to come up to work, you have to advertise that job for American citizens first X number of times. You've got to be willing to pay X amount, and the government stipulates that amount. And if you still can't find workers, then you're allowed to go to Mexico and bring in workers. But many of the undocumented workers he has have family members or friends who are undocumented.

30:52 And this is what he had to say. Take a listen. You could come in and do a pretty thorough job of making sure that people couldn't stay here who are illegal, whether you build a wall or not. But the problem is what you're going to leave is a big vacuum. If you don't have the front line janitorial people, you don't have the front line roofers, you don't have the front line landscape contractors, I think it's going to create a big inflationary issue in the marketplace. If I can get immigration reform and have plenty of people available that want to take this job that are here currently, great. If I can bring them in on seasonal visas, that's great too, but we need something to happen because both of those sides are getting crushed. I don't meet very many people that say, get them out of here. I just don't hear that because I think people see these guys that are migrant workers and know that they're here to produce, they're doing good things for the economy, and I don't think they feel threatened by them, but yet we can't figure out how to get something done somewhere. When we look back, you know, 10, 20 years from now, and we look at what's happened with immigration and how it's been broken for so long and there's been needing to be something done and it's been this stalemate for so long, I think we're gonna be ashamed of ourselves. I really do. I think we need to be doing something to change this program, to get some visas available, to make the situation right. The country needs immigrants, so we need to come up with something and I like the people to get behind something.

32:17 But Gordon wasn't telling you which something you had to come up with, but he's talking about our needs in America, the people that he knows. Let's do something. Let's figure out how to make this situation right. All right, so all of that leads us to the question of how does our faith speak to this, right? Because up to now, you've gotten a lecture and a history lesson. But where does this become a sermon? And the sermon comes in when we begin to ask, how does our faith speak to this? Now, when it comes to the Bible, what does the Bible say about immigration? Now, I just remind you up front, the Bible is not written to be a public policy manual. The Bible describes for us how the people of God have understood God's will in various times and places, and they tell us something about what they've heard from God, what they believe about God. And part of what we find in the Scripture is the Bible is a book whose story is primarily about immigrants. Right? There's Abraham, who in the book of Genesis is called by God with his wife Sarah and their servants to leave the land of Mesopotamia and immigrate to the land of Canaan. When they get to the land of Canaan, they find they have to leave Canaan, and they end up immigrating to Egypt.

33:12 They come back to Canaan at the end of his life story, but eventually his grandchildren, Jacob or Israel and his children, find that life in Canaan is so difficult, like the Irish in the 1850s, because there's not enough food, they immigrate to Egypt, just like many people immigrated to America. This is the defining story of the Scriptures. And so we find them in Egypt, and what we begin to find happening in Egypt is once more xenophobia. The Egyptians become afraid of these outsiders, and when they're afraid of these strangers, they begin to oppress them, and they make them their slaves. Then God seeks to liberate the slaves and calls these immigrant people, these slave people, his own, and he sends Moses to deliver them from slavery in Egypt. They come to Mount Sinai in the Sinai Peninsula, and they gather around there, and God gives them the law through Moses. And they're not even at the promised land yet, and yet in the midst of that moment of giving the law, God speaks to them about the aliens who will live in their midst when they get to Israel. And this is the passage of Scripture we have before us today.

34:05 When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. You shall love the alien as yourself. For you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God. Now this doesn't tell us exactly what we do with people who violated immigration law. It just tells us God's heart towards people who are immigrants. the people who are living in the shadows, that God cares about them. And what's interesting is in the ancient Near East, aliens were not afforded the same status as citizens in any other country. But in the law, what we find is that aliens were to be treated like the citizens of Israel. They were to be treated with love and respect and dignity. Now, I'm reminded of what Jesus says in that wonderful parable. We've talked about it so many times here, many of you haven't memorized.

34:57 The parable of the last judgment, where he talks about the nations coming before him and him separating the sheep from the goats. And then one of the lines in there is this one. It says, Then the Son of Man said to the righteous, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. The Greek word for stranger in this parable? Xenos. I was an alien. I was a foreigner. And you welcomed me. And as much as you did it for one of the least of these, you did it for me. I love the fact that in the New Testament, one of the pictures of who we are as Christians, in 1 Peter as well as in Hebrews is we are aliens in a strange land. We are foreigners. We are immigrants living in a strange land. And this world is not our permanent home. We're only here for a while. Our permanent home is the kingdom of God. Our leader, our highest authority is God our king.

35:48 We have laws for restricting immigration into our country. Maybe we need all those laws. But some of them need to be fixed it seems like. We have people who are desperate who are willing to bring their kids to the border and hope they make it through, somehow we've got to ask, you know, what's a just way of resolving this? And of course we can't welcome every person from every country around the world who desperately wants to come here, but somehow we've got to find a more just solution, it seems, than what we have now, in particular to those who are already living here, who've grown up here, who've married here, who make their lives and livelihood here. And what I'm asking of you is not to vote for a particular solution. I want you to wrestle with this issue in the light of your faith and to see our undocumented immigrants as human beings and as children of God, not to paint them with a broad brush, not to look for hardline solutions to human beings, but instead to apply your faith to thinking about this complex issue. I want to end with a quote from Roger McCruman again, and I love what he says and how he ties this issue and our role as a church into Dr. Martin Luther King. Take a listen.

36:49 We have a sphere of immigrants, and I saw that fear largely emerge for the first time in my practice after 9-11 because I never, you know, I started in the early 90s, I never saw people associating immigration with terrorism until after 9-11. So there's a lot of attitudes that need to change and I really think the church ought to be the place where it starts because we should have a certain ethic that transcends that fear that's in the American population. The church needs to be, I think, to echo Martin Luther King Jr., the church needs to be the conscience of the nation. So I'd encourage the church to not get co-opted into thinking they have to belong in one camp or the other, but they need to be the conscience of the nation. When the nation acts outrageously out of fear, the church ought to say, we're not part of that.

37:47 Part of my hope and prayer for you as a congregation, you're the largest congregation in the Kansas City area. My hope and prayer is that you might be, in part, the conscience of our community. You might be people who think about these issues. You know, most churches wouldn't touch this issue with a 10-foot pole. That you would at least be people who say, I know something about this issue, and I think it matters, and I think people matter, and to be able to stand up and speak out for those who have no voice. And for you to be people who love the alien in your midst as you love yourself. For you to be people who look for just and merciful solutions to complex problems, not overly simplistic solutions that demonize people, and for us to live up to our national aspirations as a place that says, give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

38:41 Let's pray. Lord, we confess that it's so easy for us to become afraid of the other, that we're here and we're nervous about those who are not yet here or want to come here or come here and yet they aren't documented. Help us, O Lord, to have your heart, to know your heart and to have your heart towards those who are aliens in our midst.

39:05 O God, help us as a nation to come up with compassionate solutions to complex problems, to stop making people a political issue, scoring points with them, but instead for looking for ways of caring about and practicing our American ideals and our faith towards those in our midst. Guide us, we pray, lead us, we ask, and help us to be, as a congregation, the conscience of our community. In your holy name.