- These two sermons were preached at the Frontera de Cristo conference celebrating its 35 years. RESPONDING TO AN EXODUS: Gospel Hospitality and Empire – November 8-10, 2019, in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico
We have Arrived
Opening Worship – Friday at 5:30pm
2 Corinthians 4:1-15
1 Therefore, since it is by God’s mercy that we are engaged in this ministry, we do not lose heart.
2 We have renounced the shameful things that one hides; we refuse to practice cunning or to falsify God’s word; but by the open statement of the truth we commend ourselves to the conscience of everyone in the sight of God.
3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.
4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
5 For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.
6 For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.
8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair;
9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;
10 always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
11 For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh.
12 So death is at work in us, but life in you.
13 But just as we have the same spirit of faith that is in accordance with scripture—‘I believed, and so I spoke’—we also believe, and so we speak,
14 because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus, and will bring us with you into his presence.
15 Yes, everything is for your sake, so that grace, as it extends to more and more people, may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.
We have arrived! Thank God, we have arrived!
By the mercy of God, we have arrived!
We have arrived in the lands of the precious Yaqui indigenous people, the Apache, the people of Agua Prieta and Hermosillo.
We have arrived where our Mexican sisters and brothers have never left.
We have arrived where the life of God is booming with beauty, kindness and strength not only everyday but every hour of the day!
We have arrived!
We have arrived where the devil wants to destroy what is good and life giving.
We have arrived!
We have arrived where so many of us fear. Fear that distance us from those places and people who need us the most.
When we live in fear. Fear is one of the major feelings of our time. Our politics, our economic structures cast a heavy blanket of fear in all of us. We can’t live without fear it seems. To fear is to live. I wonder if we are losing the sensibility of living without fear. Living with courage, living with boldness. I wonder.
For fear comes from every corner. Fear comes from the outside and fear comes from the inside. Everything becomes a great ball of fear and fear is all we see and feel and share to each other.
We fear violence.
We fear losing our jobs.
We fear losing our family.
We fear losing our homes.
We fear losing our health insurance.
We fear losing our churches.
We fear we are not going to make it.
We fear elections won’t change anything.
We fear what our countries are becoming.
We fear the ways our politicians run our countries.
We fear the cartels.
We fear the gangs.
We fear the economy going down.
We fear the climate change heating us hard.
We fear for our present and our future.
We fear for our kids.
We fear losing our courage.
We fear fear.
We fear losing our own selves!
And fear begets anger, and anger begets destruction, and destruction begets violence, and violence begets fear again.
Nonetheless, here we are!
Thank God here we are!
By the mercy of God here we are!
Next to a tragic event that killed a precious family in cruel ways.
Next to a wall that is searing with fears and constant threats. A wall of fear that begets anger that begets destruction that begets violence that begets fear.
Nonetheless, we came.
Thank God we came!
By the mercy of God we came!
We came to offer our presence.
We came to show our love and support.
We came to learn.
We came to listen about love. We came to learn to speak about love.
Love that conquers fear. Love that breaks the chain of fear.
Love that says we are here and together, we can face this.
We came to break the spell of fear.
We came to say O death! where is your sting?
We came to love. We came to be-loved. We came to learn about kindness. We came to show kindness.
We came to pray. All we will do here is a big great prayer!
To pray with those who need our prayer and our blessing.
And to receive a prayer and a blessing.
We came to celebrate the Frontera de Cristo, this ministry that has been casting away fear for 35 years. Frontera de Cristo is this place of love that witnesses the love of God and signals a different kind of world; another world that is coming and is coming soon!
So here is our crusade during our time: not to conquer anyone else but our own fears. And by conquering our fears to break away from the spell of dominium, the spell of feeling dominated by anyone else or by any institution. By breaking away from the empire of fear we are set free to love kindness, to show mercy, and to walk humbly with God.
We come from El Norte with privileges and choices. We come and we go because we can, but many of our brothers and sisters from the south of the border don’t have the same privilege.
To understand the growing exodus is to admit to ourselves and others that they deserve to have the ability to come and to go just as we do. To understand their exodus we need to understand what they go through daily, what they hear and what they see and what they feel. It is a work of empathy.
They hear about bombs and burnings.
They hear about disasters and horrifying news.
They hear about death and rumors of death.
They see their beloved ones being attacked.
They see their crops being destroyed by climate disasters.
They see their jobs disappearing.
They see their families being consumed.
They see their neighborhoods eroding.
And yet, they have to stay.
Behind closed doors. Out in the open. Living the life that they can live.
And we? we have no idea what that means!
They live with an urgency of life that we from El Norte, do not know.
They live as the first Christians did; knowing that life can come to an end at any time.
All we learn from our government, politicians, churches and institutions is that immigrants are all threats to our beautiful and great US American way of life. And that to protect this life we need to turn immigrants into carriers of death as they have become the new plagues of Egypt.
Yet, since we came, we have the opportunity to change that narrative! We have to transform these feelings! We have to change these immigration policies. And we as the people of God will start by saying that
They carry this treasure of God’s love fully now, in clay jars, In their broken bodies, so that it may be made clear to us that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.
They are afflicted in every way,
They are perplexed all the while,
They are persecuted in many ways and forms,
They are struck down from time to time,
They always carry in their bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible to us, in our bodies.
And it is through their suffering that they teach us what it means:
to be afflicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;
struck down, but not destroyed;
How do we learn that?
Not to be driven by despair?
Not to feel forsaken by God?
How do we keep ourselves alive rather than destroyed especially when we are struck down?
How do we carry in our bodies the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies?
How does the death of Jesus become a sign of life around this wall?
Today, we will be invited to walk around the wall and to discover the ways in which people find life amidst death here; ways in which people carry the life of Jesus amidst signs of death. How do people prophecy against the structures of death and keep on going? How do they see, through and beyond the wall, the life that is there and is coming?
Our Mexican sisters and brothers are warriors! They are warriors of love and resistance who carry the weight of the world right here. They see the face of evil and keep on moving on. They hear the sounds of death, the news of terror, the explosion of yet another bomb, another death, and they say: God have mercy; God have mercy on us! Receive our precious people in your boson and help us to continue; and off they go! Loving, caring, living, singing.
There is a way of living within poor communities that engages both life and death together more clearly as they are woven into each other intimately. In every cry of pain, there is also a song, a stretch of the soul, a Psalm, a prayer, a stubborn celebration. Mexican culture is known for celebrating death very vividly. Mexicans are not as scared of death as we are in El Norte because they perceive death as a part of life.
As you will see these days that relation between life and death is very visible in the presence of the Wall. The border is such a visible sign of distress, hatred, confusion and fears. Yet, how do local people see it? What is the alternative narrative that is right here at the Wall? Your task is to relate to both, the Wall’s major narrative and the art narrative of the people in your own context. Wherever you are coming from, there are immigrants and refugees in your own town and city. You may want to start with yourself. You are also an immigrant, like your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. What do you make of this narrative? And how do you weave it into the narrative of your own family? What were the walls of your ancestors’ times? How did they paint those walls at those times in their lives and their own neighborhoods? How did they make it?
Connect to their stories and also connect to our story here and now; see the similarities of immigrants and refugees everywhere searching for signs of life. God has brought you here to do something with you. What is God doing with you right now?
During this time, you will experience the weaving of death and life everywhere; and fundamentally at the Wall. Pay attention to the art in it; it is powerful! What do you see? How can you relate coming from wherever you are coming from? What will God speak to you? Here is a snapshot of what you will see.
In every picture, a sing of death; the Wall; the impediment; a big sign: don’t come! You are not welcomed! The uttermost symbol of shame! fear! hatred! A humanity gone astray. At the Wall, our hearts fall to the ground.
And yet, on every picture there is also a manifestation of life! Crosses announcing the life and death from which we are made of;
Butterflies flying all around in spite of the wall; and here! To remind us of life of Jesus resurrection! Of life going through death! Cvercoming death!
We see hearts with harvesting fruits composing the axis of our relationship between our human bodies and the body of the earth; supernatural presences empowering the hearts of the people to continue;
magical realism everywhere bringing together animals and people and places in deep relationality;
local and national figures appearing in the Wall as promises of a culture that has markers of life in the midst of death.
La llorona is there too reclaiming her place in the culture and in the streets. She is there as a symbol of life and death; a symbol of love and distress that weeps publicly in the streets.
As my Mexican friend from Tampico, Mayra Picos Lee told me, “La Llorona doesn’t stay quiet. She proclaims her distress and love through the streets. Maybe, because the streets are outside any organized system and the places in which women can start to become subversive. The streets are also the places in which Jesus encountered most women who made it into the gospels too because the streets were the only public places in which they could be seen.” There lies the power of an alternative narrative that brings life from death!
And so in that wall, our own imaginations will need to run free, as we see huge birds flying as a sign of freedom and in spite of the Wall. We see horses running free as well! And even in the midst of the desert, there are whales swimming and oceans flowing! How powerful is that? At the end, we see the sign of peace and justice kissing each other in the touching of two hands. It is a message of mercy, kindness, welcoming and togetherness.
In that wall, we see the sign and hope for a new world: love sin fronteras! Love sin fronteras replacing the signs of fear in the fronteras and within the Wall.
And so we all came here to learn with our brothers and sisters; to learn how they and we may continue, day and night, to fight in the struggle sin perder la ternura, without losing tenderness.
We will wrestle with ways to respond to an over-present Exodus, in the midst of many more exoduses. How do we welcome the caravans of people in the move coming from everywhere? How do we learn that these exoduses are not created by the immigrants but by our economies and governments? Because to blame the immigrants is to blame the wrong people!!!! In order to understand the exodus, we need to understand the background of the exodus and that is what we are doing here during these couple days.
And so since we came!
We have arrived!
We are here!
We are receiving a gift from God which is to learn in our flesh what it means to say the Word of God together.
Let us say it together. I will say each line and you repeat it just like we do in big street protests.
For it is the God who said,
‘Let light shine out of darkness’,
who has shone in our hearts
to give the light of the knowledge
of the glory of God
in the face of Jesus Christ.
But we have this treasure in clay jars,
so that it may be made clear
that this extraordinary power
belongs to God
and does not come from us.
We are afflicted in every way,
but not crushed;
perplexed,
but not driven to despair;
persecuted,
but not forsaken;
struck down,
but not destroyed;
Always carrying in the body
the death of Jesus,
so that the life of Jesus
may also be made visible in our bodies.
For while we live,
we are always being given up to death
for Jesus’ sake,
so that the life of Jesus
may be made visible in our mortal flesh.
So death is at work in us,
but life in you.
But just as we have the same spirit of faith
that is in accordance with scripture—
‘I believed, and so I spoke’—
we also believe,
and so we speak,
because we know
that the one who raised the Lord Jesus
will raise us also with Jesus,
and will bring us with you
into God’s presence.
Yes,
everything is for your sake,
so that grace,
as it extends to more and more people,
may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.
Alleluia!
Amen!
From fear, we move to love. Love! Love that cast away fears!
From darkness, we move back to light and back to darkness through God’s luminosity.
From exhaustion, we learn about our own strength.
From being defensive we move to organize resistance and move forward.
We must rehearse what is coming: We will go from borders of shame and walls of fear to a world and a land without walls.
We will go from sadness to the Glory of God! Announcing that God’s life is everywhere.
Are you ready for this wall? Are you ready to learn how to offer hospitality to a growing exodus?
Come and stay! With the immigrants! Come with and without fear. Destruction is everywhere but construction is what we are doing!
May God speak to our hearts, minds, bodies and soul.
As we hear, listen, feel and taste the goodness of God, may we do that with our hearts on high, thanking God for the 35 years of Frontera de Cristo.
Amen!
Final Worship – Closing Worship
Siding with the Immigrants
Ephesians 3: 18-21
18 I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
20 Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine,
21 to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.
I Corinthians 15:50-58
50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed,
in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality.
When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.
How do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
What are we taking from this place and this time at the borderlands where our precious brothers and sisters give their life and love daily?
We have seen God at work here. We have hear God’s voice in so many ways through many people. It is now on us to decide what we are going to do with it.
What are we going to do with it?
How do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
We heard our sister at the church yesterday saying that the whole situation is getting worse. Immigrants being attacked by organized crime and the military, which should be the institution that protects people. We heard how daring is the situation of those working with immigrants and all of the criminalization of their work.
We heard immigrants and their stories. We hear Todd Miller talking to us about the expansion of the US Border around the world. We heard our pastor telling us how to read the story of Moses for our days.
We have seen the art, the art of tears, the art of resistance, the art of sustenance that makes people continue.
What are we going to do with it?
How do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
What are we going to do with the weight of the world when we hear about familias being ripped apart; simple people searching for a better life now being placed in private jails for profit and their children being kidnapped by the State?
How do we continue without a bitter soul when we witness the death of a father and his daughter who was wrapped inside his t-shirt as they both drawn in the Rio Grande? Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his nearly 2-year-old daughter, Valeria (Presente! Blessed be their memories!), lie on the bank of the Rio Grande in Matamoros as they were trying desperately to find a life on this side of the river?
I can hear Óscar’s voice saying to his precious niña: Venga Niña venga no te preocupes, papá esta aquí.
How are we not to drown in a river of tears? In an ocean of anger? In a world of powerlessness?
What are we going to do with it?
How do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
How do we keep on going when more and “more toddlers appear alone in court for deportation under family separation” than ever before? 2,000-plus children will likely need to deal with court proceedings even as they grapple with the ongoing trauma of being taken away from their parents. A lawyer says:
We were representing a 3-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child — in the middle of the hearing — started climbing up on the table. “The parent might be the only one who knows why they fled from the home country, and the child is in a disadvantageous position to defend themselves,” Toczylowski said.[1]
And now, the government is deleting all of the files reporting what is happening in jails and in dealing with the immigrants; just like the Nazi government did.
What my friends?
What are we going to do with it?
How do we go from here?
Where do we go from here?
I search for those who have been lost, killed, kidnaped, jailed and forgotten; every day when I imagine the cry of my children in cages…
Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in a river of tears.
What are we going to do with it?
Where do we go from here?
How do we leave this place?
Well, I want to send you forth with a few things to do as you leave today.
But fundamentally, you have to take sides with the immigrants.
As we go back to our churches, we must help our people to understand that the problem of the exodus is not the immigrants. They did not create this situation. To blame the immigrants is to blame the wrong people! To blame the immigrants is like blaming the Jews for wanting to leave Egypt and find their own freedom. To blame the Jews is like taking side with the Pharaoh and supporting his merciless attempts to attack them. The Egypt of our time and the Pharaoh of our time are all rootless. Pharaohs dressed in cloths of power, authority and death, dripping in blood and mercilessness.
As these exoduses continue, nothing less is asked of us than to take sides with the poor. For you cannot be on the fence supporting both sides, or supporting none as indifference is killing us too! To take sides with the immigrants is to be with them all the way, doesn’t matter what. To take sides with the immigrants is to say there are my family because they are! We are all connected!
To take sides with the immigrants is to know their condition, the why’s of their journeys, the reasons of their need to flee their own homes into the unknown.
To take side with the immigrants is to believe in a God that is already on the side of the immigrants. It is to pray with the immigrants and against the empire of our times. It is to say woe to the ones holding to this situation of death. Who are you with?
To take side with the immigrants is to be willing to understand what is to live crossing all kinds of borders all the time. Just like Jesus did. As I mentioned to you before, Gloria Anzaldua refers to the border as “Una herida abierta where the third World grates against the first and bleeds.” If you are to choose to be on the side of the immigrants and undocumented and refugees, you have to know what is it that bleeds and that you will bleed too. Your heart will bleed everyday, and you will weep as you will pray without ceasing.
To understand the exodus is to take side with the immigrants!
To understand the exodus is to understand the background of the exodus, and why it is happening.
The exodus of people is growing in numbers since the shameful treaties like NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement and CAFTA-DR which is the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement.
Both agreements served to benefit the United States and the corrupt governments of the South. In both agreements, since its inception, we have seen many of the effects that people cautioned at their onset, namely:
- poor economies
- governments unable to provide basic services to the population.
- farmers being displaced when they can’t compete with grain imported from the United States.
- amid significant levels of unemployment, labor abuses continue.
- workers in export assembly plants often suffering poor working conditions and low wages.
- Natural resources extraction proceeding with few protections for the environment.[2]
All of these combined are like a bomb with explosive combustion. The results?
- Thousands of people trying to cross the borders.
- 000 people in jail.
- Tally of children split at border tops 5,400 in new count
- 11 million undocumented people living in US fearing for their lives.
- Families separated.
- The rising of all forms of violence.
Pain everywhere.
Thus, to take the side with the ones at the margin is to make them our homeland! All the people crossing borders, they are our home! All of the separated children from their parents and now in cages, they are the homeland of my heart. All of the 11 million of undocumented people, they are our citizenship. Their fragility is our collective strength! Their lives are our flags! Their cry is our national anthem!
Moreover, to take side with the immigrants is not to hate those who are working against us. To hate the Pharaoh and their principalities, thrones and drones, TV’s, cameras, guns, border patrol and dominion, is to be hooked into their own spell, to be caught with our mouth foaming with their own venom. We don’t hate the Pharaoh, we love more the immigrants! We are not dominated by any one! We are bound to the love of God who bind us with the wretched of the earth.
What keeps us going then is the love of God for the immigrants, our love of God by loving the immigrants. They are our new heaven and earth. They are the face of love, they are the face of God. A face that is not so clean cut, so proper, not so adorned with the romanticism of our faith.
As a result, taking side with the immigrants is to commit to live the costly grace of God.
We have turned the African song Kum-by-ya into a wishy-washy song where we make everything be so nice and easy, that nobody needs to change. If we only sing it, we will keep the same levels of comfort and all will be well.
However, this song asks us way more. First it asks God to come by us. Come by us my Lord. Come by us and offer shelter. Come by us and heal our wounds. But to call on God to come by is to call on others to come-by-us as well. Because God is incarnated in the lives of those who are at the margins.
Thus, when we sing “come by us,” we are calling God to come to us by way of another! God will come to us not by an amorphous visit but through the incarnation in the lives of those who are suffering. To sing Come by us my Lord is a call for others to come where we are and stay with us. Precious Jesus, come by us and we will give you shelter!
Little Jesus Come by us and we will find your family back! Refugee Jesus, come by us my Lord and you will give you shelter and you will live with us.
But to sing “come by us my Lord” means that we have to change. Our spaces, our resources, our songs, our traditions, our faith and our ways of living, everything has to change.
Because to come by us means true hospitality, hospitality that is given to God. WE don’t need immigration laws to give hospitality to God! We need people offering hospitality to people!
Refugees, immigrants and jailed people, they are to be fully received! And to be the host is to undergo changes and transformations by the ones who we are offering hospitality.
To sing “come by us” means that we will say
We know your sorrows!
We know your pain!
Come by us!
When we live the costly grace of God we discover “the power (of God) at work within us (that) is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. It is the work of God within us that can change us and charge us to other transformations! Abundantly!
Another consequence of taking sides with the immigrants is that we must get on a fight! A fight where peace triumphs over injustice, kindness overcomes hatred and love conquers fear. A fight that we can learn from the Mexican culture: lucha libre!
PUT ON THE MASK AND THE CAPE
To take sides is to decide what side of the fight we are on. And we are fighting on the side of the least of these, the migrants, the refugees the ones seeking asylum, the DACA kids, the mothers and father and niños, abuelitos y abuelitas trying to make ends meet.
I learned about Mexican luchadores when I was a child in Brazil. The luchadores don’t give up. They go all the way to the end and only finish when they can’t get up anymore.
Their fight may be fake but it is real too. To be a luchador is to be on a fight of love and kindness. It is to stay in the struggle all the way, no matter what.
The Luchadores perform a hope that goes against hope. They don’t change anything and yet they change everything! They change people’s perception, positionalities, best strategies for the fight. Also, they help people gain awareness of who they are and where they should stand.
But more than of hope, we will be carriers of joy.
Our weapon of destruction of evil is joy. That is our final challenge today: to live in joy. We learn from people who have seen the end of their worlds, how they laugh at the face of the perpetrators of their death.
The indigenous people who live in Xingu a place in the Amazon, have their laughter and their weapon of defiance against death and the perpetrators of their death. They live a furious joy that sustains them alive!
Our joy is based on the lunacy of the gospel, on the craziness of our God.
For example: The United States spends 1 trillion dollars on weapons of war. 24 billion of dollars on the wall as we heard yesterday. How do we respond?
We are going to get on our masks and capes and give our pennies to those institutions that are working with the immigrants and support them.
* They will come to us with ATV’s trucks, heavy machinery.
We will respond with our crosses and candles.
* They will sing their judiciary and judges and national anthems.
We will respond with our passionate lawyers, our rallies, our coritos and popular songs like La Llorona, Cielito Lindo, or itsy-bitsy-spider.
* They will come fuming with anger!
We will respond sticking our tongue out!
* They will come telling us to behave and be proper!
We will get our act together and we will dance in front of their altars!
* They will say: You are nobody in this fight!
And we will laugh and respond: It is God who makes us somebody!
* They will say you are week!
We will say, no we are not!
We are vulnerable and in our vulnerability we find our strength and our resistance!
* They will say: you will perish in your fight.
And we will respond with the word of the Bible:
For this perishable body will be put on imperishability, and this mortal body will put on immortality.
They will nervously laugh saying: you are alone!
And we will respond laughing so hard we will be crying. We will say: you know nothing. We are a multitude! Just here at the borders we have so many border-crossers. We have Jesus the greatest border crosser of all! We are fluid! We have all of the poor people with us! As we also have Cabeza de Vaca, Teresa Urrea, Don Pedro Jaramillo, Niño Fidencio, the Nahuas, La Llorona, the Zapatistas and all the luchadores!
And finally, they will say: we are going to kill you, you are going to die!
And we will respond with a joke God has taught us to say. We will reply
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
What are we to do with all we heard here?
“We are here, we have arrived.”
Now let us stay! As we go back to our homes.
We will need to face our fears! Changing not only the landscape of our hearts, but the very soil where we are planted. Love cast away fear. Love the immigrants. Than go from fears to joy!
Take these walls with you and dismantle them a little every day!
Take it to the heart!
Take sides with the immigrants!
Live a faith in Jesus that entails the costly grace of God!
Lucha! Be a fighter!
And carry joy in everything you do!
Amen!
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/more-toddlers-appear-alone-in-court-for-deportation-under-family-separation?fbclid=IwAR1ciA2ci7dv1UyplQVYH–SYdc2iAoAb8LHReBhDvpjK4gSwH-HmGGcCck