Dear Folks,
How a household responds to its most vulnerable member reveals a lot about the health of the system. Are a person’s needs addressed or ignored? Is he blamed for his struggles or offered understanding? Is her weakness nurtured toward strength or condemned out of hand? Consider your own experience: was there a person in your family implicitly designated as “the problem,” whose challenges organized everyone else? Healthy families resist heaping coals on the prodigal’s head, recognizing instead that everyone brings gifts and grief to the party.
In the same way, a nation is judged by how it treats its weakest members, and by that calculus an American dis-ease has been revealed over the past few days. As Laura Bush wrote on Sunday in the Washington Post, “I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.” A strong country does not work out its immigration policy on the backs of children. We are better than that. Nor does a legal system based on the rule of law quote the scripture willy-nilly to coerce behavior or belief.
The ethical teachings of Paul’s letter to the Romans do not compel blind obedience to government authorities. Rather, they are grounded in the duties of love and hospitality, actions which weave the civic fabric from a community’s diverse strands of people and possibilities. Paul writes, “Let love be genuine, hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor… Extend hospitality to strangers.” (12: 9-11, 13)
It is fitting that the daughter of Jewish immigrants wrote our country’s most famous sonnet of welcome.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
When your trust is all but shattered, when your faith is all but killed, you can give up, bitter and battered, or you can slowly start to build… Let us build together a nation whose depth of loving is the true measure of its strength.