A step too far … and not far enough

You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltness be restored? It is no longer good for anything …. (Matthew 5:13)

Arresting farm hands harvesting strawberries was apparently a step too far in the current crackdown on undocumented workers.

Cabinet members lobbied President Trump on behalf of agricultural states, pointing out that the administration’s current policy could leave fruit and vegetables rotting unharvested in the field, as undocumented workers were being rounded up or not coming to work to avoid ICE raids.

One could cheer this development as a partial return to sanity, if not decency, curbing the despicable passions of those who would deport willing workers who, in many cases, have done arduous farm labor in this country for decades, raising their families and paying their taxes while bringing food to our tables.

But neither wisdom nor decency are evident in the casual cruelty of federal policies that daily inflict the nation’s conscience with images of children placed in zip ties by masked, gun-toting agents arresting their mothers and fathers, carting them off to an ICE gulag.

Their lives and families crushed by forces that neither see nor care about the inhumanity they inflict, one wonders at the fear fired in the fragile hearts of those children … and whether it will harden into hatred of what this country is doing to them.

Malignant seeds are sown into the soil of society with every one of these ICE raids; some, no doubt, will yield a bitter crop of alienation, resentment and perhaps, violence, in years to come.

And curse it all, too many of those who bear the name of my Savior, Jesus, the Christ, stand silently or cheer as if this display, rising from the cynical circles of hell, were not utterly contrary to Jesus’ call to love their neighbor.

One hopes that the president’s order to refrain from rounding up undocumented farm laborers, as well as hotel and hospitality workers, restricts ICE’s reach and destruction of the lives, families and communities wounded by recent sweeps.

We can also hope rational voices will prevail and further restrictions will be placed on arrests of others—like short order cooks and street vendors, or the mechanic in the shop down the street or the guys who show up every Friday to landscape around the townhouse where I live.

It's a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

As one who names Jesus as Lord, I can’t help but notice the reason given for the president’s recent directive, to hold off on some arrests, reflects a very pragmatic, utilitarian ethic. Don’t round them up because we need them. They are valuable to us. The ag economy might take a dive without them. Food prices would spike. Meat won’t get packed. Hotels and the hospitality industry won’t have enough workers.

This rationale sounds reasonable, but it falls far short of recognizing and respecting the humanity of each person, whether documented or not. It depersonalizes and devalues human beings to the status of economic units, of value only if they produce something society needs or wants.

And if they don’t, well, perhaps chasing the unwanted across strawberry fields and zip-tying their children becomes justifiable.

The moral and spiritual degradation into which our society threatens to sink is all-too-clear in the daily assaults on human bodies and souls that cross our television screens, offenses that deny the God-given sanctity of human life and the dignity of every human being—values which Christians insist upon, as long as they remain committed to Christ.

‘You are the salt of the earth,’ Jesus tells his followers in the Sermon on the Mount. At no time in my life has this nation more needed Christ followers to be exactly that—salt, working to preserve respect for the dignity of every human being. Christian witness in these times requires no less.