Melting the ICE

Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12:31-32)

Two visions collided in my heart this week. One was the image of ICE agents herding supposed criminals onto planes, ferrying them away to brutal foreign prisons without the benefit of hearings or trials or anything but the unsubstantiated claims of self-interested politicians.

The other vision melted my heart, feeding a soul-deep hope that will not die.

It happened on Sunday morning. My pre-service prayer complete, I opened my eyes and immediately knew prayer was not done with me. Look and see, said the voice of the Spirit within me.

The crucifix hanging high above the altar first captured my attention as the congregation gathered. Two Filipino mothers crowded in beside me with five children, black and brown. An elderly Chinese woman kneeled ahead of me.

An African American family sat three rows further up. Across the room, a batik-clad woman and her children looked like they’d just arrived from some west African country. And dozens of Hispanics from several southern nations scattered among folk who are as white as me.

I didn’t see a suit and tie in the place, except for the cantor and organist. More obvious were jeans, tennis shoes, the weathered faces of people who work outdoors, and others, with softer hands, who labor in classrooms and offices and over keyboards like the one beneath my fingers.

Looking at the crucifix above our gathering, it all felt right. Jesus’ words rang truer than ever. ‘If I be lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.’

For there we were, drawn together by the transcendent love of the One who makes the many … into one. That’s what love does, but it is better to say that is what Love does. The God who is Love, whose all-embracing compassion bears the face of Jesus in his suffering, seeks ever more to draw the human family and all creation into one loving union.

This vision held me through the service. I couldn’t stop looking around. What I saw was profoundly hopeful, promising a gracious world of welcome infused with the love of Jesus, whose heart is known in every welcome and act of hospitality whether his name is spoken or not.

But as hopeful as it was to kneel at Divine Savior Church and see what the Savior is doing among us, I was equally engulfed by a profound sadness over the daily reports of ICE raids. However necessary and important their function in society, too often human souls are being indiscriminately swept up and treated like trash—the documented and undocumented, the guilty and the innocent, the citizen, the green card holder and people who look like my brown-skinned grandsons and son-in-law, for whom I worry.

The vision of a world-made-one is a true and deeply Christian vision of God’s desire for the nations, including our own. The vision of ‘one out of many’ is also deeply encoded in the history and DNA of our nation. But it is daily attacked and shattered by the present administration as it stokes anger and fear of those who look like they ‘don’t belong here.’

Tragically, many Christians also have lost sight and faith in the vision of their Lord, who draws the many into one, ironically unaware that such hatred and rejection stands judged by the cross of Christ and the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

But the vision of a world made new, born of God’s Spirit, does not die. It lives in human hearts and appears in flesh and blood gatherings, like Sunday morning, as we gathered beneath the cross of Christ where the hope of the world was clear to see.

All we needed to do was look around … and see what Love does.

‘I feel good when I fire someone’ … our spiritual crisis

All those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to [Jesus]; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah. (Luke 4:40-41)

I could never produce a convincing reason why Jesus told the demons to shut up when they shouted his identity. But the times we live in suggest an answer. More on that in a minute. First, a dinner party.

Nearly 20 years ago, Dixie and I sat in a suburban living room with several other church members, sharing a glass of wine before dinner. When conversation turned to work, one of our evening companions said he had to fire someone that day.

So sorry about that, another said. The response was immediate, ‘Don’t’ be. I feel good when I fire someone.’  

Two women in the room gasped and objected when he said it, including his wife, but he doubled down. ‘It makes my business more successful.’

That night had not occurred to me for years until the evening news assaulted my consciousness with the sight of Elon Musk prancing across a stage wielding a chain saw.

Gleefully delighting in dismantling government programs, he celebrated throwing talented, dedicated people on the street, all while a roomful of well-heeled sycophants cheered him on, utterly oblivious or willfully blind to the pain of those they’d repeatedly slandered.

Nor did they see, or have the spiritual capacity to see millions of people, in this country and beyond, who are served by the programs being trashed, people like my friend’s son who needs exorbitantly expensive medication to work and stay alive, or veterans who struggle to get health benefits, or special ed kids whose programs are disappearing, not to mention hundreds of thousands … who will die … because of the death of USAID.

But let’s go back to the dinner party. It is a relatively small step from what I heard years ago in that suburban living room to what hits us in the gut every day on the evening news. The only real difference is one of scale.

What is happening in our country has everything to do with the lack of empathy so evident in my dinner companion. Even with further conversation, he evinced no willingness or ability to see or consider the impact of his actions, even if they were necessary, on the mind, heart and well-being of another human soul.

He understood power and how to use it, sometimes employing it to bring people to heel, bending them to his will, a trait evident and celebrated in the MAGA movement in which being dominant is the most important value, trumping all others.

And this may be the great spiritual crisis of our day, the valorization of power, the ability to make others bend the knee, to get your way, to gain advantage or take revenge, to make America great.

And if others are injured or destroyed, killed or just waste away (and make no mistake, they are and will), well, that’s just the cost of doing business. Most of them are just parasites anyway. After all, empathy is a bug in the system of greatness. It just gets in the way.

But power without empathy, power untutored by faith and human values, is blind, deaf and dumb. It makes no friends, builds no relationships and cures no ills as it splinters societies. It sees, hears and attends to its whims and wishes, as utterly oblivious as those cheering Elon Musk’s chainsaw dance.

And this brings me back to Jesus and the demons, who always seemed to recognize who he was when others did not. Jesus wouldn’t let them spill the beans, and now I get it.

They only knew his power. That they recognized, but they didn’t see him and therefore didn’t really know him. For knowing him requires seeing, feeling and knowing his compassionate willingness to suffer in order to free the hearts and lives of those the great ones … would have us ignore.