This morning we welcomed and were honored to have Zahir Manan participate in our worship service. (Offering the Call to Prayer). Zahir is the Imam of the House of Peace Mosque in Meriden, Connecticut. He is also the Chaplain for the Meriden Fire Department. We are also very pleased and honored to have our friends and sanctuary family Malik, Zahida and Roniya join us and help in leading the worship service – as well as Lina Tuck, the Chair of our Immigration Assistance committee.
Texts: Jeremiah 1: 4-10; Mark 9: 33-37
June 24, 2018
Remarks by Steve, Zahida and Lina Tuck begin the sermon time. (No text available)
Steve Jungkeit – Conclusion
Steps Along the Way: Reflections on a Sojourn of Faith
I begin with a basic affirmation. There is, I believe, a Spirit at the core of the universe, one that goes by many names – sometimes God, sometimes Allah, sometimes something far different. That Spirit is trustworthy, a gentle force of love that, if only we could hear it, whispers and calls to each one of us. That Spirit, call it God now, intends our flourishing, our happiness, our ability to thrive. And that same Spirit weeps when that ordinary joy is prevented or somehow blocked. I begin with a basic affirmation: there is such a Spirit, one that is radically with us and for us, no matter what adversity we may experience, no matter what impediments we human beings may throw up in the way of that flourishing. There is such a Spirit.
I’d like to name three ways in which that Spirit has been present along our journey of sanctuary and hospitality. The first has to do with Malik, Zahida, and Roniya, and how they’ve demonstrated the existence of such a spirit. The second has to do with the wider, cultural implications of what we’ve experienced, and the ways that Spirit is being ignored. And the third has to do with where and how that Spirit may yet be speaking, and leading all of us. There exists a Spirit, called God by some, Allah by others, and many other names besides.
First, Malik, Zahida, and Roniya. From you, we’ve learned something of what it means to demonstrate enormous courage under pressure. And we’ve learned something of what it means to exhibit grace under enormous personal strain.
To be faced with deportation, and to enter sanctuary, is, at its most basic, to enter a kind of prison, a velvet prison, but a prison just the same. It amounts to having one’s freedom of movement revoked, and one’s ability to work, and to earn a living. It has involved the separation of your family, along with extended periods of loneliness, simply waiting for something to happen. But it involves much deeper concerns as well. The future, your future, has been suspended, and it hangs in mid-air. It has left you to wonder if there exists a place on earth that you can call home. It leaves you to wonder what ignorant stranger may lash out at you, or what ICE agents may choose to inflict upon you, whether prison or detention or eventually, forced removal. To be in sanctuary isn’t simply to reside in a church for a temporary period of time. It is to have one’s very existence as a human being thrown into question. That pressure has been real, and I know how deeply you’ve felt it.
And yet your humanity has remained intact. You invite us into your space, and you share food and stories with us. You greet us with hugs, and the laughter you instigate through your jokes and your stories is real. Malik, I love how you greet us all with a hand placed over your heart, and I love your gentleness. I love how transparent you are about your sorrow. I love the stories you tell. I love that chickens now line up outside your door, and that you feed them as if they were trusted friends. You have become our trusted friend, and we are blessed to be in relationship with you. And Zahida, I love your wit, the way your face breaks into laughter when one of us says something outrageous. I love your fierce protective care of your daughter, and I so admire how you’ve created a zone of family normalcy under extremely abnormal conditions. I love how you’ve shared your traditions, your prayers, and your cooking with us, even as you’ve both thrown yourselves into activities that have given many of us new life as well – music nights and suppers that break the fast during Ramadan, embroidery and yoga, language lessons and pizza nights. And Roniya, the joy you’ve brought to your parents every Friday night that you’ve come is amazing. The energy that you bring to this place, and the joy and the life that you show is wonderful.
You’ve opened yourselves in profound ways, and the gifts you’ve brought to us are immense. You’ve taught us something of what it means to stay human under extraordinary pressure.
Here’s the second thing this experience is revealing to us. It’s revealing the profound flaws around notions of nationality and citizenship. The world now resembles a series of gated or fenced in communities, where each of us is assigned a place within those fences by an accident of birth. The territories within those fences are given names, of course, like the United States, or Pakistan, or Mexico, or Canada, and we’re said to belong within those boundaries, and, more and more, only within those boundaries. Questions arise. What happens when you don’t wish to reside within those boundaries? What happens when for cultural, or personal, or familial, or for some life threatening reason, it’s no longer viable to reside within those boundaries? And what, finally, does it mean to say that a human being who originated within a different boundary isn’t entitled to the same things that I’m entitled to within my own? What does it mean that I have rights and privileges through an accident of birth that others simply aren’t entitled to? Is this not, in a different guise, the ranking, valuing, and sifting of human life that made an institution like slavery possible in the first place? Is this not a global caste system, one that we instinctively resist whenever we encounter it in other parts of the world, but that we’re now becoming adapted to in a different form? Is this not a vision of the world that resembles gated communities, only now writ large, as a social plan? If there does exist a Spirit at the core of the universe, one that intends human flourishing, wouldn’t such an arrangement, such a caste system, such a sifting of human life, enact the opposite of those intentions?
Perhaps, perhaps, we are living through a moment in which we’re all of us being invited to imagine the coming of a new heaven and a new earth, where distinctions based upon accidents of birth and geography cease to be relevant. Perhaps this is a moment in which we’re being asked to birth a new consciousness, akin to those moments in the 18th and 19th centuries when it became impossible to imagine enslaving human beings? Perhaps something new is being birthed among us, even here, even now, amidst the turmoil. That’s the second way that loving Spirit may be working among us.
But I believe that persistent Spirit is present in a third way as well. In the book of Jeremiah, the Spirit of God is instilled in the life of a young man, a child, who claims he doesn’t have words. But his lips are scorched with flame, and the text gives us to understand that this Divine, Holy, Sacred Spirit that some of us call God, and that some of us call Allah, and that some of us name in far different ways, speaks through a child. Jesus himself corroborates that insight when he tells his disciples that to be great is to become as a child and that whoever welcomes a child welcomes him, and the one who sent him. In Jeremiah, the Spirit of God speaks through a child. But Jesus goes further, implying that God, the Spirit in whom he places all his trust, is somehow akin to a child.
Is it then, the very voice of God that we are hearing when we listen to the recorded cries of children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in detention centers? Is it not God who is revealed in the face of that crying toddler who looks on while her mother is being searched by border agents? Is it, to bring it closer to home, the very Spirit of God that we encounter whenever Roniya runs through our halls?
Malik tells the story of sitting with Roniya at a regular check in meeting with ICE officials. He speaks of his dismay when he was informed that he and Zahida were required to purchase a ticket and leave the country within 30 days. “But what about my daughter,” he asked. “What about Roniya?” “Don’t you have family members you could leave her with?” the agent asked. “No, we’re not giving our daughter to family members to raise,” Malik replied. “Don’t you have friends you could leave her with?” “No, we’re not leaving our daughter to be raised by friends,” Malik said. “Well then, we have agencies that will take care of her,” the ICE official said.
It turns out they do have agencies that will do such things. God help us, they’ve set up camps all over the country to do just that. But churches, and mosques, and synagogues have a different kind of agency to offer, where we do everything within our power to keep families together, to insure that neither children nor adults are placed in camps. We can and we will continue to model what it means to practice love in a time of intolerance, embrace in a time of cruelty, hospitality in a time of inhumanity and indecency. The Bible would have us know that God speaks through the voice of a child, that God in some mysterious way resembles a child. Perhaps it is God who is calling to us in all of those images, in all of those cries, in all of those tearful laments.
I’m so proud of the way all of you have embraced this work. I know it’s not always easy. I know your neighbors and your friends may talk, and I know there are those who would try to embarrass or shame you for being a part of a church that engages the world like this. I know that. Which makes it all the more poignant that you’re here, doing the work you do, loving Malik and Zahida and Roniya, explaining why it is we do what we do. There is a Spirit at the core of the universe, called God by some, called Allah by others, called many things. It is a Spirit that intends all people to flourish, and not just a few. It’s a Spirit of love and grace that’s calling to each and every one of us, a beating heart that loves and sustains us all.
I know it’s hard out there sometimes. But in here, I want to remind us what it is to be a community of care and of grace, what it is to be a people who support one another, what it is to be a people who weep and pray and listen to the voices of children, who may well bear the Spirit of God. We can do that, and we can carry it into the world around us as well.
Somewhere along the way, we’ve been told that it’s embarrassing and silly to have Kum Ba Yah moments. We’ve been told that it doesn’t matter, and that it’s silly. Who told us that? Why have we believed that? I want to take that song back. I want to be a community that sings and prays, Come by Here, Lord, Come by Here. Could we fill up the aisles and make a big circle for our closing hymn? It’s number 256 in your hymnals. And could we sing that song together, as a way of demonstrating who and what we wish to be in a tumultuous time? Can we be the ones who join hands and practice such unfashionable things here in Old Lyme? Let’s do it. Come by Here, Lord, Come by Here.