Shameless

Gather together, gather,

O shameless nation,

Before you are driven away

like the drifting chaff,

before there comes upon you

the fierce anger of the Lord,

before there comes upon you

the day of the Lord's wrath.

-Zephaniah 2: 1-2 (NRSV)

I thought of a lot of things I might start with this morning, but this really seemed like a time for a Prophet.  I was scrolling through the usual stuff on social media.  Reading arguments about whether or not we should call them detention centers or concentration camps.  Looking at vulgar rhetorical smackdowns from both sides of the left-right divide, and yes, even the ones I tend to agree with are vulgar, because they do not convince, they do not heal, and most importantly they do not alleviate the suffering that is taking place at our southern border.

There should be no argument that what is happening to people in those facilities is unacceptable, but the unacceptability goes very deep indeed.  The depth of this problem is such that you can't even lay all the blame on Trump, these places and practices existed under Obama as well.  Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric has not helped issues, and his America First foreign policy that has led to actually decreasing foreign aid to crumbling Central American countries, as well as his bombast about a wall and his bullying of pretty much anyone who gets in his way are just festering boils on the surface of the problem.  But he didn't start this fire, he's just throwing kerosene on it.

The fact of the matter is that we have become shameless when it comes to our responsibility as human beings.  Whether it is our environmental impact, our complicity in heartless policy decisions, or our general ignorance of reality, we feel no shame.  If we're honest, we must admit that our appetite for cheap goods, illicit drugs and our governmental penchant for meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations, has led to a toxic situation in Central America.  Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are on the brink of becoming failed states (some would say over the brink).  Our "War on Drugs," has been lost on almost all fronts, and the most tragic consequences of that ill advised strategy has left cartels richer and more powerful than governments.

The people who are arriving at the border seeking asylum are distinctly different than the migrant workers who were the face of undocumented immigrants a decade ago.  It is my belief that we should have been more kind and open to those migrants, mostly Mexican, mostly here to make some money that they could send home.  It was a "problem" that didn't need to be called a problem. Yet, it bred resentment and fear.  It led to people becoming irritated by non-English speakers and having to "press one for English" on phone menus. Seriously, is it that hard? That vague and mostly unwarranted resentment, led us to harden our hearts and close our minds and to shut down our compassion. If we could not open our hearts to people fleeing simple poverty, working in our fields and cleaning our hotel rooms, it was only a matter of time before our hearts atrophied even further.

Now we have massive numbers of people who are fleeing horrific violence and crushing poverty, we have mothers with young children, families of people who feel they have no other hope than these United States.

I am humbled by the fact that, for all our mistakes and our complicity in the creation of the nightmare from which they are trying to wake, they still have some hope that this nation of ours will also be the solution. I am grieved and ashamed that we are letting their children sleep on cold floors and deeming basic hygiene supplies "unnecessary." I am ashamed that we spend our time arguing over what to call this atrocity, rather than simply working to end it.  I am ashamed that we have become such a shameless nation. I have heard people declare that God is going to judge our nation for everything from being too nice to gay people to allowing our kids to play too many video games, but if you read the Scripture with any seriousness you will notice that how we treat strangers and immigrants is actually a really major point, I offer the following examples, but please know this doesn't even scratch the surface: 

Exodus 23: 9 : You shall not oppress a resident alien; you know the heart of an alien, for you were once aliens in the land of Egypt. The basic premise of Israel's treatment of outsiders.  Repeated early and often, usually right on the heels of the Ten Commandments.  Seriously, this is all over the books of the Torah.

Deuteronomy 23: 15-16 : Slaves who have escaped from their owners shall not be given back to them. They shall reside with you, in your midst, in any place they choose in any one of your towns, wherever they please; you shall not oppress them.  Particularly salient on how to deal with people who are fleeing oppression, even though slavery was not considered the abomination it is to us.

Isaiah 58: 6-12, Just look up and read the whole thing.

Luke 10: 25-37, You guessed it, the Good Samaritan.

Matthew 25: 31-46, Seriously, is the shame kicking in yet?

D-Day

I went to Normandy in High School, on a trip with my French class.  We spent most of our time in France doing pretty typical tourist stuff: castles, chateaus, the Eiffel Tower, even a winery.  The day we were going to go to Omaha beach was cold and rainy.  Our tour guide was a little french woman, who actually looked exactly what you would expect a French tour guide to look like, and who much to the delight of a bunch of adolescents pronounce the word beach like "bitch." She was standing up in the front of the bus saying things like, "when we get to the bitch, we are going to have about two hours to walk around and see the bitch." The boys in the back of the bus chuckled, because we were 17 and idiots.
When we did get to the bitch, I mean beach, the laughter stopped abruptly.  The bus stopped in a parking area where you could see the gray expanse of the North Atlantic and a couple of bunkers atop a cliff, but the thing that immediately yanked your eyes and shut your stupid mouth was the white crosses and stars of David that covered the landscape, thousands of them.  We got off the bus silently, pretty much for the first time in a week that we were really quiet as a group.  I walked down to the cliff, looked in a few bunkers and meandered along the coastline, I saw the iron beams still rusting away in the surf, I saw the sheer impossibility of landing on such a narrow strip of sand with machine guns perched in those concrete pill boxes.  I began to get a sort of choking feeling in the back of my throat.
I turned up the hill and started to walk among the graves, looking at the names.  It dawned on me that a lot of those names were probably not much older than me when they piled out of the landing vehicles and went into the meat grinder.  Saving Private Ryan was still a few years off, so at least I didn't have that vivid visual to go with it.  I wondered if they had been sitting out on the ships before the invasion, laughing at rude and inappropriate jokes just like my classmates on the bus.  They probably had, in fact it may have been worse.  The shadow of the gallows tends to bring out the blackest type of humor.
I sort  of lost track of time, we were supposed to be there for two hours, but the grim Normandy weather had apparently altered the deal with most of my classmates, as I came within sight of the bus, I noticed that it was beginning to move, I was about to be left in a graveyard in a foreign country, but all I could do was laugh.  The sobriety of the past hour or so made the prospect of actually getting left behind by my tour bus, just not even that big of a deal.
Fortunately for me the bus stopped, my seat mate had done his job and told the teacher that we were one idiot short.  I saw my teacher pop out of the door of the bus, scan the terrain and start waving and yelling at me to get down there pronto (huite, huite). I did, and I got back on the bus, and back into the world of high school kids making fun for almost getting left behind.  I looked back on all those white markers that were actual kids who were going to stay there forever. 75 years they have been there, having given everything for the sake of humanity (that war was more about that than most people realized at the time).
Even the ones who survived are leaving us now. This is not a political statement, just a reality that all of us need to deal with: we should be worthy of what they did, and what they gave us at the cost of their lives, that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan where Ryan asks his family if he was worthy of the sacrifices that were made for him, is something we all need to ask ourselves.  Remember them yes, but more importantly let's work on getting to be the country they were fighting for rather than a bunch of idiots who get distracted by stupid things and shiny objects.