Sanctuary

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 19, 2015

First UU has become a sanctuary church for an immigrant facing deportation to a country where her life would be in danger should she be returned to it. We will explore the tradition and the current state of the sanctuary movement. How might it transform her and our religious community?

Call to Worship

Rev. Marilyn Chilcote from “The Public Sanctuary Movement, An Historic Basis of Hope: Oral Histories”

Sanctuary was a loving and mutual relationship. It’s much more than us giving to them. They gave to us a sense of what it means to be a people of faith. Everybody predicted our churches were going to lose members over this. Our churches grew because people started coming back, looking for a place where faithfulness meant something.

Reading

Rev. Robert McKenzie from “The Public Sanctuary Movement, An Historic Basis of Hope: Oral Histories”

It was in every way a conversion experience. I mean, awakening me to the true issues of the gospel.

I read the bible very differently than I used to. I see the world very differently. I read the bible, and I see God’s concern for the poor…

That was the same purpose for which we were struggling in EI Salvador, for justice and a better world, an equitable distribution of the world’s goods and equitable opportunities for life in this world. And those are the controlling ideas as I read a scripture. I used to read other stuff. Now I read this stuff. And I get impatient with speculation, with non concrete flirtation of ideas. I just don’t have any time for that. It used to be very big in my agenda, you know, sort of the abstract theological reflection.

Now, all of that means nothing much to me, and the concrete, hands on, dealing with people, entering their anguish, dealing with their poverty, with their hopes and their expectations, all of that now means everything as I read scripture, as I deal with the community of faith, as I engage myself with the world ….

Then also the whole business of listening to people whose life experience are so deep. It’s just come to me that people who are struggling with life and death issues are people to be listened to, are people who have an uncommon wisdom, are people who ought to be setting the agenda. It’s that kind of solidarity with the poor. I’m not there to minister to them. They minister to me.

Sermon

Ingrid and Omar, a young couple from EI Salvador, came to the United States right out of college. They decided to make the treacherous journey after witnessing several of their fellow students being shot down in an attack on their campus due to student protests in which they had also participated. Omar remembers lying on the ground as the shots whizzed by overhead and the bodies of his friends fell all around him.

Ingrid was pregnant.

They knew they had to escape. Omar came first, traveling much of the way strapped to the bottom of a pick up truck. Ingrid came later, seven months pregnant and hiding in the trunk of car. They came with only a few pieces of clothing and Omar’s violin. They came because their lives and the new life Ingrid carried with her were at stake.

And despite the threat of persecution and even death in their country of origin, our government refused to grant them asylum and would have deported them, had not St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California offered them sanctuary.

That was in 1982. A small number of churches were beginning to form what would become a much larger church sanctuary movement for Central America refugees fleeing human rights violations, even death squads, in their home countries.

And today, over 30 years later, we find ourselves in a situation that is eerily reminiscent of that time. And, once again, a handful of churches, including this one, are offering sanctuary to refugees from many of these same countries.

As most of you know, last month, we began providing sanctuary for Sulma Franco, a woman from Guatemala who had been a leader in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and transgender rights activism. She fled her country and fears going back because LGBT persons in Guatemala are routinely murdered or physically abused. The Guatemalan government does nothing to protect them, implicitly supporting these abuses. Any yet, like with Ingrid and Omar in the 1980s, our own government has refused Sulma’s request for asylum. It has failed to offer her refuge, so First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has.

In doing so, we assumed the mantle of “prophetic church”, along with a tradition and set of responsibilities that go with it.

Now, we’ve been using that term, “prophetic” a lot lately, and a number of folks have come up to me and asked some version of, “What does that mean?”

I think we can get hung up with the word “prophetic” because many of us learned that it has to do with predicting the future. And indeed, the biblical prophets in our Judeo-Christian tradition were described as conveying messages they had received from God about what the future would be like – and it was pretty often a terribly bleak future because the people and their leaders had been behaving quite badly and their God was preparing to throw a rather ill-tempered fit about it.

The ancient prophets though were also offering a critique of the injustices they were witnessing – a vision of how their world could be made better. It is this meaning of prophetic that we use today to describe a church that is bold enough to confront the injustices of its time, creating beloved community both in its midst and out in its world.

Likewise, the church providing sanctuary as both a safe-haven for victims of injustice and as prophetic witness against larger systemic injustices also goes all the way back to those ancient times. We stand in a long history and tradition regarding this meaning of prophetic church.

In the ancient Israelite culture of the Hebrew Bible, their tabernacles, and later the temples and even entire towns could serve as refuge for a person accused of a crime, particularly if what they had done had been an accident.

You see, the laws of the time contained a system of retributive justice – what we often hear described as, “a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm, etc.” Now, this system of retribution applied whether the offense was intentional or not. So, if you accidently poked your neighbor’s eye out while wagging your finger in their face for forgetting to recycle, they could turn around and poke your eye out for being overly sanctimonious.

A bigger problem though was that the ancient Israelites were even more tribal and cliquish than we are now, so if my brother dropped his axe and accidently cut off your third cousin’s left foot, then someone from your tribe could cut off my brothers foot, but then I could take retribution by cutting off their foot and pretty soon our tribes would be at battle, hacking off body parts right and left, like some Monte Python sketch.

That didn’t seem very just in the long run and was a real impediment to passing on the gene pool, so the availability of sanctuary served to help interrupt this chain of events.

It also provided those wrongfully accused of a crime a means to escape immediate and harsh retribution and a refuge from which injustices could be critiqued.

During the early decades of Christianity, house churches sometimes offered a safe haven from oppression under the Roman Empire. In the middle ages, churches in England were legally recognized as temporary sanctuaries, where persons accused of wrongdoing could gain time to allow for their case to be made.

During the Protestant Reformation, reform churches and the cities in which they were located, such as John Calvin’s Geneva, sometimes provided refuge for protestant exiles from the Catholic church – though not always, as our Unitarian forbearer Michael Servetus found out when John Calvin arranged for him to be burnt at the stake, greatly irritating the Catholics, who wanted to do it themselves.

In the U.S., churches provided sanctuary along the Underground Railroad for slaves fleeing the South to seek freedom. Later, churches sometimes provided shelter for women’s and civil rights leaders.

It was in the early 1970’s though, that our sanctuary movement in its current form really took root. Responding to the prolonged, casualty heavy Vietnam War, peace activists and clergy in San Diego and Berkeley, CA, offered church sanctuary to soldiers agonizing over whether to return to the war. This combination of providing safe haven to people in desperate need and at the same time issuing a public declaration against unjust governmental policy and actions became the foundation upon which the immigration sanctuary movement would arise.

As Eileen Purcell, an early activist in the sanctuary movement puts it, “What distinguished sanctuary … was the educational and decision-making process that engaged entire faith communities and led to a corporate and public declaration of sanctuary.”

In the mid-1970s, religious organizations like Church World Services, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, with the support of the U.S. government, began assisting refuges escaping abuse in Chile and Argentina, but then in the 1980s and 90s, civil war and political turmoil broke out in Nicaragua, EI Salvador and Guatemala. Our government was often involved in supporting, sometimes covertly, the forces that were inflecting wide-scale human rights abuses in these countries. Because of this, the government refused to establish the legal framework regarding human rights conditions in these countries that would have allowed refugees pouring out of them to receive asylum and argued instead that they were coming for economic reasons. Sound familiar?

The church sanctuary movement arose to again both provide much needed support for folks like Ingrid and Omar and to shine a light on the injustices being perpetrated both here in the U.S. and in these Central American countries.

People from across different denominations, classes, political parties and races came together in this fight often both working in the sanctuary movement in the U.S. and traveling to Central America at their own personal risk to bear witness.

Our own Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (or UUSC), our congregations and our religious movement as a whole were intensely involved in these efforts, and we sent delegations to Central America. The UUSC provided education and advocacy, as well as a study guide on how to become a sanctuary church.

The government responded by infiltrating sanctuary churches with paid informants. One pastor recalls answering the door one morning to find someone who said they said they were there to repair the phone lines. A few minutes later, he answered another knock at the door, only to find another uniformed man, who also claimed to be from the phone company.

Both of them were government informants in disguise, who had somehow gotten their wires crossed. Awkward. And pardon the terrible pun.

Eventually the government charged a group of clergy and lay leaders in Texas and Tucson, AZ with a number of counts, including harboring and transporting illegal aliens. In the Tucson trial though, the government blocked the defense from making any mention of conditions in Central America, refugee stories, applicable international treaties, the U.S. Refugee Act of 1980, religious convictions or U.S. Foreign Policy. The resultant “kangaroo court”, while obtaining some convictions, backfired against the government in the court of public opinion. Those convicted received suspended sentence or a very short period of house arrest.

Eventually, in a negotiated settlement of a legal case called American Baptist Churches versus Thornburgh, the government agreed to reopen previously denied asylum cases and to accept new applications from those who had been afraid to apply before. Later, Congress passed legislation providing temporary protected status, allowing many more refugees from these countries to avoid deportation and to obtain work permits.

Today, a new sanctuary movement has arisen out of this history and tradition – responding to the needs of people fleeing these same countries and calling attention once again to our government’s mistreatment of these refugees. It is a movement that is again pointing out the U.S. role in creating such terrible conditions in their countries of origin in the first place – this time due at least in part to our failed war on drugs and the activities of our multinational corporations.

This sanctuary movement is the prophetic legacy into which First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin has stepped.

It’s important that you know this about legacy, because your board of Trustees will soon be engaging the congregation in a discussion about whether we want to become a sanctuary church for the longer term.

Under our system of governance, called policy-based governance, the board works with the congregation to establish the church’s values, mission and ends. The ends are kind of the goals we will pursue in order to live out our values and mission. Our senior minister, Meg, then determines the means, or the things that we will do and the ways in which we will pursue those goals. The board also sets limitations for the senior minister, specifying what she may not do in trying to achieve our ends, mainly things that are illegal, unethical or just plain mean and un-ministerial-like.

So when the question of offering sanctuary in this one case came up, doing so was a means for pursuing our ends. Likewise it didn’t seem to involve going up against any of those limitations. So Meg, after consultation with the board, decided to seize the prophetic moment and offer sanctuary to Sulma.

By contrast, the larger decision about whether to become a sanctuary beyond this individual case, potentially involves a redefinition of our ends or at least a redistribution of our priorities within them. As such, Meg and the board believe that it deserves a larger, congregational discussion.

In that discussion, you will have to consider the costs and risks associated with becoming a sanctuary church longer-term. You have heard something of the potential risks today. We have already experienced something of the potential costs in terms of resources and ministerial, staff and volunteer time needed to support providing sanctuary.

So too though, will you consider the potential for transformation. Certainly, we hope that providing sanctuary will be transformative for those who come among us. Sulma has told me that she feels a sense of safety and protection here, as well as a renewed sense of hope, knowing that there is an entire community behind her. Our wish is also that publicly declaring ourselves a sanctuary church will contribute to changes for the better in our immigration system and in our role in the world.

I hope though, you will also consider the potential for transformation within the church itself. I have already sensed in the church a more tangible sense of common purpose, a renewed commitment and passion for our mission.

I’ll close by letting you know that your response to welcoming Sulma among us has already made a big difference for me personally. Just before Sulma moved on campus, I was having a pretty tough time of it. As many of you know, my stepdad had died only a few months before. In the time since, my spouse Wayne had been battling some pretty serious health challenges, and his insurance company was refusing to pay for a procedure he badly needed: the evils of our still for profit healthcare system – but that’s another sermon.

Then, I got a call that my mom was also in the hospital. Both Wayne and Mom are doing much better now, but that was a real low point.

I’m a humanist to the extent that I have an overall faith in the ultimate goodness of humanity.

I’m a theist to the extent that I normally have a sense of connection to something much larger than myself and yet that I am a part of and hold a part of within me.

I have to admit though, at that point, I was loosing that faith in humanity. That connection to something larger than myself seemed far away and in danger of slipping completely out of reach.

And then we put out an email announcement with a list of items we needed folks to donate in order to make a welcoming home for Sulma. That evening, I went to bed exhausted, without checking to see who might have responded.

I got up the next morning to an email inbox full of new messages from church members offering to help. We had several offers for every single item we had listed. We had offers of things that we hadn’t even thought about. People wrote me to say, “I don’t have any of that stuff, but let me know what you need and I’ll go out and buy it.”

Then, we put out another message saying that we needed a bed for Sulma. Almost immediately, two email messages appeared in my inbox at the same time. One of them said, “I have a very nice queen-sized mattress but I don’t have box springs to go with it. The other said, “I have queen sized box springs but no mattress.”

Now, I’m a dyed in the wool Unitarian, but I could have sworn something I’m not allowed to call the Holy Spirit was moving through my email inbox about then.

This church’s outpouring of generosity and compassion renewed my faith and reconnected me with that wonderful and sustaining sense of being a part of something so much larger than myself.

I think that’s what truly living out a shared mission can do for a religious community. I think that’s the transformative potential of putting on that ancient mantle of prophetic church.

Not that I have much of an opinion about which way I hope our discussions may go.

Benediction

May you go forth today carrying with you a sense of awe and wonder that makes transcendence in our world seem possible.

May you carry with you the sense of beloved community we share here, so that you may create more of it in your world.

May you freely give and receive compassion.

May you know the courage to live honestly and vulnerably, seeing all of life’s beauty.

May possibilities for transformation be ever present before you.

May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed be.” Go in peace.

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