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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.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
July 5, 2015

The beginning of our Declaration of Independence lays out a set of values to which we aspire but have not always fulfilled. As our “Standing on the Side of Love” campaign and the recent Supreme Court decision establishing marriage equality demonstrate, our Unitarian and Universalist religious traditions have always been and continue to be intertwined with our social mores and our political system. Celebrate equality and contemplate our nation’s progress with Rev. Chris Jimmerson in “Independence and Interdependence.”

So, all three of your ministers here at First UU Austin were in Portland, Oregon week before last, including last Sunday, to attend the annual Unitarian Universalist General Assembly.

As the first of us to be back in the pulpit, I thought I should start by asking, “Anything very significant happen while we were out?”

Oh yeah, the whole Supreme Court legalizing same sex marriage across the country thing happened.

And let me tell you, there was some celebrating going on in Portland (and that was in addition to their annual nude bicycling festival).

When the news came out, it electrified the atmosphere where thousands of Unitarian Universalists from across the country had gathered for our assembly, and I think rightly so. I think we can rightly claim that, though small in number, we have long been strong advocates for LGBT persons, culminating in our Standing on the Side of Love advocacy campaign, which has publicly and vocally supported marriage equality.

Love won, we were a part of making it happen, and that is certainly worth celebrating.

Once again this year, a theme that emerged repeatedly at general Assembly was how storytelling can both help us work for social change and nourish our own spirits. Telling our own stories and hearing those of others, sharing our stories, can be such a powerful way of reaching across borders and lines of otherness, raising social consciousness and creating religious experence.

So, in the light of all this, 1’d like to shift a little from what had planned for this Sunday and share with you a part of my own marriage equality story. I call it, “The New X-Files: Chris and Wayne Got Married.”

Wayne and I have been together 24 years now, and several years back, we decided to get legally married. Back then, only a small handful of states in the U.S. recognized same sex marriage. We decided to go to Vancouver, Canada instead because, well, it’s a fun place.

I was fairly new to lay leadership here at First UU Church of Austin, and my call to ministry was then a very faint voice only beginning to emerge (or actually reemerge, but more on that later). Having left the Southern Baptist religion of my childhood far behind and embraced a very rationalistic, science-based worldview, I was, at the time, struggling with how or even whether I could find a way to redefine and re-embrace terms like God, even metaphorically.

On the Friday we were supposed to start our trip to Canada, Wayne got a call that his sister, who we have since lost, was in the hospital with heart failure. We decided to go ahead and go to the airport not knowing whether we would get on the plane or have to cancel our flights. Wayne was on and off his cell phone the whole time we were making our way their. As we got to the airport, he got a call. She had stabilized.

We boarded our plane and started on our journey to get married. Surely, nothing could stop us now.

We made a connecting flight in Denver, but shortly after taking off for Vancouver, the smell of something electrical burning filled the plane and it started getting very hot in the cabin.

The pilot came over the P.A. system and told us that the plane was going to return to the Denver airport due to an electrical malfunction in the air-conditioning and heating system.

In other words, it was on fire or at least about to be.

A young woman named Tiffany, who was sitting in the seat between us, gave me a very worried look, and downed the vodka-seven she had just ordered.

And then, the pilot came back on and announced that we were going to make an emergency landing in Cheyenne, Wyoming instead. By now, it had gotten so hot in the cabin that a woman near the front of the plane had passed out and fallen into the aisle way.

I thought, “So, I was right along. There is no God, and we’re never going to get married. Instead, we’re about to die in a fiery crash in some cornfield in Wyoming.”

I’m not even sure there are cornfields in Wyoming but that was the vivid image that sprang into my mind.

We started a very bumpy and very scary descent. Tiffany asked if I would hold her hand. I did. She gripped my hand so hard that the pain at least temporarily knocked me out of my existential crisis.

As we neared the ground, Tiffany noticed that her cell phone had a signal, so she let go of my hand and dialed her fiance.

“We’re making an emergency landing. I think the plane is on fire and I’m not sure if we are going to make it. I’m living a nightmare! This is Tiffany, call me later.”

We landed. The plane was bigger than the hangar at the airport. They pulled up some metal stairs to the exit door and hurried us off of it, asking us to please pick up any rolling bags as we went past the woman still sprawled across the aisle way. She was OK – they got her out safely too.

There was a bar in the little tiny airport hangar. It was still open.

“There is a great and merciful God, and she provides comfort in our times of great difficulty.” I thought.

Eventually, they gave us our luggage, loaded us in buses and took us back to Denver, where we would board a new flight to Vancouver very early the next morning.

Now, we were faced with a new challenge. The marriage-licensing agents in Canada closed at noon on Saturdays, so we were going to have to rush to make it to one on time to get our license, so that the person who would marry us on Sunday could sign it and make it legal.

Our flight to Vancouver was uneventful, and we rushed through the airport, trying to make it through customs, get our luggage and pick up a rental car in time to get to the closest licensing agent.

We hit customs, only to find that there was a large group of rather heavy-set men with grey hair and full grey beards wearing a variety of red and white outfits or tee shirts with Christmas themes. Apparently, we had arrived in Vancouver just in time for the people who play Santa Clause each Christmas annual convention. Most of them were accompanied by plump, rosy cheeked, Mrs. Clauses, one of whom was wearing a tee-shirt with red lettering that said, “biker chick,” while her Santa’s shirt asked, “Naughty or Nice?”

Wayne gave me a look that said, “If there is a God or some kind of divine presence in the universe, it has a sick sense of humor.”

We made it through customs, grabbed our luggage and a rental car and made it to a licensing location with just barely enough time left. I parked the car, threw a coin in the meter, and we practically sprinted to the place.

We both signed where required on the paperwork, and then all that was left was to fill out the rest of the required information and pay the fee. We agreed that Wayne would do that part; while I would make sure there was enough time on the meter for us to have lunch nearby. I went back outside and walked over to the car.

And then unexpectedly, as I was glancing at my watch to see how much time I would need to add to the meter, my eyes suddenly filled with tears. I couldn’t stop it. I was so overwhelmed with joy.

As we were having lunch later, Wayne started telling me about how he had looked up at the clock as they were finishing the paperwork. “We’re really going to get married,” he had said out loud, his eyes filling with tears.

I asked him what time that had been.

It was the exact same moment as when I had experienced the exact same thing.

Perhaps the divine exists in an interconnectedness that is so much more complex and vast and powerful than we can fully understand. Maybe the divine is what happens when we love each other beyond our ability to express it in words.

The next day, in a beautiful historic home on the Vancouver bay, a wonderful woman conducted our wedding service for us. An adorable dog named Marley broke into the room and sat right beside us, our little best man with a squeaky toy in his mouth, which he occasionally chomped down on, causing it to punctuate key elements of the ceremony with a loud squeak followed by lots of laughter.

It was perfect, and beautiful and it still fills my soul with an indescribable joy to remember it.

I think that like our struggle to go get married, in the larger struggle for marriage equality, and indeed, any social justice movement, we have to keep at the journey. We have to know that the struggle for justice itself has inherit value. It is worth it, even though sometimes we will lose people who were on the journey with us. We have to keep going, even when it seems like this world upon which we travel in life is burning, and we are not sure we will ever get to the destination.

And sometimes the absurdities in life will throw Santa Clause conventions in our path that will slow us down. So too though, will we find comfort in our connections with each other. We will cry together, and we will laugh together when angels like Marley bring joy into our lives.

Yesterday was Independence Day, and it feels like the words in that Declaration of Independence, the values expressed all those years ago have come one step closer to actually being realized – that all of us are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights.

Wayne and I, as well as married, same sex couples across the country, are now legally protected in the same way that any other married couple would be. We can’t be thrown out of the hospital room if one of us gets sick. We now have the same inheritance rights as other married couples. We have the same benefits, such as access to one another’s social security after the loss of one of the spouses.

Perhaps more importantly, for me, it feels like we have made a giant step forward toward being recognized as full citizens, as full human beings.

And yet, my friends, there is still much to be done. In 28 states, it is still legal to fire someone simply for being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered. Trans-lives and their rights and dignity are still under assault, both figuratively and literally.

If Wayne and I were to drive less than hour in most any direction from here, stop at a restaurant and, while there, publicly display the same affection toward one another any married, heterosexual couple might, we would likely be placing ourselves in danger.

While we have been celebrating the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, eight African American churches in the South have been burned down, police have assaulted and killed more unarmed African Americans, including two children run over during a high speed chase through a residential African American neighborhood.

So our work is not done. We have to find ways to sustain it, and I think our successes with marriage equality contain the seeds of how we may do so.

When I was only five years old, I told my mother I was going to be a minister when I grew up. I used to record sermons on the little cassette tape recorder my parents had given me. Later though, after rejecting the religion of my childhood, I no longer had a context within which to imagine a call to the ministry. I have since realized that the non-profit and theatre work I did most of my adult life was a way of trying to construct a secular ministry of sorts.

It wasn’t until I found this church, and this religion, that I was able to rediscover that call. A church and a religion that, unlike the one I had left those many years ago, recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of all people. A church and a religion where a gay man can offer what gifts he may have to its ministry, and those gifts will be accepted in a spirit of love.

This church and this religion gave me back my calling in life. Reimagined, this church and this religion gave me God back.

And in doing so, it transformed my life.

And I want ours to be a faith that is transformative for so many other people, especially those who still suffer oppressions and need a church that will welcome them with open arms and a great love for all of humanity. Folks like a young African American woman that I met at General Assembly.

Our wonderful youth group had put together an Action of Immediate Witness – a call for Unitarian Universalist support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Such actions require debate and a vote by the delegates attending the assembly.

We had a long and at times painful debate with a group of us standing in solidarity with the youth and representatives from the Black Lives Matter movement to pass the action of immediate witness worded as they had presented it. A number of amendments to the wording had been offered that in our view would have watered it down to make it more comfortable for white people.

In the end, it passed overwhelming with only minor amendments.

As we stood together, chanting, “black lives matter,” I noticed that the young woman was crying.

I hadn’t really met her, though we had been standing together in a group of folks throughout the debate, but I put my hand on her shoulder to try to provide some comfort. She threw both of her arms around me, pulled me into a hug, and holding onto me started really weeping. I placed an arm around her.

She said, “I was so scared they weren’t going to pass it.” And suddenly, I found myself placing my other arm around her and crying now myself, saying, “I was scared too.”

And though I had not known it until that moment, I had been afraid – afraid because had it had not passed, my religion would have so greatly disappointed, so greatly hurt our youth, our allies from Black Lives Matter. It would have so greatly fallen short of the religion I believe we can be.

It would have hurt and disappointed me.

I had reached out to minster to her, and instead, by being so authentic with a total stranger, by opening a space where I could get in touch with my own vulnerability, she had ministered to me.

And I think maybe it starts there – two strangers, standing in that great big assembly hall, holding each other and telling each other our truths, our fears, being fully human with each other.

I think this is the love that we can cultivate in this church and this religion by sharing our fears, our stories, our fragilities that make us human and let us see each other as human. I think this is the love that we then carry outward into our world and that transforms itself into justice – just as it did with marriage equality and the standing on the side of love campaign.

So, may our well-deserved and much-needed celebration also renew our commitment to standing on the side of love for all people. May it rekindle and refuel a burning fire for doing justice.

Amen

Benediction

Transcendence – To connect with wonder and awe at the unity of life

Community – To connect with joy, sorrow, and service with those whose lives we touch

Compassion – To treat ourselves and others with love

Courage – To live lives of honesty, vulnerability, and beauty

Transformation – To pursue the growth that changes our lives and heals our world

These are the religious values this church has expressed and that underlie our mission that we say together every Sunday.

May you carry these values with you into your daily lives and live them out in a world that so badly needs you right now.

Many, many blessings upon you.

May the congregation say, “Amen” and “Blessed Be.”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.

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Rev. Chris Jimmerson
May 10, 2015

On this Mother’s Day, not far from here, hundreds of immigrant mothers are being held in a detention facility, separated from their children and loved ones. Just a little farther away, immigrant women and their children — some as young as three — are also being held in detention, many of them for months at a time. How do we view this ethically and religiously, especially through the lens of our religious values and our mission? Join Rev. Chris Jimmerson as we examine “Inhospitality to Strangers.”

Sermon

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Hebrews Chapter 13, Verse 2.

This morning, I want to recall a story some of you may have heard me tell before – a story from several years ago when I was working for a non-profit that provides immigration legal services called American Gateways. It’s the story of an asylum seeker who I will call Mykel, though that is not his real name. Mykel fled his home country with a family member because they were being persecuted, even receiving death threats, due to their religious beliefs.

When they arrived in the US, they immediately contacted immigration officials and asked for asylum.

Immigration officials immediately locked them up in an immigrant detention center.

That’s where we first Mykel, at the T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas.

He was two years old at the time. He turned three during the 7 months he and his mother were held in this facility, which at the time was used to imprison entire immigrant families.

Just after Mykel turned three, we represented them before the San Antonio immigration court, and the judge granted them asylum.

We did not get to celebrate though. The attorney for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (or ICE) promptly appealed the judge’s decision.

They locked shackles on Mykel’s mother’s wrists and ankles, as he sobbed in terror, not understanding what they were doing to his mom, and took them back to the prison for immigrants.

Mykel’s mom refused to give up and accept being deported, so we decided to try something different.

A few days later, we had a conference call with that ICE attorney, and all of the sudden, he decided to withdraw the appeal and admitted that their request for asylum was likely valid.

We think part of his change of heart might have had something to do with the call he had gotten from a national reporter earlier that day.

How that reporter found about Mykel’s story, and how she got that attorney’s direct office phone number remains shrouded in mystery.

Several years later, Mykel was living in a large city on the east coast, where his mother had gotten a good job. He had become very proficient with English and was doing well in school.

We know this, because Mykel’ s mom sent American Gateways a letter with an update on how they were doing. “

Enclosed with the letter was a photograph of a bright, smiling Mykel. Paper clipped to the photograph was a check for a thousand dollars, a contribution to, as Mykel’ s mom put it, help the organization help others like her Mykel.

“Thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

Today is Mother’s Day. And while we celebrate the many terrific moms in this congregation and beyond it, as the reading you heard earlier describes, there are folks who are also hurting for a variety of reasons on this Mother’s Day.

I am painfully aware of my own mom and how she must be hurting because it is the first Mother’s Day since we lost my step dad, Ty.

I wanted to start with Mykel’ s story today, because it was one that was a part of a public relations and legal battle that a broad coalition of human rights advocates fought several years ago to force ICE to discontinue family detention at T. Don Hutto.

And they did. We won that one.

On this Mother’s Day though, the victory has turned out to be short lived. We have not only come full circle, it has gotten much worse now.

Today, hundreds of immigrant women and their children, some of them infants, are spending Mother’s Day imprisoned in a detention facility in Karnes City, about an hour southeast of San Antonio. Many of these women and children have been held there for eight months or more. Many of them, like Mykel and his mom, fled persecution and death threats in their home country, only to be re-traumatized when they came to the U.S. seeking asylum, asking for our help.

As if that’s not enough, a little over an hour to the southwest of San Antonio in Dilley, Texas, ICE has just opened another detention facility, which will eventually imprison up to 2,400 immigrants, most of whom will also be women and children. Just last Saturday, several members of this church participated in a rally to protest this facility and call for and end to all immigrant family detention.

The T. Don Hutto Center now houses up to 400 immigrant women, again many of them asylum seekers, who will be spending this Mother’s Day separated from their children and families. It’s hard for me to even imagine which would be worse – being separated from your children or knowing that they will be locked up with you for some unknown period of time.

People who come to the U.S. and ask for asylum have done nothing illegal- in fact, what is illegal according to U.S. law and international human rights treaties is this prolonged detention of asylum seekers while their cases are processed.

And even in the vast majority of instances where immigrants have come for other reasons, such as harsh economic conditions in their countries of origin, they have at most committed an immigration law misdemeanor, the equivalent of getting a traffic ticket. I wonder what would happen if they started holding white people in prison for eight months while their speeding ticket cases got processed.

Excellent research shows that supervised, community-based alternatives to immigrant detention work extremely well. Immigrants comply with the law, showing up for their immigration court and other appointments. These alternatives are also far less expensive than the over 2 billion in U.S. tax dollars we are spending each year on immigration detention.

Yet, for-profit prison companies, like the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, who run Karnes City and Dilley respectively, have discovered that the millions they spend on lobbying at the local, state and federal level to make sure the United States remains the prison capital of the world has been a great investlnent in light of the billions in our tax dollars they rake in every year. Their efforts have resulted in a U.S. incarceration rate nearly 5 times greater than most other countries. They have successfully lobbied, for instance, for congress to require that over 34,000 immigrants Inust be imprisoned at any given time. They were also involved in ICE declaring that the women and children in Karnes and Dilley are national security threats.

Strange how often the people we label as dangerous felons and national security threats happen to have brown and black skin, isn’t it?

Felicia Kongable, one of several of our church members who visit immigrant women and children in local detention facilities, described the following to me about the Karnes City Facility:

– Women who have risked everything to follow their maternal instincts and get their children out of life-threatening situations only to find themselves locked up with up to three other women and all of their children in a room about the size of my office here at the church.

– Infants not being allowed to crawl past the doorway of such rooms.

– Water that tastes like salt and chlorine

– Food that the children do not like and that does not provide proper nutrition for them at this important developmental stage.

– Mothers having to spend the tiny amount they earn doing work for the prison to buy their kids other food from the commissary and bottled water at $1.75 per bottle.

– When many of the women went on a hunger strike to protest their prolonged confinement, they made sure their children still ate. Still, the guards told them, if you don’t eat, we’ll say that it proves you are an unfit mother and we’ll take your children away from you.

– Children depressed. Children distraught over seeing their mothers treated like criminals, subjected to numerous cell counts throughout the day.

– An interior courtyard surround on all four sides by two story building walls as the only outside area for children, where they cannot even see trees or the horizon.

– Children talking about committing suicide by jumping off the second story balcony.

And in fact, Felicia and the others I talked with for this sermon told me of so many horrors that these women and their children had experienced, first in their home countries and then at the hands of our government and these private prison contractors, that I cannot possibly fit them all in one sermon. Even worse, immigration official are denying most asylum cases and issuing deportation orders for entire families, despite the fact that these families are clearly facing severe threats and possible murder if returned to their home countries.

I wish I could let these immigrants speak for themselves today also. They have shown such great courage. I can share with you, with their permission, the words of one of them wrote down.

“My name is Bobbie (not his real name-I changed it) and I am eleven years old. I have been threatened and taunted because I have a language problem. Children at school have teased me, bullied me, hit me and taken my money.

At times I would come home from school with my clothes torn and dirty and I would be so depressed that I didn’t want to leave the house and never wanted to go back to school.

These schoolmates are part of a gang who were also extorting money from my mother. Even the neighbors (believed to be members of the same gang) threatened to harm me and my family. They have said they would kill me because they think I am a homosexual. When my sister tried to defend me, she too became the target of mistreatment and threats.

As children with a woman alone, there is no one to protect us. If I have to go back, we believe that the gangs will follow through on their threats and harm us – because they can. The police are either unwilling or unable to assist us and so we are defenseless in our country.”

When Bobbie’s mother brought him and his sister here to ask for asylum, we locked them up in the Karnes City detention center, despite the fact that they had been issued an initial finding of a credible fear of being harmed or killed if they return to their home country.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

And yet we do the opposite. We bind the angels, and we clip their wings and far too often we toss them back into a torturous hell on earth.

When I was a kid in school, we were taught about episodes in U.S. history that had come to be thought of as stains on the soul of the nation.

– The slaughter and subjugation of natives.
– Slavery, of course.
– Jim Crowe.
– Lynching.
– Imperialism
– McCarthyism
– The Japanese internment camps.

And in our time, I fear that the polluting of our national soul is escalating, a cancer spreading through our very core. The disproportionate execution of black lives by law enforcement, a criminal justice and corrections system gone wild and these modern day internment camps imposed upon immigrant women and their children, these are all just different manifestations of that same cancer – a cancer rooted in racist and classist systems that in turn support an excessively unequal distribution of wealth and power.

But on this Mother’s Day, in this, our time, I think we have a choice. After all, we are still living in our time.

And we can rise up together, a chorus of voices crying out in harmony, “This is not the history we will allow to be written. This is not the story we will allow to be told about our time.”

This will not continue in our name. This will not be done with our taxes.

This makes a mockery of the values we were taught are at the core of our nation.

This violates the principals that we affirm and promote as Unitarian Universalists.

We have a different vision – a vision of beloved community wherein all people are enabled to live lives of dignity, where we act from a spirit that there is enough for each of us rather than out of a culture of scarcity.

We have a vision of offering hospitality to strangers, treating them as if they might well be angels among us.

Now, I know that challenges like these can seem so huge and overwhelming. It is easy to loose hope. It easy to feel that one person cannot possibly make a difference.

I will tell you there is hope. We have won against family detention before. A federal district judge has recently issued a preliminary ruling that immigrant family detention must stop. The final ruling is in less than 30 days, and no doubt the private prison contractors and the forces that fear the stranger will be working hard to appeal or find other ways around this ruling. So now is the time to make our voices heard.

At the social action table today after the service, you can meet a representative of Grassroots Leadership, one of our partners fighting against family detention, and get information about how you can get involved in their efforts, as well as those of many of our other partners. While you’re there, be sure to find out about the immigration action group “Inside Amigos” we are forming right here at the church.

From participating in campaigns to call for an end to family detention, to visiting these women and children, to supporting their legal costs, to providing backpacks with supplies for the kids if they do get released, our many al1d varying efforts all added together really can make a difference.

On this Mother’s Day, in this, our time, in the history that is yet to be written, we have never had a greater opportunity, never been called more to nourish souls, transform lives and do justice. May this be so. May this be the story that we write together. See you at the social action table.

Benediction

Now, as we go out into our world;
May the covenant that binds us together dwell in your heart and nourish your days,
May the mission that we share inspire your thoughts and light your way,
May the spirit of this beloved community go with you until next we are gathered again.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.