2 Corinthians 5:16-21
Psalm 32
Luke 15:1-32
Once upon a time, the National Guard was mobilized and sent to the Mexican border, and no one protested or called it a political stunt. It all started just over one hundred and three years ago, on March 9, 1916, though maybe you could say it really all started at the Battle of Puebla on Cinco De Mayo, fifty-four years earlier, for long before folks were drinking fancy margaritas Cinco de Mayo was a day for celebrating Porfirio.
On that first Cinco De Mayo, General Porfirio Diaz became a national hero as he led Mexican troops against a French intervention. He would ride that celebrity for decades, all the way to the presidency, and with the exception of one four year term, would serve as Mexican president from 1877 to 1911, pretty good for someone who originally ran as an opponent of presidential re-election. Resistance to his continued rule built slowly over the decades, erupting into civil war in 1910, though some prefer the term revolution, depending on which side you pick and which historian you read.
Whether it was a civil war or a revolution, one thing is clear. It was a horrible mess, not a people throwing off a colonial power, a native despot, or even an oppressive economic system, but instead a game of factions and shifting sides, often with little ideology but much naked ambition, greed, and personal animosity.
When a nation become lawless, the lawless thrive. So it was that a bandit from Durango became a revolutionary. Born José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, you know him by his adopted name, Pancho Villa. As commander of the División del Norte, he proved himself an able strategist and leader, if not a particularly faithful ally. He would help overthrow one president, but then turn on the one he helped put in power.
Early on he had been depicted as a flamboyant hero in the American press and even caught Hollywood’s eye. But in 1915, he and his army were defeated at the Battle of Celaya in April, and again at the Second Battle of Agua Prieta in November. Villa and his forces became nothing more than a rag-tag guerrilla force from that point on, desperate for supplies. So it was that one morning in March 1916 would find them on the outskirts of Columbus, New Mexico, three miles into US territory.
Columbus was home to much-needed supplies and munitions precisely because it was an outpost of the 13th Cavalry Regiment, assigned to patrol the US-Mexican border. Pancho Villa’s scouts badly under-estimated the number of troops in the garrison, and while they captured arms and supplies that day, Villa lost sixty-three men during the fighting, with seven captured and dozens more later dying from their wounds. Several US cavalrymen and civilians were killed as well. US President Woodrow Wilson mobilized the National Guard, and a punitive expedition into Mexico was led by General “Black Jack†Pershing, who would later distinguish himself in the Great War.
Alas, the mobilization was ineffective. While Villa’s raid on Columbus was a terrible thing, the threat had been wildly exaggerated. The handful of other incidents on the border during that period may have simply been run-of-the-mill criminality. Wilson’s response, five thousand US troops, was disproportionate, and while Black Jack and his men pursued Villa for almost a year, he was never captured. The former bandit turned revolutionary commander was once again little more than a bandit for the remainder of the Mexican Civil War, though he would be granted amnesty at its conclusion.
One hundred and three years later, and we are still mobilizing troops and sending them to the border, and some might argue, in a way just as disproportionate as before the First World War.
Now, as I’ve said from this pulpit in the past, I dislike illegal immigration because I like law and order. I think a country should be able to control its borders. I didn’t like the Mexican day laborers standing at the side of the highway on Long Island when I served there, though I understood they just wanted to support their families back home. I grieved when Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorian immigrant, was murdered by seven local teens in Patchogue. I don’t like an economic system that creates grinding poverty abroad, nor do I like an economic system that creates jobs so horrific and poorly paid here that no American will take them. If the machine of free market capitalism requires broken human bodies for fuel, then you’ll excuse me for believing that there has to be a better way.
I don’t like fruit and vegetables rotting on the vine and in the field either, and especially don’t like those who profit from and often exploit the vulnerable population of undocumented workers.
Somewhere in the middle of the politics of agribusiness, multi-national corporations, and white nationalist extremism are real people who want to feed their families, raise their children, and feel safe and who would really prefer to do it in their home countries if they could. They are some mother’s son, some sister’s sister, humans who love and hurt and laugh and cry.
What we have at the border today is not those single Mexican men I saw on Long Island, crossing illegally into the country looking for work. There is simply no illegal immigration crisis at the border. There are, at our southern border, tens of thousands of refugees, not illegal immigrants, seeking to legally enter the country for safety, mostly families, mostly from the northern triangle of Central America. While we can distort and exaggerate for political gain, ramping up racist fear, can highlight a few exploitive traffickers, the bottom line is that what we are experiencing is no different than the crisis Europe faced at the height of the Syrian Civil War, before Russia restored that country’s brutal dictator. The families fleeing Syria then and the families fleeing El Salvador now risk possible death to escape certain death.
The flood of refugees overwhelmed Europe and is overwhelming the US, stoking anxiety and hate. There is a crisis, just is not the crisis we hear described. It is a crisis because the need, the desperation, exceeds our willingness, our compassion, maybe our capacity. It is a crisis of conscience.
The underlying question is one that America has never been able to answer, not when the immigrants were Southern and Eastern Europeans, not when they were Chinese, not even when they were Jews fleeing the Nazis. Will we be an open society or will we be a closed one? Will those of us lucky enough to have made it in, four centuries ago, three decades ago, two years ago, slam the door and prevent the entry of others, like dragons perched on our spoils, or will we live up to our one-time aspiration of being a land of opportunity where anyone who is willing to work hard can get ahead? Will we build walls or will we open doors?
I don’t have answers. The situation is scary, painful, complex, and in the news constantly. But if we are going to err, and it seems inevitable that we will err at times, I’d prefer we err on the side of love, of hospitality, of justice, of openness.
A similar struggle is at the heart of today’s reading. Will we be an open spiritual community, a people that are expansive and reconciling, or will we be a closed community, controlling and fearful? Is there a finite supply of the divine? This is a tension that played out between John the Baptizer’s closed repentance community and Jesus’ radically open table, a cause of consternation for the scribes and Pharisees in today’s reading. It is a tension between Peter’s vision of a Jewish reform movement and Paul’s expansive way of Christ that took in Gentiles.
The parable many think of as the Prodigal Son is the last of a three-part cycle on what seems to be a straight-forward theme, the recovery of something that was lost. Imagine my surprise, laying about reading last Sunday’s New York Times to find that cycle referenced in a profile on Rick Steves, the travel guru. Steves turns out to be a pretty groovy guy, not because he has a bong in his living room, not really my thing, not because he is a faithful Christian, active and generous in his church and denomination, though as you can imagine, I’m definitely good with that, but because he is both deeply patriotic and deeply critical of our country. It is my contention that true patriots know history well enough to know America was never great for everybody, but also have enough imagination and hope to believe that it might yet be.
The take-away of the profile on Rick Steves was his core belief that experiencing other countries and cultures makes us better Americans.
If only we could interview that prodigal son a couple of years after the story! I bet his travels, his time feeding pigs (remember, they were an unclean animal to the Hebrews, so this was about as low as he could go) certainly made him a better member of his own family, his own community, once he got home.
The story that most of us know as the Parable of the Prodigal Son has been called many things over the centuries, including the Parable of the Two Brothers, the Parable of the Lost Son, the Parable of the Lovesick Father, and the Parable of the Loving Father. This confusion reflects an uncertainty you see in the a history of interpretation. Who are we supposed to be in this parable? We’ve all made mistakes and had to find our way back, but most of us have also been peevish when others did not receive punishment and consequences we thought they deserved, so we’ve been both sons, that’s for sure. At our better moments, we may have even been like the Father in our radical welcome and forgiveness.
The most common interpretation, certainly among Protestants, has absolutely nothing to do with the actual teaching cycle of which the parable is a part, the recovery of what is lost, for it has been used again and again as a parable of faith versus works, that false division that has plagued Christianity since the beginning. Jesus protests empty obedience, religion without heart, not religion itself. He isn’t anti-works, he just things faith and love matter more.
Faith and works and God’s amazing grace and the asymmetry in our relationship with our Creator aren’t really the point of the story. Or maybe they are. Maybe it is the superfluous love of God that is the point, standing in contrast to our own stinginess. The brother already got his share and blew it. The father’s generosity is eating into the future inheritance of the hardworking brother who stayed behind. But there is a problem with the story at this point, because the father is God and God’s love, God’s grace, God’s blessings, are not zero sum. God’s well of forgiveness does not run dry. Maybe we are only supposed to understand it in exactly the context we find in scripture, the joy of finding what was lost, God’s joy when we are once again restored. If we overthink it, we might get lost in human notions of justice and scarcity.
It is a story that feels incomplete. I want to know if there is going to be reconciliation between the brothers, not the point of the parable it seems, but still… The welcome, the hospitality, the integration, that concerns me, not the sins of the past. I want to know how things are going to be going forward.
Restoration and reconciliation can only happen if the household is porous enough to re-admit the prodigal. And, I would argue, the household is enriched by his mistakes and his experiences.
Our church, our covenant community, must be porous as well.
We are a church of sinners, not saints, and we carry our failures in the door with us each Sunday morning. God, the father in the story, Mother-Father-Creator of us all, welcomes us back no matter what, has the power to turn our failures into the kind of compassion that is love in action.
Rick Steves wants you to experience otherness and to be changed, then to bring those gifts back to our country, making something completely new of yourself and your community with every thread you weave into our collective story, shiny to obsidian and everything in between, a jazz of African rhythms and Northern European fugue and the sloshing of the bayou against the gin joint door.
I want to know that the faithful son came around. I want to know that the newly humbled prodigal made an effort to celebrate his brother, all that hard work, because brothers are a thing in the Hebrew tradition, and not always a good thing.
But mostly, I want to pray: for me, for our church, for our nation, that we might have a heart as big as that of our God. Whether it was what was lost and now is found, or what is discovered for the first time, in one another, in other cultures, it is certainly cause for celebration. May we find it in our hearts to bring out the best robes, kill the fatted calf, and throw a party of welcome.
Amen.