Immigration and refugee settlement continues to be one of the most politically polarizing issues in America during the 2016 election cycle and the recent president’s executive order to ban immigrants and refugees from seven countries to enter the United States. I am not neutral on the President’s ban on immigrants and refugees. There are many issues that involved, from the targeting Muslims as a religion and the impact it has on families and business in the US. In addition, his ban places a death sentence on LGBT refugees from the seven countries that were targeted.

We have a banner on the church that reads, “Immigrants and Refugees Welcome,” with the image of Mary carrying the infant Jesus and Joseph leading the donkey to Egypt. Ironically, Joseph was displaced to Nazareth from Bethlehem, and he comes to Bethlehem for the census and cannot find shelter as a native son. Now Rev. Al Sharpton tweeted, “Before you head to church today, remember to thank God for his son, Jesus a refugee who fled to Egypt.”
But the response from fundamentalist Christians to this tweet: “They went to pay Taxes in Egypt. They went home. YOU need to pay your taxes and learn Bible!” Fox slammed Sharpton similarly for using Jesus to tackle the Trump ban.
Now to those who claim that Mary and Joseph went to Egypt to pay their taxes, there is no scriptural evidence from the Gospel of Matthew. After the visit from the Magi, an angel appeared in a dream and warned Joseph: “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him.” (Mt. 2:13) Fleeing to Egypt to avoid death is not going to Egypt to pay taxes. This is really “fake” truth or invention of alternative truth to support the ban by racist Christians.

But after the birth of Jesus, Mary with child in her arms and Joseph flee from the persecution of Herod the Great, who dispatched his soldiers to Bethlehem, to kill all male infants from age 2 and under. At the heart of the gospel story, when Mary and Joseph took their infant son Jesus and fled to Egypt, they became refugees. They journeyed as refugees to Egypt.

Joseph took his family and fled to Egypt. There they lived lives as aliens, outsiders. They didn’t speak Demotic, the language of 1st century Egypt, and they were relegated to the most menial of labor. I am awed by the depth of their pain and suffering of refugees. There is often loneliness and strangeness of living in a foreign country that places a strain on immigrants and refugees. Jesus’ parents experienced what it meant to be refugees from violence and seek re-settlement. It is part of the gospel to proclaim Jesus the refugee. Jesus was an alien and refugee, and later an outsider.

Our biblical heritage is full of stories of the chosen people as immigrants and refugees. Abraham migrated from the city of Ur to Canaan, seeking a better life and opportunities. Jacob and his sons and their families migrated to Egypt due to famine, and a couple centuries later, the Hebrews under the leadership of Moses fled slavery and oppress in the Exodus. Ruth migrates with Naomi from Moab to Canaan, and Ruth a foreigner becomes the great grandmother of King David. Many Hebrew families were forced into captivity and go into exile by the Babylonian conquest. The exile was a forced migration and resettlement. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures are full of migration and refugees.

I would argue creatively that God’s incarnation in Jesus is also migration from God to humanity—God with us. As I mentioned in the birth stories of Jesus, Mary and Joseph fled Bethlehem to Egypt to save the life of Jesus as an infant. They were refugees in Egypt.

Now listen to this story of Maria: Maria, a refugee from a different part of the world, perhaps Syria, was 20 years old when she also had to flee a step ahead of soldiers.

My husband woke me in the middle of the night. He told me we had to leave right away. He had a warning that soldiers were coming. We could take only what we could carry. I wrapped the baby to keep him warm. We walked for days. Later, we heard what the soldiers did: they killed all the boy babies in our village. Where we live now, the food and the language are strange. My baby is growing up without knowing his home country. Built isn’t safe to go back, not yet.

This story sounds very close to the story in the gospel of Matthew and the flight to Egypt of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. I am horrified that the holy family as well as Maria, her husband, and child could be turned away from our country and not granted political asylum. The holy family would now be turned away by homeland security and to go back to Bethlehem.

In our country, we welcome immigrants with green cards, except from the banned seven countries where the Trump administration designated. There are, at least, 12 million undocumented migrants in the United States, and there are nearly two million dreamers, those who were brought to the US as children by their families. They made no decision on their own to cross into the US legally, and the Obama administration asked those dreamers to register. They are terrified at the new administration targeting themselves for deportation. Or those who have crossed the southern border from Central America, fleeing for their lives. We welcomed several refugees from San Salvador, who fled for their lives because they were gay. They were threatened and beaten up for being gay.
Numerous Christian churches and Jewish synagogues have adopted Syrian and other refugee families in their relocation to the US. Refugee families migrate from their home countries from the circumstances of war, oppression, and poverty. All of us, unless descendants of Native Americans, are immigrants. How many Europeans and other nationalities migrated to the US because they were persecuted? Many Europeans came to North America because of religious persecution and oppression while others came for economic opportunities. But they not learn from their experience and appreciate the indigenous people in North America. We displaced many Native Americans from their lands and forced them to live on ghettoized reservations. And now we displace them with oil pipelines. And in the future, are we prepared for the hundreds of million and even billions of human beings who will be climate refugees.

I am the a 3rd and 4th generation descendant of immigrants to the US from both sides of my parents. I suspect that many of us here this morning could claim the same. My Greek grandmother and her sister came from the Greek island of Samos through Ellis Island. They were both unable to read or speak English then. But on Ellis Island were written the bold words of Emma Lazarus:

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! (Emma Lazarus)

The American ideal, enshrined in these words at Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, are embodied in our scriptural tradition of welcoming the migrant and the refugee. Do we dare look upon those strangers, refugees and immigrants welcome them with the value and love that God has for them? Or do we fall into the hysteria and exclusivist vision of rejection espoused white nationalist and racist Christian churches intertwined in a holy union of nationalism with hatred and bigotry? For remember Christ’s words, “Truly I say to you, just as you did not do to one of the least of these, so you did not do it to me.” Do we dare to reject Christ in the face of the immigrant and the refugee? I will never reject the Christ in the refugee and the immigrant. My roots and your roots go back to our ancestral immigrants and refugees.

As you listened to the various scripture verses read antiphonally by Layne and myself, we realize that our religious ancestors in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures were often migrants and refugees.

Jesus teaches us how we individually and collectively treat the least of our sisters and brothers–who are now refugees and immigrants– is the way we welcome and treat him. In the world’s refugees, we encounter the refugee Jesus.
In an article on refugees in the Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Roy Branson observes that:

While Christianity affirms the importance of the individual stranger, it also values community. The sanctuary movement [that is, the historic practice of offering sanctuary to those fleeing danger] not only draws attention to the exile but also to the cities of refuge. As in designated Old Testament towns, and in British and European cathedrals into the 16th century, security from retaliation and injustice must be provided … The theme of exiles and pilgrims as the chosen of God, who must in turn welcome the stranger, is so strong a theme in biblical faith that it creates a presumption in favor of admitting the immigrant, granting asylum to the refugee, and treating the alien as an equal.

The church consists of “foreigners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11). It was a church of independent women, slaves, various ethnicities, and different classes that came to together as Christians. They were outsiders and from many cities. Many LGBT folks have been treated as foreigners and exiles. The same Christians who do not welcome us, usually do not welcome refugees and exiles; they are outsiders to be feared and shunned. These Christians express an amnesia of their biblical heritage. But they ignore God’s preferential care for the outsider, the foreigner, immigrant, and refugee. One UCC clergy, Rev. Matt Fitzgerald, involved in a Syrian family re-settlement program at St. Paul’s UCC in Chicago, observed:

The people of Saint Paul’s know what it is to be ‘a stranger in a strange land…Therefore, our church has a strong, clear, continually rewarding spirit of hospitality. Welcoming a Syrian family felt like an extension of who we are, rather than a new direction or a risk. Our simple act of Christian hospitality looks bold because of President Trump’s anti-Christian executive order. In a time like this, all the church has to do is be the church for our light to shine brightly.(Supporting the Stranger, KYP)

Like Jesus, we know what it’s like to be outsiders. Many of us have been targeted and excluded as outsiders, despised for sexual orientation or for gender variance. In the world’s refugees, we meet Jesus Christ the refugee. We must reject the racism of the Trump ban, the fears building the wall, and any deportation force that takes away our neighbors. It is not acceptable to surrender to policies based on fear and racism,