Encountering Mercy at the Borderlands Preached on September 9th, 2018 At Wollaston Congregational Church Focus Scripture: Mark 7:24-37 Today we take a trip, in our minds, to the borderlands. Here we find desperate mothers and fathers seeking healing and safety for their children. We also find Jesus, grappling with the extent of his ministry, and what are the borders of God’s kingdom. For ourselves and for Jesus the borderland is a place of discomfort and struggle. It is also the place where we meet God’s unfathomable grief and mercy for all God’s children. The PBS Frontline documentary, “Separated: Children at the Border” introduces us to Esmerelda Rodriguez. Esmerelda journeys north, from Honduras, through Guatemala, to Mexico with her three daughters. She plans throw herself on the mercy of border patrol agents when she reaches the USA. She wants to ask for asylum. Her oldest child, just a young teenager, has been a witness to the murder of her godmother. The gang members who committed the act have threatened to kill the entire family if they do not leave the country. The child is traumatized by what she has seen. Her mom brought her to a psychologist, but nothing can stop her nightmares. The journey to the border is a nightmare in itself. The family travels through Central America’s violent northern triangle in beat up vans. They are packed in – sweating and parched - with other migrants. They are poor. They cannot afford plane tickets or a safe vehicle. When they reach Mexico they take their chance on “the Beast” – a freight train, where migrants ride on top. Gangs patrol these “passengers.” There are thefts, rapes and murders on top of that train. In recent years Border agents have reported floods of children and teenagers crossing the US southern border from Central American countries. The owner of a ranch regularly finds bodies of those who have died in the heat of the desert. He has electrified the fence that contains his ranch and runs his own militia, to help with border patrol. He tells the PBS interviewer “I’m black and white, I’m not gray – they’ve broken our laws by coming into the country illegally. We cannot take care of the whole world.” This past spring for a period of about 2 months our government adopted a policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border. Somewhere from 2,000 to 3,000 children were taken away from their accompanying parent and held in pens and cells “pending processing.” When the processing came around, children as young as 1 year old were brought to court and expected to answer questions about their immigration status. Some did not even know their own name or country of origin. The policy did not last long – the nation’s outrage was heard. But the repercussions will last for years. The Militias remain resolute, but there are others who have heard the cry of the children. Pro-bono attorneys , nuns, and other volunteers, have been working to reunite families. Some parents had already been deported without their children. Others were being held in detention far away. Donors have posted bail for parents held in detention. Still hundreds of children remain separated. In a world that does not live up to God’s will for peace among all people, borders and border protection are necessary. Neither we, nor our government created the situation in Central America. Let us pray for our elected officials, as they try to create a reasonable immigration policy, and may we also pray that children will never again be forcibly separated from the parents who are trying to protect them. There is infinite wideness in God’s grief at this tragic situation and God’s mercy for all God’s children. So, may there also be a wideness in our human grief and mercy. Our gospel passage for today tells of a time when Jesus’ mercy was challenged by a mother’s love. And this takes place near the border of his land. Jesus has traveled to the border region far north of Jerusalem. He is in Gentile territory. The people of this place have not been welcoming to Jews in the past. Gentile landowners exploit Jewish tenants and Jewish customs are not observed. Jesus seems to have come to this unfriendly place to seek asylum from King Herod. Jesus and his disciples are exhausted from their recent tour of Israelite villages. They have healed the sick in so many places and now Jesus wants to lie low. Perhaps he assumes that since he is outside of Jewish territory he will not be bothered. And yet Mark, the gospel writer says, he could not escape notice. The Syrophoenician woman is most definitely not of Jewish descent. She is of a different culture and a different ethnicity. But she is a desperate mother of a sick child and she has heard that Jesus can heal this kind of sickness. That is all she needs to know as she falls on her knees at Jesus’ feet and begs him to have mercy. This is not Jesus’ finest hour. He sounds closed minded and mean spirited: “let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The people of Israel are the children he assumes he has come to serve. The Gentile woman and her child are on the outside of that boundary. He refers to them as dogs. Even though dogs are beloved to most of us, we know an insult when we hear it. The woman does not retreat silently after his rejection. Instead, she is bold, standing her ground. She even plays with his words, as she replies “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Jesus is taken aback by her reply. He does an about-turn. “For saying that you may go-the demon has left your daughter.” Immediately the child is healed. Jesus has gone from closed-minded “charity begins at home” to opening up to the wideness of God’s grief and mercy. Before his meeting with the Syrophoenician woman he believed his ministry was limited to the people of Israel. After this encounter he understands that God’s kingdom extends to all the world. God’s loving kindness, God’s grief and God’s mercy are for all people. In my final year in seminary I took the reading-heavy Ethics class I had been avoiding. This was an online class, and students were assigned to discussion groups to reflect on each week’s readings. My discussion group included a man named William, a member of an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston. William was slight in his build and rather quiet. I remembered from another class that he possessed an incredible knowledge of the Bible. His perspectives were intelligent, his thought process was meticulous. I knew he would keep me on my toes. Mostly we got along well in our online conversations. William would share his perspective of a black American Christian navigating a white world. It was not always comfortable reading for me. Even though I was working from the comfort of my own home, my interactions with William brought me to the border lands between black and white America. During the course of the semester, a Middle School student from my community and church died from cancer. I knew the family and the child, who bravely had battled the disease for some time. I was devastated, along with our entire small town. I felt unable to tackle the Ethics class questions that week without referring to the young girl who had passed away. I shared my feelings with my group and William gently commiserated. But then he shared with me the number of times that he had attended funerals for the children of his close friends at church and in his community. These young people had died from disease, gun violence, and overdoses. To say that there were ten deaths in his community for every one in mine is probably an underestimate. I simply could not imagine multiplying my feelings of grief for the one child by 10. My church was ministering to the family and the community in the midst of the loss. My pastor told me that he imagined the grief the community like waves of the ocean crashing onto the shore. Looking back, I imagine God’s grief and God’s mercy at the loss of each child of the African American community and each child separated at the border like another ocean crashing onto the shore. 1000’s of oceans of grief and mercy – God’s grief and God’s mercy – unfathomable to you and me. We learn just a little of this great grief and mercy, if we travel to the borderlands. Perhaps your borderland is a state of mind … a courageous place of prayer … a willingness to have a conversation with someone who thinks differently than you do … a venture into the territory of sobriety … a new connection with someone who looks different, worships differently or loves differently from ourselves. Whether we travel physically or in our minds, today here is an invitation to the borderlands. We could stay within our own territory where it is safer. But, wouldn’t you rather go? Wouldn’t you rather grow?
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