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If I Were Gazan

If I Were Gazan

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If I were Gazan
I would pray for sleep
sweet unconsciousness
for dreamless sleep
unhaunted by grey ash or orange fire or crimson blood.

If I were Gazan
I would cleave to memory
consoling souvenir
sunlight dancing on my wife’s face
dappling the beguiling smile now forever erased.

If I were Gazan
I would scream at God
dumbfounded rage
badgering the pitiless One
unmoved unmoving while his children are returned to dust.

If I were Gazan
I would rue my grandchildren
cruel blessing
their unbearable tomorrows
untempered by any yesterdays in which to find fleeting succor.

If I were Gazan
I would pray to never sleep
desperate vigilance
my only remaining duty
to help them survive — to breath, to touch, to be touched — one more day.

If I were Gazan —
but I am not Gazan and you are
unthinkable injustice
that the same sun and the same God
shine warm and bright on me and burn you with searing flame.

Human Rights Watch Issues Report on Salvadoran Deportees

Human Rights Watch Issues Report on Salvadoran Deportees

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Yesterday, Human Rights Watch issued a report entitled, Deported to Danger, summarizing its findings after tracking the fate of Salvadoran asylum seekers returned by the United States to their homeland. They found that “in many cases the US is putting Salvadorans in harm’s way in circumstances where it knows or should know that harm is likely.” Many of those returned have either been killed or subjected to “sexual violence, torture, and other harm,” exactly the reason for which they sought asylum in the first place. The Trump administration is deporting Salvadorans discounting the very real threats they face upon return, “despite clear prohibitions in international law on returning people to risk of persecution or torture.”

Human Rights Watch recommends that “instead of deterring and deporting people, the US should focus on receiving those who cross its border with dignity and providing them a fair chance to explain why they need protection. Before deporting Salvadorans living in the United States, either with TPS or in some other immigration status, US authorities should take into account the extraordinary risks former long-term residents of the US may face if sent back to the country of their birth.” And they specifically urge the following six steps …

  • The Trump administration should repeal the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP); the two Asylum Bans; and the Asylum Cooperation Agreements.
  • The Attorney General of the United States should reverse his decisions that restrict gender-based, gang-related, and family-based grounds for asylum.
  • Congress and the Executive Branch should ensure that US funding for Mexican migration enforcement activities does not erode the right to seek and receive asylum in Mexico.
  • Congress should immediately exercise its appropriation power by: 1) Refraining from providing additional funding to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unless and until abusive policies and practices that separate families, employ unnecessary detention, violate due process rights, and violate the right to seek asylum are stopped; 2) Prohibiting the use of funds to implement the Migrant Protection Protocols, the “Asylum Bans,” or the Asylum Cooperation Agreements, or any subsequent revisions to those protocols and agreements that block access to the right to seek asylum in the United States.
  • Congress should exercise its oversight authority by requiring the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Inspector General to produce reports on the United States’ fulfilment of its asylum and protection responsibilities, including by collecting and releasing accurate data on the procedural experiences of asylum seekers (access to counsel, wait times, staff capacity to assess claims, humanitarian and protection resources available) and on harms experienced by people deported from the United States to their countries of origin.
  • Congress should enact, and the President should sign, legislation that would broadly protect individuals with Temporary Protected Status (including Salvadorans) and DACA recipients, such as the Dream and Promise Act of 2019, but without the overly broad restrictions based on juvenile conduct or information from flawed gang databases

If we indeed remain a government “of the people,” we must make our voices heard and work to reverse this cruel policy!

May it not be long

May it not be long

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A prayer from John Bell …

May it not be long, Lord.

May it not be long
before there are no more beggars at the door
waiting for crumbs from the tables of the rich.

May it not be long
before northern exploitation
of the southern economies
is a fact of history,
not a fact of life.

May it not be long
before poor economies
cease to be havens for sex tourism,
child labor and experimental genetic farming.

May it not be long
before those nations we once evangelized
show us the larger Christ
whom we, too often, have forgotten.

May it not be long
before the governments of our nations
legislate against commercial avarice
and over-consumption which hurts the poor
and indebts them.

May it not be long
before Christians in this land
examine their economic priorities
in the light of the Gospel,
rather than in its shadow.

May it not be long
before we respond out of love,
not out of guilt.

May it not be long
before we find wells of hope
deeper than the shallow pools of optimism
in which we sometimes paddle.

May it not be long
before we feel as liberated and addressed
by your word
as those first folk did
who heard you summon the oddest of people
to fulfill the oddest of callings.

May it not be long, Lord.

Amen.

(From This Is the Day: Readings and Meditations from the Iona Community, edited by Neil Paynter, ©2002, Wild Goose Publications, Fourth Floor, Savoy House, 140 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3DH, UK)

Revolutionary faith

Revolutionary faith

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In June 1966, less than two years before he was killed, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached from his Atlanta pulpit of the dynamic dance between Good Friday and Easter, between death and resurrection, between despair and hope.

“The church must tell [people] that Good Friday is as much a fact of life as Easter; failure is as much a fact of life as success; disappointment is as much a fact of life as fulfillment,” he said. Dr. King added that God didn’t promise us that we would avoid “trials and tribulations” but that “if you have faith in God, that God has the power to give you a kind of inner equilibrium through your pain.”

These are the first two paragraphs of an article by Michael Eric Dyson, We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In, published March 31 in the New York Times and shared with me by my friend, “Meach” Meacham.

We can do our best to avoid disappointment and failure and pain. Jesus could have … by not going to Jerusalem, by not following the path of obedience, by not putting the kingdom of God first, by not caring about people, all the people.

For Jesus, Good Friday was a choice, a choice to be where God called him to be and to do what God called him to do. And we too have a choice: to follow Jesus, or not.

“The great tragedy is that Christianity failed to see that it had the revolutionary edge,” Dr. King said, two months before he was killed.

If Christianity is not revolutionary, then what good is it? To keep us mollified, while the world and our neighbors go to hell? Jesus was revolutionary, preaching and enacting a kingdom of God that was and is turning the world upside down — not to upset it, but to make it right!

If we choose to follow Jesus, if our faith is genuine not merely a pacifier, then we cannot remain complacent. The church of Jesus Christ cannot stand by watching as people suffer, as whole peoples are marginalized, as whole classes of humanity are deprived of life and liberty and happiness whether by malice or by apathy.

Dyson’s article is good and timely reading …

As America in its present incarnation, with its present leadership, teeters toward an arrogance, isolationism and self-importance that are the portals of moral decline and political self-destruction, the nation must recall the faith of Martin Luther King Jr. He saw faith as a tool for change, a constant source of inspiration to remake the world in the just and redemptive image of God. On this holy day, instead of shrinking into the safety of faith, we should, as Dr. King did, bear the burdens of the less fortunate and rise again to serve humanity.

we still need heart!

we still need heart!

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Donald Trump promised, “We’re going to show great heart,” and it is time to keep that promise.  The fate of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) hangs on the balance as ten states have challenged its legitimacy in court and it is not clear whether or not the Trump administration will do anything to defend it.

“Children took a big risk by registering with the government to be covered under DACA. Now, this trust in the American government may lead to their deportation if the Trump administration doesn’t act to save the program.” (Vivek Wadhwa, Washington Post)

What is gained — for the United States, for individual states, for business, for communities — if DACA is allowed to lapse? I can think of nothing that could be gained. We would no safer. We would be no richer. We would be no truer to our democratic heritage.

But we have much to lose! We could lose the dreams and talents and contributions and goodwill of these hundreds of thousands of young men and women who have been “virtual” Americans all their lives. And we would lose something of the “soul” of our nation: our compassion for vulnerable people, our welcome of homeless people, our belief in justice for all, our vision of making “one out of many.”

i was hungry

i was hungry

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“I was hungry and you fed me.”

It’s clear.  It’s specific.  It’s indisputable.  Jesus said this is what righteous people do.

The author of the gospel of Matthew places this message at the end of the twenty-fifth chapter, just before  beginning the account of Jesus’ last days — his passion, his arrest, trail, and execution.  These are Jesus’ “final words,” his “parting message,” to his followers.  This is what matters.  It is by this standard that you will be measured.  “I was hungry and you fed me.”

But when did we ever see the Lord hungry and feed him?  Whenever you did this for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it for me.  That is Jesus’ message.  Clear.  Specific.  Not metaphorical, but quite literal.  You see a hungry person?  Feed her and you feed me.

I was overcome with grief and horror when I read about the plight of the people of the Horn of Africa as I was doing research for last Sunday’s sermon.  Twenty million people in Somalia and South Sudan and Yemen at risk of severe famine.  The equivalent of the entire population of Iowa and Wisconsin and Minnesota and Missouri combined, all starving to death.

If that were indeed true here, we would think it a crisis of apocalyptic proportions.  It is a crisis of apocalyptic proportions!  I could not do nothing: “I was hungry and you fed me.”  If you want to do something, consider a gift to the American Relief Agency for the Horn of Africa (ARAHA), a relief organization based in Minneapolis.  A gift of $150 supplies one family with a relief package that includes a “food basket, nutrition packs for children, and water“ (https://araha.org/drought-relief-2/).

a tale of two florida prosecutors

a tale of two florida prosecutors

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1) Miami-Dade prosecutor Katherine Fernandez Rundle declined to press charges in the case of Darren Rainey, a schizophrenic prison inmate who died in June 2012 after being locked in a hot shower for two hours, saying that “the evidence does not show that Rainey’s well-being was grossly disregarded by the correctional staff.”

However,

witnesses [interviewed by the Miami Herald] including a nurse on duty that night, and several inmates interviewed by the Herald over the past two years, have said that two corrections officers, Cornelius Thompson and Roland Clark, forced Rainey into an enclosed, locked shower stall and that the water had been cranked as high as 180 degrees from a neighboring room, where the heat controls were. … Rainey screamed in terror and begged to be let out for more than an hour until he collapsed and died.

And,

when his body was pulled out, nurses said there were burns on 90 percent of his body. A nurse said his body temperature was too high to register with a thermometer. And his skin fell off at the touch.

Rainey was serving a two-year sentence for cocaine possession.

When a mentally-ill minor drug offender is imprisoned, does he forfeit all his rights, all his human rights, including the right to live? Who protects him? (If not us?) Who will ensure him justice? (If not us?)

2) Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala announced last Thursday that she will not pursue death sentences for any capital cases during her time in office. That earned her a angry rebuke from Florida governor Rick Scott who removed from her jurisdiction the high profile case of a man charged with killing a police officer, saying she “has made it clear that she will not fight for justice.”

Because only a death satisfies justice? If blood revenge is the only means of “fighting for justice” (which is what the death penalty is, after all, blood revenge), what does that say about us?

Death sentences are notoriously inequitable in their application, do not provide any deterrence, cost taxpayers more, do not bring “resolution” to grieving families, rather, and as Ayala observed, “cases drag on for years, adding to victims’ anguish.” Could it be that refusing to pursue death sentences is in fact “fighting for justice?” Because the question remains, beyond any concerns about fairness and effectiveness, is killing by the state just? Or is it an overreach and abuse of power and a corrosive threat to our humanity?

Which of these prosecutors is fighting for justice? Which showed courage? Which represents the best of who we are as human beings?