HIPPOPOTOMONSTROSESQUIPPEDALIOPHOBIA*
A Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

June 29, 2008

Matthew 10:40-42

I have my fair share of things that I fear.  I work on most of them when they get in the way of doing what I want to do.  There is nothing like a fear to render us different from how we prefer to be.  Real fear can be nearly immobilizing.  Our normal demeanor and coping mechanisms are rendered nearly useless when we are in great fear.  Spiders are not my favorite of God's creatures.  I value them.  But I prefer not to encounter them.  I few weeks ago when I was part of a work team down in Harlan, Kentucky, lying on my back under a house where critters of all varieties had easy access, snakes and spiders were on my mind.  I don't need to kill them; we just need to have healthy distance from one another.

An interesting thing about phobias and fear is that when we are caught in a phobia, in fear, and our normal range of emotions shrinks down to one emotion, fear, we most often cease to act like people who have a wide range of emotions and choices available to us.  Fear, while possibly warranted, is a tough emotion to make long term decisions from.

When I was much younger my fear of spiders and snakes had one response: destroy.  I have learned to have a wider and greater appreciation for these creatures and so have made more sane decisions regarding my fear response.  I don't value killing as a response to life.  I have come to believe that all creatures have a right to existence and that I need to moderate my existence along side of theirs.  I believe in sharing.  Much of my life changing response to fear, incidentally, has come as a result of my faith belief structure. 

Boys on the farm where I came from killed things.  We were dominant and all other things were not.  We had guns, knives, testosterone, our farm tough bodies and attitude to prove our point against near defenseless creatures.  It was not until I became a person committed to the ways of Jesus that I found myself seriously, foundationally restructuring my behaviors and perhaps, equally importantly, my attitudes.

We weren't big out on the farm with strangers.  We saw someone who was new to the area coming; by the time a true stranger would reach our house, our party line phone system would have told us that they were coming down the road.  Insular communities have advantages, as well as disadvantages, and deterrents to newness.  There was no place within 20 miles where we were not known as the Skiles family and by name individually.  You could count on the reality that if anyone did something wrong, our folks would know about it before we got home.  The night my first girlfriend, Rosie Boyd, broke up with me, my folks were waiting at home to talk to me about it.    Boy, that was not the first thing I wanted to do when I got home that evening.

When in church we heard about strangers and being open to strangers who needed a cup of water from us. Such messages were honestly met with skepticism.  When the Bible readings in church dealt with issues of immigrants, like Abraham and Sarah immigrating to a new land that God would, so to speak, show them, it never once caused us to ponder that we were immigrants.  We had always been right here in Indiana. “Thanks for asking!”

We were part of a clan, a tight family structure, a church group of farmers.  Jesus loved farmers.  In addition we were Hoosiers, the real ones, not those Hoosiers down in Bloomington, we were Boilermaker Hoosiers and part of the red, white, and blue that took care of the rest of the world and led the world mainly against communists and their sympathizers.  Just about anybody we didn't like in those years were sympathizers, probably communists.  It didn't matter.  They were strangers and we were in the right.  Watch out for the sympathizers, they were the doorway drug to red communism.

One day two carloads of Mexicans drove onto our farm.  My dad had arranged for them to come and pick tomatoes with us.  We used to hire poor white people from Alabama.  After many years of working with the same family from the southern states, my dad invested in them and got them on their feet and soon they were farmers in their own right.  We needed help during the harvest season.  There were five of us kids and all our relatives and still we had more tomatoes that needed picking than we could get to.

I'm sorry you never met my father.  He died just before we move here in 2006.  To some degree, I'm sure you see him, experience him, in me.  My father was not a religious man.  He could barely contain his anger at organized religion.  He was spiritual to be sure.  He simply found traditional religion hurtful and disappointing.  He got baptized a few years before he died, he told me, just in case there is something to it.  I value pragmatism.

Dad hired Mexicans not to pay them any less.  We worked side by side and lived side by side.  We got paid exactly the same and he demanded respect one for the other.  We worked with the same two families for all my growing-up years.  My father did not deal well with racism and saw our fellow workers as human beings just like us, not strangers.  Interestingly, my father said it was the army that taught him to enjoy all other people.  It was helpful that we were Scottish, Irish and German.  He understood and taught us that the Germans of World War II were to be distrusted because of their politics and beliefs, not because of their ethnicity.  He was part of the occupying force of Japan and I never heard him say anything but how lovely the Japanese were.

If you were to bother pointing your computer browser to the phobia lists, you would quickly comprehend the reality of how many deep fears and phobias we human beings have developed, including the one in the sermon title this morning.  Most phobias affect scattered individuals.  But one phobia is proliferating at an alarming rate, spreading from person to person as if it were contagious.  And, in a way, I guess it is.  The phobia?  Xenophobia, the fear of strangers or foreigners.

You and I know it exists and it is difficult not to participate in aspects of it.  You board an airplane and notice the glances of others toward persons of perceived Middle Eastern descent.  We see it nightly on the news around the furor over immigrants and aliens, both legal and illegal.

I know that immigration is a politicized issue.  But, long before it became that, it was and is today for me an issue of faith, to what it means to be a faithful follower of the ways of Jesus, the one we call the Christ, the Messiah.  For Jesus, hospitality was one of the highest virtues, a sacred religious duty.  Extending private and national hospitality to strangers was a defining characteristic of civilized society.

Let me confess my two overriding biases:  (1) I understand immigration primarily as a person of faith, not as a national citizen, and (2) I am an immigrant, not far removed from my ancestral wanderings.  My folks came out of northern Europe hunting for a warm rock to sit on.  From Denmark we know our folks crossed over first to Scotland and then, due to forced immigration, on to Ireland and eventually to Virginia . In Virginia they found the rocks too hot in the summer and they moved on to the balmy fields of north-central Indiana, which we have called home since the late 1840's.

Chicago , our home for much of the last two decades, felt strangely comfortable, even though the combined population of the area was nearly 9 million people.  Next to us was an elementary school where 16 primary languages, other than English, were spoken.  We found ourselves regularly surrounded by Italian neighborhoods and Irish and Polish, Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Korean, Russian, Filipino and Hungarian ones.  Mosques and synagogues by the hundreds were mainstay to us.  It is probably the single thing we miss most in our move back home again to Indiana, the phenomenally huge ethnic and cultural and religious diversity of that city.

I have lived, in my short life in these United States, on both ends of the continuum.  I have known exclusionary living that has a short memory of past sins and I have known America at its best as it has been a home to the world's marginalized peoples seeking economic prosperity and possibility and religious freedom.  As tragic and horrible as 9/11 has been, seeking to build security fences and force democracy is not an adequate response to bullies behaving badly.  The ways of Jesus remain superior and are yet to be seriously tested on the international scene by this nation.

Our faith, Christianity, is the faith of poor immigrant people, beginning with Abraham and Sarah, who left the land of Ur in Babylonia in current day Iraq and traveled in search of a land that they claimed, “God would show them.”  The history of ancient Israel is both a story of the development of the faith of Jesus, Judaism, and the fight of the Jews against the native Palestinians. 

The Jewish Scriptures are filled with respect for those not Jewish.  The Hebrew Bible never forgot that the Jews were once aliens themselves.  Exodus 22:20 states:  “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”  Because it was assumed that these aliens would be poor, they are included in the standard list of poor people, widows, orphans and the resident aliens.  In the legal reform that is the book of Deuteronomy, it is prescribed that a tenth of the harvest, the wine, the oil, as well as the firstlings of the flocks, shall be taken to Jerusalem for an offering to the Lord (Dt. 14:22-27).  On every third year this tithe will not be taken to Jerusalem but will be kept in the villages where it will be provided at no cost to the Levites, the resident aliens, the widows and the orphans who live there.  Likewise, the law that requires that the product of trees and fields not be stripped but some left for the poor specifies the resident aliens among those entitled to pick leftovers from the trees (Lev. 19:10).

At the heart of the faith of Jesus is a full respect for resident aliens, who don't sound much different to me than immigrants to this country who live here, who work here, who have no desire but to find well-being for themselves and their families.  If we are a nation that predominately follows Jesus, it seems only right that we would share his faith as we express ours.

In my faith considerations I do find myself greatly desirous of immigration reform.  The current system is badly broken and real people, especially poor people, are being hurt and further marginalized by our current immigration system.  Poor, hurt, marginalized people are exactly those that Jesus would be most concerned for, that we are called to be most concerned for, and if we are not concerned for them in caring compassionate ways, they will become fodder for yet another group of extremists who will exploit them for very narrow, politically extreme goals.

The churches of our nation in many quarters already stand in favor of humane immigration reform that respects the dignity of human persons, that reunites rather than separates families, and helps those who are in this country without documentation to legalize their status in a process that is just, compassionate, and attainable.

Why so much controversy about this issue of basic human rights in a country that is 96% immigrant based?  Gross misinformation is spewed by radio, television and pulpit demagogues, false prophets if you will, who spread hate and fear rather than the ways of Jesus. 

Our current legal system does not provide a workable, fair way for most immigrants to live in this country.  The United States government issues a mere 5,000 visas a year to year-round unskilled workers from other countries, a drop in the bucket compared to the demand and the need for such labor.

Three quarters of a million illegals enter the country each year and they have no illusions that they will ever get one of those five thousand legal tickets.  Yet our economy finds a place for all those illegals.  Government statistics say that 96% of undocumented men living in the US are employed, which exceeds the labor force participation rate of legal immigrants and US citizens by 15 percentage points.  Many of those same men are working two or more jobs.  It is clear that employment is a major driving force behind undocumented immigration; many industries, such as restaurants, hotels and agriculture, report that they rely on these hardworking migrants.

I could go on and on and my point is a small but significant one -- the essence of our faith demands the greatest concern for those most at risk, those most at peril, most of whom are coming to the United States because of us.  Our government subsidizes farming here so much that prices are so low that small farmers in Mexico can't make a living.  There are not enough factory jobs in Mexico and so they head north, not because they want to, but because they have to keep from starving.  In essence our policies put them in double jeopardy and so our moral standards should oblige us to refuse to participate in hounding these folks and letting them take the blame for our society's ills.

Our immigrant neighbors work for the least amount of money and have the lowest crime rates of any groups currently in the United States , including well-heeled, well-educated Caucasians. Our immigrants are nearly 90% Christian and only find refuge in extremist political religious groups when we fail to treat them with dignity and respect.

Jesus is calling us to care with the greatest urgency for immigrants, to be concerned about our government's policies and for the horrible rhetoric that too often accompanies the public and private discourse.

In the Hebrew Bible the prophets cried out saying, “You shall not molest or oppress an alien, (Ex. 22:21).  Jesus told his followers, “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20) and he warned them to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, tend to the sick and visit the imprisoned (Matthew 25:31ff).  To 1st century Christians, the writer of James admonished, “Be doers of the word and not hearers only.” (James 1:22) And the writer of the Hebrews said:  “Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels.”  (Hebrews 13:2)  Today, angels continue to visit us, in the guise of the immigrant poor, who are strangers and aliens in our midst.

Amen.

*Fear of long words.