Cadences of God

You probably have never heard of Elvira Arellano. She is lives in a small 25-by-100 foot lot which houses a storefront church, its offices and parsonage. She cannot leave, not even to go out and feel the sun on her face.

For the last 8 months, Elvira has been defying a deportation order and she has claimed sanctuary in the Saint Adalberto United Methodist Church.

Since Easter, along with her pastor Rev. Walter Coleman, she has been conducting a 25-day hunger strike to protest the injustices which have been laid upon her and fellow immigrants who are seeking a new life in the United States.

Like most illegal immigrants, Arellano lived a quiet life and avoided trouble while working with false papers as a cleaning woman at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

She became politicized after she was arrested in a post-September 11, 2001 “terrorist” sweep and ordered deported. Elvira Arellano has a US-born son who, accordingly, is an American citizen. So, the federal government is seeking her deportation and forced separation from her son.

To fight this insanity and anti-family government legalism, she organized La Familia Latina Unida to lobby for immigration reform for parents who are in exactly the same situation she is. She held helped to organize massive street demonstrations last year, one of them from the front of the church where she is now living.

8 months into her sanctuary, her life is more or less normal. She gets her son ready for school, sits down at a computer, she checks her MySpace account, answers the phone for a law firm serving immigrants. She talks to the activists, students, reporters and well-wishers who stop by the church, though only those who are expected get through the padlocked doors and the security cameras. She helps Saulito with his homework and settles down to sleep with him on a single bed in a cramped room she shares with another woman who is taking sanctuary in the church offices. She has no idea how long she will stay there.

Homeland Security decided to refuse a stay of deportation last summer, even though there are bills supporting her pending in the United States Congress from House members who support her plight and those who are in her same situation.

Now, I do not like to be an alarmist or suggest conspiracy theories, but nothing is ever irrational. For all government actions, it is worth asking who benefits. Who benefits from seeking to remove a woman who have been engaged in regular civil action against our present immigration policy? Why to the minutemen show up to protest her?

Let me guess that she is really only ticking off a certain group of people here. The one at the top, President Bush and many other leaders who are predominantly Republican (though not exclusively) have been regularly pressuring to close US borders to illegal immigrants and expell anyone from the country under any pretense, especially if they are “undesirable”.

I can appreciate the legal argument here. Someone breaks the law, they deserve to incur the punishment which the law dictates. That is the way of the world. That is the way of the government. I do not for a moment suggest that Ms. Arellano is not guilty of exactly what the U.S. Government says she is guilty of.

My stand is religious. We are commanded by God, who last time I checked is of even greater power and authority than the United States government, to remember that we too - as people of faith - are descended from peoples who were once immigrants and strangers in a stange land (Deuteronomy 10:19), and so too we are commanded to forever be hospitable to the alien in our midst (Leviticus 19:34). This is repeated yet again by Paul who orders us to “extend hospitality to strangers” (Romans 12:13). In fact, Hebrews 13 reminds us that when we “remember the stranger” we may at times entertain angels unawares. This was something that Abraham discovered when he inadvertantly entertained the Trinune God to dinner in Genesis 18! (see picture above.)

The US or even the people of our nation may be inhospitable to immigrants, but Christians may not without breaking the will and command of the Almighty God.

Tags: Peace, Discipleship, News //