Genesis 12
“Crossing Borders”
August 11, 2019
The date was May 18, 1952. The place was the Peace Arch border crossing, an hour south of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada right on the U.S. border. Having been denied his request to have his passport renewed because he refused to sign a loyalty oath in the midst of the so-called “Red Scare” at the height of McCarthyism so that he could fulfill concert contracts around the world, one of the greatest singers of the 1940s, the African American Paul Robeson, stood on the back of a flat-bed truck, accompanied by Lawrence Brown on an upright piano. He then gave, by all accounts, a moving and powerful concert in his beautiful baritone voice to the 40,000 mostly Canadian concert goers sitting right on the other side of the border. Robeson had taken a strong antiwar stance and had been branded as one of the most dangerous men in the world. Crossing a border for Robeson meant that his body stayed on one side but his glorious voice got to travel to the other.
Borders and those who cross them are very much a part of our shared story in scripture. Here Abram who will become Abraham has heard from God and what he’s heard, both promise and blessing, will change the world. We think about Abraham as the “Father of all nations” who is revered in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We remember and honor this descendent of Adam as obedient to the plan God has for him, even though it will take him far away from the land and people and life he knows. In order to follow the path that God has laid out for him, Abram must migrate to Canaan along with his wife Sarai who will become Sara and Lot, his late brother’s son.
And so he sets off for Canaan taking all of his possessions as well as his servants, stopping to build an altar along the way in recognition and gratitude for the legacy that God had pronounced for all future generations because of Abram’s faithfulness. And then came the famine and this was because the land there was semi-arid and unpredictable as a source of food. With widespread hunger closing in on him, Abram kept going, heading for the fertile Nile delta of Egypt which made it a real draw for immigrants like him. Abram doesn’t have permission to enter Egypt. He went seeking food and a way to make a living. The disturbing second part of this story is the fact that basically Abram traded his wife for financial security in the form of more livestock and servants. It is what we now know by the name of human trafficking. And this won’t be the last time because a little further in Genesis, Abram will again offer his wife to King Abimelech. Fortunately in that instance a dream from God stops the King from having relations with Sarai. When we think about Abraham today we rarely use the word immigrant and almost never criminal because we have come to recognize that there were mitigating circumstances.
The borders my family members crossed to come here into the United States included a trek alone as a 17 year old over the many diverse and sometimes controversial borders of nations in Europe on the brink of World War I, finally making it to Liverpool, England and sailing on to Ellis Island, following in the footsteps of a brother who had made the same journey before him. Another ancestor, my great-great–great-grandmother was crowded onto a ship trying to escape another time of little food like the one Abram and Sarai would flee as they migrated into Egypt. Interestingly, on my trip to Ireland in June I was made aware from a guide on one of the Aran Islands that what we have been taught to call the Irish Potato Famine that brought 1.6 million Irish people to the U.S. should be known more accurately as The Great Hunger as there was enough food – it was instead a distribution issue as the wealthy sold the food to other nations instead of feeding their own people.
We are part of a country that is wrestling mightily with the notion of who gets to come in, who gets to stay and who is sent back to where they came from. For example, we hear almost nothing of the 600,000 Canadians and Europeans who are here in the U.S. undocumented. For we Vermonters, the closest national border is with our friendly neighbors to the north and we have trouble imagining the life and sometimes death circumstances we are witnessing at our southern border. The photo on the cover of today’s bulletin was taken on the U.S./Canada border – it’s that black line that divides the Haskell Free Library and Opera House where the library collection and the opera stage is located in Stanstead, Canada while the main entrance and most of the opera seats fall in Derby Line, Vermont – maybe Robeson should have considered singing there back in the 50s.
Borders are human creations. Since the beginning of time, we have had a need to surround ourselves with folks like us, starting out with extended family but which very often became entrenched when money and power entered the mix and many a war or coup or plain old land grab was needed to establish and keep those borders. Language and religion have played key parts The image that you’ve seen on the screen that is the least natural and most fortress-like and also covered with graffiti is the Israel/Palestine border in Bethlehem. Some borders were established because of mountains or rivers or oceans as you see from some of the other images of national borders. There are also borders that are so porous as to create either threat and chaos or friendly cooperation.
One such border I crossed two years ago was between two lands that have a shared history, a shared island and, in many instances, a shared blood line but the border had been drawn by forces not actually living there. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland which has been part of Great Britain for generations is one in which the only way in my husband and I we were able to tell we had crossed it in either direction was through the signs telling us the speed limits because in the Republic of Ireland it was in kilometers per hour while Northern Ireland was in miles per hour. This hard-fought seamless crossing where thousands of citizens move back and forth daily from one nation to another is currently under threat should Brexit be resolved with Great Britain leaving the European Union. What terrifies the Irish on both sides of the border is a return to the bad old days of armed soldiers at border crossings.
Our southern border continues to be a place where tremendous suffering and anguish is happening in our name. This summer we are intentionally trying to stay mindful and offer small gestures of relief through the gathering up of Hygiene Kits here in Bailey Hall and extending the opportunity to our neighbors to join us when we staff a table at the Arlington Farmers Market. In a time such as this when we pray and desperately want to do something in accordance with our belief that every stranger in our land is a beloved child of God, we are following Jesus’ lead when he was making his way to Jerusalem and found himself straddling the border between the much maligned and distrusted territory of Samaria and Galilee on the other side. The lepers shouted over to him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” (Luke 17:13) Jesus told them to go find the priests and present themselves for inspection and they did and discovered they had been healed. We won’t be healing but the kits will hopefully say “We see and hear you, neighbor.”
Borders constructed to keep the desirable ones in and the undesirables out were not able to stop Jesus from compassion and mercy. May we not let lines that are intended to separate keep us from compassion and mercy – advocating for it from anyone who can offer it as well as acting on it every chance we get. Borders do not define who and whose we are. As John’s first letter reminds us, “Let us not love in word or speech, but in truth and action.” (1 John 3:18)
We are who we are, individually and collectively, because borders were crossed. Hear then the words offered in this prayer entitled “My Neighbour” from British writer Monica Furlong:
I am glad you made my neighbour different from me;
a different coloured skin, a different shaped face;
a different response to you.
I need my neighbour to teach me about you;
She knows all the things I don’t know.
Amen and amen.