Feb 8th: I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me, with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski.
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Rev. Dr. Steven Koski
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I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me with Rev. Dr. Steven Koski. Series: Standalone Services A Spacious Christianity, First Presbyterian Church of Bend, Oregon. Scripture: Matthew 25.
Curious about how faith speaks into immigration, empathy, and our shared humanity? Join us this Sunday, online or in-person, as we hear Steven share Maria’s story and explore Jesus-shaped compassion for our neighbors. You’re welcome to come, listen, question, and reflect. You have an open invitation.
Transcript:
Steven: Friends, we risk losing our own humanity when we fail to see or protect the humanity of others. There’s a diner in Nashville off Charlotte Avenue. You know the kind of place where the coffee arrives before you sit down, the kind where the waitress already knows whether you want cream or sugar with your coffee. Maria worked the morning ship there for 17 years, 17 years of early mornings and aching feet, 17 years of knowing the regulars by name, knowing when to talk and when to stay silent. 17 years of raising three children on tips and minimum wage, her youngest daughter was studying to be a pediatric nurse, and then one Tuesday morning, Maria didn’t show up for work, no call, no explanation, the owner checked the hospitals called her home. Nothing. That afternoon, Maria’s daughter came into the diner carrying a backpack stuffed with documents, birth certificates, social security cards, marriage licenses, asylum verification, everything needed to prove what should never need, proving that her mother existed, that she belonged, that she was real, that she was human. Maria had been taken by ice during a traffic stop a broken tail light, Wrong place, wrong accent, wrong shade of skin. On a morning when quotas needed to be met, Maria’s daughter spent six days making phone calls that that led nowhere, transferred 43 times. She drove to three different facilities, each telling her Maria wasn’t there. At the fourth facility, 200 miles away, they admitted they had someone by that name, but couldn’t confirm it was her mother come back with an attorney. They said she didn’t have an attorney. She couldn’t afford an attorney. What she had was a backpack filled with proof that her mother was a human being. You know, we talk about immigration as an abstraction, numbers, statistics, policy debates conducted by people who’ve never missed a meal, wondering whether their parent is eating. We sanitize the language, enforcement actions, removal proceedings, detainment facilities. We don’t say what actually happens. A father vanishes from a construction site. An eight year old waits by the window because daddy always comes home until he doesn’t. A woman is taken from a grocery store parking lot while her toddler watches from a car seat. The child cries in Spanish, the strangers respond in English. The terror is multilingual. When did we decide that proving your existence should be your burden, while confined to a place you cannot leave, unable to access the very documents demanded of you. The architecture of cruelty is always justified by those who never have to stand inside that very same cruelty. And here’s what Jesus says in Matthew 25 I was a stranger, and you welcomed me truly, a truly, I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me. Not kind thoughts about me not not debates about me at kitchen tables or in the halls of Congress, not prayers for me from a safe distance. Jesus said I was a stranger. I. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me, you fed me, you visited me, you stayed human with me. Jesus doesn’t spiritualize suffering. He locates himself inside it. Maria was released after 11 days, no charges, no apology, no compensation, just released, as if 11 days of a real life, of a real human being, a child of God, could be returned like a library book. Maria doesn’t work at that diner anymore. She’s too afraid. She carries her documents everywhere now, proof of existence, just in case her daughter dropped out of nursing school. You know, trauma has a way of rearranging our lives. There are hidden costs to every headline we read in the news. This is what disappearing people looks like, not far away, right here in Nashville, in Chicago, in Minneapolis in Bend, Oregon. It always begins with a story we tell ourselves, a story where, where some people are not fully human, where, where some people’s lives have less value than other people’s lives, where mothers become statistics, where where children become shadows at the edge of slogans. We call them criminals. We call them illegals. We call them invaders. Dehumanization. Have you noticed dehumanization is never loud at first, it arrives dressed as concern, as law and order, as common sense. It asks only that we believe the worst about someone else, and promises it won’t cost us anything, but it always does, because the moment we accept a lie about another person’s humanity, We loosen our grip on our own humanity. We begin to tolerate cages we would never enter. We normalize cruelty that we ourselves would never survive. We accept violence that we would never excuse if the names were people that we knew and loved, Jesus. Is clear, as you have treated the least of these. You have treated me, which means you can always find Jesus among the disposable, among the dehumanized, among those the systems, the system is designed to forget. You know, former President Jimmy Carter once said the truest measure of our compassion is how we treat the most vulnerable. Father Greg Boyle said it another way. He said, compassion is standing in awe at the weight that some people are forced to carry, rather than standing in judgment as to how they are carrying it. That is empathy. Empathy. Empathy always begins with a question that you know, a question that that we seem to have forgotten. What is it like to be someone else? What would it be be like to live, to live their story, to be inside their skin. Imagine for a moment it was your mother, your your father, your spouse, your child. They leave for work on a Tuesday morning, they kiss you goodbye, and they remind you to to. Pick up milk, and then they vanish. No call, no hearing, no lawyer, no no way to find them. How long for you before panic becomes unbearable? How many phone transfers before you start screaming? How many miles would you drive? How many doors would you knock on? How many times would you pull those documents from a backpack, hoping this time, this time, someone might actually care empathy. Empathy is loving your neighbor as yourself. Empathy is refusing to accept less for your neighbor than you would accept for your own family. The book of Hebrews puts it plainly. Remember those who are mistreated, as though you yourself were being mistreated. You know, not sympathy, which you can do from a distance, empathy, which is always close up. You know, the gospel of Jesus Christ doesn’t begin with borders. It begins with incarnation, God does not save us from a distance. God becomes one of us in Jesus. And Jesus says, the way that you love me is seeing me loving me in the stranger, in the hungry, in the imprisoned, in The disappeared Maria is not a problem to be solved. She is Christ asking to be recognized. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me, or we didn’t. And in the end, the question that Jesus asks is, it’s not what we believed, but how we loved who we became. May we choose empathy, may we choose humanity. May we choose love, not just a soft, sentimental love, but a Jesus shaped love. May we welcome Christ again and again and again in the faces of those the world would rather forget and in doing so, it may be our own humanity that we are saving. May it be so?
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