As I hear God’s words to Ezekiel I can’t help but hear them through the filter of our current national quandary. “Mere mortal,” God says, addressing us. “I am sending you to your own people. They are stubborn and obstinate children. They and their ancestors have transgressed against me to this very day. You will say to them, ‘thus says the most high God.’ As for them, whether they listen or not—for they are a rebellious house—they will know that a prophet has been among them. We have so many prophets among us today! I will introduce you to four I’ve discovered. One, at least, you already know and I will begin with him. At the international conference titled “Saving our Common Home and the Future of Life on Earth” Pope Francis, our first prophet said: “The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world…There is a real danger that we will leave future generations only rubble, deserts and refuse…Humanity has the know-how and means to cooperate responsibly in safeguarding the the earth…All governments should strive to honor the commitments made in Paris, in order to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. [This} requires honesty, courage and responsibility, above all on the part of those countries which are more powerful and pollute the most….we cannot afford to waste time.” Whether we listen or not, a prophet is speaking.
A second voice: As part of its #EveryFamilyIsHoly campaign, Christ Church Cathedral of the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis put its Nativity statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph out on the lawn last Monday night. It imprisoned the Holy Family behind a chain link fence topped with barbed wire to protest the detention of all families arrested near the U.S-Mexico border. The Rev. Lee Curtis who serves at Christ Church came up with the idea, bringing to the foreground the immigrant status of the Holy Family itself—a powerful witness to the travesty being perpetrated by the current administration. Another prophet, speaking.
A third voice: Michael Sherrard of Faithful America reports that clergy within the United Methodist Church have formally charged Attorney General Jeff Sessions with child abuse for separating migrant children from their parents. Sessions is a longtime member and Sunday school teacher as well as a former elected church delegate, says Sherrard. “The formal complaint against Sessions…cites specific ‘chargeable offenses’ outlined by church law, which additionally include racial discrimination and disseminating unsound doctrines….More than 600 United Methodist pastors and laypeople were brave enough to sign this complaint.” Faithful America is a group that aims to mobilize Christians to challenge the religious right and its dangerous alliance with the current administration. Another prophet, speaking.
The fourth voice: the Diocese of El Paso three weeks ago published a statement from the Commission on Migration on Family Separation at the Border, signed by Bishop Seitz and the two co-chairs of the Commission. “The bridges that unite us to our sister city of Ciudad Juárez,” it says, “have been converted into steel gates against families fleeing for their lives. We have heard the crying of children separated from mothers and fathers. Our Tornillo port of entry will soon be transformed into the likes of a child refugee camp. The blood of Claudia Patricia Gómez González (a 20-year-old woman shot in the head by the border patrol) continues to cry out to heaven and question us – why?” The statement ends with these words: “All things have been made one in Christ. And still, Christ is found in the one lonely migrant who knocks at our door, looking for respite. Now, let us feed them, pray with them and wash their feet.” Yet another prophet, speaking.
The prophets are all around us. They are in the streets of our cities. They huddle in tents along the roadside and under freeways. They pile into vans and trucks and decrepit boats, risk the hire of coyotes in hopes of crossing borders, struggle for safety as bullets fly around them, stand helplessly by as their homes sink further into the melting permafrost. They are also standing up in churches, mobilizing congregations, defying orders along the border, walking refugees from Juarez across the bridge into El Paso, taking in the children, creating shelters across the country, blocking federal court house and protesting ICE, providing free legal counsel and assistance to asylum seekers, counseling the traumatized. They needn’t say a word. Hearing of their suffering, seeing their photos in news stories, glimpsing a posting on social media—the vehicles of prophecy are limitless, as boundless as the Spirit of God inhabiting the human heart.
It is so painful to listen, to look into these faces and recognize our own eyes staring back at us. It is painful, yet necessary, to see and feel the devastation, to accept the challenge however it presents itself. “Tear down the wall of silent complicity!” says the Commission on Migration of El Paso. What might this mean for us—those of us not living on the border, or living in the crevices of our fraying cities, whose homes are not being repossessed or swallowed by melting ice, rising seas and torrential rains, or burned to the ground in raging wildfires? What is being asked of us? I wrestle with this question everyday. It is a “thorn in my flesh” as intractable and humbling in a political way as, perhaps, the personal thorn Paul describes in his letter to the people of Corinth.
It will not go away, cannot be removed, must be endured. It is a teacher and reminder that all of us are vulnerable, all of us painfully weak and human. We need each other in order to see our own reflection in the mirror. It is how we grow. The ‘thorns’ spur us toward compassion, wholeness, wisdom. I send you to your own people, God says to the prophets. I send you as a thorn to lance their obstinacy that they may finally heed my call and learn to love.
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