Sermon:  "An Immigrant Nation"
Date:   July 3, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  Matthew 11:1-6, 25-30

IMMIGRATION:  That’s certainly a word we’ve heard a lot of in the past year.  Arizona passed a law that traffic enforcement officers, pulling over someone’s car, can ask to see the driver’s citizenship papers.  Should a higher, more effective fence be erected across the border between Mexico and California, Arizona and Texas?

It causes one to wonder just who is a citizen of the United States of America, and how did they become one?  The actress Eva Longoria tells that her relatives were Mexican, but she and her sisters are American, yet they were all born on the same land.  How?  The portion of Texas where her family is from used to be part of the Mexican Territory, so her ancestors were born when the land was Mexico, but more recent generations of her family were born once the land became part of Texas.  She’s not Mexican; is she Mexican-American, or just plain American?

A week-and-a-half ago, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Washington Post, Jose Antonio Vargas, went public with the fact that he is an illegal immigrant.  His mother sent him from the Philippines when he was 12 to live with his grandparents in California.  He says he didn’t know about his citizenship status until he was 16 and applied for a driver’s permit.  The DMV clerk told him his green card was a fake.  Vargas found his grandfather had purchased the fake document.  Now, a graduate of San Francisco State University and a full-time reporter for the Post, Vargas reports:  “I’m done running.  I’m exhausted.  I don’t want this life anymore.”  Now he wants to push Congress to pass the DREAM Act, that would allow people like him to become citizens if they go to college or serve in the military.

Speaking of the military, in last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times (6/26/11), there was an obituary for an infantryman from L.A. killed in an Afghan explosion.  He was another Filipino immigrant, Rudolph Ryan Hizon, who had been in the U.S. only three months in 2008 when he joined the Army at age 19.  Deployed to Afghanistan, he was 22 when he was killed by an improvised explosive device south of Kabul.  A few weeks after his burial at Forest Lawn, Glendale, at a naturalization ceremony in Afghanistan for the U. S. military, U. S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry spoke of Hizon’s sacrifice:

“Specialist Hizon gave his life for the honor of his country.  In addition to receiving the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and the National Defense Service Medal among many other awards and decorations, Specialist Hizon also became a citizen of the United States posthumously on March 13.  Although Specialist Hizon was not able to swear the oath of citizenship, we know from his actions that in his heart, he was a true American.”

These are but two examples of the immigrants who make up our nation.  When did it become a nation of immigrants?  From its very beginning.  When the English established a settlement at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth Rock in 1620, these immigrants were far from the first to settle in this land; the Native Americans were already here.  From that time forward, America has been an immigrant nation.  The Chinese were brought here in the 1800s to build America’s railroads.  After wars in Vietnam and Cambodia a few decades ago, we have a huge Vietnamese population in “Little Saigon” a few miles down the freeway in Orange County, and Long Beach has the largest Cambodian population outside of Cambodia.

Later this week, Peggy and I will be in New York City, and we’ve already purchased our tickets for a tour of Liberty Island and Ellis Island.  Our own families were immigrants, coming from England in the 1700s and Germany in the 1800s.  My mother-in-law is a first generation American, with her father born in Ireland and her mother in Scotland.  Our families were all immigrants at one time or another!

One characteristic of immigrants, no matter whence or when they came, is the desire for a better life for themselves and their families in America.  Coupled with that desire is their determination to work hard to make that happen.  That better life may not happen first for them, but most immigrants of any nationality realize that the key to a better life for future generation lies in education.  It is not surprising to see names of many scholars graduating from high schools and colleges across our nation are ones of families who were immigrants.  Just as their families worked hard to make a life here, those scholars worked hard to excel and succeed in their educations and future professions.

In the familiar and beloved closing verse of today’s lesson—“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28) –Matthew referred to the burden of religious obligation imposed by the scribes and Pharisees, which he understood as a barrier to God.  The saying has had a long life in the history of the church as a more general invitation to all those who are put off by the pretensions of human religion.

But we tend to read it a different way.  We are comforted by the promise of Jesus:  “Take my yoke upon you…and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (11: 29-30)  Is this not what the immigrants coming to our shores over the centuries were hoping for?  Freedom from religious, ethnic, political, economic tyranny and discrimination in their countries of origin?  The freedom to live in this land which we, who grew up in the 20th century, so take for granted?

While this lesson is the suggested Gospel for this Third Sunday after Pentecost, it seemed appropriate for this Independence Day weekend.  In selecting the next piece of music, both music director Julie and I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between Matthew’s scripture passage and the poem inscribed in the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was the fourth of seven children of Moshe Lazarus and Esther Nathan, Portuguese Sephardic Jews whose families had immigrated to New York in the colonial period.  She was asked to write a poem as a donation for the campaign to raise funds to build a pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.  She initially refused, but was convinced by a prolific American author that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor.  Emma did not live long enough to realize the full impact of her poem.  She died in 1887, and it was not until 1903 that a bronze plaque containing the words of her sonnet was erected at the base of the Statue of Liberty.  Lazarus’ famous lines caught the nation’s imagination and continue to inspire the way people think about freedom and exile today. 

The title of the poem and the first two lines refer to the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  The poem talks about the millions of immigrants who came to the United States, many of them through nearby Ellis Island at the port of New York.  The “air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame” refers to New York City and Brooklyn, not yet consolidated into one unit when she wrote this poem in 1883:

The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

with conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles.  From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips.  “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”