Get up! Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt.
UNICEF
reports that some one hundred thousand Syrian children shiver in the snows of
refugee camps on the Lebanese border. They skitter across urine-soaked ice in
plastic sandals and risk immolation as their families burn garbage to fend off
the cold.
Asylum
seekers from Sudan and Iritrea recently bolted from their detention center in
Israel's Negev desert and swarmed into Jerusalem where they besieged the
Parliament building to plead for legal status. They bore signs emblazoned with
Exodus 22.21, You shall not wrong a
stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers
in the land of Egypt.
In
November the United States Senate passed a bi-partisan bill that sketches a
thirteen-year path to citizenship for eleven million illegal immigrants. It has
sufficient support to clear the House and become law. House speaker John
Boehner refuses to let it come to a vote.
So Joseph got up and took the Child and His
mother while it was still night, and left for Egypt.
We
make much at Christmas of Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem. Manger scenes
grace homes and altars. We hear less about the Holy Family's Runaway Scrape to
the south. Yet Stage Two of this reverse-Exodus has all the same elements: mother
and child, angels and kings. Granted, the infant is now a toddler, and
reasonably hot property into the bargain; instead of singing, "Go and
see," the angel now hollers, "Run for your life!"; and the king
brings death squads instead of offerings. Perhaps most troubling of all, the
child wants to pass through a border checkpoint.
It
seems that the older he gets, the more trouble Jesus causes. The song says that
the "little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes," but a hundred thousand
starving kids put up quite a racket.
Poet Malcolm Guite frames the issue with
disturbing clarity in his sonnet "Refugee", which he and Steve Bell have expanded as a song. It begins:
We think of him as safe beneath the steeple
Or cozy in a crib beside the font
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of
weariness and want.
Too
often Christians loudly demand that society put Christ back in Christmas. Too
seldom does that slogan include the difficult, risky, and expensive task of
springing him from the razor-wired no man's land of hobo jungles and
Hoovervilles. Before we condemn that mythical innkeeper who hung a No Vacancy
sign on the Motel 6, we should ponder the Keep Out placards that protect our
own turf. Once again, Malcolm Guite reminds us:
For even as we sing our final carol
The hounded child is up and on that road
Fleeing from the wrath of someone else's quarrel
Glancing behind
And shouldering their load.
Away in a
Prison Cell, no Roof for His Head,
Doug
No comments:
Post a Comment