Listening for God: The Power of Sanctuary

Sermon, 2/28/10. The pastor shares his direct experience with the underground Sanctuary Movement aiding Central American refugees in the ‘80s & ‘90s. This movement’s witness & Jesus’ words today convey to us our ongoing prophetic challenge of providing sanctuary to those who need it the most ...

‘C’   //   Lent 2   //   2-28-10   //   Celebration of Worship, Bethesda Presbyterian Church

Scriptures      Psalm 27   Luke 13:31-35

Listening for God:

The Power of Sanctuary

In a sermon last month, some of you heard me tell a piece of the story I am going to relate to you now in a little more detail.

Twenty years ago, while I was in seminary, the time approached for me to serve in an internship. I had only one place in mind – though this place certainly did not think to return the favor.

I wanted to serve for a year – which I ultimately did – at a modest-sized  barrio church in Tucson called Southside Presbyterian. Its pastor, the Rev. John Fife, was the high-profile leader of the congregation there. A dynamic interracial congregation that had opened its doors to thousands of Central American refugees several years before.

Beginning in March 1982. March 24th, to be exact. Timed to correspond with the second anniversary of the assassination of a prophetic Salvadoran archbishop named Oscar Romero. Romero had taken a strong stand for the poor in his country – and their name was Legion, given the fact that 14 families in his homeland owned 60 percent of the land. And because Romero had taken such a stand, he quite publicly urged our country to halt the annual half billion dollars of Cold War military aid that ended up in the hands of paramilitary oppressors there.

In a nationally-broadcast homily the day before his assassination, Romero directed a few of his words to the Salvadoran armed forces:

Brothers, you are from the same people; you kill your fellow peasant . . . No soldier is obliged to obey an order that is contrary to the will of God … In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: stop the repression.

For his priestly order, Romero paid with his life – a single rifle shot to the heart while lifting the chalice in Mass the next day.

And now Romero’s befriended and politically-ravaged poor by the hundreds of thousands were fleeing north. Fleeing from the desperately militarized poverty of El Salvador. Fleeing from the killing fields of Guatemala, where over 400 indigenous villages were quite literally wiped off the face of the earth in a four-year period of time.

They were fleeing north – crossing Mexico, where most could not safely stay. Crossing the Rio Grande: the most dramatic borderline in the world, arguably, between the so-called Third World and First Worlds. Crossing into Texas, and California, and New Mexico, and … Arizona. And many of them being caught in the process by the Border Patrol, and being returned to their home countries with the most minimal of processing – too many of them, to a certain death.

Southside Presbyterian Church heard their cry. And Southside Presbyterian Church decided to do something about it. And Southside Presbyterian Church joined five other churches in California on the second anniversary of Romero’s assassination to declare themselves a public sanctuary church. Two banners shot up over their adobe building: “This is a sanctuary for the oppressed of Central America”, one of them read. The other: “Immigration: Do not profane the sanctuary of God.”

By the time I arrived on the scene nine years later, over 10,000 refugees had slept on and eaten off the floor of Southside’s adobe sanctuary – only slightly larger than one of our sanctuary’s transepts. Well-documented and -screened political refugees, who could not return to live safely to their own country, could not stay in Mexico, and often had a church or synagogue further north to support them. Approximately 500 churches and synagogues, by that time.

The power of sanctuary. We know this beautiful space, or just about any space, where we publicly worship to be a sanctuary – meaning a sanctified, or safe, place. It’s a comforting place. A place to publicly worship.

Not a place to hide out. But that’s what these churches and synagogues did for Central American refugees. Hide them out, from the federal government’s Immigration and Naturalization Service that would circle the block of Southside Presbyterian Church over and over and over again and deport refugees it could snare without notification, and in a flash.

A Tucson police officer once stopped me while driving a car once because I had not completely obeyed a stop sign. My passengers: four refugees returning to the church floor from a medical clinic. You never heard a quieter car while the officer was drawing me up a moving violation.

I could tell you many, many more stories. I could tell you about the stories of each of the refugees we crossed over the border and sheltered – who we’d only assist if our overtaxed refugee support group came to a consensus about their plight. I could tell you, then, about the clandestine meetings to pick up these refugees in the hush of a Catholic sanctuary on the Arizona-Mexico border – refugees who would then ride prone on the backseat on the 70 mile trek to the Southside sanctuary. I could tell you how sanctuary churches and the denominations that backed them were ultimately vindicated in 1991 by an out-of-court settlement with the federal government that brought a halt to the sudden deportations of Guatemalans and Salvadorans – with new opportunities for thousands of them to file for the political asylum so unfairly denied them for a decade. (I was present in the San Francisco federal courthouse when the settlement was reached.)

I could tell you all these things, and more. But what I arise to tell you today is simply this: That, as Luke makes plain about the first century church through the mouthpiece of Jesus in the gospel account today, our call to provide sanctuary as a Christian church is never meant to be an uncontroversial, risk-free endeavor – by no means! For I have discovered through long, hard experience as a church worker and clergyman that fewer things pose a greater threat to the powers-that-be in this world than peacefully sheltering those who will either not participate or succumb to the violence that would draw them out.

And – as with any peacemaking endeavor – churches pay the price. Whether it be Christ’s body sheltering hens from the Herodian foxes who would deport them without notice to quite literally the executioner’s axe – or it be churches who take a stand in the face of endless denominational squabbling about the place of Christian women and men in churches who so happen to express a certain type of love in a different way than the majority would express it. Churches pay the price. Their pastors – my mentor, John Fife, among them – are convicted in civil courts of felony conspiracy for doing nothing more than sheltering refugees. Churches pay the price. Their pastors are investigated and some are tried and convicted in church courts for doing nothing more than blessing a lifelong loving relationship between two women or two men. (God help us to bless a lifelong loving relationship! What’s Christ’s body coming to, anyway?!)

Jesus’ Pharisee friends urged them – or perhaps they were plotting enemies, we do not know: “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” Go seek shelter – a sanctuary of your choosing. Get away!

But Jesus knew what Luke’s first century church would know – and what a pastor and theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer would know when he decided not to remain in New York City but sailed home to Nazi Germany and the teeth of a Third Reich that would eventually hang him for being a faithful Christian. Jesus and Luke’s church and the man who would popularize the phrase “cheap grace”, bemoaning its hold over the Western Church, they all knew one truth.

They all knew that the life’s purpose of those who would be faithful to God is not, ultimately, to seek sanctuary. The life’s purpose of those who would be faithful to God is to provide sanctuary.

Talk about the radically personal hospitality of the church we are, and the church we are striving to become!

A radical and costly hospitality. For Jerusalem – and Washington – and Tehran – they and countless others will all continue to be, in Jesus’ words today, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those that are sent to it!” These prophets who do not even raise a weapon, or even a fist, in anger!

But these prophets do raise a much more powerful weapon – and their oppressors know it! One that the greatest of oppressors from Caesar Augustus to Adolf Hitler were at an utter loss to combat. They raise the weapon of sanctuary.

What better way to listen for God’s presence in our midst than to provide sanctuary – a safe place – in our communal and individual lives for those who so desperately need it.

Who knows who, among us, may need it next?

I close this message today with a story I told at the beginning of our Session meeting two weeks ago – a meeting focused on our Session’s spiritual formation and our church’s ongoing transformation based on hospitality.

In his classic 1972 book The Wounded Healer, the late Henri Nouwen shares the story of a young fugitive who, trying to hide himself from the enemy, entered a small village.

The people were kind to him and offered him a place to stay. But when the soldiers who sought the fugitive asked where he was hiding, everyone became very fearful. The soldiers threatened to burn the village and kill every man in it unless the young man were handed over to them before dawn. The people went to the minister and asked him what to do. The minister, torn between handing over the boy to the enemy or having his people killed, withdrew to his room and read his Bible, hoping to find an answer before dawn. After many hours, in the early morning his eyes fell on these words: “It is better that one man dies than that the whole people be lost.”

Then the minister closed the Bible, called the soldiers and told them where the boy was hidden. And after the soldiers led the fugitive away to be killed, there was a feast in the village because the minister had saved the lives of the people. But the minister did not celebrate. Overcome with a deep sadness, he remained in his room. That night an angel came to him, and asked, “What have you done?” He said: “I handed over the fugitive to the enemy.” Then the angel said: “But don’t you know that you have handed over the Messiah?” “How could I know?” the minister replied anxiously. Then the angel said: “If, instead of reading your Bible, you had visited this young man just once and looked into his eyes, you would have known.”

“While versions of this story are very old,” Nouwen continues, “it seems the most modern of tales … we are challenged to look into the eyes of (the strangers in our midst) today … Perhaps that will be enough to prevent us from handing them over to the enemy and enable us to lead them out of their hidden places … where they can redeem us from our fears.”¹

What better way to listen for God’s presence in our midst than to provide sanctuary – a safe place – in our communal and individual lives for those who so desperately need it.

Who knows who, among us, may need it next?

¹Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (NYC: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 25-26. Emphasis added.