Praise the Lord for the New York Times.  Some may call that blasphemy, I call it preparing the way of the Lord.  Jesus is no doubt weeping over the state of our immigration policies and how we in the United States treat our ‘neighbors’, which He was very clear to instruct us on such relationships.  This Jesus who declared solidarity with the poor, even incarnated Himself in them (Mt. 25), now finds Himself separated from Himself because of Gulf War 1 steel and metal tarmac pieces upended and jammed into the ground to enforce such separation.  So, instead of rejoicing in Micah’s prophetic proclamation that swords would be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks – namely, weapons of war and destruction would be turned into instruments of production and cultivation – Jesus watches those proverbial swords beaten into, well, the ground to form barricades preventing families created in His image from sharing even the most humanizing act of a hug across this small swath of international boundary.  At the most trafficked border in the world, Jesus wouldn’t even be allowed to embrace the little children stranded on the other side, the ones He said to let come to Him, because theirs was the Kingdom of God.

It’s sad, really.  Watching families weep, utterly weep over separation by what was once an arbitrary line in the ground, and before that, was Mexican territory.  I remember weeping in the hallway of my house when I found out my parents were getting a divorce.  It was one of the most painful moments of my life.  That’s the kind of weeping that Bethany and I have seen over the past few weeks as we have taken Communion at Friendship Park, formerly known as Border Field State Park.  There is a monument erected in the 1970s a few yards back from the fence that proclaims the Park’s purpose is to facilitate friendship and mutual understanding between the inhabitants of the US and Mexico, and that to commemorate such friendship, a flag has been erected as a symbol.  Today there is no flag.  Not one.  Ironic, that the very symbol of Friendship Park has been torn down.  Was it out of humiliation at the hypocrisy of the contemporary border policies that in no way mirror friendship toward our neighbors?  Was it time to erect a new ‘monument’ of friendship, one that would simply be implicitly understood as just the very presence of the Park and access to it, by Americans only, no less.  Or was it because that flag got in the way of building a second wall, a second fence designed not only to dehumanize our neighbors, but to squash any semblance of hope that would be derived form their re-uniting, through tiny fingers slipped through the small metal links of the fence by friends and relatives from El Norte?  There is no flag, but there are preparations for more barricades.

Please read this article in the New York Times to hear more about what a small group of us are trying to do in declaring solidarity with our brothers and sisters on both sides of the fence, through the most ubiquitous symbol of friendship and sacrifice ever created, the Body and Blood of Jesus shed for us that we eat together in memory of Him, and in declaration that in the Name of Jesus, no barricade shall separate family members from one another.

For the Healing of the Nations,

Lars