I remember my face was sunburnt, having already spent hours in the heat at the very southern tip of our country. Skirting on the edge of the border city of Matamoros, I had spent the morning serving food and trying to help organize asylum seekers who were all wanting to get in line to receive legal advice from the “abogada”, my immigration attorney friend who was offering counsel to as many people as possible. I had been fighting a migraine and nausea since crossing the border the day before. I decided it was my body’s way of letting me know what I was taking in around me was upsetting and deserved my awareness.

It was as I was processing my physical reaction to all I was seeing and experiencing that one of the asylum seekers, an older man from Cameroon, approached me. He asked if I could help him understand the latest asylum rule that had just been announced and what it might mean for his case. I told him, as I had been telling so many all morning, I unfortunately wasn’t an attorney, and simply didn’t know. He sighed deeply and stayed to talk, lamenting with me about how long he had been waiting and how concerned he was about the future. I listened. I held his story as I could with empathy. He then shifted the conversation to the U.S. and what he had heard us say about people like him and like the community around us waiting at the border. “I know what you say about us. We are criminals, here to hurt your country. All of these people here, we all came for different reasons. But we are also all fleeing something. We were experiencing some sort of threat. Why else would we be here? Why does the United States hate us so much?”

I let his words sit on my chest like brick, my face stinging from the sun but now also the shame. I didn’t know how to respond, I merely let myself say I was sorry. I could understand why he might ask me this, even though I was as much a stranger to him as he was to me.

Instead of defending my country in that moment, I prayed and asked the Lord if in reality the Cameroonian man’s words were actually meant for me to hear. I was curious what message God might be speaking to me in this man’s particular words and the many words I had been offered as I sat among this group of resilient humans for two days.

ANGELS: MESSENGERS FROM GOD

This belief that God would be speaking to me through the man from Cameroon comes from a place of deep theological conviction. If we as the church are to believe the stories in Scripture as true, we know that often God shakes up the world and crosses our path with angels who are disguised as strangers in our midst (in New Testament Greek, “angels” literally means “messengers”). They themselves are the messengers of God carrying a word from our creator to us.

We see this in Genesis 18, the story of Abraham and Sarah entertaining three visitors who appear outside their tent. Abraham’s response to these strangers was, “Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”

And after these messengers had eaten and drank together in the heat of the day, partaking in the hospitality of Abraham, they then inquired of Sarah his wife and one said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.“

It was a word from God! And if we had any doubt, God called Sarah to task for laughing to herself at their words. The Lord said she would have a son. These men said so and they were the mouthpieces of God.

As I engage with the current humanitarian crisis at our border, I often think about this story and ask the question: what might God be saying to us, the church, through these messengers standing at the metaphorical doors of our country, asking for shelter?

XENOPHOBIA: WHO HAS BEWITCHED YOU?

I don’t know the answer, but I do feel burdened by our behavior. We seem to be responding with suspicion, anger, and fear of the “stranger”. Pew research shows Evangelicals are the least likely group to believe that we as a country ought to care for people who are displaced by war or violence like these migrants. There is a word for this kind of ideology: xenophobia. We appear to be as bewitched by it as our current president.

We have mostly stayed silent as the Trump administration has ripped apart parents from their children and has housed humans in cages like they are animals. We shake our fist and yell, “Criminal!” at the migrants desperate enough to try to cross deserts and rivers to get to refuge, but then we quite literally shut the gate at ports of entry, leaving people who are wanting to follow our law waiting for months and months without concern for their well-being in these border towns where cartels often run the show. Could it be because we think they are as evil as the Cameroonian man lamented to me? I think it’s important for us to interrogate our posture here because really…is this any way to treat angels?

And while I can’t know for sure what message God might be wanting to speak to us through these vulnerable people, as I look at our reaction to them, I can’t help but think God might be wanting these messengers to call us to account for our collective xenophobia and for our country’s embedded historical sin of white supremacy that still infects so much of our reality today. Perhaps the message from this very normal human movement happening at our borders is God’s way of sending us prophets and healers to bring this hard word from the Lord and to then help us heal from this long lasting stain on our souls. I don’t know. But I do know we would first need to welcome these people into our country to find out.

THIRSTY FOR LIVING WATER

As I managed my pain and tried to stay composed in the face of families suffering around me that whole day in Matamoros, I was also reminded of walking through the desert several years before, leaving jugs of water to help stop the migrant deaths happening near the Tijuana border. As a group of us took part in the dropping of these water jugs, I thought of desperate people unable to meet this basic need that all our human bodies hold. I thought of dry lips, dry throats and sunken skin, eyes unable to give tears and a voice unable to cry. It was too much for me to imagine without being overcome with grief.

In the throes of this crisis, it does seem that the church has lost its voice. I wonder if perhaps our own throat is also parched just like the migrants in the desert. Perhaps our throat is so dry we too can barely swallow. Maybe our cries are absent because we are dried out with no tears to spare. If so, then we need to drink in the cool water of empathy to reconnect to our own humanity once again. We need to be restored by seeing with the eyes of God the imago dei present in the people suffering under our current policies. We need to coat our mouths with the life-giving water found in the acts of loving our neighbor and living justly. If we don’t, if we continue to stay silent, we too will die of thirst. A thirst not created from traveling miles under the heat of the desert, but a thirst from a straight out refusal to drink from the oasis in front of us, given to us freely by the Holy Spirit. God will not force our mouths open.

So church, will we take a drink, find our voice, and perhaps save our own lives in the process? God has a message for us. Will we listen to His messengers?

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You can read more from Kristy on her blog, yosoykristy.com, or follow her on Twitter/Instagram at @yosoykristy. You can order her book Hermanas at https://www.ivpress.com/hermanas.