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| Call to Hospitality and Justice |
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(Please feel free to email a response or a question) May 3, 2009 Leviticus 19: 1-2; 9-18; 33-34; Luke 4: 16-21 May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us. Amen. I’d invite you to think about this phrase you heard in the reading from the book of Leviticus this morning: “When an alien resides in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.” About three weeks ago, a group of about 25 Hispanic workers from a national fast food chain of Mexican restaurants came to see the folks at the Workers Rights Center in the Villager Mall on South Park Street. They had all just been fired from their jobs. They were told they were being fired because the company had questions about their Social Security numbers. Now it is quite possible that not all of those employees were in this country legally. But they were not given a chance to clarify any questions about their legal status. Under Department of Homeland Security guidelines, employers are supposed to give their employees 90 days to correct any possible mismatch with their Social Security numbers. The group included managers and supervisors and some employees who had been with the company for as long as ten years. There was no explanation as to why the company was suddenly questioning their legal status. As these workers talked with people at the Workers Rights Center, some other stories began to emerge, said Patrick Hickey, who is the director of the center. The employees were not allowed to speak Spanish anywhere in the restaurant – not at the counter, even if a customer spoke to them in Spanish. Not in the back where no customers could hear them. About a week before they were fired, the company hired a number of new employees – none of them Hispanic. The current employees trained them during that week, in effect training the people who would replace them. The new employees were hired at about a dollar an hour more than those who were fired. These are the kinds of cases the people at the Workers Rights Center see all the time. They are the kinds of cases that exist just down the street at workplaces in Dane County. Yes, some of the employees may be in this country illegally. But while they are working, they are still entitled to some basic protections – like getting paid fairly for the work that they have done. Listen again to some other words from that reading from Leviticus: “You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning.” And now listen to a couple more stories from Patrick Hickey. One involves the case of about 30 workers from a restaurant in Stoughton that shut down in November, promising its workers if they moved over to another restaurant owned by the same people in a nearby community, the company would make good on their bounced paychecks. They worked for a few more weeks, and then that other restaurant closed and their checks bounced again. Another story involved two workers at an area organic orchard who quit after working for a week. Their employer told them they would not get paid unless they worked a second week. It took public pressure and legal action for them to get their wages for that first week. Those stories and many others like them are the context for the readings that we heard from our scripture today. Patrick says that of the 500 workers who came into the Workers Rights Center for help last year, 45 percent of them were there because of unpaid wages. This year, he expects the number of workers coming to the center to rise to 750. Most of them are Hispanic. When Rabbi Renee Bauer, who directs the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice, and I were preparing this service in conjunction with the United Church of Christ’s focus today on immigration issues, she selected the reading from Leviticus because it speaks so clearly to fair treatment for workers and to God’s call to treat not only neighbors well, but also those who are aliens in our land. It’s one of a plethora of scripture passages with that message. In many Christian churches, we follow what is called a lectionary – a set of scripture readings designated for each Sunday. It’s like that in Jewish synagogues as well. During the course of a year, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, from Genesis through Deuteronomy, are read in order. As it happens, the reading from Leviticus that we heard today is the designated reading for Jewish Sabbath services in this coming week. We tend to bypass the book of Leviticus in our readings around here. It’s pretty much a list of very detailed rules and rituals for sacrifices and for consecrating priests and for determining what is pure and impure in dietary customs and health conditions and sexual practices. But in the middle of all that detail, a section bursts out called The Holiness Code. It seems that while the priests of the Israelites were busy writing rules and regulations, other writers were trying to integrate the simplicity of the Ten Commandments and the teachings of the prophets into all of this ritual. What struck Rabbi Renee about this is how the words of this section speak to so much of our contemporary reality. In a world where people are hungry, it says, save some of your food for the poor and the alien. In a world where the economic stability of people has been undermined by deceptions and greed and fraud and sophisticated theft, it says, adopt a standard of honesty and fairness. In a world where some people face physical challenges, do not reject them or put a stumbling block in their way. Don’t slander those who are different than you. Don’t profit by the blood and sweat and toil of those hired to do the jobs no one else will take. And when you see someone mistreating another, the response is not to hate them but to approach them to see if you can convince them to change their ways. I have no doubt that there are a wide range of opinions in this room about how the United States ought to deal with the complicated and controversial issues of immigration. These are issues on which people of good will and good faith can honestly and respectfully disagree. And even in the cases that Patrick Hickey told me about, I can imagine that the employers were facing pressures of their own. The people who shut down their restaurants undoubtedly were struggling with their own financial disaster as well. The approach of Patrick and the Workers Justice Center has been to try to distinguish between employers willing to try to do the right thing and those who are simply exploiting vulnerable workers. What the Holiness Code in Leviticus reminds us is that a consistent message of our Bible is God’s expectation of hospitality to the stranger, care for the poor and embracing justice in a world that too often accepts exploitation. In other words, no matter what the complexities around the issue of immigration, the first call to us is to treat all those we encounter as people created in God’s image, worthy of dignity, worthy of being treated with justice. That should be a common ground for us as people of faith. Jesus went a step farther in that inaugural address he gave in the synagogue in Nazareth. He sets out in clear terms what his mission is – and what he expects of the followers he would gather around him. He reaches back into another book from the Hebrew Bible and quotes the prophet, Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That’s our work now. We may find different ways to do that. For some, we bring good news to the poor in the form of food placed in our Allied Drive food pantry cart. For some, we proclaim release to the captives by helping people escape from the emotional prisons that come with illness or unemployment or fractured relationships. For some we help the oppressed go free by supporting the groups that advocate on their behalf. But when someone among us is mistreated, when their heritage makes them undesirable, when their legal status leaves them open to exploitation, we have a chance to be among those who proclaim a year of the Lord’s favor for them. This Sunday, United Church of Christ congregations all across the nation are taking time to hear the cries of those like the Israelites far from their homeland, living in exile in Babylon, just like their ancestors had once lived in exile as slaves in Egypt. “By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept,” goes Psalm 137 (that you heard the choir sing today). “For us there is no music in this foreign land, the song of God is no longer ours to sing.” There are people among us who are far from home, who sit and weep in a foreign land, whatever the circumstances that brought them here. On this day, let us hear their cry, let us see them as companions on our own journey through life, let us help them experience God’s love even as their struggle with the harsh realities of an uncertain future. Let us act as though the Spirit of the Lord is upon us as well. |