Searching For Root Causes: Interfaith Delegation to Honduras & Guatemala

Over the last four years, I have been intensely involved in the struggle for human rights for immigrants in our country, especially those who live here without proper documentation. To me it has been a necessary extension of my faith commitment to civil rights and human rights.

I have been very focused on the immigrant families who live in Alabama, the harm caused them by Alabama’s anti-immigrant law HB56, and their struggle to create a path to legalization because there is now no way for them to come here legally. There is no line for them to get in.

My world got much bigger over the last couple of weeks as I travelled with faith leaders from around the U.S. in Honduras and Guatemala to study the root causes of migration.

We crossed three borders and visited churches, community organizations, shelters for migrants and a coffee cooperative that sustains 60 families. We were welcomed with open arms and entrusted with perhaps their most sacred possession, their stories, asked only in return that we share what we heard.

Despite their own history of beloved priests and leaders being gunned down in churches

(an atrocity we recently experienced in Charleston), they not only welcomed us into their sanctuaries but even opened the communion table – an unheard-of gesture of hospitality. The sermon was on Jesus as the bread of life – how could He not be shared?

We heard stories from the Garifuna, descendants of African slaves and Central American indigenous peoples, whose communally-held lands have systematically and forcibly been taken from them by the government and developers of 5-star hotels with names like Infinity Bay and Indura Beach & Golf Resort.

Their message: “If our land is taken away, it will eliminate the Garifuna people."

We heard stories from the priest and community leaders of the Parish Arizona risking their lives to stand up against mining companies’ violent dispossession of land, contamination of rivers and murders of countless people who have refused to succumb to extortion and who have risked their lives to denounce, in their words, the theft and destruction of “Tierra Madre, our common home.”

 Their message: “It’s a miracle that anyone fighting for land and rivers is alive.”  

We heard the stories of Jesuit priests of the Scalabrini order whose sole calling is to minister to migrants all over the earth. They run Casas del Migrantes, safe houses for migrants, sanctuaries for people headed north and also for those pushed back south by deportation, violence or longing for home.

Their message: Human beings need to be the center of policy and decisions about migration.

We heard the stories of the Mothers of the Disappeared whose stories encompass the full tragedy and hopes of that region. They are searching for their lost loved ones, lost to violence, lost to El Camino, the migrant trail, where many experience unimaginable horrors. 

They become victims of La Bestia, The Beast, the “death train” that carries only cargo in its compartments and kills and maims the migrants who risk the ride on top. They become subject to human traffickers. They die in the desert. They become prey for gangs.

They flee poverty and violence only to endure a harrowing journey that leads finally to death or a dead end at the border. The Mothers are among the countless left behind to wait, to search, to grieve, to bury their dead.

Their message: “Help us find our lost children.”

 

Every person we met talked about Impunity. It’s a strong word.  It means “exemption from punishment, penalty, or loss.” There is a lot of that going around. 

So much in fact, that now tens of thousands of people in Honduras and Guatemala hold weekly torch marches against government corruption and impunity.

The corruption of their governments runs deep and wide, to be sure, but there is no way we can avoid the implication of our own. 

Our country has also acted with impunity. We have propped up ruthless dictators, we have supported coups of democratically elected presidents. We deported our gangs to those countries. We are exploit natural resources addictions to energy and to drugs. 

Our patterns of consumption support cultivation of monoculture farming of bananas and palm oil, which employ few and feed environmental degradation and political corruption.

What happens when people are pushed out of their homes, communities and land by violence, exploitation of people and natural resources and dire poverty that results? 

They often have no choice but to flee under the very real threat of death.

They become migrants.

They move.

That what it is to be a migrant – 

someone who moves

toward life.

Here are some of the lessons I want to share about the root causes of migration:

1. Migration is something that humans do.

They move. From the beginning of time, across the world, history is defined by migrations of people forced to moveby war, poverty, disease, disaster - as well as opportunity and hope. 

 

2. Migration is a human necessity.

 “I have put before you choice of life and death, curses and blessings, choose life.” (Deuternonomy 30:19-20). Sometimes the only way to choose life is to move. To flee. 

To leave all that is dear – the land of your ancestors, the graves of your family, the people who care about your children and who help you care for your children, all that is known and certain, to strike out to the great unknown, the light, the promised land.

We were told time and again, “No one wants to leave their country.” They leave their country only when the perils of migration seem far less than the perils they face at home.

3. To migrate is a human right.

And as one priest said to us, “Not to migrate is also a human right.” 

Everyone should have the food, water, work and safety needed to sustain their families, so that they will not be forced to flee.

4. Migration is something that God does.

Throughout the Bible, God uses migration to accomplishes God’s purposes. Think about Joseph’s brothers fleeing to Egypt from drought and starvation. What if they had been turned away at the borders?

Think about Jesus’ family fleeing the threat of violence to find safety In Egypt. What if they had been denied by guards at the borders?

Think about the Exodus where God saved his people from slavery and sent them into another land inhabited by other people.

Think about Abraham and how God told him to migrate with his family:

Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred

and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 

I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse

(woe to you, Donald Trump); and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

I wonder how differently we would hear these biblical stories if, by accident of birth, we lived in a country where condition were so severe that if we didn’t move, our children would starve? If we didn’t move, our family would be killed over territory that some army or some gang is trying to control?

God moves people across borders, across nations, across great oceans, vast deserts and massive mountain ranges to accomplish God’s purposes, mysterious though they may be to us from where we comfortably sit.

Hear Isaiah 43:

I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you; 

I will say to the north, “Give them up,” and to the south, “Do not withhold;

bring my sons from far away and my daughters from the end of the earth— 

everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory,

whom I formed and made.”

Is it so hard to believe that God is even now using the process of migration to lead people to find the abundant life promised to us all?

5. Their struggles are also ours.

We are not a separate people. We are not even separate countries; companies are called ‘transnational’ because they have no interest or respect for borders.

Theologically, we are one people. We are all made in the image of God. We are all precious children of God. To the extent that we are not yet One, remember that Jesus said, I came that you might be One. That you might be One People.

            

Paul said,

There is neither Jew nor Gentile,

neither slave nor free,

nor male and female,

for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Jesus said,

            Who are my brother and sisters?

            Those who do the will of God.

This is a clear challenge for us to move beyond the tribalism of family and nation to embrace “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore … the homeless, tempest-tossed.” (The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island).

We asked what those who shared their stories what they would have us do when we returned home from the U.S. The answer: Remove all borders, not just geographic ones.

As one priest said, “The most difficult journey may be from here (the head) to here (the heart); we need to go from the head and the heart to the hands – to action.

And yet at the border we return our brothers and sisters to certain death. We build a wall to keep them out. We turn a blind eye to their humanity and their suffering.

When will we realize that our God Is so vast, there is no wall high enough or long enough to thwart God’s intentions of abundant life for all of creation.

At times during our travels the conditions seemed utterly hopeless - and you know that I am not someone who gives up hope easily. I asked many of the people we met, ‘Where do you find hope?’ They answered quickly, “We are Christians!” “We find hope in the people beside us who risk their lives to fight for the land, the rivers and each other.” “God is with us.” “We have faith.”

If the people we met in the most oppressive and life-threatening circumstances can have hope, then surely we can.

If they can risk their lives to stand up for their families and their land, surely we can stand up for them.

Rev. Angie Wright

Preached at Beloved Community Church (UCC)

Sunday, August 23, 2015