Clarity of Coincidences

As a prologue to this topic, here is what I think on issues of immigration - nothing. Honestly, the issue has never been very interesting to me. I am, like most Americans, completely unaffected by the issues. I don't see my tax dollars disappearing except once on April 15th, and if I ever had any control over those tax dollars, I would certainly stop funding wars that we have no business being involved in. I know my lettuce arrives. I know buildings get built. I know my theaters continued to be cleaned when I was the manager and I tried to talk to the janitors in English and Spanish but they seemed very insular (as well they might be if they were afraid of being deported every second). I once taught immigrant children to read as part of a mission trip and found the children to be... well, children. Children are children. Adults are adults. And we're all on this crazy merry go round called life. If I have any opinion on immigration, I think it would be that its terrible that people feel they have to come all this way just to provide food and clothes for their families, cause I know damn well I wouldn't want to do the kinds of jobs they're doing in order to get that food and those clothes.

So, to summarize, I have no opinion and I really don't think about immigration at all.

On Friday, then, I plopped in a DVD of Children of Men - a dystopian Sci-Fi thriller about a man who has to smuggle a pregnant woman out of England. In this dystopian future, however, aside from the lack of children, the biggest issue of the day seems to be immigration, or more pointedly, immigrants. As in, England doesn't want any. They round up any immigrants and ship them out of England (or force them into refugee camps). Suddenly, immigration appears on my radar. But in a mass entertainment format, I generally ignore it.

Still...

On Saturday, I am reading Leviticus and I come across a biblical passage, Leviticus 19:34... "34 The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God." Now, at this point, I'm not making any connections. I'm just thinking to myself, yet another thing the Republicans seem to be forgetting. Here it is in black and white. Treat the aliens as native borns. I wonder how come I don't remember this passage.

On Sunday, my pastor is delivering his sermon on MLK and on the struggles of our denomination vis a vis Gay Rights. Last week, the San Francisco Presbytery narrowly agreed to move forward with the process of ordaining an openly lesbian pastor. This does not guarantee ordination, it simply guarantees that the process will continue (ultimately the decision will be reviewed by the national church). Within hours of the decision, however, our former pastor called to let us know that two churches in his presbytery were already resigning from the national church. All this is preamble to say that, suddenly, the sermon turned away from the issue of civil rights and church politics.

It seems that the Presbyterian Church's highest elected leader didn't seem phazed at all about the issue of lesbian pastors in her church. What she shared with our presbytery was a concern that in 40 years, the one issue people will look back on to see where we stood in our leadership was on the issue of immigration. She pointed out the irony that this nation fought a bloody civil war to keep a foreign population as a permanent work force, and now, more than a 100 years later, we're equally adamnant that we keep a foreign population from ever becoming a permanent work force. The sermon went on to remind us of what Leviticus says about the aliens living with you.

Okay, admittedly, I sat up and took notice. I'm kind of dense from time to time, but as a writer, I'm paid to take notice of things that continually get repeated - seemingly out of context of the rest of the story. Immigration means little or nothing to me, yet here, out of the clear blue, its mentioned to me three different times in one weekend. Clearly God has something He'd like for me to notice or think or feel, or something. The problem is, I'm just not getting it. I'm just too dense to figure it out. As Albert Brooks might say, "I'm just a little brain."

So, I'm not writing this to elicit responses on either side of the immigration issue, though I know some of you have strong opinions which you are free to repeat here, but merely because God has this tendency to tell us things that we aren't always ready to hear. I just wanted to say that I heard them, but I have no idea what they mean. I'm hoping that some sort of clarity of coincidences becomese evident in the near future.