What Peace is This?
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
Sunday, May 9, 2010

Reading: From Natural Resources by Adrienne Rich

Message: What Peace is This?

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. If you want to hear what was actually said, you can listen to sermon visit our website at www.uurockford.org. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2010.

Turn back, turn back.
Forswear thy foolish ways.

My heart is moved by all I cannot save.
I cast my lot with those who
with no extraordinary power
reconstitute the world.

A little less than a year ago, I heard a story –
I was at an interfaith rally for immigration reform
one of the speakers was a man named Larry Love –
a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
Larry Love is a great name, isn’t it?
It makes me think of the 1967 Supreme Court case
that outlawed bans on interracial marriage,
that case was known as Loving vs. Virginia,
because the couple that sued were Mr. and Mrs. Loving.
And that’s what had happened to Larry:
he had fallen in love.

The woman he loved had grown up in Guatemala,
and had run into trouble with the local gangs,
which are all-powerful in some neighborhoods there.
She had applied for asylum in the United States,
but been denied.
She came anyway.

She had three children, born after she arrived here.
She worked, paid income taxes, obeyed the all but that one law,
and kept her head down.
She attended a bilingual LDS church,
where she met Larry,
who had learned Spanish on his mission trip years before.

They married.
He adopted her children.

One morning – 6:30 A.M.,
a knock at the door.
Loud, insistent.
Larry opens the door –
two agents stand on the stoop,
Immigration and Customs Enforcement – ICE.
They hold out a picture –
have you seen this woman?
It isn’t his wife, and Larry relaxes a little.
No, I haven’t.
Can you ask your wife, they say.
Larry, at the rally last year,
tells us that if he had been a little more awake,
a little less off balance,
he would have then said,
you don’t have a warrant, you can’t come in.
Larry’s wife comes to the door.
The agents say,
we’re not looking for this woman in the picture.
We’re looking for you.
Handcuffs.
After much crying and pleading,
the agents do permit the wife
to kiss her children goodbye.

Larry and his wife are lucky, comparatively.
Larry hires a lawyer,
his wife doesn’t disappear in the bowels of the system,
she gets an electronic bracelet
and can go home while she awaits her deportation hearing.

Thousands are not that lucky.
A few weeks before Christmas in 2006,
ICE agents raided six meat packing plants across the country,
including one in Greeley, Colorado.
The workers – citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented ones,
were held in a room with no water, no bathroom access,
for hours while agents checked their papers.
Families, hearing rumors,
gathered outside the gates, and prayed.
A few hundred workers were loaded into buses,
and sent to detention centers in Texas –
fathers, mothers – gone.
The children, mostly citizens born here,
showed up at school the next day in Greeley
with no idea where their parents were
or if they would ever return.
Some of the mothers were still nursing their infant children.

Those detention centers were notorious for their horrific conditions,
the fact that the people there were held without hearings,
without being able to contact their families,
their children.

The federal system has gotten a little more humane in the last year,
but mothers and fathers are still routinely separated from their children.

This is the point where I guess I am supposed to say,
I don’t condone lawbreaking, but . . .

I don’t really feel in the mood to say that.
I do wish that folks with ambition,
folks who want a better life,
would work harder to change their home country –
but that’s hard for them,
when the most powerful country in the hemisphere
makes life in their country so awful.

When our drug policies and habits sustain and feed
an unimaginable violence in Northern Mexico and other places throughout the continent.
When Coca-Cola and other companies
fight clean water projects so that the market for soda will stay strong.
The weapons used by those gangs in Guatemala,
the ones that drove Larry Love’s wife to flee her homeland,
those gangs got their weapons
as leftovers from the American-armed militias in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama.
We’ve toppled governments, or tried to, in how many Latin American countries?

Actions have consequences.
The individual stories of families torn apart are heartbreaking –
and the bigger story of oppression, violence, and poverty
is even more heartbreaking.

Another reason that I don’t really feel in the mood
to say “I don’t condone lawbreaking”
is the obvious racist character of our immigration discourse in this country.

In Colorado, where I used to live,
it was well known –
everybody knew it –
the Swedish ski-bum,
part-time instructor up at Vail or Aspen,
who had overstayed his visa years ago,
nobody knocked on his door at 6:30 in the morning.

The busboy, the maid, who had fled drug violence in search of decent work,
they were the ones the agents went after.

This is the context:
oppression, facilitated by our country, drives migration.
Racism leads to hyped up fears, inequality in enforcement.

Arizona then passes a law –
not unlike California’s 1994 law,
which also came in the context of fear, resentment,
and the aftershocks of a more mild recession,
when folks wanted someone to blame.

And the main part of the law gives police officers,
local and state cops,
the responsibility to check for papers.
And the law says that the police officer
has to have reasonable suspicion,
and it can’t be based on race or ethnicity alone.

And I bet that most of the cops in Arizona
will follow those rules.
Probably the vast majority.

But not all of them.

The rally where I heard Larry Love’s story,
it was in Salt Lake City,
and I was there for the general assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association,
last summer.

I had also been in Salt Lake City
exactly 10 years prior, in 1999,
for the same event:
the meeting of members of our congregations.

I had just graduated from college and was about to start seminary 11 years ago.
I was the vice-chair of the young adult meeting that year.

One night, after the meetings were over,
about 20 of us young adults,
from all over the country,
we decided – it was a warm June night –
that we would go out to the park,
about four or five blocks from the hotel,
and play night-frisbee.
Someone had a glow in the dark disc,
and so we put on our shoes and walked over.
It was a beautiful night in the mountain west –
the air clear, the city quiet.

We were a diverse group.
Men and women of all different races.
We ranged in age from 18 to about 30 or so.
Some were pretty buttoned down,
others had pink hair.
You know, your typical UU gathering.

And we tossed the disc around,
sat on the grass and chatted.

All of sudden, headlights approached.
Car door opened,
and there was a Salt Lake City police officer.
He said, “you all can’t be here,
the park is closed.”
He was angry, aggressive.
He said, “I need to see everyone’s ID.
You are breaking the law.”

Some of the folks in our group shrunk back.
One young woman started to cry.
The cop directed his attention to her –
“give me your ID.”

I, being foolish, or self-assured,
feeling responsible for this group, I guess,
knowing some of my rights,
stepped forward and motioned for everyone else in our group to step back.
They did.
I, like most of the group,
had brought only my hotel keycard and no ID.

I said, “excuse me, officer.
We didn’t know the park was closed.
We are tourists in your town, you see.
Most of us didn’t bring our ID with us,
we were just here to play some Frisbee.”

He was angry – “it is state law that you must have your ID with you at all times.”

I think I muttered something about Stalin,
but kept it under my breath.

I said, “I’m sorry, we are not from here, we didn’t know that.
We’ll just go back to our hotel and stay out of your way.”

“No,” he said, “I need to see your ID.”

I said, “look, we are tourists here.
In the morning, I’ll call the convention and visitors bureau and tell them
that we were harassed.”
I was trying to stay calm.
I could hear the young woman crying behind me.
I said, “officer, can you please tell me your name and badge number,
for when I call the bureau?”

He said, “I don’t have to give you that.”

I said, “I’m pretty sure you do.”

He was silent for a moment.

He said, “look, just carry your ID from now on.
And go back to your hotel.”

I said, “we’ll leave right away.”

We all left.
Some in the group were shaken up,
some were angry and wanted to fight back.

But we got back to the hotel, hugged, went to sleep.
Went on with our lives.

I think about that night every once in a while.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot since Arizona’s law was passed.

I was a self-confident, well-educated, white middle-class male.
I had experience with the police,
from when I had engaged in civil disobedience against the death penalty
not a few months earlier –
spend a night in jail, even,
and I wasn’t afraid.
I knew my rights.

I spoke English.

I think about that night every once in a while,
my relative privilege in the face of state power.

What if our group had been younger? Less white? Less well-educated?

I thought about that night when I read
a column by Ta-Nahisi Coats,
who is a senior editor at the Atlantic Magazine.
Coats wrote this:

“Essentially, Arizona has made it a crime for anyone in the state to not have proof of citizenship on them at all times. Defenders of the law will say that police still have to stop you for something, and they still have to "suspect" that you did something.

Forgive, but I don't find that comforting. Amadou Diallo is dead because the police "suspected" he was drawing a gun. Oscar Grant is dead because the police "suspected" he needed to be tased. My old friend, Prince Jones, Howard University student and father of a baby girl, was murdered by the police in front of his daughter's home because police "suspected" he was a drug-dealer. (The cop was not kicked off the force.) Only a year ago, I was stopped in Chelsea, coming from an interview with NPR, because police "suspected" I was the Latino male who'd recently robbed someone.”

My friends and colleagues who are black or Latino/Latina
tell me these stories all the time –
they happen to them, their children, their family.

I think about that night in Salt Lake City,
and I think about that rally in Salt Lake City ten years later.

I think about mothers thrown in buses and driven hundreds of miles away
from their nursing children
to sit in detention centers
for what is, after all, a civil misdemeanor and not a felony.

I think about children who have spent 17 years in this country,
and apply to college with terror
that they might be caught and deported.

I think about Norbert Capek,
loving the diversity of humanity,
standing up for freedom against the Nazi’s,
jailed for opposition to arbitrary state power,
murdered, gassed,
another martyr to the cause of human dignity.

I think about Julia Ward Howe
and that first mother’s day,
about that extraordinary proclamation,
Blood does not wipe out dishonor,
nor violence indicate possession.

Her plea – that we would see ourselves as mothers and parents first,
and put aside our nationalism
for the sake of the great human family.
Earth shall be fair, and all its people one.
Its people one.

And I think about all those who,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
I think of folks in Arizona,
anglos, I imagine,
writing in paint on the back of their cars:
I’m Mexican, arrest me!

I think of our sisters and brothers in faith
in the Unitarian Universalist churches in Arizona
who are standing on the side of love,
who are not backing down or giving up.

I think of those of other faiths,
Catholics and Methodists, Presbyterians and Quakers,
who say, with great compassion,
God knows no borders.
All people are children of God.

What does it say in Leviticus?
you shall not oppress the alien.
you shall love the alien as yourself

Either all people have dignity, or none do.
I believe that.
God knows no borders.
I believe that too.

I believe, like Norbert Capek,
that diversity is a beautiful gift.
I believe, like Capek,
in freedom from arbitrary state power.
I believe, like Capek,
that we who have power
must stand on the side of love
with those who have too little.

Capek used flowers –
all the colors,
all the colors of people now taking their place in the sun,
to say,
see, everyone is beautiful.
Everyone is worthy.

I asked my colleague in Phoenix,
what can we do?
She said, call your congressman.
A good federal law could bring folks out of the shadows,
end the uncertainty,
stop mothers from being torn from their children,
and supersede the Arizona law.
She said, that’s how you can stand on the side of love.
I pass along that request to you,
for you to do as you see fit.

I think the other thing we can do is speak up –
tell the stories I’ve told you today,
do your own research, find out the facts.
Speak up.
Use whatever power you have for the sake of others.
Remember, everyone is beautiful.

Don’t turn away.
So much is lost.
But we can reconstitute the world,
one act of compassion at a time.
Let’s begin today.