The church, writ large, is the Body of Christ.

We do many things as that Body.  We visit the sick, hold spaces for life passages, feed the hungry, and provide community from which to draw meaning and heart.

Being church is a verb-y kind of thing.

We are both a building and a story, a place full of persons and a movement grounded on the teachings of Jesus.

During these days when children are being separated from their parents and housed in holding pens, the Body of Christ is pierced.

Jesus was a refugee.  Jesus fled with his family to safety.  He and his family found asylum in Egypt.  They stayed there until it was safe to return home.  The body of the Christ was saved because his parents summoned the courage and grit to get their beloved son to safety.  They were not turned away or separated at the border.

While children’s lives are being scarred on our Southern border, the Body of Christ called church cannot remain silent.

Remaining silent condones desecration of Holy teaching.

Remaining silent denies the story that Jesus taught, lived, and lives yet.

The Body of Christ cannot remain silent while the civic-authority-challenging apostle Paul’s words are used by government authorities to stifle outrage.

This issue cannot be muffled by the finger pointing theatre of  partisan politics.

The jousting and howling over who has done what in the political arena is meant to distract.  The prophet Isaiah speaks to the nation of Israel with clear reminder of the gratuitous distraction provided by mud-slinging and moral trumpeting:

“If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom be like the noonday. ” (Isaiah 58: 9b – 10)

There are children and mothers and fathers and a nation calling for the people of Jesus the Christ to stop the pointing of fingers.

We have so much work to do.  There are systems of oppression to dismantle, light to shine into the caged places in our own nation and hearts, and voices to raise.

Let’s be about that.