Go Back to England

I heard a story about a man in a check out line in a large supermarket. Behind him was a woman talking on the phone. The conversation was in a language which the man did not understand.  When the woman finished her call, the man turned to her and said, "If you want to speak Spanish, go back to Mexico. This is America, we speak English."  The woman calmly looked at the man and said, "I was speaking Navajo, and if you want to speak English, why don't you go back to England?"

A rather powerful way to remind us that almost all of us are here as the results of some body's immigration into this country.  Almost all of us are here because we have ancestors who came to this country.  Some were brought here by the desire to create their own religious community. Some were brought here by the English to empty their prisons. Some were brought here by ships as slaves. Some came as a result of famine and crop failures. Some came looking for land. But almost all of us are the results of immigration to this country.

Yet now there are some who want to stop this process. They want to build walls to keep people out of the country.  There is even talk by some that we should round up all of the recent immigrants and ship them home.

The great irony of this passion to stop the influx of Mexicans and Latin American people is that all of this focus on the Mexican border ignores the fact that the Hispanics are no longer the largest group of immigrants into our country.  The expenditures of billions of dollars to build a wall on the Mexican borders, (and who really thinks that we could build a wall on the Canadian border as well as one politician suggested) is to try to stop the second largest group of immigrants.

According to the Pew Research center the figures for 2013 show that the largest group of immigrants was Asians. The Asian portion was 35% of the immigrants while the Hispanic percentage was 33% and going down.  Our focus is in the wrong direction if we want to stop the largest group of immigrants now coming into our country.  One does not hear a word about stopping the Asian influx.

The immigration issue is not just a United States issue.  Europe is currently besieged by the flood of immigrants from the Middle East because of the wars and fighting which was unleashed by the USA invasion of Iraq.   This is an issue that all of the nations are going to have to face and find a way of dealing with all these people on the move. It is a position our congress has refused to deal with. But it will not go away.

Put it to use

He was a very well known preacher in his day. In the 1950's he was a special guest at lots of preaching missions. I know he was always a special preacher in the East Tennessee yearly preaching mission in Johnson City, Tenn. His name was Charles Allen, and he was the pastor of the First United Methodist Church in Houston, Texas for ages. He proved to me that the Methodist do not always move their ministers every four years.

He once told me that when he found a great story or an illustration, it did not matter what he was preaching he was going to use that story the very next Sunday. He did not want anyone else to use it before he did, and he knew that even great stories lose their power when they are no longer timely.

He told a story about a man in his congregation who made buckets of money. He was super successful in his business and he did some great financial planning. It was a good thing because the man died very young. The business man had set up a trust fund for his son that said that the son would get a regular income, a living wage, as long as he was in college.  So the son spent 48 years in college, earned 11 degrees and did absolutely nothing with any of his education.

It is a painful story because I think it reminds us that all of us have been left incredible resources and opportunities, and the question that has to haunt us all is what have we done with it. What kind of contribution have we made to the betterment of our community, our state, our world with what we have received?  48 years of college for one man is amazing, but 500 years of accumulated wisdom is available to all of us and how have we made use of it?

First Citizens Bank has a commercial that suggests the same thing, "Money isn't everything, but so much depends on what you do with it."  Having the gifts, having the abundance and advantages that we have as citizens of this country, the question is still what have we done with it?  How have we helped the other countries in the world?