“Dream Act”

Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost       10 September 2017
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector

"Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”                                                                                                               Matthew 18:20

“Like what you’ve done with the Neanderthal skeleton.”

That’s an opener if you walk into the office of Svante Pääbo, headline-generating geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig.

Why the skeleton? Pääbo is committed to sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome. In the process, he’s discovered that humans and Neanderthals interbred up to 30,000 years ago. And he’s proven that all modern, non-African humans ─ from the Chinese to the French to the indigenous peoples of the Americas ─ have between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. In other words, he’s discovered where some of us humans and the Neanderthals converge.

However, what Pääbo really wants to find out is: Where do we diverge? Read: What exactly does it mean to be human?

Or, as Pääbo frames it, what makes modern humans so crazy, like venturing out on to a wide expanse of ocean where you don’t glimpse a speck of land? Pääbo calls this “madness.”

That is, in terms of shear self-preservation, it’s just crazy. You’d never encounter a Neanderthal acting so crazy. “What is it in our human genes that drives taking a risk like that,” Pääbo asks.

Or take another “crazy” human behavior: At the nearby Leipzig Zoo, evolutionary anthropologist Michael Tomasello notes, “Chimps do a lot of incredibly smart things. But at the zoo today, you won’t see two chimps carrying something heavy together. They don’t have the kind of collaborative instinct even human children have.”

In other words, the type of community that approaches solving our common problems together with creative risk ─ like two, three, four, or more embarking on a lonely sea or sharing the task of carrying burdens too heavy for just one ─ that type of community is uniquely human. Risky collaboration of that sort, it’s crazy, really. It’s madness. But it’s what makes us human.

And if we learn nothing else from the Gospels, it’s what made Jesus human.

Case in point: A issue lighting up our newsfeed that would undoubtedly draw Jesus’ attention. It's the daily battle were engaged in over the Dreamers. They’re roughly 800,000 of our neighbors, most of whom were under the age of seven when their parents — entering the country illegally before June 15, 2007 — brought them here in the very human hope of keeping their families intact.

The Dreamers. Once again, they’re our neighbors. They’re here, now, established among us … working … getting educations … serving in our military. They’re neighbors who dream of one day enjoying the rights and responsibilities all citizens enjoy, but whose aspirations are now not only in limbo, they’re also under threat with the Administration’s suspension of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) due to go into full effect in less than six months.

Just a reminder: DACA allows these neighbors of ours to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation. And it means they’re eligible for a work permit. And where there’s work, there’s health insurance, also pay: money earned for housing, food, education, a future. Where there’s work and pay, there are taxes. Dreamers contribute $1.6 billion in taxes per year. And — good consumers like the rest of us — they spend their earnings. It’s estimated that, if allowed to stay, Dreamers will contribute $433 billion to the economy over the next decade.

And yet, some want to ship them out of the country to return them to places they really have never known, places truly foreign to them, places where they will be lost.

Reality check: Why are we even entertaining thoughts of deporting them? Their plight — given Jesus’ own take on the issue (“When I was a stranger, you welcomed me”) — is a no-brainer for people who claim to follow Jesus.

The Christian option, then, is: Clear the Dreamers’ path to citizenship … here, where they have a clear sense of history and belonging … rather than pave their way out of the country to what? Utter uncertainty and, especially for LGBT Dreamers, certain discrimination, or violence, even death.

Under the circumstances, however, where there shouldn’t be, there’s debate. It’s a debate about two choices: The craziness of community (thinking of neighbor, working for neighbor, working with neighbor) … vs. inhumanity. Inhumanity: Doing only what’s best for yourself … and yourself alone. Looking out for your own economic interests or — or, especially if you’re a politician — the interests of your racist base. Yes, racist base. Because who dares deny that we wouldn’t be having this stimulating conversation if, let’s say, 79 percent of the Dreamers in question were from Norway … and not Mexico? (Credit goes to economist Paul Krugman for that observation.)

Which response, then — eventual citizenship or summary deportation — is the more Neanderthal? And which the more human?

Neanderthal: “I’ve got mine because my parents (or immigrants in my family before them) got it legally, so what do I care about Dreamers?”

Human: Fair play and decency. The craziness that looks a lot like Jesus’ own take on community: "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

Was ever God’s personal stake in community more clearly stated?

Or, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, “What life have we, if we have not life together?”

That means that the “we” that makes up the “we” when we say, “We believe in one God” and so on … or the “our” of “Our Father, who art in heaven” … that “we” is a community of twos and threes and fours and how ever many there are of us here today and every Sunday … pointing us to a key question: What is the purpose of this church?

Answer: The purpose of this church is community. To bring us together as a people gathered in Jesus’ name, all being healed of our divisions and differences and issues so that each of us might heal others and reconcile them to God and each other, all of us.

Community: To make us — together — so radically welcoming that every stranger who walks through our open doors (or into our neighborhoods or wider community … into this country) isn’t ignored or just tolerated, but made to feel genuinely at home, respected, and accepted.

Community: To press the “mute” button on our own voice so that we might hear other voices: God’s voice … or our neighbors’ voices, their stories, their needs, their answers to the questions that stump us.

Community: To suspend our own blinkered agenda so that we might be free to explore God’s agenda for this country, for St Paul’s … an agenda that may be light years away from ours.

Community: To make each of us fully human, the way Jesus was fully human. Willing to be right here among us, contributing and benefitting, learning and evolving … even when only two or three are gathered in his Name.

And, when we remember how blessed we are to be alive, housed, fed, employed, and able-bodied to venture out on a wide sea of opportunity so that our neighbors might do more than just dream?

Community.

It’s madness.

It’s human.

Just crazy!

Amen.