Matthew 25

The U.S. State Department announced that it will drastically cut down the number of refugee resettlement offices across the country since the Trump administration's plans to sharply reduce refugee admissions into the U.S., according to a Reuters report. 

OVER THE PAST several months, Republicans in Congress tried time after time to make good on their seven-year threat to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Each time a wide variety of groups stepped up to protect the vulnerable and ensure that millions of Americans continue to receive the health care they deserve. At several critical junctures, Christians played an important role.

This summer, for instance, a clear witness against health-care repeal was brought together by the Circle of Protection, a coalition of Christians we help convene who have come together around the biblical mandate to protect poor and vulnerable people. All the families of our faith—the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches, the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army, and most of our denominations—came together to say: We may differ on many things, but we are joining to protect the people Christ has called us to protect. The group urged political leaders to pursue “options that do not ask our poorest neighbors to bear most of the weight of budget and health-care cuts.”

Back in July, on the very day a repeal vote was scheduled, about 20 of us showed up outside the Senate chamber door in response to a request from a senator. We were from many different traditions and denominations—Catholic, evangelical, Protestant, black churches, Latino churches—and we started praying outside the door.

Seeing this cooperative work leaves me with a deep sense of awe for how humanity can come together. Local communities worked together even before any national or international aid agencies set up shelters. They created plans and networks, and even used Twitter to rescue strangers stranded on roofs. While my heart breaks for the lives lost and interrupted, I see all the ways God is knitting us together through these local responses. 

But also, right now, ACT for America, a major anti-Muslim hate group, is meeting in Washington, D.C. Groups like ACT for America aim to marginalize and block whole groups of people from our nation’s religious and community fabric. Both ACT for America and the founder, Brigitte Gabriel, have a long history of promoting policies at the federal and state levels that are intended to manufacture fear of Muslims and promote the false idea of Muslims as a threat to the United States.

“It is preposterous to claim that justice for immigrants isn’t central to Catholic teaching,” wrote Rogers. “It comes directly from Jesus Himself in Matthew 25, ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food … a stranger and you welcomed me.’ Immigrants and refugees are precisely the strangers we must welcome. This isn’t Catholic partisanship. The Bible is clear: welcoming immigrants is indispensable to our faith.”

We are living in a time of unprecedented economic disparity between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots. Masses live in poverty so that a handful of people can live as they wish. The world’s three richest people own more than the combined economies of 48 countries. The average CEO in the US is making 400 times the average worker.

Christians who refuse to break rank from their political tribes and social circles at the expense of refugees, immigrants, the sick, the poor, the uneducated, the maligned, and the outcast are prioritizing carnal hopes rather than divine promises.

While they told Moses that, “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do” (Exodus 24:3), in the end they turned to idols and broke God’s laws. By the time we get to First Samuel, we hear the people clamoring for an earthly king so they could be like other nations (1 Samuel 8:4-22). They thought life would be better if they shook up their system of government, so they ditched the judges and looked for an outsider. In the end, they got exactly what they asked for – a king named Saul who was wicked and moody and paranoid.

As a pastor in a historically black church, Quinn Chapel A.M.E. Church in Jefferson City, and the Executive Director of Missouri Faith Voices, a PICO federation, I say this attempt to silence and disenfranchise voters is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. When I interpret Matthew 25, it is not merely about providing food, clothes, and hospitality — it is about transforming systems that have caused people to be left out.

Days after creating a stir by saying that Donald Trump “is not Christian” because of his harsh views on immigrants, Pope Francis again took up the theme of “fake” Christians in his homily at Mass the morning of Feb. 23. Referring to the readings of the day from Isaiah and from the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus warns of the judgement that awaits those who do not practice what they preach, Francis said Christians must act on their beliefs and care for the neediest — the hungry, the thirsty, and those in prison.