crucified
crucified
a poem for Kilmar
I taste the salt in my tears,
in his sweat the bitter taste of blood
I watch him carted away, buried in a tomb,
a prison built to set all of us free.
Separated from his mother,
from all his beloved tribe.
The ground could not hold him;
rising, he released the captives of sin.
Yet here we go, burying him again,
exiling him in a jail in El Salvador
in the name of law and order,
in the name of keeping peace
but certainly not in the name of grace,
not in the name of the Lord of love.
Liz McFadzean
Some say that our country must be governed by law and order, but that only makes what is happening in the deportation and incarceration of Kilmar Abrego Garcia seem like a more terrible miscarriage of justice. Even conservatives have harsh words for what has been perpetrated against him:
"Once you make the concession that he was deported in error, you can’t just say, ‘Oh, well, it doesn’t matter’…clearly there is political demagoguery from the White House that is trying to make a political virtue out of this legal vice.”
Ed Whelan, conservative legal scholar
Ethics and Public Policy Center
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of constitutional order…this should be shocking, not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from court houses still hold dear.”
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Ronald Reagan appointee
US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit
“They have already conceded in court that they made a mistake. It’s not clear to me why they are fighting so hard in court to say they have no ability to bring Garcia back.”
John Woo, conservative professor
University of California at Berkeley
A broader issue than what is happening to this one man is that the xenophobia that motivates it completely ignores what the Bible says about the hospitality that we are commanded to give the stranger and sojourner in our land. I have long felt that the next big missionary movement would be from the Third World to us here in America. As British Christian writer Adrian Warnock has written, “We who were commanded by Jesus to go into the whole World and preach the gospel to every nation, should see it as a privilege that God is bringing the nations to our doorsteps!”
Jesus himself said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners…truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”
“They all answered, ‘Crucify him!’
‘Why, what crime as he committed?’ asked Pilate.
But they shouted all the louder, ‘Crucify him!’” Matthew 27:22-23
Love,
Liz
Photo from St. Jakobus Kirche, Rudesheim am Rhein
