Ask the Pastors S6 E9: “Should Christians obey the law when it conflicts with our “care for the sojourner”?”
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Welcome to Ask the pastors a segment of the West Hills Podcast where you have the opportunity to ask your questions and receive the biblically grounded, pastorally sensitive answers from our pastoral staff. My name is Brian. I'm your host, one of the pastors. Hey Brian. I'm joined by our lead pastor. Will. Hey, that's me, pastor Thad and Pastor Austin. Question, can you hear when I type, go ahead and try it. Oh yeah.
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I mean that's a really aggressive type though. You type like a human and not a chimp fan.
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I say that was a little too aggressive. If you type softly, you're good. Okay, you're good. Well, on today's episode we have a question from Zach and Freddy. We can just go ahead and read that. They wrote, in Texas and Arizona, restaurant owners have been arrested for harboring, employing aliens, undocumented immigrants,
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Little green men,
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And as believers we are to care for the needy and follow the laws of the land. If a Christian were faced with a similar situation, what do they do? Do we turn away the needy on our doorstep because they broke the law? And then with two asterisk, this assumes a lot of factors, willingness to work, not violent, et cetera.
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Okay. First of all, I don't think we've done a ask the pastor on the little green men aliens yet, have we?
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No, we should, should make
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It. We should do it right now. I don't know. Just forget their question and just go straight. Talk to aliens. I don't know why we haven't. I don't know why no
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One has submitted it.
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I mean this has been all that anyone's talked about. Anyone, anyone for the last year has only been talking about what did they rename? UFOs? It doesn't matter. That's not the episode today.
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I want to know now.
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Yeah. Anyway, it doesn't matter. So on this question, I know I've talked first the last couple episodes, but I have the least to say. I'm sure by far on this
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Really.
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Well, I always say that and then I'll find something. The spirit will move, but I
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Are we sure it's the spirit
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Moving? I just want to say one thing though before to contextualize this question. I do appreciate the question. Thank you Zach and Freddy, the little bit of research I did on the specific Texas, Arizona, I found another one in Nashville and I'm sure they've been all over the country and a lot of 'em are sounds like restaurant owners, maybe some other types of businesses for harboring, employing aliens, undocumented immigrants. So here's what I want to say about it because the way that Zach and Freddy asked the question makes it sound like when they say, as believers we are to care for the needy and follow the laws of the land. If a Christian are faced in a similar situation, what do we do? Do we turn away the needy on the doorstep because or play by? And the one thing I want to say to contextualize this question is, and I'm not blaming Zach and Freddie for maybe misrepresenting the actual story here, but I do think it's important to say in all of the examples of folks that have gotten in trouble for employing undocumented immigrants thus far, it seems much less the case that they are like believers who are trying to care for these needy people and employ them so much as take advantage of cheap labor.
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These are people who, the one guy I read about in Nashville had 20 illegal aliens who were all sleeping on his floor in his apartment or you rent out room room in a windowless room. It just stored 'em all in there and he'd come pick 'em up in a big van every day to drive him in to his work, wasn't reporting any of it for tax purposes and was just paying him $10 a piece cash per day or something. It's like, this is not someone who's trying to care for the needy. He's like, these people are there. It is probably actually the reverse, it's probably blackmail. Like, Hey, you're going to work for me or else I'm going to report you and you're going to get sent home, or something like this. So I just think that now maybe, and obviously a lot of people fear with some of what Trump has said and started maybe to do with ice and the direction that we've gone in the past, even just few weeks since Trump was inaugurated, that maybe there would come a time when there could hypothetically be a law passed, saying that like everyone, every citizen is a mandatory reporter or something of undocumented workers.
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And even if you're not the ones employing, if you know of anyone who's here in this country illegally, you are by law forced to turn them in or else jail time for you or a fine, something like that that hasn't to my knowledge been passed any law like that yet. I mean, maybe that's the more interesting podcast episode to think about and respond to. What would a Christian do in that scenario? I just want to point out the fact that as far as where we are right now, March 4th, 2025, that I'm not sure that these two things are in quite as much tension as the question makes it seem like they are. Yet we're a Christian, although maybe y'all disagree with me as far as we as believers really feeling that tension of okay, am supposed to turn them in and not care for them or something. But here they are on our doorstep, so I don't know thoughts on that?
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Yeah, I'll just reiterate what you said that in all I read about 30 different articles trying to one find the Texas Arizona one specifically, and I found some in Texas, Arizona, Nashville, I found some in Florida other places. And in every single case it was not only a harboring or employing someone, but it always reflected more on something that the owner, him or herself was doing tax fraud, tax evasion, mistreatment of people. And then on top of that, it came about because someone reported saying, Hey, this individual owner is mistreating his employees who happened to be in the words harboring illegal immigrants. And so I agree with you right now, the question is a little bit different, but it is one for us to think about that as we think about when we read in Leviticus, you mistreat the foreigners who live among you as you treat the native born that you're seeking to care well for certain individuals.
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The whole love of neighbor who is my neighbor comes into play with this. What I like to do back up a little bit and just name, again, this can feel like a really big political partisan two party issue, but that there is a issue at the border and I think people are wondering what is it that we do when you have numbers of, again, I'm not staying an opinion of six to 10,000 people coming in illegally, that I would just go on record to say, yes, there's an issue at the border, and yes, there are people who are coming in, but I don't think either political party has done a really great job of one making it clear how it is that people come across the border. And two, what do we do with people once they do come across the border? There seems to be two extremes with that, and I think it's just been a lot of unhelpful of back and forth on policies and procedures between different political parties about here's what we think is best, here's what we don't think is best. Where I would fall in the how do we care well for our neighbor one, if there was a law that indicated someone being a mandatory reporter of that, I think that's something that would have to be taken really seriously of where does authority lie and how do I respond to the authority?
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Yeah. What strikes me about it is the way that Zach and f Freddy are setting up this question, and again, especially in the case of our hypothetical scenario that we're painting, what if
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The federal government passed a law saying you have mandatory reporter. It's interesting, this past Sunday were in numbers nine and 10 and we had the text about the Sabbath in numbers nine where God says, thou shalt keep the Sabbath. And then a couple verses later it's like, oh, but there were these folks who were made unclean because of touching a dead body. And they came to most like, well, what about us? Because you've already told us God, we're not allowed to keep if we're unclean. So I say that to say again, context. You're talking about two conflicting laws
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And of course we get into this all the time in matters of morality when it comes to our faith, I think. And so sometimes called, there's different kind of theories of ethics and moral gradation and whatever, which law trumps witch. There's a hierarchy of laws. And so when it comes to the Sabbath, it's like, okay, keeping the Sabbath trumps, you still have to keep it, but also here's how you do it. You do it in the next month. So here with this, it's like, yeah, what law would trump the other would care for the Sojourner Trump, kind of a Romans 13 in one, Peter three, respect for the emperor and honoring, obeying the law of the land. Typically what we say is you obey the laws of the land insofar as they don't conflict with God's law, which trumps if the emperor passes a law saying you got to help us round up all the Jews so we can exterminate 'em and the concentration camps, then you don't obey that law, right? So where would this kind of a hypothetical law fit within that? If again, let's say hypothetically Trump got real serious about the border thing and we're rounding them all, not just the criminal we started there, whatever, but no, no, we're rounding up all the undocumented immigrants. I mean I think he made campaign promises to this effect, didn't he? He say, I want,
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It's going to be the biggest mass deportation. So
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There is a federal criminal statute that makes it a crime to conceal harbor or shield from detection an undocumented person. So there already is one that exists and has existed.
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Okay, there you go. So then obviously we'd need to define what does it mean to Harbor Shield protect?
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But in this case, if we're going to the context of, and I'm not an attorney, but in the context
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Of none of us are attorneys,
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None of us are attorneys, this is not legal advice, call somebody else, but in the context of at least employers, you're supposed to have somebody fill out a nine nine, and that's where they check their legal status. And if that person lies on their I nine form, the employer is not liable for not doing a full investigation of that particular thing. They've done their due diligence at some point is kind of the point. So that all gets really complicated very quickly. In other words, there's a legal protection also in place like a provision for, because we're talking about employers in this case not walking around my green trails neighborhood looking for foreigners, right? I think that was kind the way we originally couches the conversation,
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Correct? Yeah. Employment, employment and harboring through employment. But if we made it more interesting and said, what if it wasn't just employment? What if it really was, we want to get so serious about this that we want everyone's help sending people back if they don't belong here. Again, I'm not using, I'm like putting scare quotes around Trump's words, let's say if he said something like that. And so every American citizen, not just harboring and legal and I nine forms, but if you know of someone who is in the country undocumented and you don't report them to ice, that could mean have criminal implications for you. Then what? As believers,
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Right? I think it's like the Romans 13, it's kind of like the household codes of Ephesians and Colossians where they're very 30,000 foot view instructions that are put in place and a lot has to be done on the ground to sift through. Does this really make sense? So we know the big 30,000 foot laws is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. Douglas Moon was probably my favorite Paul Lane scholar, and he sort of phrases that love for another, particularly with the sense of other regard to regard the other. It's just I'm going to have a hard time with all of the language of caring and not doing harm to your neighbor, finding a quick path to say, yep, pick up the phone, call 'em and get 'em out of here because most likely you're going to be doing that person harm to where they came from so to speak. That may not necessarily always be the case, but think that in a lot of the cases of those that have come across into our country legally or illegally, it has been to get out of a situation of some kind of harm. Now I know that there's all kinds of situation where that's not the case.
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Yeah, that's part of where it gets tricky. That matters
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For sure.
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It's not always the case. And some people, again, if I was going to play devil's advocate, some people would say, even if it was the case, isn't it still the case that countries have borders for a reason, they have laws for a reason, and those things need to be respected regardless of the situation you're coming and the motives and this and that. And again, I think some people make a really compelling case about how this flood of, again, the undocumented illegal crossings affects the legal immigration system and the folks who have waited for literally years and stood in line. And again, I mean if we're trying to get on a ride at Disney World, and again, this is whatever analogy, but we're all trying to get on the same ride at Disney World. It's great, everybody wants to get on the ride and you're fleeing from a shark or something and this is where you can get away from that and I just want to ride the ride. Is there a way that you can still get in line and still maybe have some kind of safety protection without cutting the line because that doesn't seem fair and when you do cut the line, shouldn't there be consequences or should it just be, well, you're already here now, so I dunno, it's a bad analogy, but I
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Don't know where the sharks at Disney World are, but
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No, I don't either. But I get what you're, I know that people are coming from bad situations, but again, then you get into the whole like, well, how bad is bad? Because I'm sure the people they're cutting in front of didn't have it great. I mean, that's the reason they're leaving their home to come here. So I don't know. I don't if there is, obviously, I know we tried to at one point get Mexico to be willing to say, we all just be kind of like the line, will you all be the purgatory while people wait? And they're like, no, we don't want to do that. So I don't know what that looks like in practice, but I'm just trying to play devil's advocate for could a law like that, a hypothetical law like that, a mandatory reporter kind of law like that B, not anti-Christian enough, could it be a respectable enough law and there's good reasons for it that Christians would be kind of beholden to oblige? I mean, I think practically speaking, obviously the burden of proof that would have to be there to actually criminally try anyone.
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How much did you really know? Had you had conversations with this person? I mean you would've had to have, it's also an argument from absence or ignorance, right? I mean you don't get a card saying, I'm not a legal immigrant. You only get the card when you are a legal immigrant. So it's not like you saw someone's paperwork proving that they were undocumented. It's like, so where is the burden of proof to say we're all supposed to be hounding people, show me your green card. And I don't know. I don't know how enforceable a law like that would be anyway, it's kind of what I'm
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Saying. It's Abu, it's not. And even, well, even if I know I'm not going to go out of my way to report someone and how enforceable is that you didn't intentionally harbor them, keep them there, but you also did not intentionally go and say like, Hey, I know someone and how do you judge someone's conscious on that and our sort of legal system? But I do to your point about the waiting in line part and people jumping in who are coming from that, we can argue really terrible situations. And when I said at the beginning that there is a border crisis, I think that's part of what it is, is there's individuals who are trying to go through a system that the United States has put in place, and I don't even know all the details of it to come into the US and it's making it more difficult by those who are coming in illegally.
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And I think where it really hits home is there's this general call to care for the sojourners and love them in one sense. We all have a general call to care for the wellbeing of all people, but what it really means is those who are in proximity to you, those who are amongst you. So I think we do have a certain level of responsibility to those individuals who are immediately around us to care really well for them regardless of what their status might be like. I don't open all my conversations with individuals of like, Hey, let me know your legal status in the United States, but to still treat everyone with dignity and respect, and again, you're going to get to a different conversation if some sort of different law is put into place. But I think we should all be able to agree that we don't show partiality in that regards. We don't ask those kinds of questions, but we should. I think those restaurant owners and stuff that we talked about at the beginning who are not treating people with dignity of respect, I think there we do actually have a responsibility even if it results in perhaps some negative outcome
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Because those who are coming across and who are in that situation are actually being mistreated. And I don't think that's something that we could support as Christians in that,
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Which again is just, frankly, it gets into tricky, practical,
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What are they going into? Yeah,
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Ethical territory because it's like, I mean these are people, they're not being literally held in captive in slavery. I mean, these are people that clearly they would rather be in the situation they're in here where they're in that apartment with 20 other people and they're getting paid pennies on the dollar. They are preferring that to what they came from. So otherwise they go back or they wouldn't account or whatever. So again, I'm not disagreeing at all, but I'm just saying even then if we're asking ourselves the question, how can I do good and have regard for this person, even there it's like, okay, here's a restaurant owner who's taking advantage of these people. He deserves to be confronted, but doing that is going to have implications like you said, dad, not only for him going to prison, but then potentially those 20 people get rounded up, found out, and maybe deported and then they're sent back.
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So I mean, it gets to really tricky territory mean. So here's another practical like it. If hypothetically you found out, well, let's say the guy who cuts your grass or lady who cleans your house, you found through a friend and oh, she's great, have her come clean for you, and you find out the story that this person is undocumented, what is the ethical obligation there as a believer? If this person is in this country illegally, are you, by continuing to have her come clean once a month, are you perpetuating a, I mean skipping of the line and a violation of our country's laws and policies?
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Or is there again a calling on the Christian to care for the least of these in your midst, in your radius? And here is someone who has been brought in my life who if I drop this person and if everybody else, I think of Emmanuel K's kind of universal realizable ethic, if everybody acted like me, what would happen to this person? What would the outcome be if everybody treated this undocumented person like me and said, I can no longer in good conscience as a Christian employ you because you cut the line and you're still here in violation of our countries, then they wouldn't, it'd starve or whatever. So do you do that or do you have an obligation to care for the least of these even if they are here illegally and you know what, you do good work. And I don't know, I mean these are real not hypothetical questions for some people even in our own congregation. So what does a Christian do?
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Well, let's add to the hypothetical that person starts coming to West Hills and we fall in love with him.
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Yeah.
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Do we pick up the phone and call ice and and then therefore then what's the distinction? Do we give preference to believers but not the lost And going back to earlier on, people skipping the line to be sure there's an unfairness there. No question. I don't know many people that are trying to run a border crisis political point based upon primarily the issue of who's in line at what time. I'm not saying that that isn't an insertion in the argument, but a lot of it to me seems to me a more a matter of we're trying to preserve a sense of nationality and those people out there are causing a problem with our shared sense of symbolism, virtue values, what makes us a people group, and we want our people group to be preserved from that people group. And that's a very different kind of basis.
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And some of that might depend on who you listen to.
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Yeah, yeah, no question. Again,
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I feel like I've heard more of the former than the latter.
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Okay. I've heard more of the latter than the former. So again, I don't want to pray in any broad strokes because depending on who you're listening to, you could hear some to our point just now dramatically different voices on the issue
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To give another in reading outside the US that there's some Scandinavian countries that are trying to pay individuals upwards of $34,000 to go back to their country and painting a picture of it's throwing off the economy of both countries by people coming in and not going back and the financial piece going out. I think one of, if I was faced with your hypothetical situation, a question, which one,
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We've made so many,
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I keep layers, I'm going to go the hypothetical situation of the cleaner in our church, whatever we know, not the cleaner at our church, but coming to our church, I'd have to do I think a little bit more research into what the process would look like. But I think one way in which I'd consider, again based on story, I would never, I shouldn't say I would, I would not desire to intentionally send someone back where there would be potential harm or persecution or risk of death and going back to wherever they're potentially coming from. But asking the question is what would the process look like to help this individual be able to be here legally? Is there a way to do that? Again, I'm assuming there's probably, you must leave the country for a period of time and then come back into, I don't know if that means they have to go back to the country of origin or if they can go to a different country where there's less risk of harm and actually seeking to, Hey, let me come alongside you and help you do this the right way in order for longevity of peace and comfort and caring well for you potentially.
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Again, I don't know all the policies and what that process looks like to, well, let's get to the back of the line to start going through this, but I do, as I said at the beginning, I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done in the process of allowing those to come into the United States. And I think the US has been blessed with a lot of resources and I don't think we do a very good job of caring well for all peoples. And again, I understand the caring for our borders piece.
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I do. Well, let me ask this. I think that brings up an interesting point that we haven't talked about yet. How important is the contextualization of not every single but the majority of so many of the exhortations and callings in scripture to care for the Sojourner? How important is the context of that being National Israel in the Old Testament versus our context today? Because I just think that that's a component of this, that on the, what you might call the more progressive bleeding heart, whatever side of this argument in Christendom that doesn't often get brought up is that when God's saying, y'all care for the sojourners because y'all were sojourner, he's saying that to Israel.
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I just think it's interesting because that same camp of people who would be quick to say, we got to care for these Venezuelan sojourners or whatever, are often the same people who are very quick to point out that America is not Israel, we are not the new Israel when it comes to any host of other things. And yet when it comes to this, no, no, no, we want to erase any of that kind of distinction and we just want to take that exhortation right out of context in the Old Testament and say therefore we today. And I think that has to be said. So I'm curious to hear you all, how important do you think that is? America is never given anywhere in the Bible or anywhere else other than on the Statue of Liberty that France gave us because they want us to take their stuff. There's the care for your poor, and America is never anywhere given, and we're not a Christian nation, we are not a Christian nation. And so we are not constitutionally a Christian nation. I mean we can debate whether or not historically we ever were coming
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Next week,
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But we are not now. And so we do not as a nation have any kind of certainly biblical obligation. I mean, we can debate whether or not moral obligation and what we're doing now even with the US foreign aid cutting funding for stuff in other countries. And again, it's related to all of this America's moral imperative or whatever, but all of it to say Israel had a command from God, and we as Christians have commands from God. America as a nation does not have a command from God. I don't mean other than the really crazy out there, I don't know too many of us in our camp who want America to be a theocracy.
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So I'm going back to now ask the question if all of that is true, then doesn't America as a secular country that we happen to live in, doesn't America have a right to pass immigration border policies and laws that are in the best interest of America, even if it is to the exclusion and not to the best interest of people who would want to be American and aren't? And as Americans do we have an obligation as for Romans 13 and others to respect and abide by those laws within obviously within in so far as they do not directly conflict with our higher authority and higher, you talked about authority and higher a law that we've been given by God.
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I'll go back to the initial question I asked. How important is the context that God gave so many of these laws about caring for the Sojourner that is amongst you to Israel? How important is that in this conversation? I mean, obviously we still care for the least of these. So I mean that would seem to pull in this category of Sojourners immigrants, but a lot of the specific language you have about the foreigner, the exile, the immigrant, unless I'm forgetting a lot of text in the New Testament, a lot of that comes in the context of Israel in the Old Testament. So
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It does. And I think part of it, we could also ask the question somewhat in the New Testament, is there a sojourn or sub structured narrative to the text? And I think some people would make that argument. So there are some folks that'll say that Israel in the time of the New Testament thought that she was an exile. And there are some that'll push that so far as people like Tom Wright and in t Wright that they say basically that the return from exile and their conscious never really happened and they were looked around because of all the promises that were in Ezekiel. And by the time that you get to the New Testament, they say, Hey, it's not as good as it was going to be. So they think they're in exile. I don't think you can push it quite that far. On the other hand, I don't think that you can go so far as to say that they didn't think that the return from exile was entirely completed, even though it had been 500 years earlier that the remnant return. So I say that to say even though the language of Sojourner is not there in their imagination, they could still thinking we are still so journeying in the land in the sense that we are an occupied people at this time. The temple is not glorious the way that it was. And it is in that context that Jesus says to love your neighbor as yourself and other regard and neighbor love and so forth is his chief command next to love the Lord your God.
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At the same time. That's not exactly answering. I'm partially trying to say is it distinctly an Old Testament theme or is there a continuation in the New Testament?
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And just to help add to your point, when he is asked, who is my neighbor? He tells the parable of the Good
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Samaritan.
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So he specifically makes it about someone different from you who you might not naturally say, let's help this person out.
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And I think we have a hard time sitting ourselves in that story to understand the level of racial national animosity that those people groups had. They were extremely high, they were higher than what we're talking about today about people coming across. I mean, I'm sure there's some people that are just absolutely live that anyone across the border and they stay up at night thinking about it and God bless 'em At the same time, going back to the context of Israel, I do believe that Israel is in a sense a corporate Adam and that they are representative to do inhumanity. What Adam failed to do,
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And that David becomes the prototypical Israelite to which Jesus ultimately points to whatever the Old Testament ethic is that is given to Israel, not necessarily the law. If the law is like the floor, the minimum requirement and the ethic is the ceiling, whatever ethic that their law is based upon is really the ethic that's pointed to fulfillment in Christ. So would I say like, oh no, you're just going to cut that out because it's in the old law, it's in the old covenant. I would say no, because that might very well be the floor because so much of the sermon on the Mount, although he never specifically uses the language of Sojourner, is the looking at the law. And in fact, he usually intensifies it typically whatever the conditions of the law are undergo. You have heard it said, but I say to you now, thank goodness the whole sacrificial system and the ceremonial portion is able to be retired because it comes to fulfillment in his sacrificial work. But I'm going to have a hard time saying that. No, all that language is sojourner. We can totally gut. Now at the same time, to your point earlier, will about how certain versions of, not versions, but groups of Christian communities in the west will take that and they'll make the small thing the main thing, also commit an error.
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So you would say we, and I think I would agree that even though America is not Israel and so can't one for one map this command to Israel from a command today that we're supposed to all as a, is it fair to say you didn't say this, but that in a lot of ways the church gets to a whole bigger, but the church is a kind of new Israel, new they were God's people, then we are God's people now got different.
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So if this is God's heart for the Sojourner, then God doesn't change, his heart doesn't change. So God still has a heart for the sojourner today, even if America's not called to, I mean there were specific practical laws that God gave as part of the 613 in the Old Testament to his people. This is how you care for them. So even though we don't have that in codified in America's system, but we could say that the church today as God's be today has a similar call value system command to care for sojourners in our midst, regardless of whether the church exists in America or Germany or whenever time and place, that if you're part of the church that we have this calling that is binding on us as God's people. And if that comes into conflict with the law of the land like it did in 1930s, forties, Germany, and maybe it is today in 19, or sorry, 2020s America, where you're feeling a tension between a push to not care for the sojourner from the government in the land you live in and the tension with a call biblically to care for the Sojourner, regardless that we go with God.
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And if it means that we have to break laws here, then we do that is that
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Maybe it's challenging as well just going back to the United States as a nation in Israel as a nation. Because when we think nation, we think nation state as defined by a particular political community with a constitutional law. And that's actually a result of modernity that even that concept of nationhood didn't emerge until about 500 years ago. So if we think about sometimes we make this comparison of our nation now versus their nation, then, but their nation wasn't necessarily defined in the same way of the same, here is the border and here are the codes of law that put us together. We would think of them more as communities or ethnic groups. And so it gets a little bit challenging to make even just one-to-one comparisons there. And at the same time, I'm going to commit equivocation here, but sorry, the church is thought of as Sojourner. That's why a book like numbers that we're going through now is beneficial for edification is that we are sour in the present
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Age.
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But going back to you can't be a global citizen, this was kind of your point earlier about as Americans, I'm not German, I'm not Australian, I'm not British, I'm not Mayan. What's a de name for someone from Myanmar, Mayan, Mayan, Meese, whatever that is. I'm not one of those things. So I do think at the same time, you do have a citizenship to a particular country in place. You can't be a global citizen. And part of the challenge with issues like this where we have access to computers and technology is that even though there's great geographic gap, we have the illusion of being very close to the problem when we necessarily are not even in St. Louis, Missouri, smack in the middle of the country. We are extremely far from the border. It is probably not as major of an issue for the central
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Midwest,
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Certainly as it is for somebody that lives in along the Rio Grande and certainly not for someone up in Duluth.
(42:28):
Sure, yeah. But I appreciate that part and that you just said Austin, and especially what you said about I'm not a global citizen because that's part of where I just still get hung up on is I am an American and proud to be an American.
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I cheer for the red, white and blue at the
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Olympics, that kind of thing. I want us to win. I mean, can we stop and just all break out into the chorus? I'm proud to be an American. And so because of that and because I want to be careful for me about not just taking all the benefits and all the good stuff that comes with something like that citizenship and then not recognizing some of the cost of that. I think part of that to me is yeah, that nations have today have borders and have rules, and rightfully so I see good practical wisdom in that. I see good practical wisdom, frankly, and not for the sort of xenophobic reasons that you were mentioning earlier, Austin, of keeping them over there or whatever. But because I think that there are real questions of limited resources and whatever else that there are, I think valid reasons for limiting the flow, certainly of undocumented people in the country.
(44:19):
I mean, I think there's a care issue there when you have untold numbers of people coming in illegally, who then, yeah, then there's a care issue for, I mean, those are the people, like you said, that, that are at greatest risk of being taken advantage of by these predatory employers and things like that. So I see there's a reason to know who's here. It's like us with membership here at church, we want to know who the church is so we can care for them. I want to give the benefit of the doubt to our country America and say it's good for us to know who's here so that we can care for 'em, but also, frankly, I'll just be honest so that the country, America can be cared for by them too. Because I think we have rights and responsibilities, civic duties as citizens, not the least of which is paying taxes. If you're here undocumented, you are not paying taxes, you are not contributing
(45:22):
The highways that you're driving on to the free healthcare that you get when you go to the ER and can't pay your bill to all the government employees that are getting slashed Now by Elon, I mean all these things that the rest of us pay into the system, you're not, and yet you're still driving on the roads and you're still going to the ER and you're still going, sending your kids to public school and you're still whatever. So to me, and maybe I just have too much of a child, I don't have a problem identifying with God's heart for justice because to me, I do think there's a fairness and a justice issue there as well. And I just think that has to be said that I think that in the day and age we live in, you are right. There is a false equivalency with how societies work 3000 years ago maybe.
(46:16):
But today, in the day and age we live in, countries exist for a reason. Borders exist, laws exist for a reason, and I don't think those are all immoral, evil reasons that Christians should throw out the window. I think that I really do feel the pinch of the Romans 13 there, okay, as a citizen of America, if some of these laws are being passed, even if it doesn't feel right for me to take an action that could have adverse effects for someone else, where does that responsibility to uphold the law of your land come into play? I'm just, again, I'm trying to really think through that hypothetical situation,
(47:08):
And I think someone could make the argument of that you could be caring well for your neighbor in that sense of those who are in proximity to you of trying to make it so that people are paying into the system for doctors and roads and school systems and all of that, that you are actually in fact caring for your neighbor by doing that and providing for that around you by following the law so that those things are care well for, and you yourself are care well for cared well for. Well,
(47:42):
I mean to go back to concept ethic, I mean there's no question there. If everybody lived the way you're living, how does this ethic play out? I mean, if everybody was here illegally and no one was paying into the system, it wouldn't go well for our country. I think to your point that I think you could, at least as a Christian, yeah, make that case, make that argument that sometimes care for this person is different than care and at what point does yes, care for the wider community and society and whatever come into play as well. So I don't know. It is a really tough one. I mean, I'm certainly like as a church, yeah, we're not going to be leading the charge of let's help round people up if it again, in a dystopian like world came to that. But yeah, I mean, would we comply and to your Austin yours, I mean if we had someone here who we knew was at West Hills, and I like what you said, tha I mean, you do what you can to help shepherd him and how can we now after the fact help you legally become a citizen
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So that hopefully, yeah, you can't stay here and anyway, I don't know. That doesn't always obviously
(49:19):
Solve pan out how we'd like, but yeah, I think it's a good question and I think it's on other people's minds as well.
(49:29):
Yeah. Well, thanks for asking it
(49:32):
Freddy
(49:32):
And Zach. Thank
(49:32):
You. Yeah, good job. Any last,
(49:36):
Well, I haven't done all the research on them, but it's interesting to think about sanctuary cities as well for immigrants as well, throwing that into the mix. I was just looking up real quick, I don't recall what the current administration's stance on that is. If we still have sanctuary cities from, we do, from what I saw, we still do do. I thought it's interesting to
(49:59):
Think in comparison with the sanctuary cities in the Bible. If you committed murder, you could
(50:04):
Run there. There's something there too. It's like, oh man, man. I don't know. It's just interesting to think about that. If you're a church, if you're a business in a sanctuary city or something like that, it changes. Also the conversation too. It's interesting to think about. I don't have the answers for that, but interesting to throw into. Well, that's it for this week's episode of Ask the Pastors. Remember that you can submit your questions by visiting the info bar at West Hills by asking them online through our website at www.westhillssstl.org, and join us next week where we address the question, when and how is it appropriate to complain to God? And if you enjoyed this week's episode, hit that like button, subscribe and share it with a friend. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll catch you next week.