An impassioned sermon for the start of the Christian Holy Week

Nate and Jenny Bacon serve as missionaries with InnerChange (an ecumenical Christian Order among the Poor) in Central America, living in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

Nate with family

Nate looked on at developments in his native country this past week and posted this on Facebook:

There is an illuminating window into deeper realities provided by the recent draconian measure of not only cancelling the legal social security cards of immigrants in the US, who are under Temporary Protected Status, but also adding their names to the “DEATH MASTER FILE” previously reserved for…well…dead people. It sends a clear message,

“You are as good as dead to us”.

Jesus said that even if we call our neighbor “Raca” (“empty-head”), we are guilty of committing murder. How much more, when we literally label our immigrant sisters and brothers as “DEAD”?

If we look carefully, we can see that it is the spirit of DEATH that is at work in and through all of this, to turn us against our own flesh and blood, created in the same image and likeness of God.

It is the slippery slope to genocide, and helps explain why we so easily shrug at the dehumanization of our fellow human beings, and even at genocide itself.

Do we want DEATH to be our MASTER?

When we are silent in the face of these acts, or even celebrate them, we enlist ourselves into a group that could be called by the same name: “DEATH MASTER FILE”. Because we have opted for DEATH as our MASTER.

As for me and my family, we choose LIFE, and the AUTHOR of LIFE, and refuse to submit to Death.

And YOU?

Let the most sacred week of the Christian annual cycle begin.