VOL. 6, NO. 44
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DESTINATION
AMERICA |
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~ Why did (some
of) your ancestors come to America?
~ When was that?
~ And how did they get here? |
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Does anyone truly understand the difference between
legal and illegal immigration? |
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Scripture: Matthew 22
Jesus’
summary of the Law
7. Jesus
replied: "`Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind.'
38.
This
is the first and greatest commandment.
39.
And
the second is like it: `Love your neighbor as yourself.'
40.
All
the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
41.
While
the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them,
42.
"What
do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?" "The son of David," they replied.
43.
He
said to them, "How is it then that David, speaking by the Spirit, calls
him Lord? For he says,
44.
`The
Lord said to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under
your feet." ’ ?
45.
If
then David calls him Lord, how can he be his son?"
46.
No one could say a word in reply, and
from that day on no one dared to ask him any more questions.
Will we find Him
living among the Greeks?
33.
Jesus
said, "I am with you for only a short time, and then I go to the one who
sent me.
34.
You
will look for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot
come."
35.
The
Jews said to one another, "Where does this man intend to go that we cannot
find him? Will he go where our people live scattered among the Greeks, and
teach the Greeks?
36.
What
did he mean when he said, `You will look for me, but you will not find me,' and
`Where I am, you cannot come'?"
37.
On
the last and greatest day of the Feast, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice,
"If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.
38.
Whoever
believes in me, as the Scripture has
said, streams of living water will flow from within him."
39.
By
this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.
Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been
glorified.
40.
On
hearing his words, some of the people said, "Surely this man is the
Prophet."
41.
Others
said, "He is the Christ."
Still others asked, "How can the Christ come from Galilee?
W
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
“Huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” That’s us. Christians have been both
immigrants and exiles since the first century. Today we celebrate a
religious observance that has been added to the annual calendar of the
Presbyterian Church that we call Reformation Sunday. It doesn’t come from the
Bible, but it comes from the history of a people of the Bible. It marks a
particular moment in the life of our church that gave us our identity.
THE 95 THESES
Reformation Sunday is always
the Sunday that is closest to the day that Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses
on the door of the Castle Church
in Wittenberg, Germany.
He did that on Halloween, 1517. It was the beginning of the Protestant
Reformation. At our best, our denomination has been a gang of religious and
political reformers ever since.
Who has been to Wittenberg?
(With this congregation, it is always fun to ask that.) The documents nailed to
the church door are also referred to as “The disputation on the Power and
Efficacy of Indulgences.” Posting documents on the church door was the
customary way of advertising an event on a university campus of Luther's day.
Church doors functioned very much as bulletin boards function on a twenty-first
century college campus.
The
Theses were soon printed on the Gutenberg Printing Press, and were widely read
throughout Europe by 1518. They challenged the leaders of the Catholic Church
on several points, and the primary one was the selling of indulgences to
shorten one’s time in purgatory following death. It was a clever scheme to
finance the art, architecture, and ambitious exploration projects of the Roman
Catholic Church. It was a clever scheme, but it had no basis in theology.
History
remembers the 95 Theses as the flash point that sparked the Protestant
Reformation.
The
Protestant Reformation was political as much as it was religious. From Germany,
to Switzerland, Holland, England, and Scotland, the Reformation spirit spread as
the countries that made up the Holy Roman Empire broke into smaller religious
and political states.
SCOTTISH
HERITAGE BECOMES PRESBYTERIAN HERITAGE
Last year the Church of the Roses celebrated Reformation Sunday
with a Scottish bagpiper and Scottish liturgy and music since many
Presbyterians have an ancestor or two that can be traced back to the
Reformation in Scotland in the 16th century.
But Presbyterians come from every imaginable country. Currently
some of the greatest growth in our denomination comes from Korea. It is for the
Korean students at the seminary that we are gathering coats this week; they had
to pack light to make the trip. So from Scottish Heritage to
Presbyterian Heritage Sunday, it is only a small jump.
We have advised you that this
would be the appropriate day to wear your family colors or bring the family
sword or something that reminds you of something about your family heritage.
As our nation becomes more multicultural with every generation,
most of us can trace roots to several ancestors from different places. So when
it is your turn, I ask you to select just one part of your heritage, and I want
to find out:
·
where are your ancestors from,
·
why did they come to America,
·
when did they come to America,
·
how did they get here?
I expect your responses to be
very interesting.
And then we will conclude by remembering
all those who have died in the last year and who have contributed to the
heritage of our own church.
WOULD YOUR ANCESTORS
BE WELCOME HERE?
From your heritage, it is
only another small jump to immigration in our own county. What if your
ancestors wanted to come to America
today? Would they still be welcome? That is a question that is right out of the
current headlines. What is the difference between legal and illegal
immigration? The distinction is not as
clear as we had thought; it depends upon what century we are talking about --
particularly when you consider who occupied the United
States as recently as 150 years ago when
white people came to settle San Francisco
and Santa Rosa.
So that is a short outline
for the morning.
What is your heritage; what
brought you here?
People
come to America
for many reasons:
·
Some come to find work from countries where
there is great poverty.
·
Perhaps they are brought to America
to help build the railroads – the Chinese, the Irish.
·
They work the fields – the Asians, and now the
Latinos.
·
They come as brides or families following
foreign wars.
·
And there are many, like my own ancestors, who
came to America
to flee religious persecution during the Protestant Reformation.
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FIRST CENTURY IMMIGRANTS
AND REFUGEES
In the First and Second century, Christians were immigrants to
the Mediterranean countries fleeing religious persecution in Jerusalem
and Biblical Israel. Some Christians stayed to meet in house churches in Jerusalem
and in Galilee after the death and resurrection of
Jesus.
But most of the New
Testament is about
the people who did not stay,
and fled to Turkey, Greece and Italy.
Just read the names of the books of the
New Testament and you will see how Paul, Timothy and others took the church to
Ephesus, Turkey, Corinth, Greece, and Rome, Italy, with
stops in Cyprus, the Greek Islands.
A
large number of early Christians were immigrants to Egypt,
and it is likely that Jesus’ best friends, Peter and Mary, spent much of their
time in Egypt
debating the structure of the church that would bear Jesus’ name.
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A PERSON OF INTEREST --
ROBERT CUSHMAN OF KENT, ENGLAND
My own ancestors are typical
of many who came to the United States
fleeing religious persecution. For our family, Robert Cushman is a person of
interest.
Robert
Cushman (1578-1625) was one of the the Pilgrims. He was born in the village of
Rolvenden in Kent, England. He spent part of his early life in Canterbury. He was one of a group of Pilgrims who fled to
Holland because of differences with the official church over their practice of
religion. From there, he later returned to England and arranged the purchase of
the Mayflower for the Pilgrims to use on their voyage to America. He did not
complete the trip aboard the Mayflower with the other Pilgrims, because their
smaller sister ship, the Goodspeed, experienced a disaster which threatened its
survival. He left the Mayflower, which had not proceeded very far at that time,
in order to involve himself in saving this vessel.
His expertise in financial matters, which had been valuable in
acquiring the Mayflower, was also valuable in arranging for needed repairs for
Goodspeed. Cushman sailed to Plymouth in the fall of 1621 on the Fortune, but
returned shortly thereafter to England to promote the colony's interests. – I
have here a copy of the Mayflower Compact he helped to create.
His son, Thomas Cushman (ca. 1607/08 -
1691), who accompanied him on the Fortune, was raised in the family of Governor
William Bradford, and served as Ruling Elder of the Plymouth Church from 1649,
until his death in 1691. Robert Cushman was also an ancestor of U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Within a few miles of Santa Rosa, we have a fascinating place
of interest. It is called Angel Island. Larry Kocher was a docent there; Ted
McCarthy was a docent right around the corner at the Point Bonita Light house.
And others of you know its history and its importance to the people who
immigrated through the station for the decades between the 1900’s and 1940’s.
Like much of the California coast, Angel Island was
subsequently used for cattle ranching; this destroyed most of the native oak
woodland and brush cover. In 1863, during the American Civil War, the U.S. Army
established a camp on the island (now known as Camp Reynolds or the West
Garrison), and it subsequently became an infantry garrison during the U.S.
campaigns against Native American peoples in the west. In the later nineteenth
century, the army designated the entire island as "Fort McDowell" and
developed further facilities there; including what is now called the East
Garrison or Camp McDowell. During the Spanish-American War, the island served
as a discharge depot for returning troops. It continued to serve as a transit
station throughout the first half of the twentieth century, with troops engaged
in the First and Second World Wars embarking and returning there. During World
War II, Japanese and German POWs were also held on the island. The army
abandoned the island in 1946, but returned in the 1950s when a Nike Missile
Base was constructed; this was decommissioned as obsolete in 1962.
From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station
processed approximately 175,000 Asian immigrants entering into the US, serving
a similar role to Ellis Island for European immigrants. Angel Island is
sometimes referred to as "The Ellis Island of the West." The Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882 provided tough entry restrictions, so many immigrants
waited on the island for as long as two years while they exhausted appeals. The
conditions of buildings on Angel Island were poor. Many of these immigrants
carved poems in Chinese on the walls of the island's buildings, poems which have
been anthologized and studied by scholars.
One unhappy prisoner carved in the wall, "For what reason
must I sit in jail? It is only because my country is weak and my family
poor."
A fire burned down the administration
building in 1940, and all subsequent immigration processing took place in San
Francisco.
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DO GOOD FENCES MAKE
GOOD NEIGHBORS?
(AP) President Bush signed a
bill Thursday authorizing 700 miles of new fencing along the U.S.-Mexico
border. "Unfortunately the United States
has not been in complete control of its borders for decades and therefore
illegal immi-gration has been on the rise," Bush said at a signing
ceremony.
"We have a
responsibility to enforce our laws," he said. "We have a
responsibility to secure our borders. We take this responsibility
serious."
He called the fence bill
"an important step in our nation's efforts to secure our borders."
The measure Bush put into law
Thursday, before heading for campaign stops in Iowa
and Michigan, offers no money for
the fence project covering one-third of the 2,100-mile border. Its cost is not known, although a homeland
security spending measure the president signed earlier this month makes a $1.2
billion down payment on the project. The money also can be used for access
roads, vehicle barriers, lighting, high-tech equipment and other tools to
secure the border.
Mexican officials have
criticized the fence. Outgoing Mexican President Vicente Fox, who has spent
much of his six years in office lobbying for a new guest worker program and a
chance at citizenship for the millions of Mexicans working illegally in the U.S.,
calls the fence "shameful" and compares it to the Berlin Wall.
Others have doubts about its
effectiveness.
"A fence
will slow people down by a minute or two, but if you don't have the agents to
stop them, it does no good. We're not talking about some impenetrable
barrier," T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, a
union representing Border Patrol agents, said Wednesday. Last month, I wrote my
column in the Rose Clippings about some people who work in the vineyards and do
some of the odd jobs in our community who will be affected by a fence. They are
ambitious people; when they are not working, many of them are learning English
as a second language in Graton. Building a fence will make their lives more
difficult. I will pray for them.
WHO
DID YOU COME FROM?
Today is
Reformation Sunday in churches all over the United
States, and they are thinking about the same
questions we are asking this morning. So now, let’s hear what you have to say.
DESTINATION AMERICA:
·
Why did (some of) your ancestors come to America?
·
When was that?
·
And how did they get here?
(Dr. Cushman called on Bonnie Barber to speak about
her ancestors, and then she went throughout the congregation with a microphone
to others who had special thoughts to share about their ancestors.)
Dr. John H. Cushman
Presbyterian Church of the Roses
2500 Patio
Court
Santa Rosa, CA 95405
October 29, 2006
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