The Young and Fearless Prophet
In case you missed it, amid the firehose of news, Liam Conejo Ramos is back home in Minnesota with his family. If you’re struggling to place the name, Liam was the five-year-old in the blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack detained by ICE on January 20th. You may remember the picture. Liam and his father Adrian have active asylum claims and no deportation orders, but ICE arrested them in their driveway and transported them to the Immigration Center in Dilley, Texas.
On January 27th, Federal Judge Fred Biery ordered the federal government not to deport Liam and Adrian; on January 31st, he ordered their release. The judge wrote scathingly in his order, calling out the government for its policies of cruelty. And, in an unusual move, he ended the statement with the viral picture of Liam and two Bible verses: Matthew 19:14 and John 11:35.
“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these'” and “Jesus wept.”
We usually talk about Jesus twice a year on the two big Christian holidays, Christmas and Easter, and I worry sometimes that I’ve done you a disservice by not mentioning him more often. Not because I think you need to believe a particular thing about Jesus, but because even though he lived and died two thousand years ago, his ministry remains relevant in so many ways.
There are reasons why Judge Biery quoted the gospels. When so much of our country is run on a platform of Christian nationalism, Jesus counts for a lot. Jesus counts for a lot, if we can go back to the source texts and stop waving him like a flag, that is.
‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these’. These are the words of Jesus, printed in red letters in some editions of the Bible. The kingdom of heaven belongs to the little children you would push away.
Judge Biery is appealing to the authority most commonly recognized as higher than the President of the United States, and that authority is siding with compassion and the innocence of children, not might and power.
Of course, many of us are looking for the Jesus who flips the tables, who overthrows corruption. The story of Jesus cleansing the temple, where he runs the money changers and sacrificial animal vendors out of the temple, overturning their tables and brandishing a whip of cords, you can find a version of it in each of the four gospels.
And then there’s the story I told the kids, the feeding of the five thousand, the loaves and fishes. This story is the only miracle other than the resurrection that is in all four gospels.
If I can switch away from the six-hundred-year-old Armenian gospel illustration of the loaves and fishes miracle I have on the screen to another image about ten years old.
Bear with me a minute, as we look at these very Western European-looking Jesuses. About ten years ago, the internet was full of “he protec, he attac” memes, where the same character has a defensive posture and an offensive posture. The meme grew to have a third pane “but most importantly…” and something that rhymes. So, we get “he protec”–Jesus welcoming and blessing the children– ”he attac”–Jesus cleansing the temple– and “but most importantly he multiply snac”.
The Bible is an excellent collection of memes that are thousands of years old, after all. And I don’t mean memes as visual internet jokes, or not just that. I’m going back to the older sense of the word as a dense nugget of cultural information that is replicated and circulated through the culture and evolves through transmission.
It’s not the only thing that has created our culture, but Christianity of one sort or another is the normative religion in our country. Think of how elegantly Judge Biery dropped two Bible citations into his order, and with two words and four numerals millions of people understood that he was appealing to a higher authority than the government of our land, an authority that government claims to be serving. People also understood it as an appeal to compassion. People understood it as a defense of the rights of children. It was all of those. It was powerful, especially when paired with his text and the picture of Liam.
When the alternative is Christian nationalism, going back to the Jesus of the Bible–the strange teacher who railed against injustice and corruption, the healer who touched unclean people and restored them to community, the holy man who hung out with sinners–that Jesus is somebody I don’t want to lose track of. I don’t want to give him up for the Jesus who vanquishes enemies and judges the outcast instead of the powerful, the triumphant Christ of Christian nationalism. I like the original version better.
The Jesus who welcomes and defends the children, when children are under attack. As schools lose funding. As our government finds new ways to persecute trans kids. As we hear stories of the abuse and exploitation of children.
The Jesus who removes corruption from sacred places. As Pete Hegseth hosts Christian nationalist prayer services in the Pentagon auditorium. As the President of this country claims a mandate to remove our rights and the rights of those we love. As supposed ministers of the gospel get rich promoting the persecution of the vulnerable.
The Jesus who feeds everyone. As the gap between billionaires and the rest of us grows. As one in seven households in the US experience food insecurity. As we watch as children starve.
The good news is that the gospel is good news. The Jesus in the gospel’s sides with the poor, vulnerable, and oppressed. The harder part, but the realistic part, is that after two thousand years I don’t think he’s going to pop in and set everything right. So it’s up to us, all of us living now. It’s up to us to end oppression, corruption, and poverty. And even if he did show up, wouldn’t we rather be working on building the kingdom of heaven? Wouldn’t we rather be building the world that belongs to the children, the one we want them to inherit? Wouldn’t we rather be building the Beloved Community than waiting for it to appear?
Because every life saved, every burden eased, every heart opened, it’s worth it, even if we don’t know the full realization of Beloved Community in our lives. Even if it doesn’t fix everything, doing the part that we can is better than doing nothing. Because the kingdom of heaven, the Beloved Community, is real, even if it doesn’t exist yet, so long as we keep building it.
And so many of the people in this country who want to build the Beloved Community, the kingdom of heaven in our midst, they talk in this language of Jesus, of miracles that some understand as fact and some understand of metaphor, of radical teachings of love, of challenging the status quo of greed.
We’re going to continue, in our public moral discourse, to hear demands made in the name of Jesus, and a lot of people making diverse arguments will invoke him as a higher authority. I challenge you to listen to what they have to say. Because the people who speak of a Jesus who divide the worthy and unworthy, we’re not ready to build together. But the people who speak of a Jesus who lifts up the oppressed, who challenges the powerful, who loves above all, those are our collaborators in building the Beloved Community, the kingdom of heaven.
We see them washing dishes at Wednesday breakfast, packing the 400-person sanctuary at First Church for the most recent LUCE bystander training, reaching out in love across borders, going into prisons, or standing outside them, to comfort and release the prisoners. These are the kind of Jesus people who are realizing the kingdom of heaven, one step at a time, and they are our co-conspirators in the Beloved Community to come.
May we build the kind of world that Jesus preached.
