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The sermon text reading for today is Psalm 146. You can find this passage in the Sanctuary Bible on page 927. Please listen as I read God's Word. Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, my soul. I will praise the Lord all my life. I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground. On that very day, their plans come to nothing. Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God. He is the maker of heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them. He remains faithful forever. He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free. The Lord gives sight to the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. The Lord reigns forever. Your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord. Here ends the reading.

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Morning, everyone. If I have not yet had the chance to meet you this morning, my name is John. I get to serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood, and as as has already been said this morning, if you are our guest here today, whether someone invited you or whether you just sort of found us online, uh, we are so grateful that you are with us here today. The plan for this morning was to take on the next passage in the book of 1 Corinthians, because that's the series of messages that we have been in the early part of this year. But our elder team thought that it would be appropriate to hit pause on that series and address some of what is happening in our city. If you have been around Elmwood in the last number of weeks, you know that we have addressed this situation here on Sundays in the worship gathering. We've scheduled times, as you just heard about, to gather and pray about what's happening. And we've also mobilized our church to gather food for an immigrant church community that meets in our building on a different night of the week. So there's things that we have been doing, and uh we also thought that it would be good to address it in a more extended way during a sermon portion here on Sunday, and so that that is what we're going to be doing here today. Uh a few things I want to say uh sort of preliminarily before we get into the heart of the message this morning. Uh first thing that I want to just uh submit to you is uh I'm well aware of the minefield that I'm stepping into today. Okay? One of the things that I genuinely love about our church is that we are a diverse group of people. Uh we're generationally diverse, we're socioeconomically diverse, come from different backgrounds, have different interests, and one of the areas of diversity in our church is that we are politically diverse. Meaning some of the people in our church genuinely love Jesus and they lean right. Some of the people in our church genuinely love Jesus and they lean left and everywhere in between. So I understand the risk that I'm taking this morning in offending people, and I need you to know that my goal this morning is not to make everyone happy, uh to be transparent with you. My goal is that everyone here would be just a little bit offended by something that I say, okay? Like I actually I want that because it means you're listening, and when scripture speaks into our life, we tend to get offended. And so that's what I want for us this morning. Uh so I'm well aware of the danger that I'm stepping into this morning. I also want to just uh say this that I take this part of my job as a pastor very seriously. Most weeks I am tasked with opening the Bible and speaking on behalf of God. And I don't take that lightly. I don't take that calling uh lightly at all, especially when we're talking about subjects that are so emotionally and politically charged. I understand the weight of what I do here on Sundays, and I do my best to weed out all of the things that are my personal preferences, my personal opinions, my personal convictions, because we don't need to come here and hear from me. And so I take this very seriously. Lastly, I'll just say this in one message, I cannot and do not intend to speak comprehensively. Okay, you all understand this. You've been hearing about this for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I have 30 minutes. Okay, so I'm not gonna speak on this comprehensively, I'm not, I don't intend to, I don't want to, I can't say everything, I can't caveat everything, I can't nuance everything the way that I would want to, and so I'm asking you to be really, really gracious with me today. Okay? Just imagine what would my life be like if I had to do what he's doing today? Okay? And let that lead you to kindness in your heart towards me and what I have to do this morning. I'm fully aware of the danger that I'm stepping into this morning, and I also believe that it is worth it. It's worth it because we both individually and collectively need to see what's happening in our city and in our country from God's perspective. And so that's my goal this morning, is to help us do just that. So the main question that I want to address today is uh a very simple question. What should be the Christian response to what is happening in our city? And again, I'm not going to speak comprehensively. Uh there's more, certainly, than that we could say than we have time to say today, but I do want to provide uh something of a framework for how we can respond to what's been happening in our city. So, what is the Christian response? Uh I will offer a three-part response uh for us this morning. Number one, we respond by adopting God's heart for the foreigner and the immigrant. Psalm 146, which you heard read uh just a few moments ago, is bracketed by a command to worship. So it begins in verse 1 by saying, Praise the Lord, and then it ends in verse 10 by saying, Praise the Lord. So this psalm is bookended or bracketed by this command to worship, and in the center of the psalm, we see two reasons why he is worthy of our worship. The first reason is that unlike human leaders and human politicians and human governments, God is a reliable source of help and hope. So the psalm writer here says that the blessed person, the person who is flourishing, is the person who does not put their hope in princes or human leaders or politicians or governments, but rather whose help is the God of Jacob and whose hope is the Lord their God. So we worship him because he is a reliable source of help and hope. And the second reason that we are told to worship God in these verses is that he cares for the vulnerable. The later half of the psalm identifies eight kinds of vulnerable people who were the most vulnerable people in the ancient world, and some of the most vulnerable people in the modern world as well: the oppressed and the hungry, and the prisoners, and the blind, and those who are bowed down, and the foreigner, and the fatherless, and the widow. These are the most vulnerable people, and we are commanded to worship God because he is on their side. Now, obviously, the psalm writer is not saying that God is unconditionally on their side no matter what they do. Nor is the psalm writer saying that God loves only the vulnerable. But what he is saying is that because God's heart overflows with compassion, because that is his impulse, he has a special place in his heart for those who are vulnerable and thus in need of compassion. Among those vulnerable people that are listed in Psalm 146 are the foreigners, the immigrants. As we look at the story of the Bible, we can see that not only does God love the foreigner and the immigrant, God actually uses them to bring about his saving plans in the world. Let me just highlight a few brief examples of this. Abraham. Abraham was not an immigrant when God called him, but in calling Abraham and telling him to leave his family and his country and go somewhere else, God turned Abraham into an immigrant. And it was through Abraham and through his descendants that God brought the Savior into the world. And then fast forward, and you come to the Hebrew people who are Abraham's descendants, who emigrated from the land of Canaan into the land of Egypt, where they lived as a vulnerable immigrant community that was eventually oppressed and enslaved by Pharaoh. And God heard the cries of his vulnerable immigrant people and he rescued them. And don't forget that when they left out of Egypt, there were Egyptians who left with the Hebrew people. And by going to the promised land, those Egyptians made themselves immigrants. One last example, Ruth. Ruth was an immigrant woman who came from the country of Moab. And she was grafted into the people of God. And she became a part of the bloodline of the Messiah. So this immigrant woman became the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother of Jesus himself. And we could give more examples of this from the Bible, but I hope the point is self-evident. God loves the foreigner and the immigrant. God includes foreigners and immigrants into his saving plans and has brought his plans to fruition through foreigners and immigrants. Not exclusively, but God loves the foreigner and the immigrant. And so the application for us then is this: God loves the foreigner, and as worshipers of that God, we must adopt his heart for the foreigner. Now I understand that we live in a vastly different context globally, culturally, than those to whom this was originally written. Okay? I understand that. And so just to be clear, I'm not saying that in the modern world application of this, I'm not saying that loving the immigrant means we should have wide open borders. I'm not saying that loving the immigrants means that we stop enforcing federal immigration law. What it does mean that God loves the foreigner and the immigrant is that our attitude towards the foreigner and the immigrant needs to reflect God's heart towards them. And God loves the foreigners and the immigrants. Proverbs 14, 31 says this says, Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker. That is the maker of the poor person. Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker. And actually, this sounds a whole lot like Jesus. When Jesus said to his disciples, What you have done to the least of these, you've done to me. And I think the point of this is that how we treat those made in God's image is something God Himself takes very personally. So the question that each one of us is faced with then, as we see God's heart for the foreigner in Psalm 146, we see the ways that God has used and included the foreigner throughout his saving plans, and we see what the book of Proverbs says and what Jesus says, and the question that we are forced with then is this Does my attitude towards the immigrant show contempt for their maker? Does my attitude, does your attitude towards the foreigner and the immigrant show contempt for their maker? Friends, we we may live in the most privileged time and privileged place in the history of the world. With the amount of resources and wealth and opportunities and freedoms that we have, no one in the history of the world has experienced life as good as we have it here in the United States. And so it should not surprise us that there's lots of people from all over the world who would like to come to our country. Many immigrants come here because they're seeking a better life. They come here because they don't have the opportunities or the resources in their home country, and so they come here seeking the opportunity to build a better life. Many immigrants come to our country fleeing places that are terrible, fleeing situations where they are in danger, or they are persecuted, or their countries are being torn apart by war, or other kinds of situations that most of us who sit in this room know nothing about on an experiential level. And so immigrants come to our country for all kinds of different reasons. And can I just say that if if the media sources you listen to have convinced you that all or even most immigrants are dangerous criminals, please find better sources of news. Because it's just not true. Does our attitude towards the immigrant display contempt for their maker? Does our heart towards the immigrant reflect God's heart towards the immigrant? Because we know God loves the foreigner and the immigrant. So the first way we respond is by adopting God's heart for the foreigner. The second way we respond is by clinging to the biblical values of life and human dignity. In the early years of the Jesus movement, Christians were acting in ways that were diametrically opposed to the Roman culture around them. When a child was unwanted, either because of the sex of that child or for some other reason, it would be left on the beach at low tide, so that the tide would come in and drown the child. It was a crude and primitive form of abortion. But Christians became known as the people who would go around and take those children and raise them as their own in their own families because they believed that each person is created in the image of God and has dignity and value because they are created in God's image. Psalm 8 says that as glorious as the created world is, and it is glorious, isn't it? If you've ever been to the mountains or to the beaches or to the forests or to the rainforests or lots of different places. Creation is glorious, and David says in Psalm 8 that as glorious as the created world is, humans are even more glorious. After expounding on the glories of creation, David says, What is mankind that you are mindful of them? Human beings that you care for them. You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. And so humans have this unique, beautiful status in God's created world as being higher than creation, lower than the angels, but we're in this dignified, honorable spot where we've been crowned with glory and honor. And this is what shaped the early church's view of life. And that's what informed their decision to go rescue those children who are left to die. Elmwood, if if you've been around Elmwood for a while, you know this that Elmwood has a rich legacy of being pro-life and advocating for protection of life from the moment of conception. And we're proud of that legacy. And our pro-life convictions do not remain in the womb. Our pro-life convictions do not end when a baby is born into this world, but our pro-life convictions extend beyond the womb to the entirety of a person's life. Which means being holistically pro-life means we advocate for the protection of life in the womb, absolutely. And also for the dignified treatment of human beings since they are created in the image of God. What this means is that when we see immigrants who are harshly treated by ICE agents in the process of being detained, or who were denied legal counsel, or who were released from detention into sub-zero Minnesota temperatures without a coat, we say this is not okay. When we see immigrants who are awaiting deportation in grossly overcrowded detention centers and are having to ration food and water, we say this is not okay. And the reason it's not okay is because those immigrants, regardless of their immigration status in our country, are image bearers of God. And they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. When we see protesters, whether it's for or against ICE, who are physically assaulted or thrown to the ground or verbally attacked, we say, this is not okay. Because those protesters are created in the image of God. When we see ICE agents who are physically assaulted or who are intimidated or terrorized for doing their jobs, or whose families are doxxed and now live in fear, we say, this is not okay. Because the protester and the ice agent alike are created in the image of God. When we see protesters who are shot and killed, we say, this is not okay. Regardless of what we think about the circumstances surrounding the shootings that took place in the last few weeks, it's not okay because Renee Good and Alex Pruddy were image bearers of God. When we see people in digital environments, Facebook and other online places, who spew hatred and vitriol and who dehumanize others they disagree with, we say this is not okay. Because the people with whom they are disagreeing and dehumanizing and demonizing are created in the image of God. Friends, as followers of Jesus, and because we are followers of Jesus, we advocate for life. We advocate for the dignified treatment of people who bear the image of their creator, regardless of their politics, regardless of what their immigration status is in our human country, regardless of any of the other dividing lines that we find ourselves so easily divided and pitted against one another over, we advocate for life and the dignified people, treatment of people who bear the image of their Creator. When Jesus said, when Jesus commanded us in the Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies, he said, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. He didn't say, just don't do anything bad to them. He said, I want you to actively desire the good and the flourishing of the people that you consider to be your enemies. And when Jesus commanded us to love our enemies, uh, did you notice how he didn't qualify it? He didn't say, love your enemies unless they're in your country illegally. Then you can treat them however you want. He didn't say, love your enemies except if they're protesting on the wrong side. He didn't say, love your enemies, unless you don't like how they're enforcing federal law, and then you can say whatever you want about them. The moment that we say, yeah, but we have left the narrow way of Jesus. The moment that we say, yeah, but and then list our reasons for why it's okay to dehumanize or to degrade or to hate someone we disagree with, the moment we say, yeah, but we We have left following the way of Jesus and we're on a different path altogether. We advocate for life and we advocate for the dignified and just treatment of people who bear the image of their Creator. And friends, we do this because we are pro-life. Thirdly, we respond by remembering who we truly are. We respond by remembering who we truly are. In his first letter, at least that we have recorded in Scripture, Peter addressed Christians in the Roman Empire. And he addressed them, saying, To God's elect, exiles scattered throughout the Roman Empire. And then later in chapter 2, he says this. He says, Dear friends, I urge you as foreigners and exiles to abstain from sinful desires which wage war against your soul. Now, what's so striking and unbelievable about this is that Peter is writing to people who are living in their home country. I mean, certainly some of them are immigrants, certainly some of them are foreigners, but he's writing to people who are citizens of the Roman Empire, living in Roman cities, and he calls them foreigners. And the reason is because of what Paul said in his letter to the church in Philippi, when he said that we are not first citizens of any earthly country. He says we are citizens of heaven. We are citizens of the kingdom of God, which means no matter where we live in this world, no matter what our legal status is in any earthly country, as followers of Jesus, we are foreigners here. The logic of the gospel says we cannot possibly despise the foreigner because that's who we are. By nature, we are foreigners to the kingdom of God. Our sin has left us exiled from God's presence. Our sin has expelled us from him, and we, because of our sin, are deserving of eternal death. We were once far off, but God has now brought us near through his son Jesus. And so we look down on the foreigner and the immigrant who were in a place of vulnerability only when we forget our deep and enduring vulnerability. Only when we forget that apart from God's intervention, we are not just vulnerable, we're not just in danger, we are spiritually dead, spiritually lifeless. And if God would not, of his own gracious initiative, had given us new life and had taken us from the kingdom of darkness and put us into the kingdom of light, we would live and die without hope. That is our condition. And we only look down on immigrants when we fail to see ourselves in them. We close our hearts to the foreigner and to the immigrant only when we forget the welcome that we have received through Christ. Only when we forget that in Jesus, God opened his heart to us and has made us a part of his kingdom and has made us a part of his family at unimaginable cost to himself. We only close our hearts to the immigrants when we have lost sight of how God has treated us. We respond by remembering who we truly are. Where does this leave? Where does this all leave us? Let me briefly suggest uh two points of application to take home with you today. Number one, fight to humanize the people you disagree with. And it does take a fight. It does require effort to humanize people you disagree with. And of course, this goes back to what we just said a few moments ago about clinging to the value of life and human dignity. I think we all know this, that the easiest thing to do, and this happens on both sides, by the way, the easiest thing to do is to assume the worst of others, and to caricature others in the worst possible way, to talk about them in ways that breeds anger and fear and outrage. That's easy. That's the kind of climate that exists, especially online. Is it is the algorithms are fine-tuned to get you to see things that get a rise out of you. And so if you're an angry person because of Facebook, realize Facebook wants to do that to you. And you're letting it happen. It's easy to be angry all the time, it's easy to breed anger and fear and outrage, but this is a dangerous game to play. Because when we dehumanize others and when we caricature them in the worst possible version of themselves and ascribe to them the worst possible motives, we then not only do we have just the right, we also have the responsibility to use any means necessary to get rid of them. To use any means necessary to defeat them, and we can justify treating people any way we want. We have to fight to humanize people, even the people we disagree with. Secondly, love your immigrant neighbor. We can't control how immigration is being enforced in our city, but what we can do is we can love our neighbors. We can love our immigrant neighbors, and and I'll tell you, I I've I've loved hearing the stories over the last couple weeks of those of you who have uh shared with me different ways that you're caring for and loving people in your sphere of influence. For some of us, it's looked like driving our neighbors to appointments. For some of us, it's looked like going grocery shopping for them, or giving their kids a place to go when their kids are staying home from school because they're afraid, or it's contributing financially to community-based initiatives that support immigrants. There's numerous different ways this could look. Actually, there was a person uh this last week who told me uh that they sent an email to President Trump and Vice President Vance. And I'm like, how did you get that email address? But this is one of the ways. Like, there's so many ways that we can love and serve our neighbors, and again, I'll say this uh what we've talked about here this morning is uh this is not comprehensive. Okay, but this is that this is this is a start. And this is what we have to do is we have to fight to humanize people who disagree with us, and we have to love the people that God has put in our sphere of influence. This is how we respond. As we come to the communion table today, we are reminded of our deep vulnerability, and we're reminded of the welcome that we have received through Christ. And this is the foundation of our response. We respond to what we see in the world around us, whether it's this situation or any other situation. We respond by looking first to what God has done for us in Jesus, and that fuels a response, that fuels action. And so the place to start is to come to the communion table, to remember our deep vulnerability and the welcome that we have received in Christ. Let me invite you to take just a few moments for a silence and confession, and then we will come to the communion table and receive Christ together.