Immigration and Burritos

I love burritos. I miss not being able to eat them. Every once and a while someone finds a new Mexican restaurant here in the Czech. Everybody is excited, we go, it sucks. Really. I have yet to have good Mexican food here. It's sad.

But, I'm not writing about burritos. I was listening to a Rob Bell sermon a while back and he said something that really shed some great light on the whole immigration issue. As far as I know, the US news is onto some new big story and no one cares anymore, but I still felt compelled to share.

Rob (yeah, we're on a first name basis) was talking about how we are completely unworthy of anything that we have and how only the Lion of Judah is worthy (Rev 5). He shared about how in our human nature we naturally feel like life should be fair and that we feel like we are owed something. He then started talking about how God called the nation of Israel to care for those who couldn't care for themselves; those with whom life hadn't been fair. Those who had suffered a tough life (the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner). He focused specifically on Deuteronomy 24:17-22.

In this passage God commands the nation of Israel to "not pervert the justice" due to the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. God says that when harvesting their field that they are to leave anything that they forget to take. That when beating their olive tree, they are only to go over it once and leave the remainder. And finally, when they gather grapes that they are to go once and leave what they don't gather the first time. In all of these instances the remainder was for the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner. All of this was because they were to "remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there". God had redeemed his people. He had showed immesurable grace on His people and He was calling them to do the same to those who couldn't care for themselves.

As a Jew, I'm thinking, "What the heck? I work my butt off all year so that I can harvest my field/beat my olive tree/harvest my grapes. I'm not going to leave some for people who aren't doing anything; who aren't earning it. They need to work for themselves. They can't just come into my land and take what I have worked hard for. They aren't even Jews..."

Get the point.

It seems like the default argument for kicking the Mexicans out (notice they never talk about building a wall on the Canadian border) is that they are stealing from us. We work hard to make a living and they come in and "take from our fields". I can understand this from someone who hasn't receieved God's immesurable grace poured out on them. But as Christians, as men and women who have received an inheritence in God's Kingdom for free, for no reason other than that God poured out His grace upon us, shouldn't we be more gracious? Shouldn't we be caring for those that cannot care for themselves? As Americans we are born into amazing wealth...shouldn't we be more willing to leave our "fields" open for the widows, the orphans, and the Mexicans...burritos or no?