Hospitality and the City of Lakewood

I want to break from my normally scheduled writings to you all to share my observation of what might have been one of the most contentious and heavily attended Lakewood City Council meetings in years.

Over the past few weeks, a tense discussion related to the complications Denver is coping with around so many migrants being bussed there (against their will) from Texas. They come ill prepared for the weather and in need of shelter and resources. It is a humanitarian emergency. In light of that, members of our City Council asked staff to have a conversation with staff of Denver to see what Lakewood could do as a good neighbor.

This was seized upon by some politicians in Lakewood, and the rest is history (read about that here). All of that background noise resulted in an absolutely wild time at Lakewood City Council on Monday Night, February 12th. Hundreds of people attended this meeting which normally considers twenty people attending to be a crowd. The session began at 7pm and didnt end until after midnight.

While the chaos was interesting, and while a lot of the behavior at times felt alarming, what struck me were the important steps that our city took despite the chaos, and even more impressively, the ways that many of them responded to what was happening with a poise and generosity that truly inspired me. I was proud to be represented by our City Council in that moment.

What was especially impressive is their kindness despite how they did not feel the same way as so many of the people who were there and not on their best behavior. It is possible to disagree and still be kind and loving. It is possible to disagree but still listen—and our City Council did that.

At the center of all of this is a really important moral conversation that is bubbling up all over the place in the US, especially as this presidential election year ramps up. In my lifetime, immigration has been a constant story of suffering and government failure. It has become even more chaotic in the past ten years as destabilization is happening in countries all across Central and South America.

What should our response be as Christians and as citizens? It’s not my job to tell you what to believe. As a pastor, my job is to share how our faith invites us to interpret things that are happening in our lives. And one primary way our faith speaks is in the stories of scripture.

“On coming to the house, the Magi saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route. When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod.” (excerpted from Matthew 2, NRSVUE)

Jesus was a toddler when his family was forced into the same kind of decisions that so many who find themselves crossing our southern border have to make. According to scripture, Jesus was an asylum-seeking refugee who found a safe place to live for a few years in Egypt while King Herod committed acts of Genocide in Judea.

One important thing about this story in scripture is the reminder that we violate our identity as Christians who worship a God of love when we reduce these people who are sojourning from peril to our country as simply “illegal.” The rhetoric has truly gotten out of hand. I heard that rhetoric at City Council when individual after individual named every criminal behavior they could think of as guaranteed to increase if Lakewood became a “sanctuary city.” Lakewood isn’t becoming a Sanctuary city.

Personally? I would be supportive of that. But we don’t need to be a sanctuary city to remember that these people are humans and fellow children of God. We don’t need to reenact the toxic conversations of our federal government’s politics to figure out ways that we can extend compassion and hospitality to these folks.

I am sure this conversation isn’t over. If you are a resident of Lakewood, I hope you will consider your voice as a follower of Christ in this conversation. Raising our voice, especially in conflict can be one of the most terrifying things for us to do, but when hate and fear are shouting, voices of hope and love must drown the hate and fear out so that those who need to hear that love and that hope can hear it.