Photo: J. Scott Applewhite, STF / Associated Press

I have never been told to go back home or to go back to where I came from. I don’t know the pain of that abuse firsthand. I don’t know what it feels like to be sent away, but I do know that such rhetoric is not new.

Congresswomen are not the only people being told to go home. People of color, regardless of where they were born, have similar words hurled at them in grocery stores and on playgrounds. The desperate people at our borders are told to go back to where they came from. Several religious and political figures have publicly attempted to legitimize what is happening at our borders by describing the people there as disease-carriers, criminals, swindlers, uneducated. This rhetoric is an effort to legitimize the belief that these are the types of people that American culture must be protected from.

The idea that American culture is at stake seems absolutely true to me. But what culture or values do we seek to protect? Is it “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? Is it “No state shall deprive any person under its jurisdiction of the equal protection of the laws”? Is it “for such as you have done it to the least of these, you have done it to me”? Or are the values and identity we seek to protect those of that peculiar strain of WASP culture as dripping with piety as it is parched of historical understanding of the systemic racism it has entrenched and profited from?

The biblical story of Jesus and the disciples feeding more than 5,000 hungry people begins with the disciples, Jesus’ closest followers, suggesting that the people be sent away. The people are hungry. Many of them are poor. Some of them are sick. They have gathered to hear Jesus teach, but now the hour is late and they need food. The disciples are ready with a solution: “Send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat” (Mark 6:36). Send them away.

This is not the first time the disciples want to send people away. They wanted to send away the children who were coming to see Jesus, but Jesus insisted that the children come to him saying that “it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” (Luke 18) When a Canaanite woman cries out for help, “the disciples came and urged Jesus, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’” (Matthew 15:23)

Jesus does not send the people away. He does not tell them to go back or suggest that they should not have come to begin with. Jesus’ solution is quite the opposite. He tells his followers: “You give them something to eat.” (Mark 6:37)

Jesus not only welcomes the people and feeds them, he invites the disciples into full participation with this solution: Jesus has the disciples find what food is available, welcome the people and have them sit down, Jesus gives the disciples the food to distribute, and has them pick up what is left over afterward (6:38-43). They live into the solution they did not consider, the answer they thought impossible, they move with Jesus from send them away to welcome and care.

It wasn’t just the disciples who wanted to send away those the culture named as “other.” The religious leaders were often upset with the company Jesus kept. Consider Luke 15: “Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ They are not worth your time, Jesus, they should not be treated as equals. They are not people you should sit down and eat with. These sinners and tax-collectors - they are not like us; they’re not worth your attention. Send them away.

When the disciples want to send the people away, Jesus welcomes them. When the religious leaders want to exclude the very people Jesus welcomes, Jesus tells a story of radical inclusion, of radical welcome in response to their othering, their demoralizing: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbours, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.” (Luke 15)

Some have focused on the lines: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.” But it seems to me that this story is not really about repentance. Sheep cannot repent; it is not part of their ovine nature. The sinners and tax collectors with which Jesus shares meal after meal and mile after mile: the Bible doesn’t say they repent and then they are included. They are simply included, welcomed, sought and found.

“Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” Jesus lets his question hang there. The answer is obvious to everyone. Nobody. No one does this. It’s insanity. If you lose 1 percent of your holdings, you don’t abandon 99 percent of your holdings to get the 1 percent back. By leaving the 99, you risk them roaming off, being stolen, or being killed and eaten by a wolf. This parable turns value on its head.

Jesus’ story points us to a God who risks in order to care for one individual. Jesus welcomes the very people the religious leaders and his followers want to send away. He eats with them and listens to them and loves them.

In the Kingdoms of this world, humans are expendable. Both diversity and need are met with fear, threats, scapegoating, and increased abuse. In the Kingdom of God, cries of pain are heard and heeded. In the Kingdom of God, all are welcomed, all are included, all are loved.

If you are like me, you are not sure what to do; how to help; how to counter policies and rhetoric that are inhumane and cruel. James Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

At the very least we can refuse to shut our eyes, refuse to ignore, refuse to turn away. We can hear and we can help by reminding ourselves and everyone in our communities that people, real people are suffering just a few miles away. We can respond to rhetoric that would suggest that the suffering people at our borders are somehow of less value by redirecting to empathy, by focusing on the intrinsic worth of every person. We can refuse the rhetoric of quid pro quo, of monetary value equals worth. We can resist making snap, unfounded judgments about entire groups of people. We can shout our words of welcome to counteract words of “go home” and exclusion. We can make it clear that this is our shared home; we can make clear our welcome. We can work for justice for every person.

If you, like thousands of other people in our country, have been told to go home or some other version of exclusionary, rejecting, hateful words, I am sorry. I am sorry you have been treated as though you do not belong. It is not your fault. I am grateful you are here. I am honored to be your neighbor.

Rev. Laura Mayo is senior minister of Covenant Church: an Ecumenical, Liberal, Baptist Congregation in Houston.