Episcopal Migration Ministries (EMM) was one of 10 agencies with federal contracts to resettle refugees on behalf of the State Department. With funding for EMM and similar agencies halted last week, the agency has ceased operations.
Consider what that ministry looked like on the ground: after an extensive process of vetting by State Department and overseas agencies, a family given permission to migrate to the United States would be placed in the care of EMM, who would then connect that family to a local church who had been called by the Holy Spirit to take up this ministry of radical, faith-filled hospitality. It was the Kingdom of God made visible, where souls met across borders and new life could happen, all within the structure of a humane, and fully legal, process of welcoming new people to our country.
EMM is just one of countless agencies, communities, and people caught up in the maelstrom of change brought on by a new administration. Indeed, there are many federal employees in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio – including Trinity members – who are potentially impacted by Executive Orders designed to rapidly shrink the federal work force. The Episcopal church grieves the narrowing access to refugees and migrants of previously available (and legal) channels to our country. Here at Trinity Cathedral, we are deeply frustrated, even angered, by the cessation of inclusion and diversity measures in our federal government, including LGBTQ+ protections.
At his installation as our Presiding Bishop at Washington National Cathedral this Sunday, Bishop Sean Rowe proclaimed that:
We’re told by the kings and the rulers of the day that the rich shall be first. That somehow compassion is weakness. That fealty to political parties—and here I mean either one, or all of them—is somehow paramount. That differences of race, class, gender identity, human sexuality are all divisions that must somehow separate us, and that we should regard migrants and strangers and those among us whom we don’t understand, with fear and contempt.
But those divisions are not of God. Those are not the divisions of a kingdom about which Jesus speaks… In that kingdom of God, the meek shall inherit the earth. The last will be first. The merciful shall receive mercy, and the captives go free.
The first step in caring for one another, from supporting the vulnerable to loving our adversaries, is remembering this vision of the world that Jesus proclaimed. We can so quickly lose that when the waters rage and foam, and the nations make much ado, to borrow a phrase from Psalm 46.
Yet we must remember – and hold fast to – God’s promise to be with us, and God’s particular care for the marginalized and vulnerable. That is our call as followers of Jesus.
The Very Rev. Bernard J. Owens