God’s People are Valued

The issue of Liturgy entitled “Preaching Migrations,” guest-edited by Jerusha Matsen Neal, looks at movement of people; trajectories of social, economic, and cultural change; the impact of these changes on preaching. What follows is an excerpt from an article by Tito Madrazo on the importance and power of preaching for those who are migrate to a new home. –– Melinda Quivik

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Over the years, I had listened to innumerable sermons highlighting . . . one of the key images of the “God of migration”—from nearly all of my collaborators, male and female, from Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal congregations.

One particularly poignant example came from a Methodist preacher named Eduardo who preached a sermon entitled “Bajo el Pacto de Dios”/“Under the Covenant of God” to his congregation of first-generation immigrants and their children. In his message, Eduardo drew on several Old Testament images of God gathering his people together through covenants. He began by recapitulating the covenants he had explored in previous sermons, including the story of the great flood.

. . . Even at this point in his sermon, Eduardo was already inviting his hearers to see themselves as participants in these divine covenants. When he arrived at the point . . . in which he spoke of God committing himself a su gente/to his people, he extended his left hand toward the congregation as if to indicate that his hearers were these people with whom God was making this new covenant. The connection was further solidified when he asked them to corroborate God’s ongoing faithfulness to this commitment by asking, “¿cierto?/right?”

This connection became fully explicit as Eduardo jumped forward to the book of Exodus, where he laid out the situation of the Hebrew people in slavery. . .

No somos una casualidad/We are not an accident. Those words resonated deeply with the members of the community. They were not just the flotsam and jetsam of global currents of migration, set into motion by desperation and never fully accepted in their new home. They were not just nameless laborers in the nearby fields, factories, and kitchens, to be used and discarded. Instead, they had value. They had been chosen by God. While many might deny their basic personhood, God had bestowed upon them a royal priesthood. Their lives had a purpose, above all to reveal the purposes of the God who had called them into this newly gathered community of faith.

This new identity as a royal priesthood and a holy nation transcends their migration status and even their country of origin. Eduardo’s congregation comprises members of several different nationalities. Eduardo himself is Peruvian while the majority of his parishioners are from Mexico or Central America. While their cultural and linguistic differences owing to these disparate origins could serve as roadblocks to congregational unity, Eduardo uses the language of Exodus to provide an overarching framework for cohesion.

Whatever their differences may be, God is the one who has gathered them together just as God continually gathered and re-gathered the Hebrew people in the days of Noah, Abraham, and Moses. He has gathered them out of rejection and suffering. He has brought them together from individual isolation and anonymity. They are no longer solely Peruvian, Mexican, Guatemalan, Salvadoran, or Dominican—identities that are sometimes looked down upon in their new country of residence. They are holy people whom God has gathered to himself—a people with a purpose. They are no longer an accident.

All of the essays in Liturgy 36, no. 2 are available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Tito Madrazo is a Program Director in Religion for the Lilly Endowment and the author of Predicadores: Hispanic Preaching and Immigrant Identity (Baylor University Press, 2021).

Tito Madrazo, “Preaching and the Wounds of Migration,” Liturgy 36, no. 2 (2021): 45-50, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2021.1895633.