I love Jesus but I drink a little...

Gladys from Austin, Texas, called Ellen Degeneres to let her know she needed to move one of her spiky plants. At certain angles it made Ellen look like Alfalfa, a character with hair that stood up on his crown. Ellen called her back and the eighty eight year old woman was full of herself. She tickled the audience with her conversation. One of her best lines was, “I love Jesus but I drink a little”. Most of us do, I think, love Jesus and drink a little. We mean well, we try hard and we fall short as human beings tend to do.
“The Help”, a novel and now a movie, is full of folks, black and white, who love Jesus and drink a little. The temptation is to judge the Hilly Hypocrites of that world without seeing the Hilly in ourselves. It is so very easy to decipher right from wrong on the big screen fifty years later and miss right from wrong in the here and now. Punitive immigration laws in Alabama and Arizona don’t differ all that much from Jim Crow laws in the fifties. Relationships between the help and the boss ladies in Jackson, Mississippi hinge on the ignorance, the chosen ignorance, of the truth of the help’s lives and selves. And, therein lies the sin.
I listen to people talk about illegal immigrants, about the problems that have come with the wave of Latino workers sweeping across the south and the west. I know the rhetoric is heated and feelings run high. There is a problem with our immigration laws and their enforcement. It isn’t a fair and just system. It never has been. I know most of this latest influx of folks are coming for the same reason my great-grandparents did… a chance at a better life for themselves and their children. It is so very easy to see the Latino woman working at McDonald’s but not really see her, not know her or her story. It is so very easy to generalize… they are taking jobs away from our people, they are not trustworthy, they abuse our welfare system… and indeed some of that is probably true. But there is another side to the story.
One of my chosen sisters employed a young man to help her remodel her grandmother’s house. He was a talented, hardworking young man with a wife and baby, an illegal immigrant who worked hard, paid his taxes and dreamed of life as an American. Caught up in a traffic stop, he was deported to Mexico leaving his young wife and child behind. It was only a matter of months before he was back working hard again, trying to better his life and support his family. Knowing him, knowing his story, makes it hard for me to generalize about illegal immigrants.
I don’t know the best solution to the problems with our illegal immigration. I do know that as Christians who drink a little, we are called to see the face of Christ in all the faces of those who are the least among us. Abilene, one of the maids in “The Help”, taught the little white girl she cared for words to keep in her heart. “I is kind. I is smart. I is important.” In God’s eyes, aren’t we all kind and smart and important? Help me, Lord, to see your face not only in the least of these but also in the faces of those who have more than most, those who proclaim the answers with such certainty, those who look and sound like me.