Most of us remember the Christmas story from when we were children. At the heart of the narrative is the tale of how Mary and Joseph, traveling to a foreign land are turned away from a safe place in a time of crisis. In their desperation, they are forced to shelter in a stable with the filth and smell of animals. They were prohibited as migrants – immigrants from entering the inn, and so Christ was born cast out.

Perhaps that is part of the reason that Jesus is so incredibly clear in his teaching about how people of faith must treat the poor and outcast. For Jesus, the way people treat the refugee, the prisoner, the widow, or the hungry is the way that they treat God. Jesus is more direct in his teachings about what we do to the least (Matthew 25:40) than nearly anything else in scripture.

I think it is a fair question to ask, “how we would treat those people on our southern border if we imagined Jesus among them?” Yet, I think this question fails to capture how we should fully see these migrants. For we Christians, Jesus is among the migrants in the caravan. It is not a theoretical moral question, but a statement of literal truth for those of us that believe in a risen Christ. It is not an open option for us to claim that the migrant bares responsibility for their suffering and need, any more than it would be to argue that Mary and Joseph were responsible for their treatment and for endangering Jesus. It does not matter what has brought the person in need to our door – not to Christ. When we choose to ignore their plight – to endanger the lives of people desperate for the hope of a better future and a better life – we fundamentally violate the teaching of Christ. If we can hear the good news of Christ and celebrate the Christmas story without understanding Jesus’ call to open wide the doors to the least of these then we have forgotten what Christmas is.

The most heartbreaking part of this is that it is a crisis of our own making. The present caravan is not the first to come to the border. Never before have we had mothers and children tear-gassed to force them back from where they could claim asylum. Never previously have we needlessly separated families or detained children in cages. Our changes in the immigration policy to place extreme limitations on the number that can be processed has caused a humanitarian crisis on our border. When we force families and migrant workers to spend months in poverty, living in tents with little food, that is how we are choosing to treat God. And, according to Jesus, how our faith will be judged.

The United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America both stand firmly against our current immigration policies. We stand against efforts to create unjust limits on the number of asylum or work applications. We also condemn the physical or administrative changes to make means of entry difficult or more complicated. We further condemn the use of tacks designed to manufacture a violent crisis on the border to create a justification for building a wall or militarizing the border. Most importantly we stand against the use of force, of any kind, on unarmed immigrants attempting to gain entry to our country.

We used tear gas on Jesus yesterday. The question is now what will we as people of faith do to make tomorrow different?