So, if you’re not familiar with the musical Wicked, let me fill you in briefly. Wicked tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. Her name is Elphaba, and Elphaba is born both green and magical, which sets her apart from other people from the very beginning of her life. Most people are afraid of her, but she is a compassionate character, not an evil one. She wishes for belonging and she thinks that she has found it when she befriends Glinda the good, and they go off together to meet the Wizard of Oz. But if you’ve seen the original movie, then you know that the wizard is not exactly who or what he says he is. When Elphaba refuses to use her magic to help him cover up his lies, that’s when she is branded as wicked. They start a smear campaign across Oz, portraying her as the villain, and her attempts to expose the wizard to the people of OZ are explained away as the terrifying actions of an evil witch.

This story challenges our easy categories of good and evil. Both through Elphaba who is labeled as evil but is kind, and through Glinda who is not altogether good. Glinda, though conflicted, sides with the wizard, and is willing to help him prop up his image rather than challenge his rule over Oz. Do we really know goodness and evil when we see it? Is it possible that the terrifying witch has a kind heart, or that the fairy who came down in a bubble is actually pretty selfish? Are we like the people of Oz, who are happy to believe the story they’re told? Who gets to decide who is wicked and who is good?

Well two weeks ago, a group of 20 youth and 6 adults from our church set off for Tucson, Arizona with exactly that purpose in mind. We went down to the border to see it for ourselves and meet the people who live and work there every day. We met migrants. We met the people who are their neighbors. We walked in the desert. We sat in court. We saw the wall. It was a very full week. We had some fun, but we also explored some pretty heavy topics. As always, I am so proud of our group, for their respectful behavior and how deeply and bravely they engaged with the hard things we were learning.

I think perhaps the greatest gift of this trip was the opportunity for us to stand in the shoes of migrants and ask ourselves what really separates us and them. Even coming to this issue with a lot of compassion, we still had questions like, why do they want to come here, and why don’t they come here the legal way? The truth is all that separates us is our circumstances of our birth. Some people come here because they need to escape the dangers of civil war and corruption. Some people come here because they need to find work to support their family. Some people need to come here because they were threatened by a gang, and their home isn’t a safe place anymore. Some people come because they have no longer have a home to go back to.

The border wall that we put up to keep these migrants out, doesn’t do that. There are large known gaps in the wall along southern Tucson and smugglers know that. They also know that the wall is not hard to cut through if you go to a less frequently patrolled location. Our friends at Humane Borders called this engineered death. The desert is supposed to be a deterrent, but what happens instead is that migrants are funneled through the deadliest parts of the desert in their desperation. Our wall doesn’t stop them from coming, but it does lead to a large number of their deaths every year.

People don’t want to leave their homes behind, keeping only what they can carry in a backpack, and placing their lives in the hands of strangers who may not be kind. And yet some people spend everything they have, paying tens of thousands of dollars per person, to be smuggled across the border for a chance at safety. Many migrants don’t fully understand what they’re signing up for. Even if their guide is good, and true to their word, and doesn’t abandon them along the way, they’ll still need to walk for a week or longer in the extremely harsh desert. Sometimes instead of a person to guide them they’ll just have a cellphone with a map. To survive out there, you need a minimum of three gallons of water per person per day, which is a nearly impossible amount to carry with you, especially if you have kids with you. The number one killer is blisters, because most people don’t have adequate shoes for the terrain, and after days of walking they physically cannot go any further.

Since the year 2000, at least 4,486 men, women, and children have died in Arizona while fleeing their home countries.[1] Humane Borders keeps a Migrant Death Map which you can find on their website. It marks every place where human remains have been found in southern Arizona with a red dot. They believe that these records are probably only a fraction of the reality, because of how quickly things decompose in the desert. They point to this map when people challenge their mission of putting water in the desert. Humanitarian aid is never a crime, water is a human right, and nobody deserves to die of dehydration. It was their map that inspired Alvaro Enciso, an artist who marks the places where people have died in the desert with a cross that has a red dot on it.[2] He told us that every life lost deserves to be honored and remembered. Each person has a story that matters, and people that miss them.

These are the possibilities that migrants must face. To enter our country legally is incredibly difficult. Not many people meet the requirements of being a skilled laborer or having a family member here already. At the moment it is virtually impossible to claim asylum or refugee status. So, people will try anything, even jumping onto moving trains, for a chance to go north. I can hardly imagine how bad things would need to be for me to abandon my home, or how hard the choice would be to risk my life or my family’s lives to get us to safety. Yet, unless you’re a native American, that risk is probably a part of how your family got here. We are not so different really, just born in different times and places, fortunate to be the descendants of immigrants who fought just as hard to get here for us.

There was one moment that has especially stuck with me from the trip. It was sitting in the back of the federal courtroom as we watched groups of 20-40 people at a time file in to be sentenced for illegally entering the country. Many of them had crossed the border or attempted it on the very same day. I was moved by the kindness of the judge, and the interpreters, and all of the staff in the courtroom as they efficiently moved people through the process. At one point there was a couple standing together at the front of the room, and the Judge gave his strong recommendation that the two of them be kept together as they continued through the legal process. He did the same for a pair of sisters. Later he told us that he doesn’t have any official power to keep them together once they leave his court room, but he feels that the least he can do is recommend it. His kindness was moving and of course, it made me think of my own family. What would it be like to be separated from them, possibly without knowing where they are and if they’re okay?

Who decides who is wicked and who is good? Is the color of a person’s skin enough for us to know? “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” wrote the prophet Isaiah, “who acquit the guilty for a bribe and deprive the innocent of their rights.” Woe to us for our witch hunting of immigrants brings us no justice, our razor wire covered wall gives us no safety, and our fear of the wicked leads us to deprive rights from the good.

However, before you despair, remember this: that Jesus came, not because we had it all figured out, but because we needed a healer. He came not to call the righteous but to call sinners to repentance. He came because he knew we need to change our hearts and minds. He knew about our imperfection and our brokenness, our selfishness and our cruelty, but he came anyways with a message both old and new: to love our neighbor as ourselves. This is the work that Jesus left us with: to turn ourselves and our world towards love. And we were made for this! That was our theme at Be the Neighbor this week. Even though these issues feel so much bigger than us, we remembered that God made us for such a time as this.

With every action we take, whenever we use our gifts to be good neighbors, we shift this world just a little bit more toward love. We do so alongside millions of people every day who we may never see or hear about like the ones we met in Tucson quietly, steadfastly, and proudly doing the work. People who are putting water in the desert. People who are placing crosses for strangers. People who are sewing quilts to welcome families. People who are being kind when they don’t have to. Whatever your gifts, you can find a way to be the good neighbor that your neighbor needs. May we be them, and may be become them, in Jesus name. Amen.

[1] https://www.humaneborders.org/

[2] https://borderlessmag.org/2022/10/27/artist-remembers-migrants-who-died-on-their-journey-north/