Called to Love our Neighbors

Caring for those who feel especially vulnerable has always been close to my heart. As Bishop, I have witnessed the fear and uncertainty that many immigrants and marginalized communities experience daily. Their struggles are not distant concerns but realities that demand our presence, our voices, and our support. So when Cardinal Robert McElroy and the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego, along with the San Diego Organizing Project, invited me to join in an interfaith vigil at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, I was quick to agree. 

This Sunday, I joined the standing-room-only crowd of nearly 900 people gathered inside the cathedral, as faith leaders, members of churches, and neighbors united in support for immigrant families. An estimated 600 more were waiting outside–unable to get into the packed church. As the first female Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of San Diego, this was a historic ecumenical moment for me. I was honored to be invited by the Roman Catholic Cardinal to participate in the vigil and sit next to him in a place normally reserved for Roman Catholic auxiliary bishops as he sat in his cathedra, or bishop’s chair. It was a gracious gesture that underscored our shared Christian commitment to stand with those in need. 

I am not surprised that the sanctuary overflowed with people seeking hope, justice, and unity in the face of uncertainty. Over the last few weeks, I have heard story after story of the fears of people, including many with legal status in this country, who are anxious about going to their children’s schools, visiting a food pantry, or participating in worship at church. While our country needs strong and reasonable border policies that ensure that people who arrive here and are allowed to stay will be productive members of society, the compassion of Christ also calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Our Diocese has a long history of supporting migrants–like preparing food for asylum seekers in transit, sharing Eucharist at the border, and most recently, the development of Comunidad de Luz, a migrant shelter for women and children in Tijuana. EDSD continues to be a place where vulnerable people are served, cared for, and loved as Christ intended. 

This experience reinforced for me the importance of courageous love—the kind that works to love God’s people and care for those who are vulnerable, as Jesus called us to do in his famous words of Matthew 25: “Truly I tell you, if you did it to one of the least of my siblings, you did it to me.” As I left the vigil, I carried with me the hope that this kind of solidarity  will show us the true face of Christ–unrestrained, radical love. 

I was honored to be invited to close the vigil, sending the gathered community into the world. Here is what I said:

This cathedral is named for St. Joseph, the guardian and protector of Jesus and his blessed mother Mary. As guardian and protector, the Bible says that Joseph discovered in a dream that the holy family was at risk of their lives and fled with them into Egypt to escape a violent threat, and only came home when the threat had passed. 

In other words, like millions of people in the 2,000 years since then, the Holy Family were refugees, migrants. Like them, so many other families flee because they cannot live in their home countries. They flee violence, war, starvation, poverty. They flee threats to their families. They flee failed crops, wrecked economies, dangerous communities. They flee in hope of a life where they can care for the ones they love.

Last year, I met a young family in a shelter in Mexicali – husband, wife, teenage son, young daughter. They had fled their home in southern Mexico because gangs had tried to recruit their son. When they resisted, the gangs came in the middle of the night and shot up their home, and told them if they were still there in the morning, everyone would be dead. They fled with what they could carry, all the way to the border, where they waited and hoped they could find a better life. And I don’t believe there is anyone here who can  tell me you would not have done the same to protect the ones you love. Of course we would, because we are human beings, and we are made to live in community and care for one another, just as Joseph cared for Jesus and Mary.

Every country needs strong and reasonable borders, and a way to ensure that those who arrive will be productive members of society. Our country needs the kind of agreement on immigration that would ensure strong, safe, and productive migration – not a situation where people live in fear that their families might be torn apart.

In Christian tradition, Jesus’ beloved mother Mary sings in the song we call the  Magnificat that God will cast down the mighty from their thrones and lift up the lowly. Every person who has position, power, and security must take these words to heart, hearing them as a call to share God’s blessing and God’s abundance with all the people God loves. As God told Abraham in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures: I will bless you and you will be a blessing. We are blessed to be a blessing to others.

People of all faiths believe that God is a God of love and compassion. God is a God who makes a priority of caring for the vulnerable and welcoming the stranger. That means that God is a God who calls us to join in caring for those who migrate, because they are God’s beloved children. In our walk with migrants, honoring the image of God in each person, respecting the dignity of every human being, loving one another as God has loved us, we are doing the very work of God.

As we prepare to walk a very short distance in procession, walking symbolically alongside all those who migrate in hope of a life of safety, let us pray:

Guide our footsteps, gracious and loving God. As Joseph showed the way of compassion in guiding his holy family to safety, guide all of us in walking the way of compassion in our lives. Help us care for those in need of better lives. Help us learn from you the way of love. Bless all those who migrate out of fear and despair, and guide them to lives of safety. Open our hearts to your compassion; open our ears to your words of hope; open our hands to bring care to all those in need. Help your words to be spoken today, help your words to be heard. In your holy name we pray. Amen.

To find out more about what EDSD is doing for migrants, please visit edsd.org/migration-ministry