Immigration Problems and Their Relevance for Christadelphians.

Transcript

So what I want to talk about tonight is immigration problems and how they are relevant for Christadelphians. What you see above is a flock of Canada geese. We get these birds in our backyard all the time. Our home is on a small lake called Looking Glass Lake, they like to be there, and they tend to spend a lot of time eating on our lawn and doing a few other things on the lawn not so pleasant because some Peter is very good at taking care of the grass and they like good grass. The expression free as a bird is quite evident. These birds come down from Canada, they go back, they don't need visas, they don't need passports, they don't need to be fingerprinted, but unfortunately that's not so true for human beings. Mary and I have lived in other countries extensively in England. I spent a number of years in England, almost 20 plus summers in several years and a couple of years working in Italy. One thing about physics, everybody uses the same equations in calculus and it's almost a universal language. So I thought I'd look up in general, why do people immigrate? What makes them want to immigrate? But one nice thing about the internet today is you can find all kinds of information on it. Some of it is even good. So the number one reason turns out from people who study this is poverty. I'm pretty sure most of my

ancestors on my father's side came over here because in the late 19th century the economy in Sicily virtually collapsed and I

know that my grandmother, my father's mother, Grazia, she bought tickets to go to actually immigrate to Buenos Aires because Buenos Aires and Argentina was much, they felt was much more conducive to accepting Italians and also they felt the climate there was more similar to where they came from. However, she stopped in New York, stayed with some friends for a few weeks and threw away the rest of the ticket. So that's about half of why you're stuck with me. Another reason after this and this is obviously what's driving it now are environmental factors, things that dramatically change, droughts, earthquakes, climate changes and so on, other natural disasters which make your living place

unacceptable. I got this from this website and I say this if anybody wants copies of these slides I can make a PDF and send it to you. If you send me an email I'm glad to share it and you're free to use it any way you want. It's no problem with me doing that. So here's how my grandfather on my mother's side came to the United States. He was named Angelo Bonadona and if you'll notice I got these records from Ellis Island records where almost everybody in the world came through during this period of time. They spelled his name wrong. It's not Bonaduma, it's Bonadona, good lady. I'll show you later. It caused him some real grief later when he applied for citizenship and fortunately he was able to prove his real name by getting from Italy copies of his Catholic baptismal record from the church in his town Estello Cilento. So he came over on this boat. A lot of people were shipping immigrants because until 1924 the United States had open immigration policy. You didn't need any special, you just needed to show up. The country was growing rapidly and it needed workers and

so there was absolutely no requirements to come into the country until 1924 unless you were Chinese. So he came over on this boat, the Phoenicia. It was already a fairly old boat when he came over. It had been in service and redone a couple of times. There were 2,000 people in third class, 60 in first class. The 2,000 people in third class were down in the belly of the ship and my grandfather told me once that with 2,000 people there there was only two toilets. The crossing took two and a half weeks so you got to imagine that was not fun. From Los Alamos I got other information. My grandfather eventually met my grandmother and he ran into Christadelphian literature in Italian while riding the subway to work in 1914 by a brother Gaetano Gariti who had translated most of Robert 's works and John Thomas into Italian. He was eventually baptized in 1922 in Garfield, New Jersey. He had three daughters, my mother Annette and Gilda. They were all brought up in the Italian Christadelphian Sunday School in Brooklyn. This is the passenger record. You see the spelling of red that I collected. He came from Stella Cilento and

arrived there in 1903. At the time he was 19 years old. He already had been apprenticed as a tailor from the time he was 12 years old so he was able to find work rather quickly. Fortunately by the time he retired in the late 1940s,

custom tailors were still in demand for people who wanted really fine tailoring. Stella Cilento is a little bit south of Naples, a small town and that was where he was born and raised. It's so interesting my grandfather was born the same year as Harry Truman. That's how I remember 1884. Now my grandfather came over for a different reason, a very Italian reason. It's called amore, love. He actually never intended to immigrate and I found this out very late in life. It was his late 70s when I asked him, you know, what brought you here? How did you come here? Because you had a profession, you were working in Italy and he said, well, he wanted to marry a girl in that town and her father didn't want to have any part of him because he wasn't rich enough, tall enough, whatever it was, and so they sent her to America. And being a small town everyone kind of conspired to tell him that she was sent to New York. So he bought a round-trip ticket actually. He intended to come to New York, find this woman, marry her there, and bring her back to Italy. Well, unfortunately he never found her because the townspeople and the family conspired to lie to him. He found out 40 or so years later from the Italian community connections that she never came to New York at all. She came to Philadelphia. So in the course of this, of course, he met my grandmother. It's a different woman all together and they got married, et cetera. So what are we going to talk about immigration? Actually, the immigrants we're going to talk about are the 70 people who came down from the land of the Canaanites to Egypt. These are the immigrants we're going to talk about. And this picture shows Joseph who, as you know the story, and I thought this was a good class to give because in the last few weeks we've read that, and in the next week or two we're going to read all about Joseph and the whole history that came behind him going to Egypt and what transpired there. So I thought this would be perfect kind of timing to give this class. So he greets his family and they were immigrants and they came for the classic reasons. So what are the classic reasons? Immigrants are often welcomed at first, usually because labor shortages or special skills. And even today I think they're going to make some allowance for people with special skills in the United States.

At the time my grandfather came, the United States had a huge labor shortage as industry built up much quicker than the population could produce children. And the same thing seems to have happened to Jacob and his family. Pharaoh says in Genesis 47 and 6, if you know any able men among them, put them in charge of my livestock. Apparently the Egyptians who relied a lot on the flooding of the Nile and were good at agriculture were not good at animal husbandry. And so the family of Jacob and his son were shepherds and they were very familiar and so they became useful to the Egyptians at that time. Another thing that's quite obvious about immigration is that immigrants tend to work in the most hazardous jobs. These jobs are known as the 3Ds, dirty, dangerous, and disgusting. So most immigrant workers are doing jobs native born people normally don't want to do. When I was in high school I got my working papers and on weekends and sometimes even after school I'd go in and I would deliver clothes and pick up clothes for the laundry in the hotel. And I would tell you I was one of the few Native American non-Puerto Ricans that were in that hotel. It was a time of great immigration from Puerto Rico and almost all the chambermaids and etc were Puerto Rican. And so I even picked up a little Spanish to converse with some of my colleagues. Another place is the construction industry and even today that's a very heavily populated place by immigrants. In fact there was just an article in a Los Angeles paper, who's going to rebuild Los Angeles? Probably the immigrants. And the same thing is true here. It wasn't the Egyptians who were going to stop building these treasure cities. They were going to supervise other slaves. And so the Jews became useful for them to do all this important work of glorifying their kingdom. So how many Israelites left Egypt? Well what happens is with immigrants, sometimes sooner or later they tend to, two things happen. Either they wear out their welcome and are thrown out or they're so abused they want to get out. And so much of the immigration from the eastern area of Europe, Poland, eastern Russia of Hungary of the Jews, at the same time that my grandfather came here, came here because they wanted to get out. They were so heavily persecuted. And to them it wasn't even any other issue with the various programs and punishments and all kinds of things that were bad happening to them. So the Jews got to a point where it was obvious that they were going to rely on their God to get out of there or they would be terribly abused for a long, long period of time. I worked on construction work some as the last four years I was in college. And I can tell you, working on construction work is no fun and it's not safe. At the end of my freshman year I was working on the Coliseum in New York and we were on the poor deck when the carrier that carried the cement, the cable broke and smashed into the deck. And part of the deck collapsed and my partner was standing two or three feet from me, was near the edge and he went over and was killed. I managed to fall and grab onto some rebar and not go over the edge. And I remember when I came home that night, it was in the paper and everything about the accident, my father said, whatever you do, don't tell your mother. Well, the Jews wanted to leave and it's been argued a long time how many of them left and many of skeptics of the Bible don't accept the numbers that are placed in the Old Testament. So being, you know, kind of mathematically oriented, it's pretty easy to figure some guesswork.

So I took the usual formula for population growth where P is the population and P sub zero on the other side is the number of generations to double. And if you assume that every 20 years the Hebrew population doubled, at the end of the 400 plus years they were there, their population could have risen to as high as 73,400,320 people. Well, pretty obviously their population didn't double any every 20 years. And if you make us a very small change and say, well, maybe the population doubled every 40 years,

then you find out the number drops all the way down to 71,680. So you can see right away that you can play games with numbers. Now, we don't know exactly how fertile the Hebrews were in Egypt, but we are told that Hebrew women were good at giving birth. And so when we see the record in Exodus 12 and 37, it says, the people of Israel journeyed from Ramesses to Sokoth, about 600,000 men on foot, besides women and children, a mixed multitude also went up with and very much livestock both flocks and herds. Now, that's pretty interesting. If you figure 600,000 men, a rough estimate would put it at about maybe two million total people. That's not really impossible. That means a doubling population somewhere between 20 and 40 years. And so it's not unreasonable for that to have actually happened to the Israelites. The people who dismissed this, of course, say, well, the area, the Sinai there could never possibly have fed that many people, because people who are skeptics and atheists, of course, completely discount the miracle that God provided food to them with the manna and so on. And so I think the number of 600,000 is probably correct. And this is a huge immigrant population. So I started thinking about this some time back. In fact, over several years, you know, when you retire, you have more time to think without pressure. And one time when reading this in Acts, I came across this word sojourn, which I thought was a very strange word. Acts 7 and 6, Stephen says something that always puzzled me. He says, And God spake on this wise, that his seed should sojourn in a strange land, and that they should bring them into bondage and entreat them for 400 years.

Excuse me a minute, Nikah, to take some medicine that's due at exactly that time. And my nurse made sure that I took it. So this word sojourn is absolutely weird to me. And I'll tell you why. Because when you look it up, here's the definition of sojourn. It is a frequent translation of the Hebrew term ger. I think I'm pronouncing it ger. That's probably not right, but you see the spelling. This Hebrew term and its translation convey the basic idea that a personal group is residing either temporarily or permanently in a community and place that is not permanently there, primarily their own, and is dependent on the goodwill of that community for their continued existence. So that

is what Stephen meant, that they were never really going to take out citizenship in Egypt. They never were ever going to be treated like Egyptians. And I guess that was exactly the right word for Stephen to choose. The scriptures say they were sojourners in the land because avalously it was a temporary thing. It was not their home. The land that God promised Abraham, Israel, was to be their home. And so there's a good reason that the Jews for all the years after the Roman destruction, every year they would say next year in Jerusalem. Well, I never appreciated what it meant to be a sojourner. I don't know if there's anybody listening now on to this presentation who is a sojourner here in the United States and doesn't have permanent residency. But I went to work for a year in the Polytech in Milan, and I couldn't get a visa and I couldn't get a permanent residence because the contract that started this work came through in May, and we had to be there in June. And if you know the Italian government, it is the all -time most difficult place in the world to deal with bureaucracy. And so my colleagues there said, we'll forget about it. There's another way you can stay here and work. And it turns out this way is called a permisso di sojourno. They use the exact same derivation that we use in English, sojourno. You have a permission to be there, but only for three months. And this was, I think, designed basically to get extra help during the tourist season from people in other countries that were looking for work. It was not designed as a permanent solution to living in Italy. And so what I did, and you could only renew it by leaving the country, coming back in, having your passport stamped that you re-entered, and then getting another permisso di sojourno. So every 85 days or so over the year, we would take a trip 60 miles up to Switzerland, and we'd spend the day shopping, doing, you know, whatever, sightseeing in Switzerland. And then we'd come back in Italy, get the passport stamped for all of us. Each member of the family had to carry with them this multi-page document, and it needed to be surrendered at any time, if you were stopped by a policeman or for traffic violation or even if they just were having some roundup. But it was definitely subject to the will of the country because there were a lot of things I could not do. I could not open a bank account in an Italian bank. Now, that was pretty difficult. I'm sorry. That was pretty difficult because my pay at that time made me a millionaire. I was getting paid 1.2 million Lira a month, which was about $600 at that time. And I needed that money to pay for the apartment and food and everything. And there was only two ways to get it. Travel all the way up to Switzerland, where in Switzerland you can do anything you want with money, provided you're willing to pay the 10% or 15% exchange fee. Or I finally found that I

also pay a large exchange fee because they would cash

the check, change it into dollars, and then change it back into Lira so I could spend it there. I couldn't use a senior card for transit. I couldn't use Italian hospitals' health plan. There were lots of other things that were limited if you were. So you were definitely at the goodwill of the country. By the way, in the 1990s, they finally got rid of this permissive diesel journal. And it's all now in a little card that has a scanner on the back of it. You actually can fill out all the information that was on this old form online. And then you go down to the office. You have to get online. They take your picture. They put the code on the back. And if a policeman or anyone stops you, he takes his cell phone, reads the code, and all the information about you then downloads to him. And if you want to check anything, what you can and cannot do, you can use your cell phone to scan that code on the back of this card. I just wish we had it then. Imagine carrying all that paper for me, Mary, and our three children. We had a lot of paper to carry around all the time. You were supposed to have it on you at all times when you were out of your house. Well, the one thing that hasn't changed in Italy is the long lines waiting at the Uffizo immigration. We waited on these lines roughly every 85 days. And you could wait there for five or six hours. There's a long and kind of funny story attached to that, which I'll save for maybe another time. So sojourners, how did the people of Israel treat sojourners once they became a nation? That's pretty interesting because they had been sojourners for roughly 400 plus years

and never ever integrated into Egyptian society. Once Joseph died, they were clearly at the mercy of whatever the Egyptians felt like doing with them. So in Deuteronomy chapter 15, verses 1 to 3, very interesting, it says, At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release. And this manner of release, every creditor shall release what he has lent to his neighbor. He shall not exact it of his neighbor, his brother, because the Lord's release has been proclaimed. Of a foreigner you may exact it, but whatever is yours is with your brother and your hand shall release. Now by a foreigner I meant someone not living in your country. So if somebody in Edom had borrowed money from you, you don't release that person in Edom. If someone in Lebanon borrowed money from you, it doesn't apply to them. So what went on? Contrast this with Numbers chapter 15, starting at verse 14. He says, If a stranger is sojourning with you and anyone is living permanently with you and he wishes to offer a food offering with a pleasing aroma to the Lord, he shall do as you do. For the assembly there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you, a statute forever throughout your generations. You and the sojourner shall be alike before the law. One law, one rule shall be for you and for the stranger who sojourns with you. So if you were a permanent resident working in the country near all the time, you were treated the same as any other Israelite. Now needless to say that is obviously not true in the United States and it may become even less true. And it's not certainly wasn't true in Italy either for us.

We were not treated the same as every other Italian citizen. And this is an extraordinary thing that God required

them to do. And even in the offering of food offerings, et cetera, if the sojourner, the one who lived there permanently was working there, they would be treated the same in every way. So what does sojourners and all this have to do with Christendelfia? Well, a couple of things. First, I want to present to you that all of us Christendelfians are sojourners. Our king is the dealer Jesus Christ and his laws supersede anything that the United States made want of us. And thus we don't partake in politics. And I'm old enough to have gone through the Vietnam era where I was a consultant and helped many of the young people go to their draft boards. As sojourners, we didn't have those rights and we was exactly at the goodwill of the people. And a lot of countries don't allow you to have conscientious objection. But as sojourners, we were fortunate in the United States that we were allowed to do that. So in a sense, we're all sojourners if we are Christendelfians. Our allegiance and our first and most important alliance is with our Lord Jesus Christ and his kingdom. And as the apostle Peter said when he must obey God rather than men. My experiences in Italy were

actually quite interesting. We sometimes were treated very nice by people as sojourners and sometimes not treated very nice at all. It depended on who you ran into and whether they liked Americans or not. So how do we treat each other though? We have experience within our ecclesia when someone new moves into our ecclesia from maybe some other place in the world or some other place in the country or someone is newly baptized that comes from a different background. That person then starts living with us and working with us in our community. Do we treat them as an alien, a sojourner, or do we treat them as part of the family, as a brother or sister? Do we accept them really as we share the same blood? Now maybe I'm going off the loop here, but my observance in my 86 years of being around is that we don't always treat brother or sister as being of the same blood in the in the ecclesia. We do if they happen to be our relatives and they might get priority over somebody else. Do we accept visitors that way or someone newly introduced to our congregation? As I have said, because in a sense we are all sojourners. Well let me point out some real examples of how people were not treated very well as sojourners. All of this has come to me over the years when I was

more heavily involved with the tidings committee, especially way back when it was just me and Don, of things that came back into us, letters that came back into us, sad stories that asked for advice and so on. One of the biggest complaints has always been dress code. Wearing a tie, a jacket, a sweater, different colored coatings. We are not a country club. It seems to me that some ecclesians place tremendous emphasis on. They have rules about what you can wear on the platform. I have no idea if you do in Boston and if you do that's your business, not mine. But I've seen some really silly things happen. For example, I know a sister in ecclesia showed up Sunday, one Sunday with a very nice new bright red dress and she was taught very, very harshly because she should not be wearing red. Red is the color of sin. Well this sister being pretty sharp, she then turned to this brother and said, well I am a sinner so this is a very appropriate color for me. And she sat down and she didn't get any pushback on that one. Sometimes people talk differently. Some people are more exuberant, they are more forward going and they say things that maybe are not considered so polite in some areas. And interestingly enough there are other that I've seen where if someone isn't really forceful they think they don't know anything and they don't respect them. So this personality clash can work both ways. And this is one that keeps coming up. If you don't believe in the traditional historic interpretation of prophecy or with the traditional interpretation of Ezekiel's temple from Sully's book, you're not permitted to give a bible class anymore. You're definitely a bad thinker. You're not in tune with the pioneer brethren. By the way, I've written a few books but one thing I will never do is write a book on prophecy. I got enough trouble without getting problems with people not agreeing with my views on prophecy. And then there's another bad habit that I ran into here in the Detroit area. If somebody is just not what the norm, what they consider the norm, they say we don't do things that way in Boston. Oh I'm sorry, did I say Boston? No. If I gave this in Ann Arbor it would be Ann Arbor. If I gave it somewhere else it would be that ecclesia. When you do that you're automatically saying to the person you're not welcome. We had a case where a brother visiting from Africa came in with essentially an African dress without a suit and a tie on and he was dressed down with almost exactly these words. Not in Ann Arbor but in another local ecclesia here. And that brother was coming quite offended and quite hurt by being dressed down for coming with what was to him his traditional dress. So should we be tolerant of dress? James chapter 2, 11, etc. My brothers show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ the Lord of glory. For man wearing a gold ring and a fine clothing comes into your assembly and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in. And if you pay attention to one who wears the fine clothing and say you sit here in a good place, why do you say to the poor man you stand over there or sit down at my feet? Have you not then made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts? Have you not made distinctions among yourselves? So I think it's not too much of a push to say that we should be fairly tolerant of dress. Now I'm going to tell you it's quite square. I mean I'm really square when it comes to it myself. I like to show up at meetings with a suit and a tie that's appropriate to whatever color shirt I have and so on. But I was brought up by a grandfather who was a tailor and I had good suits even when I was, you know, five or six years old. But young people say culture is different. And when I was in college in the 1950s you had to show up in class with a suit and a tie on unless you were going to lab in which case you could take your jacket off and put on one of those white lab jackets. I could tell you in my years here at the University of Michigan I never saw not only a student never wearing a jacket, I never saw one ever wearing a tie. But that was the expected norm in the 50s. Okay what about culture and gender differences? For as many of you have been baptized into Christ and put on Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, there's neither bond nor free, there's neither male nor female for we all one in Christ Jesus. So I think you need to be somewhat tolerant of cultural differences also.

I know to some extent this is a tough one because if you're brought up in one culture and one way your Ecclesia works it's often very difficult to accept somebody new who

does not fit that norm. There were several classes where this has happened where someone and we have this happening right now live that has married moved up to an Ecclesia which was a very different culture and they were they were so pressured about various things that they decided to

join their home Ecclesia via Zoom and even though they're living 300 miles away from their home Ecclesia they never transformed their membership to their new home. I think that's sad. He says I put on the new man which was renewed knowledge after the image of him they create him where there was neither Greek nor Jewish circumcision nor barbarian, Scythian bond nor free but Christ is all and in all. And I pointed this one out but again that bond nor free that is both there can you imagine Ecclesia where the master was a member in the Ecclesia and his slave was also a member at Ecclesia and he had to treat him the same as anyone else. That was quite a leap in the first century. Here is the challenge for us. There should be no differences among us.

Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ taught us a new commandment and I think this

is this idea of goodwill of the community is a challenge. I remember some years back I don't know some of you probably know brother Dennis Gillett. Dennis Gillett is one of my favorite people in the whole world. Dennis lived in Oxford, England and I was working there many times and Dennis used to take me along to board meetings to see what I wouldn't speak up but he'd asked me afterward we'd go back home and Ruth his wife was a fantastic baker she made the best pies I ever ate and we'd go have some pie and tea afterward and he asked me what I thought of the meeting and how did it work in the United States if a similar problem came up and so on. So it's pretty interesting and one time being a university town some of these Christadelphians who were students there would sometimes come to meeting with their sweatpants on and a sweatshirt and they show up at meeting that way and this quite quickly created a problem some of the older members were they said they were offended by this and so Dennis talked to some of these students and they said well you know we have a workout in the morning and we have to do them on one of the club teams and if I went home and tried to change and dress and everything come back here it'd never make it back to the meeting. So Dennis and I was there when he had this little interview I said well what are you going to do Dennis? He said well I'm going to announce Sunday that everyone who of the elders who feel there's some problem with dress should stay after meeting and I'd like to talk to them. So everybody else left except I think two or three families and he said to them so yeah I know you're offended with some of these kids show up with sweatshirts on and so on and so for meeting and they said yes yes they should they should be dressed with a jacket and tie and not stress and everything like everybody should be. So he explained to them the issue and he said now what would you rather do have them not tell them don't come to meeting because you had cannot possibly do what we're asking you to do? Would you prefer they don't come and break bread? At that point there was just absolute silence and to the credit of those people who had been offended they one of the oldest of the three families stood up and said I guess we need to live with this definitely it's better that they come to meeting and I was really impressed by that it struck me and even though this happened I believe this happened in the early 90s it was quite impressive. So here is the commandment that we are given that you love one another as I have loved you. So this commandment is really pretty impressive because it's not just loving one another as I would love my wife it's as I have loved you which quite clearly calls upon us for total and absolute commitment and our appreciation of our brothers and sisters. He says greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends ye are my friends if you do whatever I command you henceforth I call you not servants for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth but I call you friends for all things that I have heard of my father I have made known unto you. So that's an incredible relationship so if we love one love one another as Jesus loved us we would give our life any brother or sister in the ecclesia and to be called the friend of Christ what does that harken us back to when Abraham was called the friend of God that relationship is not something that's thrown around lightly in the scriptures because I really don't remember it

being anywhere else that we were no relationship that we could be called the friend of the son of God that is pretty powerful stuff so if we do love one another I think my it called to mind what I

think is a fantastic group of words and those of you who are musically inclined will probably recognize this quite quickly then let us each esteem his brother or sister better than himself to be let us each prefer another full of love from envy free

happy are we when in this we all agree I only wish this would apply in a broader sense to the

unity situations in our community so this from words from him 341 which is in the I think this is in the top list of the four or five hymns that I think are just incredible

wonderful thoughts