Not So Among You (Part 1)

Who the Story Asks Us to Blame

I'm sitting with two things today.

Every summer, from June through September, my new church becomes a food bank site for our neighbors on the East Side of Clark County. We see a wide range of people — different ages, different immigration statuses, different housing situations. No one is turned away. There's never a lot on the tables, and yet, somehow, there is always enough for everyone who walks through the parking lot.

We say our welcoming statement out loud, every single Sunday, before worship even begins. I've only been here a few months, but I'm already learning what that repetition does. It isn't decoration. Week after week, I'm hearing people's stories and watching what happens when a church's welcome stops being a line we recite and starts being a space where real welcome actually gets to happen.

I've been sitting with those two things — a food pantry that never asks who deserves to eat, and a welcome we repeat until it becomes true — while also being in an ongoing conversation with a handful of folks in our congregation who are coming from a very different place. These aren't cruel people. They are scared — about healthcare, about resources, about getting older, about a world that feels like it's running out of room — and in that fear, has landed on a familiar story: that immigrants are the reason things are hard.

I keep thinking about the gap between what I watch happen at our little free pantry and the every other week food pantry and what that story assumes about scarcity. So I want to write my way through it.

There is an old and reliable trick that empires have used for as long as there have been empires: when people are afraid, give their fear a direction. Don't ask them to interrogate the systems that hollowed out their wages, gutted their healthcare, or made the future feel unaffordable. Just point them at someone smaller than the system. Someone easier to see than a policy. Someone who doesn't get a microphone in the argument about why things feel so hard.

Immigrants have played that role for a long time. Not because the story is true, but because it is useful. It is easier to be angry at the family down the street who crossed a border than at the boardrooms that decided your pension wasn't worth funding. It is easier to believe "they" are draining the system than to sit with the harder truth: the system was built to serve very few people very well, and the rest of us are competing for scraps it never intended to give us in the first place.

I want to be honest about something. I hear real fear in the people who repeat this story — fear about healthcare, about scarcity, about a world that feels like it's running out of room. That fear is not fake, and I don't think the people carrying it are cruel. But fear that has been given the wrong target will still do real damage, no matter how sincerely it's felt.

Scapegoating doesn't require malice. It only requires someone willing to hand you a story that feels true, and a willingness not to ask too many questions about who benefits from you believing it.

So let's ask the questions.

The research on this, broadly and consistently, does not support the idea that immigrants are the cause of the strain we feel in housing, healthcare, or public budgets. That strain has other, better-documented sources — decades of policy choices about who gets protected from risk and who doesn't. I won't throw numbers at you here, because numbers get weaponized just as easily as fear does, and I'd rather you go looking for the honest ones yourself than take mine on faith. But the shape of the claim — "millions of them are the reason for all of this" — is a story about blame, not a finding about cause. Those are different things, and empire has never been careful to distinguish them.

Here is where I want to spend the rest of this post, because I think it matters more than winning an argument about statistics.

Jesus was not vague about empire. In Matthew 20, when his disciples start jockeying for power, he doesn't soften the comparison — he names it directly: "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them." That's simply how empire works. It sorts people into who gets lorded over and who does the lording. It calls that order "necessary." It calls resistance to that order "chaos."

And then Jesus says the four most disruptive words in the passage: "Not so with you."

Not so among you. Not the domination. Not the sorting of people into worthy and unworthy. Not the treating of human beings as a policy problem to be managed rather than a neighbor to be loved. Empire says suffering is the necessary cost of order. Jesus says: not so among you.

This is the same Jesus who told a story about "the least of these" and identified himself — not metaphorically, but directly — with the hungry, the imprisoned, and the stranger. "I was a stranger and you welcomed me." The word used there, in the Greek, is the same word used throughout scripture for the foreigner, the outsider, the one without standing. It's the word used in Leviticus, where the instruction isn't "extend cautious hospitality to the stranger" but "you shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Not tolerate. Love. And ground it in memory — remember what it felt like to be the one without power, without papers, without a place.

That's the frame I want to hold as we turn, next time, to a phrase I hear constantly in these conversations — one that sounds reasonable on its surface and does something very different underneath it: "I don't have a problem with immigrants, as long as they do it the right way."

(Next time I'll continue with a closer look at that phrase, and what Jesus's "not so among you" asks of us in response to it.)