There are words that belong not merely in books, archives, court decisions, or histories, but burning into our crosses.
They are the names of those whose labor was welcomed while their belonging was denied; those who washed the clothes of a city but were driven from its neighborhoods; those who cultivated California’s soil but were forbidden to possess it; those whose homes, businesses, dignity, and futures were restricted by laws that sometimes learned to conceal discrimination beneath the language of neutrality.
The Cross cannot become a monument from which we observe such suffering at a comfortable distance. The Cross brings us nearer. It compels us to recognize the person behind the ordinance, the family behind the deed, the neighbor behind the boundary.
If history tells us whom society excluded, conscience must ask whom we exclude today.
If the law once drew boundaries between human beings, justice must examine where those boundaries still survive.
If our prosperity was cultivated partly by hands that were denied belonging, remembrance must become more than regret—it must become responsibility.
For the fire upon the Cross is not given to burn the stranger.
It is given to burn away the blindness that made the stranger invisible.
Let the words burn into our crosses until the laundry worker becomes our neighbor, the imprisoned becomes our neighbor, the immigrant farmer becomes our neighbor, and every person standing beyond the boundaries we inherited becomes our neighbor.
Then history will no longer be merely something we remember.
It will become something that changes us.
And the Cross will stand not as a boundary between us and them, but as the place where every boundary is confronted by one enduring command:
See your neighbor.
Love your neighbor.
Do not build your peace upon your neighbor’s exclusion.
Let the words burn into our crosses until justice becomes visible in the streets, belonging becomes possible upon the land, and no human being is welcomed for their labor while rejected as a neighbor.
Emmanuel. Amen.
Pastor Steven G. Lee
St. GMC Corps
August 22, 2026
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