How Can You Love an ICE Agent?
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, February 22, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Gospel according to Matthew, the fifth chapter, verses 43-48.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your siblings, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
Let me ask you a question that I don’t know how to answer: How do you love an ICE agent?
I mean that seriously. Not as a rhetorical provocation. Not as a thought experiment to be resolved in the next fifteen minutes and filed away. I mean it as the kind of question that should keep us up at night, that should make us put down our coffee and tea and stare at a wall in deep contemplation. Because we are sitting here this evening in a country where families are being separated. Where people who have built their lives here for decades are being dragged from their homes and their cars. Where children are watching their parents disappear. And Jesus, the God we follow, stands up on a hillside and says: love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.
I want to honor the weight of that. Because I think we do the text a disservice when we rush too quickly to either comfortable compliance or righteous rejection. Both moves let us off the hook. Both let us stop thinking. And this text demands that we think: hard, honestly, and together.
We can’t read this text faithfully without being honest about the world we’re reading it in. The Sermon on the Mount is not a floating spiritual document delivered to nobody in particular. It was spoken to a specific people; people living under occupation, people living under the heel of an empire that had the power to take everything from them. That context is not incidental to the meaning. It is the meaning.
Liberation theologians have insisted for decades that you cannot read the Bible from nowhere. We each have a context. We each read the Bible from our identities, our social locations, our experiences, even our moods in any one moment. The poor read the Bible differently than the powerful. The persecuted read it differently than the comfortable. People being marginalized, people being persecuted are not abstractions They are our neighbors. Some of them are sitting in congregations like ours. Some of them are the parents of children in our communities. Some of them are those children.
We are in a moment of rising authoritarianism. The Trump administration has hung gigantic banners displaying the president’s campaign slogan and his image on key buildings in Washington, DC. In our communities and communities like ours across the United States, immigration enforcement has become a tool of state terror, designed not just to deport people, but to frighten everyone: to make whole communities go silent, go inside, stop gathering. When a parent is afraid to take their child to school or drive to work, when a church becomes afraid to hold its doors open, that is not just federal policy, that is the exercise of power over the vulnerable. And the church has something to say about that. We have to name it. We can’t look away.
Jesus says: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say pretend there are no enemies. He doesn’t say call the people doing harm your friends. He doesn’t say there is no such thing as persecution. He names the reality: enemies exist, persecutors exist, and then he tells us how to relate to them. The command is not to deny the conflict. It is to refuse to let the conflict determine the entirety of who we become.
Walter Wink, one of the great liberation scholars of the New Testament, argued that Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are not passive acceptance. They are a third way, neither violent retaliation nor doormat submission. Loving your enemy is a form of resistance, because it refuses to dehumanize. And refusing to dehumanize is one of the most radical things a person can do in a system that depends on dehumanization to function.
The system of mass immigration enforcement depends on the people carrying it out not seeing full human beings in front of them. It depends on categories: documented, undocumented, legal, illegal, righteous agents, and dissenters. Those categories reduce people to their administrative status. What Jesus asks of us is precisely the opposite of that reduction. He asks us to see the whole person. Even the person doing the harm.
How do you love an ICE agent? I want to be clear about what this question is not asking. It’s not asking you to approve of what they do. It’s not asking you to make peace with policies that terrorize communities. It’s not asking you to sit quietly while harm is done. The prophetic tradition that runs straight through Scripture, from Amos to Isaiah to the Sermon on the Mount is saturated with the insistence that God cares about justice, that systems of oppression are not neutral, and that God’s people are called to stand against them.
But here’s the uncomfortable dynamic: the person carrying out the terror is also a human being made in the image of God. Probably with a family, with debts, with fears, with reasons (good or bad) for why they do what they do. They may be acting out of conviction, cynicism, necessity, obedience to authority, or all of the above. They are caught in a system too, even if they are far closer to the handle of power than the people they are pursuing.
To love them does not mean to excuse them or their actions. It means to refuse to write them off as something less than human, which is precisely the mistake they’re making about others. Hatred has a way of turning us into the thing we hate. It narrows us. It makes us certain in ways that close off the possibility of change.
Jesus says: pray for those who persecute you. That is not a comfort. That is a demand. Prayer requires that we hold someone in our minds with care, that we bring them before God, which means we acknowledge their existence as more than the harm they cause. It doesn’t mean we stop working to end that harm. It doesn’t mean we quit showing up, speaking up, making good trouble, and praying with our bodies, our feet, and our wholes lives. What it means is that we do the work without losing our souls in the process.
I think Jesus is asking something even harder than we usually admit when we read this passage. He’s not just asking us to love individual bad actors. He’s asking us to practice a kind of love that refuses the logic of empire. That logic says that we divide people into groups as worthy and unworthy, human and subhuman or even nonhuman, the ones who matter and the ones who don’t matter.
That logic is in the rhetoric that calls human beings “animals” and “invaders” and talks about “swarms” and “herds.” It’s in the policies that treat people as administrative problems to be solved. It’s the logic that’s meant to divide us from our neighbors and pit us against the people with whom we usually have more in common. Capitalism and cooperations have been using this logic since before the Civil War to force wedges between poor Black people and poor white people. More recently, that logic has turned 180 degrees and has brought together the first two generations of ruling class Black people with the ancien régime of white power brokers. And if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s the logic that makes us look at federal agents and feel only contempt. It may seem logical, even correct to use the same terms for ICE and Border Patrol Agents, precisely because the temptation to dehumanize does not only run in one direction.
What Jesus offers us is not naïveté. It’s a spiritual posture, a way of moving through the world that keeps our hearts from hardening. And in a moment when the systems around us are designed to harden us, to make us afraid, to make us tribal and reactive, that posture is itself a form of resistance.
Our passage tonight ends with: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The word translated as “perfect,” teleios in Greek, is derived from the Greek for a thing’s end or greatest purpose. In this passage teleios is better translated as “whole” or “complete.” Rather than being perfect as God is perfect, which is impossible for us, Jesus is calling us to be whole as God is whole. Be the kind of person who can hold the full complexity of another human being without collapsing them into what they do to you.
There’s nothing easy about that work, but we can’t be whole people if we dehumanize other people, no matter what they are doing. We know that hurt people hurt people, but so too can whole people make other people whole.
I want to close by saying something about what the church, the whole church, is called to be in this moment.
We are called to be a community that does not look away from the suffering happening in our cities, counties, states, nation, and world. That means we have to show up. It means knowing which organizations are doing sanctuary work and supporting them. It means being the kind of congregations that people know they can come to when they’re afraid.
We are also called to be a community that does not let that work turn us into people who can only see enemies everywhere. The same love that moves us to protect the vulnerable has to be vast enough, strange enough, scandalous enough, Spirit-sustained enough to hold even the people doing the harm. Not to excuse them. Not to stop working against what they do. Not to stop trying to make them better and whole. But to refuse to give up on their humanity, which is also, in some mysterious way, an act of protecting our own. If that sounds too hard, too strange, too conciliatory, just remember the Golden Rule that we all learned: Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. We all have learned that if someone does evil to you, this primary and fundamental rule requires that we not return evil for evil.
God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good. Sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. The divine does not ration grace according to who deserves it. That is the most profound challenge to every system of hierarchy and domination that has ever existed. Because every such system is built on the premise that some lives matter more than others. We, however, follow Jesus who said that everyone is worthy, everyone is loved, and everyone is saved.
How do you love an ICE agent? I still don’t have a clear or clean answer. But I think it starts here: you refuse to stop seeing them as a person. You hold them in prayer, even when that prayer is angry and bewildered and barely coherent. You keep working hard to dismantle the systems they serve. You continue holding them accountable collectively and individually. You do all of that without letting hatred become the engine. Because hatred will hollow you out. The world does not need more hollowed-out people. It needs people who are whole. Teleios. Complete.
May God make us into those people.
Amen.