I share a birthday with Carol Rosamund Robertson. I find this remarkable. There is so much we don’t share. She female, I am male. She is a city girl, and I am a country boy. She was known as quiet and naturally good, I have never been accused of being either. She has a lovely middle name, mine is Eugene (pronounced YOUjane by some folks back home). She is black and I am white. I am turning 44, and she never made it to 15.

On April 24, 1962, the day I was born, she became a teenager. On my first birthday she turned 14 and got her first pair of high heels. On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963 she was killed when a bomb, placed by Klansmen, exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing Carol and three other little girls.

I’ve been remembering her on my birthday since I saw her tombstone on the Spike Lee documentary about the Birmingham church bombing and realized we shared a birthday. I‘ve been thinking about her often this year because today, as I write this essay, my youngest daughter turns 14 – just Carol’s age, and she too is a city girl, quiet and good, with a lovely middle name. I remember Carol lest I forget that racism is the most virulent form of hatred, and that it remains the social issue facing us – has been the issue from the very beginning of the New Testament Church.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither Slave nor Free man, there is neither Male nor Female for you are all one is Christ Jesus. Galatians 3.28

Those words are not just sloganeering. The race issue (Jew/Gentile) was the first that threatened the Church, creating the need for a great meeting of Apostles, Elders and Evangelists held at Jerusalem and reported in Acts 15. Each of Paul’s letters deal with it – it is the issue that prompted the writing of Romans and Galatians, and the race issue dogged him his whole career until it got him arrested in the Jerusalem Temple.

Race was the issue that polluted our democratic experiment here in America, and nearly caused “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” to “perish from the earth.” It was the issue that, according to Jefferson, was “coiled like a snake under the table” at the constitutional convention, and that bore down like a “great fireball in the night” upon our nation. Even though we are nearly a century and a half beyond the Civil War, the 13th and 14th Amendments, and 40 years past the Voting Rights Act, Race is still the issue that proves intransigent.

Of course, nowadays we don’t talk about it in terms of race, we talk about immigration policy, taxation, education policy, housing code enforcement, law and order, but we are talking of race nonetheless. The words I hear my brethren and myself saying are the same words, word-for-word, that George Wallace, Albert Boutwell, Bull Conner, and bomber Robert Chamblis said.

We say these words not because of high-minded ideals, but because of something more personal and immediate – when millions of people different from us - when needy people who speak a different language cross our borders it affects our quality of life adversely (and what is more important than protecting our quality of life?).

The experts tell us that such an influx will make everything better in the long run, but we know it will only be better for businessmen who want cheap laborers, not for most working people. We know our prosperity will diminish, our schools will be stressed, our infrastructure will be overwhelmed, and crime rates will rise.

And yet those parents who risk so much to make a better life for their own children, are only doing what most caring parents would do – anything possible to feed, clothe, and protect their children.

Do we realize the rare gifts we enjoy in America? Do we appreciate that no other people at no other time enjoyed as much freedom, safety, and prosperity as we do here and now? Why are we surprised when people who live so close to us want to share some part of these blessings with their children? Why do we feel entitled to these blessings? Is it because we are just used to such abundance, or do we feel somehow superior?

I’m not proposing any solutions to the harsh realities of immigration and race - and the realities are harsh. I’m just trying to remind myself that racism is sin. Roger Chamblis, Bull Conner and Adolph Hitler did not rise in a vacuum – their pathologies are the natural result of the putrefication that occurs when people, because of self interest, accept a level of moral decay.

Those droves of parents who pour across our borders, legally and illegally, love their kids as much as I love mine, and God loves them as much as he loves me. When I remember Carol Robertson on our shared birthday, I remember that the truth is personal, and each life valuable to God. I also remember that as good as we are at fooling ourselves, God knows the difference between self-interest and high-mindedness, between idealism and sin.