You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May, 2008.
A few weeks ago, in the run up to a discussion about the Border, I started kicking around an idea that I haven’t seen anywhere else. My friend Jason Evans has started prodding me to spit it out, so this is a first attempt, to which I hope comments and discussion will flush out a forming discussion about Jesus, the immigrant.
I see at least two specific references to Jesus as an immigrant. The first practical, the second theological.
First the practical, Jesus is a Galilean and is referred to as such throughout the Gospels. Our modern conception of nation states did not exist at the time of Jesus, so neither our modern conception of “immigrants.” However, Jesus and his followers are remarked upon throughout the Gospels as “Galileans” and have an outsider status in Jerusalem because they are from client kingdom in the North. This was not a positive association for the residents of Jerusalem. Jesus was thought of in Jerusalem similarly to how Mexican and other Latin American immigrants are thought of in the U.S. based upon “outsider” geo-political status.
Now to the Theological, we learn in the prologue to John’s Gospel that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Trinitarian’s “Son’s” experience is that of coming to dwell among humanity. This “dwelling among” might be faithfully rendered “immigrated to.” We hear in the prologue that ” He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11He came to what was his own,* and his own people did not accept him.” Jesus’ outsider or immigrant status is confirmed in that his people do not recognize him. God’s identity in Jesus is as a stranger, an identity thrust upon him by those who do not recognize who he is. The divine is identified as an outsider, as an immigrant.
Seeing Jesus Christ as an immigrant gives us a lens through which we see his action in scripture.
We see Jesus consistently including outsiders in his ministry. He reveals himself to a Samaritan Woman as the Messiah. He includes Matthew the Roman tax collector, and Simon the Zealot among his apostles. He ministers with women, children, lepers, and gentiles. Understanding Jesus as an immigrant outsider helps to articulate the Christological reasoning behind the need for the inclusion of the outsider. Jesus himself was treated as, had the cultural identity of, the outsider.
Beyond that Jesus calls his followers toward an immigrant identity. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God” tends to be heard figuratively, but the connotation is that the follower of Jesus is constantly seeking a homeland that is not her own. Christians are all united in their common identity as immigrants to the Kingdom of God, the promised future country in which the poor are uplifted, the hungry fed, the sinful forgiven, the outsiders included. As followers of Christ we are called to be immigrants seeking the Kingdom of God.
This issue is particularly salient in San Diego today because the Federal Government is planning to extend the double border fence and close off Border Field State park, the site of an annual Border Posada Pilgrimage. This park is one of the few places along the border that could be considered “proportional and humane,” the official wording of the Episcopal Church’s policy towards border enforcement. Family members can see one another through the fence, sit and have conversations. Every year hundreds of people gather on both sides for the Border Posada. The new fencing is being constructed without environmental impact study and with the Secretary of Homeland Security having voided all national laws pertaining to protecting the land including the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act and others.
Jesus would not have stood idly by in the face of this militant exclusion of immigrants. Indeed Christians cannot identify with the governmental and cultural powers that seek to exclude. St. Benedict taught that “All are to be welcomed as Christ.” If Judea had militantly walled out Galileans in the first century, Jesus’ ministry could not have happened. We are called to welcome the immigrants as Christ welcomed all, to see Jesus in the outsiders, and to follow the immigrant Jesus in search of a place where all are free, all are saved, all are loved; we are called to seek the Kingdom of God.
Spoiler alert: I’m preaching on May 18, Trinity Sunday, at Good Samaritan Episcopal Church. and this post is a preview of my sermon-in formation.
A couple of weeks ago The Rev. Chris Chase preached about Ascension and referenced a commercial for iPods. It features dancing figures with the iconic white headphone cord and a song by the Ting Tings “Shut up and let me go.”
Far be it for a visiting preacher to critique the rector’s sermon…but I do have some serious qualms with this ad. (In Chris’ defense, he was referencing the images of dancing, rather than the lyric.) This sentiment, “Shut up and let me go,” repeated over and over again in the ad, is becoming a central sentiment of our culture. “Shut up and let me go.” The message is conveyed on campus every day by those white iPod headphones worn as students walk around in public spaces. They say, “I am busy and I can’t hear you: Don’t Bother me.” Those white cords function as a wall.
I confess, I LOVE my iPod, and I have used the headphones on bad days to quiet the noise of people I don’t want to hear, my parents or siblings on long trips. My most frequent use of headphones happens on airplanes where I resonate with Anne Lammott when she says, ” My idea of everything running smoothly on an airplane is that A) I not die in a slow motion fiery crash, and that B) none of the other passengers try to talk to me. I use my white iPod headphones to shut people out: “Shut up and let me go.” This is something we say over and over again in our culture, with gated communities and a wall between San Diego and Tijuana. “Shut up and let me go.”
This however is completely antithetical to what we learn about God as Trinity. The Orthodox Christians talk about God’s inter-penetration, God’s three-in-one-ness, as a dance. The one-ness of God is the dancing, the RELATIONSHIP. In the Gospel for Trinity Sunday, Jesus uses the standard formulation of the Trinity “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Another rendering of Trinity that goes all the way back to Augustine, speaks of the Trinity as “Lover, Beloved, and Love Itself.” God bridges the gap of difference: God’s very one-ness is a RELATIONSHIP.
Here is the scary part. In the face of that world that says, “shut up and let me go” God is inviting us, God is inviting you, here, this morning, into relationship. You see the relationship of the Trinity wasn’t enough for God. It isn’t by coincidence that we also hear the creation story this morning. From the beginning, God has desired relationship. We are created out of God’s desire for relationship. The dance of the Trinity, the community of the Lover, the Beloved, and Love itself results in SO MUCH LOVE, that it cannot be contained and spills out into humanity, into creation. God creates our world, God comes among us in Jesus, and God comes as Holy Spirit to never be apart from us. The God who is Relationship, reaches out, bridges out, for relationship with us.
And it doesn’t stop there. 1 John 4:11 “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.” God calls us into relationship with one another. Again in the Gospel, Jesus calls his followers into relationship with “all nations.” God calls us to build bridges.
And yet we throw up walls. The same society that teaches us to put on our iPod headphones, builds fences to exclude our neighbor, causes us to fear others and shut them out because of differences of race, of gender, of political party, of religion, of orientation. We live in a world that excludes and builds walls. We have a God builds bridges.
This Church is working with God to build bridges. By inviting a group of students from UCSD into this space to worship, by naming campus as a mission priority for this parish, you are bridging a barrier that has separated you from your neighbors. By inviting Roman Catholics to share your space, you are bridging religious divides.
And you helped to send a group of students to El Salvador crossing barriers of class, race, and nationality. There they built a bridge. Literally, they built a bridge. There is now a bridge to a community called “El Carmen,” a community which during the rainy season was often cut off by flood waters from food and health care. Children often missed school. Now there is a bridge. You can see a picture of it.
God wants us to build bridges. Over Spring Break, with your help, we got to take God literally. Where in your life is God calling you to build bridges?
Our God reaches out beyond the self. Our God demands that we take off our headphones, we cross over the walls that our world creates to separate us from one another. We need one another. If we are to be whole people, we cannot go it alone. That is the take home of this sermon friends. We live in a deeply troubled world. The economy, the price of oil, the price of food, terrorism, war, racism, sexism, poverty, depression, anxiety, none of these things can be solved by saying, “Shut up and let me go.” We need each other. We need God, and God needs us to build bridges.
Some Salvadoran video to start your week off right.
