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Thinking About Immigration: should a felony mean deportation?

Immigration Reformation speaker, Lisa Sharon Harper, pens a story of an undocumented immigrant convicted of two felonies. This story sounds like a clear-cut case of “send him packing!”, but Harper complicates such a response by sharing this young man’s history.

Five year-old Tony Amorim sat with his dad in a van in Danbury, Conn., in 1989.

“Do you want to come with me,” his father asked him, “or do you want to stay with your mother?”

Tony loved them both, but the boy couldn’t imagine living without his father.

“I want to go with you,” Tony answered.

Right then and there Tony’s father drove away and took him to the far-away land of Florida.

Last week, I interviewed Tony, now 28, on the phone. I couldn’t call him directly because he is in Norfolk County Correctional Center awaiting his deportation hearing scheduled for today.

Tony’s voice was tight. He was eager to share his story — his whole story.

Continue reading…

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Thinking About Immigration: I Was A Stranger challenge

In a time when immigration has become a polarizing political issue, most Protestant Christians (91%, according to a 2010 Pew Research Center poll) admit that they do not primarily think about immigrants or immigration through the lens of their Christian faith.

In order to encourage those—both in local churches and in the halls of Congress—who profess to follow Jesus to allow their response to immigration to be infused with biblical values, the Evangelical Immigration Table has invited us to participate in a new initiative called “I Was a Stranger…,” which takes its name directly from Matthew 25:35, where Jesus says that by welcoming a stranger, we may be welcoming him. The focus of the challenge will be on inviting believers to read a short passage of Scripture each day for forty consecutive days that speaks to God’s heart for immigrants and to pray for the immigrants in their community.

We are in the midst of this challenge in the 40 days leading up to Immigration Reformation. Will you join us? Like us on Facebook or join the Immigration Reformation event to receive updates with the daily passages. You can even text  877877 to receive the daily passage on your phone.

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The Whipping Boy and “The Whipping Man”

This piece was originally published at Patheos on March 29, 2013.

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Have you ever felt like a whipping boy? Have you ever wanted to get revenge for being treated as a scapegoat and exchange places with the whipping man?

My wife and I went to see the play The Whipping Man last Saturday evening. The Whipping Man is a powerful, tragic story of personal faith and shared history involving a severely wounded Jewish Confederate soldier and two of his family’s former slaves. The Jewish Confederate soldier returns home after the close of the Civil War and finds that his family’s mansion is nearly abandoned, ransacked, and burned. The two former slaves who live there tend to his wounds and invite him to share in the Passover celebration with them, as they themselves were raised in the Jewish faith by his family. Together they reflect upon the tragedy of war, the horrors of slavery, the Exodus, and their uncertain future in a new era.

The two former slaves reveal their emotional and physical scars from their encounters with the whip at the whim and will of their former masters. Yet they still hold out hope in the God of Israel, of whom they had learned from their masters. How striking, in part, because the young former master—Caleb—who has returned home, has a hard time believing in God anymore because of the whipping he and his troops took during the war. The three men represent two peoples who have experienced in their history the tragedy of slavery joined together by faith and doubt, suffering and hope for a better tomorrow. One finds out in the end that they are joined together in even more ways—Caleb had impregnated the daughter of one of the former slaves—Simon (as a result, she was sold to someone else by his father) and his father was the father of the other former slave—John. If we go back far enough, we might find the rest of us are distant relations. Even so, one of the things we all have in common is that we all feel like the whipping boy from time to time and we are all tempted to take the whip and get revenge, just as John did and killed the whipping man.

One of the things that stands out to me today—Good Friday—as I look back upon that play and the celebration of the Passover is how Jesus identified with these Jews of different hues; he shared their history and their fate. He also offers them and all of us hope. How readily we long for revenge. How desirous we often are for grabbing the pearl-handled whip as in the story to beat the whipping man to death, like John did. I get the passion for revenge. What I often fail to comprehend is how Jesus did not respond in kind. Even on the cross he pleads with his Father to forgive his persecutors—these murderers—for they cannot possibly comprehend the horrific evil they are doing (Luke 23:34).

All too often we are enslaved to our fears and hatred of others. Forgiveness is the last thing that crosses our minds. But we will never experience true freedom if we constantly live to return the favor. This Friday is very good in that through remembrance of Jesus’ passion and death we are called to lay aside our past grievances and die to them so that we can live anew Easter morn. This spotless, innocent Passover Lamb—this guileless scapegoat—makes it possible for us to drop our whips and be healed by his wounds and scars (Isaiah 53:5), for he has absorbed the need for hate and revenge. “It is finished” (John 19:30).

Will we drop the whip and not pick it up again come Monday?

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Holy Week & Holy Wars

This piece was originally published at Patheos on March 28, 2013.

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Today is Maundy (Holy) Thursday on the Christian calendar.  On this day, Christians remember the Lord Jesus’ last supper with his followers and his institution of the Lord’s Supper before he enters into his passion.

Holy and/or unholy passions are flaring today in our society over the debate in the Supreme Court over same sex marriage. Regardless of the outcome of the case(s), I have been intrigued by how many of my Christian brothers and sisters appear to view democracy, or better American democracy, as a holy form of government, almost as if it were installed by the Lord himself. Pope Pius IX was under no illusion as to the tensions between the Roman Catholic Church and secular democracy. He had harsh things to say about Enlightenment-influenced visions of civil society that praised religious liberty and freedom of conscience and that limited the influence of the Catholic church on a society’s citizenry. In his Papal Encyclical titled “Quanta Cura” (Condemning Current Errors) and promulgated on December 8, 1864, he writes:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of “naturalism,” as they call it, dare to teach that “the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones.” And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that “that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require.” From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an “insanity,”2 viz., that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way.” But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching “liberty of perdition;”3 and that “if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling. (under point 3)

Pope Pius IX goes on to say,

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that “the people’s will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right.” But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests?

Regardless of whether or not one finds Pius IX’s encyclical pious, one cannot question his alertness to the challenges secular democracy posed for orthodox religion in his day. A Protestant Christian would be mistaken to read Pius IX’s critique of secular democracy as simply a Roman Catholic thing. Anyone who wishes to see the Christian faith play a prominent role in shaping directly a citizenry and a government of a city or nation will experience consternation to some degree.

While the United States of America has always included a significant Christian population, it has also included significant representation of communities with other convictions. Thomas Jefferson and many others were of a deistic persuasion. They were influenced by forces in Europe that were by no means champions of Catholicism or Puritanism.

This complex historical reality should not cause Christians to lose hope in being vital witnesses for what we take to be holiness during Holy Week or during any other week of the year. What I hope an awareness of this complex historical reality will do for us is cause us to look anew to Jesus and his historical context, which was also quite complex. He lived in a society that included a residue of Jewish theocracy that was forced to negotiate space for adhering to Judaism under the heavy hand of pluralistic Rome. Jesus did not try and reestablish a theocracy or remove the Romans; rather, as he told Pilate, his kingdom is of another world. For Jesus, this state of affairs did not let Pilate off the hook in terms of God’s foreboding judgment; what this state of affairs did signify for Jesus was that he had come to inaugurate God’s kingdom community—the church, which would serve as the essential means through which Jesus would rule and accomplish his mission.

In the midst of holy and unholy passions flaring this week, let the community Jesus inaugurated and the meal he instituted lead us forward to advocate for political power of a higher order. What is that order? Under this state of affairs, Jesus hangs on the cross and calls us to carry ours, offering ourselves as living sacrifices, where our freedom in Christ becomes our ultimate freedom, regardless of whether or not we experience freedom of religion or speech. May Jesus’ speech bridle our tongues so that we speak truth in love, even if our fellow citizens’ speech turns to hate. May they know we are Christians by our holy love.