The Samaritan Savior: immigration, missions, and the foreign love of God (Part 2)

We don’t want to hear this.  We don’t want to hear that we are not the saviors but the naked person, covered in blood, bruised and broken, on the verge of death, incapable, lost, without hope and unable to even give voice to our needs.  That is us.  That is you.  We don’t want to hear this word.  We want to look at ourselves and say, hey, I’m a pretty good person; I know what I’m supposed to do as a Christian and I generally do it (and at least I know enough to know that I will fail and need grace).  I’m doing alright for myself, and for others.  I can help my neighbors.  I can offer them my strength.  I can serve them with my wisdom.  I can really help them.  Just tell me who they are, who needs my help, and I’ll go.  

The Samaritan Savior: immigration, missions, and the foreign love of God (Part 1)

Tanveer Ahmad was born in Pakistan, in 1962, the fifth child in a poor family.  As an adult, he made his way to his brother’s store in Saudi Arabia and from there started traveling.  One time, he came over to the U.S., to New York, and fell in love with the city.  He eventually got a visa to come over to the U.S. and headed straight to New York in 1993.  Eventually, as often happens to new immigrants, he ended up in Texas, working at night in a gas station.  The store was in a bad location and was robbed, repeatedly.  During one robbery, he pulled out the store’s unlicensed gun to stop the criminals; the cops came to the store and fined him for brandishing the weapon.  Though he left Texas to work in New York as a cab driver, that incident would continue to haunt him.  It would undermine his attempts to get a green card, especially after 9/11.  Being a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan would make it difficult to renew his visa; having a “disorderly conduct” charge involving a deadly weapon made it impossible.  In 2005, having failed to get proper documentation, Tanveer overstayed his visa.  His roommate had done the same thing with his student visa.  After a raid by immigration officials to capture his roommate, Tanveer was told by these officials to report to immigration.  Tanveer did, where he was promptly arrested and placed in one of the many the detention centers, which currently hold a total of over 500,000 people awaiting deportation.  In this for-profit, private prison, Tanveer suffered a heart attack.  His pleas for medical attention were ignored.  Eventually the guards took him seriously but had to first request permission from their superiors to take him to a hospital.  Tanveer died at the hospital, and became one of over one hundred people who died in custody while awaiting deportation, many of whose deaths are connected to medical neglect, and some to abuse.  

Sex, Colonialism, and Anglicanism: the ethics of mourning.

When I have time, I enjoy reading the New York Times online with my morning breakfast.  As I opened the "world" section of the paper, I noticed a headline and read the article at once:  "Same-Sex Couple Stirs Fears of a 'Gay Agenda.'"  I shut the computer and finished my breakfast, trying to think through the problems, again.

Skyler and I have been talking a lot about the Anglican church in Africa and the issue of homosexuality.  We are Anglicans, in AMIA (and so under the Rwandan Anglican church), and want to go to over to Rwanda.  We've also been following the Ugandan Anglican Church's response to the proposed bill that would allow the execution of homosexuals (interesting enough, a bill that came a month after three American evangelicals gave a series of talks on the evils of the gay rights movement, how it would destroy a family-based society, and how homosexuals can be converted into heterosexuals--read more HERE).

The article I read at breakfast discussed the arrest of a same-sex couple in Malawi after having a party to celebrate their engagement.  The whole article painfully illustrates the complexities of even holding a discussion on this topic between the two continents, let alone reaching some kind of mutual understanding.  For instance, the article quotes the Rev. Zacc Kawalala, who says, "The West has its gay agenda.  It wants to look at Africa and say, 'If you don't accept homosexuality, you are primitive.' But we're not as wicked as the West." Another person comments, "These immoral acts are not in our  culture; they are coming from the outside.  Otherwise, why is  there all this interest from around the world?  Why is money being sent?"  Discussing a different case, in which a person was arrested for putting up posters supporting gay rights as human rights, a police spokesman commented, "You wouldn't allow a poster that says, 'Let's Rape the Women,' would you?"

Within these few quotes we encounter the history of European and American imperialism, in the idea of its "agenda," in its self-professed superiority over the "primitives," and in its attempts to control politics through finances.  We have the creation of a cultural unity by the declaration of the "transgressor" as fundamentally and irredeemably "alien" (the purity of Ugandan culture being safeguarded from the "threat" of homosexual acts by declaring these deeds "foreign").  This cultural practice is, sadly, something countries in the West share (note, not "used to have").  Finally, we have a question that vexes our own political institution, namely, that we all agree government needs to legislate morality, we just disagree on whose morality it ought to legislate.  The idea common among many that homosexuality is wrong but that the government should not legislate against it depends ultimately on the evaluation of how socially "harmful" such an act is to the political body (I will have to speak further on this attachment to the governmental investment to "ensure, maintain, or develops it life"--to quote Foucault--at another point).  And if this latter analysis is correct, then we return to the first two problems with even more force:  how do we talk about these problems beyond "the West's" past and present assumption of "cultural strength"?  Given the deep history of imperialism, how can we expect those who've experienced the horrors produced by our imperial endeavors to not assume that we are, once again, trying to export our own sense of our superiority?  In short, we can't figure out how to discuss these questions within our own country, even among the predominantly white, middle-to-upper-class Americans that form a large portion of the Episcopal and Anglican church.  How can we do it across these divides?

It is perhaps this seemingly insurmountable divide that points us in the exact direction we must travel:  we cannot discuss the question of sexuality apart from the operations of European/American, Christian, colonial endeavors.  The inability to "bypass" this painful, problematic history forces all of us to go right through it, into the middle of it, and try to find our way out.  The "West's" arrogant pretensions are cut out from under it by this lingering awareness of its guilt, a history that cannot be forgotten or evaded, but must be confronted and mourned.  

It's the "Western" Anglican church's inability to mourn this tragic history that creates its tendency towards amnesia.  As Behdad argues in a different context, this kind of amnesia functions as a "Freudian notion of negation," a "repudiation, by means of projection, of an association that has just emerged" (__A Forgetful Nation__, p. 4).  In "negation," one "may acknowledge an event, but the subject either denies its significance or refuses to take responsibility for it" (p. 4).  The refusal to take responsibility often takes the form of projecting "his or her guilt onto others by blaming them for what has occurred, attempting thus to hide the implications of his or her own action" (p. 5).  The Church of Uganda identifies this kind of projection in the issue of women's ordination.  They say that comparison of women's ordination to homosexual ordination is insulting, for the patriarchalism of Western Christian missionaries actually curbed the religious leadership of women traditionally found in Ugandan society, and that Ugandan Christians started allowing women into positions of leadership before the West.  In other words, the Western church tries to secure the high ground by projecting their own sinful heritage (patriarchalism) onto the African church; they then tried to use this "disavowal" (they are backwards and guilty, we are moral leaders) to advocate their continued leadership (as "innocent" moral authorities).  

The conservative American Anglicans under African leadership (AMIA), have often used this post-colonial context to berate the "liberals."  However, placing oneself under the authority of bishops in Rwanda does not ipso facto mean that the colonial history has been effectively confronted,  mourned, and surpassed.  Churches like AMIA have the ability, and calling, to remind the "Western" church that it cannot declare itself a moral authority on sexuality and dismiss its African brothers and sisters.  To do so is to take the position, again, of imperial sovereignty.  But these AMIA churches do this not from a place outside of the problem, but from an awareness that they too have been formed inside of the problem.

Perhaps it would be easiest for white, Western Anglicans to start by mourning the loss of their cultural supremacy as well as their sinful enactment of and attachment to this supremacy.  Most realize that the project of imperialism was indeed sinful (though most mistakenly think of it as "safely" lodged in the past and overcome); but recognizing that a broken attachment was/is sinful does not mean one no longer suffers from the loss of it.  The loss must be acknowledged, which is why the mourning must address both the loss of the sinful power and the sinfulness of the power now lost.  

This ethical stance of mourning is not an attempt to stall the church, to bide our time, to wait passively or ignore the political urgency of people who face jail, and possibly death, for being gay.  Much needs to be said.  But we won't get anywhere if we keep trying to ignore or evade our guilt, for our attempt to render ourselves "innocent" not only ignores the imperialist history, it reenacts it.  To begin with mourning necessitates starting in a place of dependency--we do not know how to mourn this history, and so we cannot mourn it alone, but we must seek the help of those whose did not benefit from the cultural supremacy but suffered under it.  

(it should be noted that I stuck with the term "western," sometimes in quotes, sometimes not, because it was introduced by the persons in the article and it provided a convenient shorthand; it should be read with all the typical qualifications and disavowals.  

LOST: Living Beyond Meaning

In the latest episode of LOST (season 6, episode 2), Jack Shepherd is, once again, confronted with a situation that he can't understand and yet requires concrete action.  Sayid, after having died and come back to life, is tortured by his saviors.  Jack decides he must act and confronts the people (the leader and his interpreter), demanding to know why they tortured Sayid.  They explain to Jack that they were "testing" him, that Sayid failed, and that he needed to take a pill.  For the medicine to work, Sayid must take it willingly, and only Jack can get Sayid to take the pill.  So, once again, it is all up to Jack.  He must talk Sayid into taking the pill, or Sayid will die.  At least, so they say.

But who to trust?  Jack doesn't trust them; he says he doesn't even trust himself.  You can't blame him.  The situation strikes us, the viewers, as almost banal:  of course, here we have another life and death situation in which a main character must decide what to do, and more importantly, who to trust, and in which appearances are inherently suspect.  We've seen it again, and again, and again.  Our frustration at the plot matches Jack's:  we are all sick of this inability to make sense of the story.  Or, more precisely, we (the audience and the characters) have grown weary of the incessant collapse of meaning as providing the "drama" of the action.  We know they can't make sense of their lives; they know they can't make sense of their lives; we won't even speculate as to how they are going to comprehend their lives on two different planes of existence, between a past that does not (or did not...) exist and a present they tried and failed to obliterate (or did they...).

LOST revels in this loss of meaningful explanations.  To focus on this episode--we have again a confrontation between Jack, as scientific doctor, and a green, homemade, "chinese medicine" pill.  Neither science nor spirituality has helped.  Jack has done them both, but neither gave him the ability to make sense of the island.  The characters are shackled by a complete inability to get hold of their situation, to understand it, to discern when they are acting freely and when they are being manipulated, when they are helping and when they are harming.  Good and evil are beyond them, or they have moved into a situation beyond good and evil.

They are beyond good and evil, not because they have exposed traditional ethical categories as tools of the weak to reign in the power of the strong, but simply because those terms are useless.  Is it "good" or "evil" for Jack to give Sayid the pill?  It's too simple given that Sayid died and came back to life, that he doesn't know what is in it, that it is offered by those who saved Sayid's life and then tortured him, etc.  And that is only focusing on what Jack knows (or at least thinks he knows).  What about all the interminable facts that he (and we) do not and perhaps cannot know?  What is good and what is evil then?  Who's to draw the distinction?  Does it even matter?  Is there really a difference?

Jack and Sayid place the question back to trust.  Who do you trust?  But that question unravels when you no longer trust yourself, when you are consumed by a kind of grief (or refusal to grieve), by a sense of failed responsibility and lost lives.  It is at this point that I think LOST has entered its most theologically interesting terrain.  For LOST is forcing us, as an audience, to make sense of a subject, an agent, who is not the center or ground of meaning.

When we ask whether something was meaningful, we implicitly add to you.  Jack has lost his ability to make sense of the events; they are meaningless because they are meaningless to him.  Meaning is acquired through interpretation--we provide the meaning.  To put it philosophically, we are all Kantians, whether we like it or not.  We all implicitly assume that we must make sense of things.

Instead of either celebrating or attacking this position, LOST places it in crisis.  The subject is overloaded by inconclusive, partial, inexplicable, and misleading data.  Not only is a governing interpretative framework lost (a way to organize or categorize everything, e.g., science and/or religion), but the subject itself is starting to crack.  Jack no longer knows who he is, where he is, when he is, how he is, and so he cannot figure out what to do.  Should he give the pill to Sayid or not?  He'll take it himself--see what happens!  Jack's motivating force is now centering on his need to avoid further guilt--he can't handle any more deaths on his hands.  If he just withholds the pill, he could be guilty, if he gives it to him, he could be guilty, but if he takes it, then maybe he won't be guilty.  Maybe.  Who knows?  Jack doesn't.  Not only has he lost trust himself, he has lost any sense of who he is (leader, failure, doctor, savior, deluded fanatic, etc).  He does not know what he does, nor who he is.  How does he--how do we--act in a world with that has lost all objective and subjective meaning?  The world is not meaningful, and we cannot make it so.

The idea of a stable, external meaning was lost for us centuries ago (philosophically secured in Kant); the subjective production of meaning is gone too.  LOST assumes both of these points, and then explores the ramifications of these facts.  LOST explores a world in which providence--any kind of external, sovereign, divine control--cannot even be thought.  The only way for such an idea to get any traction, any force, would be to base it in our hope, our mental belief, our organization of the world as if such a fact--that God oversaw the world--were true.  The meaning would be one I produced through my belief (regardless of its truth) that God is ordering and sustaining our historical lives.  But we have even lost that ability.  We must now live beyond both the illusion of external meaning and the illusion of being able to provide such meaning ourselves.

This collapse of all meaning is not a new situation; in fact, it is precisely the situation in which Karl Barth wrote (sorry to be more predictable than LOST).  From 1945-1951, Barth wrote his account of creation, that is, in the aftermath of WWII and the holocaust, the Swiss theologian who was exiled from Germany for his refusal to swear allegiance to Hitler, wrote out his doctrine of divine providence.  And he says, right at the beginning, "It is quite plain what God wills as the Lord of the being created by Him, and as the Lord of its history, namely, what is the meaning and purpose, the goal and therefore the glory of His lordly action.  It is not plain because we have lifted the veil of this history and discovered its secret.  It is not plain because we have perceived, planned, or determined it ourselves.  It is plain because God Himself has revealed it to us in His Word.  And He has revealed it in the simple way in which He has revealed Himself--and we must take this seriously--as the triune God who as the Father is over us and as the Son is for us and both in the unity in which as the Holy Spirit he creates our life as a life under Him and again for Him" (CD III/2, p. 33-34).  God is over us and for us (and ruling over us because God is for us).  That is the simple and plain truth, written by this theologian living in the ruins of Germany.

It is simple and plain.  History, our lives as creatures, "do not have their purpose and goal in themselves or apart from the purpose and goal to which the covenant work of God hastens" (36).  Our lives are really made meaningful, but not by us.  Our lives are not meaningful in themselves; history has no meaning in and of itself.  History has meaning inside of--on the basis of--God's gracious decision to be with us and for us (so that we could be with and for God).  History is not a meaningful order; it is precisely the disruption of ordinary meaning, of predictably unfolding events within themselves, by the one who is Lord over history for our sake.  The ground of history comes from outside creaturely history (God) within creaturely history (Incarnation).  To put it more simply, the meaning of history is found only in God's address to us, Jesus Christ.  But this meaning is not a weapon, as if Christians now possess a meaningful sense of the world, and therefore ought to rule and govern and organize those who cannot make sense of the world.  To think that way is to still place our trust in the subject, in the person who can secure his or her own meaning.  That history is meaningful only in Christ means that no history is meaningless, nobody's  history is meaningless, because all history and all bodies have been brought inside of Christ.  We need not master the chaos, the collapsing order, the conflicting and irreconcilable perspectives because they all have already been mastered, by Jesus.  We need not find our meaning because our lives have been made meaningful...without our help.

In this light, the drama of LOST loses its edge because the struggle for meaningful action is misplaced. An action is meaningful neither when it accords with some immanent, self-contained world trajectory (e.g., the upwards path of evolution, or the rules of the island) nor when it accords with my own personal structure of meaning.  An action is meaningful when it is put to use by Christ, for his purposes.  The meaning rests neither out there in the world nor in here, in my mind.  It rests in him, in Jesus, the God who has willed to be, not once, but continually, gracious to us.

If this is true, then I am free from the task of having to provide some order to the world so that I can act in a meaningful way; instead, I am free to entrust my actions to the One who gives life meaning, trusting that he will continue to be gracious and forgive me, and hoping that, by his grace, whatever I do, will be of service to his glory.

(I should mention you should check out Brian Bantum's blog post on LOST, HERE).

Seeing the Neighbor: Immigration, Race, and the Good Samaritan

note: this is a presentation I am working on; all comments would be much appreciated. I've also added Roman numerals to help you navigate through this longer piece:

I. Focuses on Ellis Island and the history of excluding immigrants by race;

II. connects the exclusionary practices ("optics") of Ellis Island to earlier slave auctions and to present day practices of racial profiling.

III. Looks at the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), alluding at points to the discussion in Part I

IV. Examines more closely how the story of the Good Samaritan challenges the "invulnerable seeing" discussed in Part I

V. Concludes by looking briefly at how working with refugees--work that I do--fits within this discussion.

I

On January 1st, 1892, Ellis Island officially opened. In the following three decades, over 70% of immigrants to the U.S. would be processed there. The decades preceding and following this moment were marked not by an open, receptive embrace of the “tired, poor, huddled masses.” Instead, these decades were filled with an increased focus on immigration, race, and citizenship, and with the refinement of techniques for excluding those deemed unworthy to belong.

In 1870, twenty-two years before Ellis Island opened, Congress passed the naturalization act. Previously, one could not become a “naturalized” citizen--meaning a citizen of the U.S.A. despite being born in another country--unless one were a free white person. The act in 1870 did not erase the qualification of being white but was expanded to include immigrants from Africa. The act was intended to complete what began with the 14th amendment: to grant citizenship rights to those who had been enslaved. However, by not erasing the racial component of citizenship but expanding it, Congress tried to answer the problem of slavery while still continuing racist policies of exclusion. By specifying that free whites and persons of African descent could become citizens, the 1870 Act solidified the link between race and citizenship, for it excluded a growing immigrant population, the Chinese. In 1875, five years after the 1870 Naturalization Act and 20 years before the opening of Ellis Island, Congress passed the Page Act. This act, as well as some legislation following it, focused on “oriental women,” women who disrupted the white social body by supposedly carrying diseases and working in the U.S. as prostitutes. These acts began a more intensified classification of “undesirable immigrants” by focusing on nations and races; the Page Act explicitly declared its focus on “subjects of China, Japan, or any Oriental country.” In 1882, ten years before Ellis Island opened, Congress passed two acts that helped further expand the notion of undesirable immigrants: it passed the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which completed what began 1870--the exclusion of Chinese immigrants and the denial of American citizenship to Chinese persons. The other immigration act in 1882 barred “lunatics, idiots, and persons liable to become public charges,” meaning those it deemed unemployable, from entering the States. In1891, one year before the opening of Ellis Island, Congress modified this act by adding to the list polygamists and those carrying contagious diseases.

The focus on health, as should seem obvious from preceding summary, is not just an isolated health issue but one that is intertwined with issues of race, national identity, gender, and the social body. Immigrants were consistently seen as threatening to contaminate, whether by altering the “racial” identity of the American public or corrupting “American” morals and political ideals. In 1891, immigrants became marked as the corrupters in a different sense: they were a threat to the physical health of the American social body. The operations at Ellis Island continued to heighten these associations of race, class, and disease.

Strangers Welcoming Strangers: reflections on Matthew 25:31-46

I spent this Thanksgiving with my uncle; we are the closest family he has (a four hour drive away), my aunt (his wife) having died a couple years ago and his son (my cousin) spending the holidays in jail. It's a long story, the details of which don't need to be divulged. For my uncle, what mattered was that he was still able to share the Thanksgiving meal with family. It also helps that he loves food and Skyler (my wife) is an amazing cook.

The holidays bring with them an increased awareness of family. However, for me, this focus on family began a couple months ago, in relation to my work with refugees. Familial relationships matter in working with refugees. Some refugees have left their families to flee; some have family members who are in "no contact," meaning, for instance, that a brother left the Bhutanese refugee work to find work in India and has not been heard from since he left, three years ago. The government regulates how we house families (how old children can be before they must be in "same gender" bedrooms...I'll withhold comments on this governmental investment in constructing "proper" familial structures).

A few months ago, I met with a refugee who has been in the U.S. for many years now and is working on an masters degree in refugee public health issues. He told me about how, when he came, he had a family member here to welcome him and help him navigate the complexities of adjusting to life in the U.S. We talked about how much harder it is for refugees who have no family, no one to welcome them, and how we both wished the church would become family to these refugees and welcome them.

I've started using this discussion, coupled with a few verses from Matthew 25 ("I was a stranger and you welcomed me"), to begin my orientation with new churches and volunteers. Every time I do it, though, I feel dishonest. I know the scripture is more complicated than I make it seem.

For instance, Jesus never tells us to seek him in the stranger (or sick, hungry, thirsty, naked, or imprisoned). Nor does Jesus ever promise that we will see him in these people. In fact, the story of judgment presupposes that those who served these people did not know they served Jesus, nor were they expecting to find Jesus there at all. Those who ignored these people likewise did not know who they were ignoring.

What bothers me the most, however, is that the story is not about generic individuals but about two peoples, "the nations" (v. 32) and the king's "family" (lit. "my brothers," v. 40), Gentiles and Jews.

The image of the shepherd separating the people comes from Ezekiel 34, where the prophet rages against the "shepherds" of Israel, who not only neglected the sheep (failing to strengthen, feed, heal, search, find, and guide the sheep) but actually fed on the sheep (v. 4-8). God will reject these shepherds (v. 10) and will come and be the shepherd (v. 11) of these scattered and abused people (Israel). In this process, Israel will "no longer suffer the insults of the nations. They shall know that I, the LORD their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people" (29-30).

Given this background, the strangers, hungry, sick, and imprisoned should be seen as specifically the scattered and abused people of Israel, Jesus' "brothers," or, as Paul puts it in Romans 9 (an important text to keep in the back of our minds here), "my brothers according to the flesh."

Matthew 25, then, retells a story about Israel's failed leaders, God's assumption of that leadership, and the people of Israel being rescued from these poor leaders and the abusive nations into which they were sent. If this is the case, then Jesus' retelling of Ezekiel's story of judgment implies that the most important thing we do is not taking care of our own people, or of all generic people, but of this particular people, the people of God, Israel. Our service to, or neglect of, the least of Israel determines our status before God. To neglect Israel is to neglect Israel's King, and hence to neglect God. Likewise, to serve Israel (the lowliest among them) is to serve Israel's King, and hence to serve God.

If this were all Jesus meant, then it would be surprising that, upon finishing this story, Jesus is compelled to talk about his crucifixion (26:2) and the leaders begin conspiring to kill him (26:3). What is so scandalous is Jesus' assertion that he is this Son of Man (a term he uses for himself throughout Matthew), and thus that Jesus is the embodiment of God's rule, the replacement of the false shepherds ("chief priests and elders" 26:3), and the one through whom Israel and the nations will be blessed. Those who serve him by serving the lost sheep of Israel will "inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (25:34). Jesus has the audacity to declare not just what will happen at the end of time but that he is the one who determines what will happen. Jesus does not just see what will happen; he is what will happen. He is the kingdom, the true ruler, the one who has authority to declare the truth of the end times.

Scripture often plays with the tension between the hidden and revealed, the present age and the age to come. This passage pushes that tension further: for it reveals the basis of judgment that was hidden until the time of judgment. Neither the sheep nor the goats thought that their salvation hinged on what they did with the least of Jesus' family. Both are surprised--the basis of judgment was hidden from them until the time of judgment. But in the story, in which the basis of judgment is only revealed at the time of judgement, the basis of judgment becomes unveiled before the time of judgment. Unlike the sheep or the goats in the story, we are explicitly told that our judgment depends on serving Jesus through the service to lowly Israel. Through Jesus, we now know what he teaches nobody knew until the time of judgment.

In the story, we are never told why the "righteous" served the lowly of Israel. By telling us--Gentiles!--the basis of judgment, Jesus provides us with a new way of seeing our action. We, the nations, are not left in the dark but are allowed to see the truth of our actions. In Jesus, we outsiders are welcomed into the family of God; in Jesus, we are given access to what has been promised to Israel, the blessings of God's kingdom. In Jesus, we see that we are in fact bound to Israel, and hence welcomed into the eternal life prepared by Jesus' Father.

We have no right to hear what Jesus says. We have no right to know about eternal life, or judgment. We have nothing of our own that would make us legitimate heirs. We are reminded at the beginning that we are the nations, those into whom Israel was scattered and by whom Israel was trampled. As these people, the sinful nations, we are now reordered and called into service. We are told to do what we did not know we ought to do--serve God's people, Israel. We are told to believe what was beyond our knowledge--that Jesus is the Messiah of Israel, and hence the ruler of the whole world. We are welcomed, now, to do what was beyond our ability to do--to love (and not seek to destroy) the elect people of God. No longer are the scattered and rebuked people of Israel a sign of our rejection (even their judgment testifies to the fact that they are, and we are not, the people of God). In Jesus, we see that these people are a sign of our hope. In Jesus, we see that they are not a sign of our rejection but a sign of God's gracious presence to us. In Jesus, we who were "far off" see that we are no longer "foreigners to the covenants of the promise" (Eph 2). Jesus tells us what we had no right or ability to know--that we are bound to Israel, to Israel's King, and hence to the true God of all creation.

It is through our call to welcome scattered Israel that we are also called to welcome the strangers among us, for me specifically, refugees. We approach the refugees, however, not as those on the inside who are gracious enough to welcome them in. We approach them through the knowledge that we ourselves are strangers bound to a people who are not our own, Israel. Our lives are not just open and receptive, capable of accommodating (and assimilating) the "aliens" in our midst. Our lives exceed our control, overflowing our own boundaries. In being bound to Israel, our existence is ecstatic, standing outside of itself. We do not need to guard our own identity; it is already mixed. By being bound to Israel, we are free to be all things to all people: we have nothing at stake in being a pure people, in having a distinct identity, in being peculiar or noteworthy. We have no ability to control or shape our identity; we are bound to another people and told that this binding is an act of grace. We believe, and thus we serve the lowly in Israel, and through this service, we find our lives flowing out into the lives of those around us, to those who are strangers among us, including refugees.

Serving refugees reminds us that our lives are not just supposed to be open but ecstatic, not just receptive but transgressive ("stepping across"). We are called to live in an uncomfortable exchange, a series of flows and leakages. Our lives are to be marked by seepage, by moments that escape our own confines, and we find our own lives strangely intermixed with those beyond our normal boundaries. We do not need to distinguish ourselves from anyone else, for we have already been marked as strangers welcomed into the household of God and therefore we know that nothing is alien to us. The most ungrateful and belligerent refugee is not our project but our brother or sister, another Gentile, a fellow foreigner, called by Jesus into the blessings of God's people, Israel. We welcome them as family, as one who like us has been called and bound to another people, the Israel of God. We welcome the stranger not just because we were strangers but because Jesus continually calls to become strange again, to recognize and rejoice in our status as foreigners blessed in Israel through Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of Man, the creator of heaven and earth.

with thanks to Micah D., for his friendly critiques.

Mexican and Arabic Bread

I keep looking up syllabuses online, using google to search for things like "race and u.s. immigration syllabus" or "refugees and american cultural studies syllabus." I want to find the right books, ones that will help me theorize the connections between imperialism, racism, immigration, assimilation, gender, etc. I work with refugees; in fact, I often work with white churches, trying to help them work with refugees. I should also say I work in the South.

A week ago, I woke up at 7 am in a panic. I had a day off and I wasn't stressed by the amount of work I still had to do. I was stressed by the kind of work I was doing. I thought to myself, "my job is to help white southern churches establish paternalistic relationships with refugees." I had been listening to Timothy Tyson's __Blood Done Sign My Name__, a memoir set within a larger portrait of the history of racism in North Carolina. At one point in the book, he describes white middle class Christians who felt good about themselves and their charity as long as the African-Americans displayed the appropriate gratitude. They gave, out of their abundance ("blessed to be a blessing," some might say). They gave in a way that made them feel better about themselves while simultaneously masking the violence that structured white-black relations (and also produced the wealth, the blessing, out of which they gave). The white benefactors could feel good about being on top because they were generous and were "well liked" by their black servants. The charity actually served as an attempt to restore the fact of mastery ("they" depend on my kindness) while hiding its violence. It was a violent charity, so to speak, and I woke up fearing I was producing a new form of it, no longer with African-Americans but with newly arriving, dark skinned refugees.

My response was not surprising: initial shock, and then, research. I could see that race, immigration, assimilation, American culture, Christianity, gender, and imperialism were all somehow tied together. I knew that one could not talk about refugees without talking about the history of American immigration (which cannot be understood apart from race, gender, and imperialism). But I wanted help in seeing how it all worked together. I wasn't seeking knowledge to gain simple mastery; I wanted to know because I wanted to help others--and myself--to move beyond it. I didn't want my work with churches to become another form of violent charity. But perhaps I'm still a bit too much of the academic, thinking that books are the solution to everything.

On this past Friday, a little over a week after my terrifying realization, I was driving an Iraqi refugee home. He often helps me move heavy furniture (though he refuses, as do I, to move any more of those $10 dressers we found). We've become friends--he's now been to my apartment and met "my family" (he laughed, likening our dog and our cat to "tom and jerry"). On Friday, as I was driving him home, he asked if we could stop by a Mexican bakery. Apparently, Mexican bread is pretty similar to Arabic bread and he wanted to pick up a few roles. We pulled into the parking lot; I advised him before he stepped out to make sure he didn't walk into any potholes filled with water. I sat in the car while he ran into the store, obviously hurrying, either to make sure he made it in before the store closed or so as to minimize the inconvenience for me.

He came out of the store with a couple of bags of bread; I thought it was a bit excessive (he doesn't live too far from the bakery, he could certainly come back in a few days). He got into the car, tied one of the bags closed, and then pushed it by my backpack in the backseat: "This is for you, Tim." I have worked with him enough to know not to argue. He is on food stamps and cash assistance, still waiting for us to help him find work. Yet every time I come to pick him to help me move furniture, he insists that I first sit down and drink juice. If I refuse, he will insist.

I wanted to offer him money but I knew that would only insult him. I thanked him for it. And I thought to myself, I am so stingy, I am so dominated by fears of scarcity that I would never think of doing that. Both my wife and I work, and I would probably debate whether to spend a couple of bucks to buy someone bread just to see if they like it. I have to force myself to offer my favorite teas to guests instead of being thrilled to share with them something that I love. It's not just a deficiency in the "spiritual gift" of hospitality. My imagination has been thoroughly shaped by ideas of scarcity and self-preservation.

Though it is enormously frustrating, I don't know how much time I will have to read all the good books I found. However, that one interaction with my refugee friend taught me a lot about immigration and assimilation. Though I don't know how race, gender, and imperialism shape the way we think about immigration and assimilation, I pray that my friend will resist all our efforts to make him a "self-sufficient" individualist. I pray that he will continue to disrupt the ways in which we--at least I--so often live in the mode of fearful self-preservation (a fear which is, I think, connected to forms of mastery, for fearful self-preservation only makes sense if I am still under the illusion that my life, and the world around me, are in some way under my control). I needed that witness; I needed to be given a few Mexican rolls that apparently taste like Arabic bread (and tasted to me a lot like standard dinner rolls). It was an act of charity that had no trace of violence; and for that, and for the rolls, I am grateful.