Migrant Truth

“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

-          Lev. 19:33-24

My pastor at First Lutheran Church of the Trinity often repeats what makes a story true, especially one in scripture, is not that it happened once a long a time ago but that it happens over and over and over again, even today.

I wish that weren’t so true about the migrant narrative of the Christmas story.

On Tuesday night I attended a vigil at the Chicago Temple, which is home to First United Methodist Church and is situated just across from City Hall, the courthouse, and a few blocks away from the federal building. I settled into my seat in the small chapel on the second floor, and then a man shared his story.

A true story.

Charles Bayo was born in the Belgian Congo, now officially called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He moved out of the country of his birth when the nation gained its independence, and hasn’t really stopped moving since. Charles lived in Belgium until the authorities told him to move out because he was a colonial and not a Belgian citizen. Eventually he settled in Chicago where he had his own landscaping business. Then ICE knocked on the door.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is in charge of carrying out the United States’ very flawed immigration laws, and they certainly catch hell from all sides. However, the way that various enforcement agencies treated Charles is inexcusable. He was held in a county prison for a month, and then he was held in a detention center for people caught in the immigration system. He repeated how he wasn’t allowed to go outside for six months. He was treated as a common prisoner, although no one could ever truly land on what it was that he did wrong.

That is a true story, and not just because it happened this past year.

The Hebrew scriptures speak repeatedly of the chosen people of God as strangers and wanderers. Memory of this migrant experience was codified in the Mosaic Law. And later, when the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem, once again the Hebrews, now called Jews, dispersed throughout the known world, from Babylon to various nations of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Christmas story, too, is a migrant’s story. According to the Gospel of Luke, the authorities in far away Rome decided that everyone needed to go their ancestral home for an imperial census. Thus the Prince of Peace was born in a stable, far away from the family and community that would normally care for a birth. The story from Matthew’s perspective is even more troubling: Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus had to flee their home to escape certain death at the hands of Herod the Great, a regional powerbroker known for his construction projects and his Machiavellian power lust.

These are true stories.

Around the country and around the world events similar to the one that I attended on Tuesday occurred in order to express our grief at how our governments and our societies treat the marginalized and displaced folks in our communities. In our contemporary, secular American culture, Christmas at its purest form is a time for family and friends to appreciate and love one another. The manner in which immigrants are treated in our country violates even this watered-down version of Christmas.

However, Christmas, in its deepest sense, is a celebration of incarnation, of Emmanuel, in our very, very messed up world. God in her most transcendent, ineffable form became human and then suffered as we suffered. Jesus was born smelling of manure, and then he couldn’t even stay there. But that is what is means to be human for a staggering number of people in our world.

Due to war. Due to disease. Due to famine. Due to greed. Due to the worship of mammon.

It’s a true story, not only because it happened once a long time ago, but because it happens over and over and over again, even today. Even to your neighbors. Even to you and me.

Join with me and celebrate Truth this Christmas.

Just Jobs

I have a friend named Bob. I know him primarily from the worship band at First Trinity Lutheran where I go to church, and all of us that play with Bob on Sundays will quickly admit that he's the glue that keeps the band together. Bob also plays sousaphone at various protests in Chicagoland with his anarchist marching band, and he organizes concerts at the church's community for the nicest punks you could ever hope to meet. On a personal level, I know Bob as a guy who just plain cares for people. That point was driven home when he stayed all night at Grant Park and then the police station on 18th and State until I came out with fellow Chicago Occupiers early in the morning.

 And Bob is officially unemployed.

At this point there shouldn't be any shame at that fact when so many millions of Americans are in the same boat. While Department of Labor statistics showed that the unemployment rate went under 9 percent for the first time in few years, the announcement was accompanied with the clarification that unemployment was down because so many people have officially stopped looking for jobs. Whether young people just entering the job market or overqualified veterans who fetch salaries that companies are looking to shed, the workers of the United States are in the middle of the toughest times since at least when my parents were getting their undergraduate degrees, and perhaps not since my grandparents were growing up.

With the incredible advances of technology in the second half of the 20th century and the deregulation of global trade, the United States has lost the manufacturing jobs that gave us the mid-century economic boom. We now have a service-based economy, and only 8% of private-sector jobs come with the protection of labor unions. Global capital moves as quickly as a high-speed internet connection, and a missed keystroke can mean a drop of nearly a thousand points in markets.

All that is to say that we live in very unstable times.

That was why a year ago Interfaith Worker Justice, the organization I work for as a 2-year missionary and organizer, started the Faith Advocates for Jobs campaign. The campaign has three basic goals: create a national network of faith communities that directly serve unemployed workers, use that network to advocate for public policies that assist the unemployed, and develop a speakers' bureau that can educate the public about the jobs crisis in the United States. I have personally been helping to organize Chicago faith communities to serve, advocate for, and minister with unemployed workers in and around the City of Big Shoulders. As I've worked, I've found just how daunting the task is.

On the South Side of Chicago where I live, the unemployment crisis is especially crushing. So many former factories and warehouses stand empty, eerily reminding us of a not-quite-forgotten past. In my neighborhood, the most stable jobs used to be city jobs, but as companies kept moving their business further and further away from Chicago, the tax revenue dried up. And let's face it--Chicago, the Windy City, isn't exactly known for dealing with money in a fair way to begin with.

Which brings me back to my friend, Bob. He was a music teacher in the Chicago Public Schools system, but he was laid off along with hundreds of other teachers. I saw what Bob can do with kids and instruments and the most minimal of resources. They had an amazing concert back in August. All I could think as I watched and listened to these kids from the West Side was, "how the hell does CPS  not have a place for this man?"

Friends, we, as citizens of this country, must ask that same question of our entire nation. How is it that we don't have jobs for so many of our neighbors? We must re-evaluate our current government policies. What are our tax-dollars doing? Are we funding infrastructure projects, or funding both sides of the war in Afghanistan? Are we promoting nutrition and health through local education programs and grocery stores, or are we helping agribusiness to flood foreign markets with unimaginably cheap grains? And can it be a just a strange coincidence that as we have deregulated  trade, income inequality has sky-rocketed?

As we come to grips with the answers to these questions, consider these actions. First, check out and join Faith Advocates for Jobs. Next, call or visit your congressperson, and tell them to extend unemployment benefits. You can find out who your congressperson is by following this link. Lastly, pray, preferably with other people, for guidance and strength, especially during the Advent season, which is both liturgically and realistically a season of stress and anxiety.

My friend, Bob, has said that he doesn't really like talking about unemployment because he doesn't enjoy receiving people's sympathy. And he doesn't consider himself a music teacher; he's a music enabler. Bob still looks to help other people, even when times are tough.

We can all learn a lot from Bob, and it's just not just about music.

Advent, Anticipation and Eschatology

Advent is an anticipatory season. I remember when I grew up in central Pennsylvania us little tykes would ceremoniously hang greens on the pews shortly after Thanksgiving, sing "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel", and hear the pastor read from the book of Isaiah. My family would gather around a homemade advent wreath of freshly clipped pine boughs and sing Christmas carols, each of our favorites. We opened the little doors on our advent calendars, one every day.

But as my theological knowledge has deepened, especially since attending a Lutheran church, I've learned that advent is also an eschatological season. That means we are anticipating the end of days--the apocalypse. Following the Common Lectionary, we read passages from Matthew 25 and 26 and similar passages from other gospels where Jesus exhorts his disciples to stay awake and watchful. After all, the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

Well, that's weird to talk about during Christmas season.

However, I've realized that in anticipating the Christ Child, we also anticipate Incarnation in general. We are anticipating the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Thus, when we celebrate the birth of Christ, we celebrate the birth of Christ within each of us. We remember our baptism, our confirmation, and other important events in our spiritual lives. We also remember the coming of Christ in in the communal sense, remembering Pentecost and other such holy days.

It is the eternal already-but-not-yet of Christ. And this got me thinking.

Recently I was talking with another young community organizer, and as often happens, we strayed away from the campaign and started talking about spirituality and life in general. Eventually she asked, "what would you do if the world actually was without injustice?" I laughed because I thought she was being ironic, but she was quite serious. My friend added that she thought it was very important for people involved in activism to imagine what the world would be like without the causes that we devote our lives to eliminate--and how we would fit into that world.

Damn.

And that is really what we do during advent. Not only do we anticipate the Christ Child but we also anticipate the end of injustice and heartache. Walter Brueggemann would call this anticipation the prophetic consciousness. We dance and sing and play every kind of musical instrument. We paint pictures and make sculptures. We tell stories on stages and around campfires and at the dinner table. We run up and down hills and climb tall trees and swim in rivers, lakes, and oceans. We do all of these things because we are free to live and love in the beautiful creation that we are still creating with our God who is both transcendent in heaven and immanent on earth.

I have to admit that I struggled with my friend's question, but eventually I answered that I would still become a pastor because I still find my greatest joy in helping others to experience God. That is one of the beauties of the Church; while it stands opposed to the worship of mammon and other despicable gods, it actively creates the world that it anticipates. Or at least it can do that, but it is up to us to make sure of it.

So dear friends, as we hang the greens, string the lights, and sing carols, let us also anticipate the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Happy Advent.

The Liberation of Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a tricky holiday. Established by a war-time president, then propped up with historically inaccurate legends, and now largely overlooked by retailers, how should we view Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving can be especially problematic for folks who are not part of the privileged Anglo heritage. Not only is turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce very foreign, but the legends of pilgrims and Native Americans sitting together seem to mock their day-to-day experience. Their schools and neighborhoods get routinely and often systematically neglected. Their employers keep them guessing if they will have a job tomorrow. Many live in fear that they or their loved ones will be captured by police and deported.

And even giving thanks can seem more like a distraction than a joyful holiday practice. I recall a quote from Eugen V. Debs, the great labor organizer of the late 19^th century, “Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.” After all, in using the language of the Occupy movement, the 1% wants the 99% to thank them for their jobs and the way that they keep money flowing in our economy, and thus it is a regressive ploy to blind the suffering masses of their plight.

Yeah, so happy freakin’ Thanksgiving. Now let’s get out the Festivus stick and get to the feats of strength.

That kind of attitude just doesn’t sit well with me. Of course, coming from an Anglo-American background, I can identify with the happy-go-lucky sentiment of the Thanksgiving legend, however blatantly false and pernicious it may be. But the point is that we move beyond the bitterness of oppression. Paolo Freire pointed out that we cannot allow oppression to continue its cycle; we must break free from it.

I believe that giving thanks can help us break free from oppression.

Really, thankfulness can be liberatory. I think back to the things that I was thankful for in my elementary school classes where we acted out the Thanksgiving legend. My classmates and I rarely said material things. We talked about family, friends, and security—maybe not in those terms, but it was what we meant.

I recall my favorite Thanksgiving tradition. My grandmother always brings mincemeat pie to remind her and the entire family about how people provide for each other in times of need. It’s about what we could call agape, or unconditional love. It’s about grace.

In recognizing grace in our lives, we break free from the material hells that so many people inhabit. We are no longer cogs in a machine that simply increases the bottom line of a corporation, but we are also agents overflowing with the energy that comes from grace. That energy flows into all sorts of things that affirm our vitality—art, music, athletics, academics, family—and these things are naturally liberatory.

So whether you carve the Tom turkey on Thursday or protest its imperialist implications, remember to give thanks.

The gates of liberation are opened by the keys of thanksgiving.

A Carwashero Takes the People's Mic

The power of the Occupy movements all over the country and across the world is that the microphone is taken away from the 1% plutocrats and then given to the folks who have such little means to tell their story. The beauty of the “people’s microphone”, the method of sound amplification via dozens of people repeating what the speakers is saying, is that the crowd recognizes everyone’s right to their voice. That power and that beauty is humbling yet empowering.

Now let’s give the people’s mic to a carwashero.

On Tuesday afternoon car wash workers in the Chicago Southwest Side neighborhood of Little Village took that people’s mic and told their story. They worked for 12-hour days in all sorts of Chicago weather with little or no safety equipment, receiving abuse after indignity from their boss.

And then they didn’t even receive actual wages for their work. Their employer distributed only the tips that the workers received for their labor, resulting in some days of only $40 for a 12-hour day. That, dear friends, is the story of wage theft.

This story isn’t only true because it happened to these car wash workers. It’s true because it happens every day all over the United States, in urban landscapes and rural communities alike. In a landmark study of wage theft in America’s three largest cities, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, researchers showed that workers lost more than $56.4 million per week.[i] This money is taken from the most vulnerable workers in our country, where the difference between making rent, putting food on the table, and providing medicine for one’s children is a matter of hours of pay.

Worker advocates call wage theft the crime epidemic that no one talks about, and that falls right into the Occupy narrative. The rich, powerful, and connected in our society try very hard to make sure that the vast majority of people not only accept these abuses but are thankful that folks have degrading, subsistence-level jobs. However, low-wage workers are finding a way to tell their side of the story.

Workers’ centers and their union allies act as a sort of people’s mic for low-wage and immigrant workers to make sure people hear about they experience every day. While the 1% tries to divide and demonize the lower strata of workers, workers’ centers unite and affirm the humanity carwarsheros and other low-wage workers.

I personally had the privilege of acting as a person’s mic at the protest on Tuesday, translating for a worker named Martín. Just like other workers I’ve met while serving as a missionary with the national group Interfaith Worker Justice, Martín understood how powerful his voice can be when other workers and advocates stand with him and amplify his voice for the world to hear.

So, on a day when Occupy movements affirm their power to speak with a prophet’s voice, let’s give that people’s mic to a carwashero and occupy together.

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[i] Berhardt, A., Milkman, R., Theodor, N., et al. 2010. Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers: Violations in Employment and Labor Law in America’s Cities. Chicago: Center for Urban Economic Development, Uinveristy of Illinois at Chicago, New York: National Employment Law Project, Los Angeles: UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Radical Reconciliation

The building was dwarfed by the skyscrapers that surrounded it. Down in the Financial District of New York City, the John Street Church seemed like a real-life anachronism tucked into the canyons created by the towers looming dozens of floors into the mid-Atlantic sky. It had a humble, wooden sign that protruded in a way that seemed better suited for a British pub than a house of worship amongst the temples of capital. But there it was, housing the oldest Methodist congregation in the United States

.

I visited John Street Church with my US-2 peers on Thursday night of our mid-term training. The seven of us young adults came from a variety of locations—Detroit, Fargo, Honolulu—and we had spent the day deconstructing the factors that drive contemporary mass migration, speaking on a panel across from the United Nations, and visiting a community organization based in East Harlem. It was already a full day, crisscrossing the island of Manhattan, but we had yet to go to visit Occupy Wall Street that night. So we stopped at John Street Church.

We ate dinner in the basement of the church, which also served as a small museum with artifacts from early American Methodism, including the earliest known portrait of John Wesley. As we munched on Cuban cuisine from just around the corner, Pastor Jason described the relationship that had developed between the 256-year-old congregation and the protestors at Zuccotti Park only a few blocks away. The congregation was a mix of young adults working downtown and homeless folks who tried to scrape by on the streets, of left-wingers who went to every General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street and protectors of the 1%’s wealth. In this mix, what were the Methodists on John Street to do?

As a self-proclaimed radical who was arrested a week prior for refusing to vacate Grant Park as part of Occupy Chicago, I wanted to hear Pastor Jason talk about how bold the church was. Certainly the body of Christ proclaimed a new day of liberation of poor and opened the doors to the Occupiers! Actually…no, not exactly. The John Street congregation decided to use their unique location to proclaim another Christian principle: reconciliation.

Pastor Jason explained that it is clear in the scriptures that Jesus came to proclaim liberation to not only the 99% but the 100%. The one time that Jesus himself used the 99 vs. 1 dichotomy (Matt. 18: 10-14), the special preference goes to the 1. While Jesus taught crowds in ways similar to teach-ins held around the United States at various Occupy movements, Jesus was not really a populist. After all, the crowds wanted to seize him and dispose of his revolution as often as they wanted to make him king.

That’s the funny thing about this grace thing—it’s free to everyone. Yes, the prophets and Jesus showed that God has a special preference for the despised and marginalized of the world, however Jesus also showed that grace is for everyone. At the point when Jesus could have utilized the crowd best—the triumphant entry into Jerusalem that we celebrate on Palm Sunday—Jesus immediately left the city after clearing the temple of the corrupt money-changers.

There was no populist Occupy Jerusalem in Jesus’ day. After all, Jerusalem was already occupied by the Roman legions.

The experience of grace that leads to true metanoia, or what we might call repentance, can occur in all people. Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God, but Jesus didn’t say that the poor would just walk through either. There is no cheap grace—not for Wall Street, not for Liberty Park (as the Occupiers call Zuccotti Park), not for the neglected ghettos of South Side Chicago, not for the expanses of farms of the Midwest. Grace is terribly and awfully expensive.

And so we proclaim Christ crucified. We do not pay for grace ourselves, but God gives grace by shedding the life-blood of Christ, the begotten Son of God. The payment is wretchedly ugly and ignoble and undignified. It probably looked something like the slow death of Muammar Qaddafi, except Jesus wasn’t hiding when his persecutors captured him.

So what does this have to say about Occupy Wall Street and the Church? I think it says that we still have a lot to learn about this grace thing. It is not summed up in chant-able verses glorifying the 99%. It is not found in leftist ideologies that claim to redistribute the ill-gotten wealth of the bourgeoisie to the wretched of the earth. Grace is found solely in the cross.

So while I will continue to support the Occupy movement, especially in Chicago, I go knowing that my ultimate concern (in the words of Paul Tillich) is with my Lord and God. And that may just lead back to a South Side holding cell (but hopefully not until after my hearing on Nov. 21^st). Or it may lead to sharing the Elements with a hedge-fund manager because he needs that grace just as much as I do.

That is radical reconciliation.

Amen.

Occupy Everywhere. Occupy Together.

(Part 2 of Maintain and Reform)

“The success or failure of this project depended not on increase in numbers and influence, but on an increase in faithfulness … By Wesley’s own standard, the Methodist movement must be reckoned a failure.”

-          Theodore Jennings, Good News to the Poor: John Wesley’s Evangelical Economics

Bold. Inclusive. Relevant.

I am personally convinced that the gospel of Jesus Christ is indeed bold, inclusive, and relevant.

Now more than the last 30 years the brokenness of our world is apparent. Not only are millions on the Horn of Africa dying of hunger and malnutrition, our neighbors here in the United States are struggling to put food on the table. Not only are sweatshop exploiting workers in Southeast Asia, day laborers on our street risk their lives every day for wages that aren’t even guaranteed to them. Not only are despotic tyrants in the Middle East silencing critics by any means available, our own elected officials increasingly ignore the cries of the most desperate people in our neighborhoods.

We desperately long for a gospel that changes this, and the gospel of Jesus Christ does exactly that.

The gospel of Jesus Christ makes the first last and the last first. It provides an abundance of resources for everyone to share. It forgives us our debts then convicts us to forgive our debtors.

The gospel of Jesus Christ reconciles all people and even all the earth back to our Creator. It is not limited to folks with a certain skin tone, a bank account, or even a Social Security number. This gospel does care about how and with whom you have sex, but it has nothing to do with excluding non-heteronormative folks. This gospel does care about what you do with your body during a pregnancy, but it has just as much to say about the rest of your life as well.

Bold. Inclusive. Relevant.

It was for this gospel that I was arrested in the early-morning hours of October 16 in Grant Park, Chicago. Many of the 175 brothers and sisters who (briefly) went to prison with me do not share my faith in the church of Jesus Christ, but they do have a passionate faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Occupiers from Wall Street to Tucson, Seattle to Orlando, and even to London, Rome, and Tokyo believe in this gospel. They don’t need to say the name of Jesus for me to know this; I saw that faith in their interactions with one another, with passers-by, with the police who were handcuffing them.

Dear friends, what would it look like for our churches to also live out this radical faith? The poor and the sick and the needy and the stranger and the imprisoned would have their wants and needs met. All voices would be honored, and worship on the Sabbath would be the most integrated hour of the week. We would abandon our church buildings because they’re not big enough to hold everyone, so we would hold worship and prayer outdoors or in each others’ homes.

And isn’t that also the great fear? Foul-smelling homeless and scary-looking wild-hairs would sit or stand next to us. Rich folks would have less because poor folks would be getting what they need. Worship would be loud and raucous and uncontrolled.

But I am convinced that to live out this bold, inclusive, and relevant gospel of Jesus Christ is indeed the only way to revitalize our churches. We cannot do it with a capital campaign, unless it goes to help the needy in our neighborhood. We cannot do it with hip youth programs, unless the youth learn about sex and poverty and addiction along with love and peace and joy. We cannot do it with mission trips to majority-world nations, unless that relationship between wealthy and poor grows to the point of true solidarity.

By the end of his life, John Wesley complained bitterly of how the people called Methodists were very good at “earning all they can and saving all they can” but quite failing at “giving all they can”. I do not agree with everything Wesley said (for example, I am glad that we have forsaken the English crown), but his dedication to the radical gospel of Jesus Christ is something with which I agree completely.

I fear that Wesley would not support the Occupy movement of today; it challenges authority far too much for his convictions. However, I am quite certain Jesus of Nazareth would be quite comfortable among the tattooed and pierced masses trying desperately to get the immensely wealthy and well-connected to finally listen to them.

On Saturday night (and Sunday morning) we chanted “we are unstoppable; another world is possible”. That possible world is based on the gospel of Jesus Christ, and indeed the Hebrew prophets, the saints, and Jesus of Nazareth prophesied that this possible world will ultimately be victorious.

And while the Occupations have the headlines for now, the gospel of Jesus Christ is not limited to them. The gospel is evident in homeless shelters, food pantries, clothing closets, workers’ centers, union halls, public schools, and churches. Yes, even churches!

So if we want to maintain our ecclesiastical structure I am convinced that we must reform it so that the gospel of Jesus Christ is apparent in it. Let us as a church embrace the Occupy movement and learn from it.

Occupy everywhere. Occupy together. And occupy with love.