Bearing Witness

Isaiah 6:8  And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me.”

The second AZ2DC (round 2) bus has come home from the trip to DC to pray outside The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner’s door.  This hallway has become a place of holding vigil since October.  The desire of all those that stand in that hallway to sing and pray is to see Congress move on immigration reform.  The families that we know and love are suffering and the window of opportunity for a bill to pass this year is quickly disappearing.

Much has happened in establishing a presence in DC since the first bus left.  Many groups of people like ourselves have come from around the country to pray together for reform.  They, like we have done, sleep on the floor of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church; like us, they traveled long distances to come to DC to appeal to the members of the House of Representatives to place a bill on the floor.  Our method is prayer and telling our stories.  We also sing.

I came home from this trip last night and have an overwhelming sense that though this mission to DC has a very specific objective of ending suffering by repairing a broken immigration system, it also holds in its hands a very holy purpose of “bearing witness”.  It wasn’t lost on any of us that at this Advent season, where we Christians bear witness to the coming of Christ, that we were enacting many of the same motifs of the Christmas story.  We knocked on closed doors looking for “room” in our nation for the strangers among us.  We experienced the good favor of “kings” and the fear of powerful people who could hurt children and mothers.  We met and affirmed those that “pray and wait” in the fasters tent, resembling the Simeons and Annas among us.  We sang loudly in the open air like the angels, made pilgrimage like the wise men, asked for help from people who could help if they were willing, worshipped and prayed and prayed some more … and we bore witness in the open to anyone who would dare listen to the stories of those affected by our flawed  immigration system.  We sang and prayed of the coming of Jesus into this very space and place for our rescue. Jesus is our hope, for He is the one who reminds us that when we welcome the immigrant (the stranger) we welcome Him.

The faithful core team that has been present since the beginning will remain until the 13^th, when congress ends its session for the year.  They will serve to integrate others from around the county who will come throughout the week to carry the work of the vigil daily.  There will be many who come.  They will bear witness also, they will offer their stories … of dads in deportation proceedings who committed the crime of having a bolt missing from a license plate … of the dreams of parents for their children and how these children intend to make them proud … they will tell of the children left behind after a hardworking parent is forcibly removed from the U.S. … they will tell of their faith in God, their commitment to sacrifice until the suffering stops, their hope and love for this country, and their persistent endurance to continue in the struggle.  They will look like our team looked, grandmas, moms, dads, college students, young adults, teen-agers, small children, a few scattered white and black people … all of them ready to bear witness to what they know.

Our last activity on this trip was to visit DC as “touristas”.   Providentially, we had just left the Lincoln memorial and were at the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial when CNN came up to us to do an interview.  We had been singing there.  They wanted to get our reaction to the death of Nelson Mandela.  We were stunned, we hadn’t heard, so busy all week and all day in particular.  It seemed so extraordinary to be located directly among this much history, all mingled up inside the same message … “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”.  CNN left us, and we prayed that we would be and raise up Lincolns and Mandelas and Kings and that we would suffer long and that we would always, “bear witness”.

Matthew 18:16

But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses.

Submitted by Kit Danley from a bus somewhere between Washington, DC and Phoenix, Arizona, Neighborhood Ministries.

(To follow AZ2DC’s activity log on to Facebook and Twitter)

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”

Transformational Love and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

" I do hope that everyone will breathe a prayer of gratitude to God
this weekend for gracing our planet with Dr. Martin Luther King." 

~Tweeted by Bill Hybels, 13 January 2012

In 2007 I was invited to write the following essay on Martin Luther King, Jr's. words from his "Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience" and an application to the current day issue of immigration that was published  at Non-violent Migration, a blog that explored the principles of nonviolence and social change with the words of Dr. Martin Luther King. Many of Dr. Kings words, speeches and writings are harder hitting than the MLK quotations that are repeated every January.  I am reprinting my essay here as a tribute to the 2012 MLK Holiday. I invite you to interact about your own role in making the world a better place.

. . . we come together to work toward a better world of equality and justice. This . . . essay is a response to the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. submitted as part of a group effort to have a conversation about using nonviolent principles to bring human rights to migrant populations.

In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addressed the annual meeting of The Fellowship of the Concerned with a speech about “Law, Love, and Civil Disobedience.” This was addressed to an interracial group of professional people who may have been discouraged because of a lack of progress and the violence that faced some who would carry their civil rights ideals forward. The problem, as described by Dr. King, is resistance in the south to the Supreme Court ruling (1954) that outlawed segregation. This has been met with counter resistance and civil disobedience of local ordinance from the student movement to move desegregation forward. This struggle needed to continue then. It needs to continue today. It is a struggle, as those who have privileges will not surrender them voluntarily. This is true today as it was in 1961.

The question to be answered by King in this speech is—how will the struggle be waged? The answer is profound. Everyone is transformed in the process—the oppressed and the oppressors. No one remains the same. God’s agape love is the catalyst.

Historically, the two most common ways to deal with the problem is either to surrender or to rise up with counter violence. King proposes a third way. It is the way of non-violent resistance. This approach was not intuitive or easily understood. King took a principled approach and worked hard to build a movement on those principles.

King is aware that the struggle is against an unjust system not against people. He says:

“There is something else: that one seeks to defeat the unjust system, rather than individuals who are caught in that system. And that one goes on believing that somehow this is the important thing, to get rid of the evil system and not the individual who happens to be misguided, who happens to be misled, who was taught wrong. The thing to do is to get rid of the system and thereby create a moral balance with society.”

Some of my learning about the civil rights struggles and the evils that were fought has been through movies. For some readers here, most was learned through books and the telling of stories in film. Cinema has a way of vilifying people by creating suitably hateable characters. This makes movies that sell tickets.

In the real world, identifying individuals who personify evil may merely be a distraction. There are plenty from whom to choose. Insert the name of the one you love to hate. Everywhere one turns on the Internet there are bloggers, and commenters, newscasters and talking heads, who are bashing someone to objectify the antithesis of their point-of-view. We need to focus on changing the systems. Changing people’s minds and hearts will lead to transformed culture and changed systems. Use God’s agape love to love the people we do not like. Until we change the system that supports injustice, the injustice will continue to oppress the weak. Focus on what is important. For Dr. King it was the segregated South. Today, it is the failed immigration system, unjust exploitation of immigrant labor, and international policies that devastate foreign economies.

That some laws are just and others are unjust, and that people have the capacity to understand the difference is essential to the founding of our county and the Christian faith’s pulpit from which Dr. King preached. King says:

“ . . . A just law is a law that squares with a moral law, it is a law that squares with that which is right, so that any law that uplifts human personality is a just law. . . . An unjust law is a code that the majority inflicts on the minority that is not binding on itself. . . .An unjust law is a code which the majority inflicts upon the minority, which that minority had no part in enacting or creating. . . .Individuals who stand up on the basis of civil disobedience realize that they are following something that says that there are just laws and there are unjust laws.”

Thomas Jefferson and the other signers of the US Declaration of Independence, carried it even further saying,

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . . But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

In the Christian faith tradition, there are biblical directives to both obey the civil authorities, and, when contradictory to God’s laws, to reject them. The Christian Bible says that civil authorities have the responsibility to ensure that people can live peaceful, quiet lives (2 Timothy 2:2) and to govern rightly and ensure order (Romans 13). When faced with a choice to obey God or the law, the Apostle Peter declares that they will obey God and disobey the civil and religious laws of men (Acts 5:29). In the biblical narrative, there are times when the government is clearly in the wrong and described as a dragon or a beast causing death and destruction (Revelation 13).

#

When we choose to engage in civil disobedience, we must be explicit about the meaning of any such activity. Without explicit, carefully written and spoken words to explain what this action means, we may be wasting our precious resources. I do not believe that some of the recent actions that I have been aware of have been carefully planned and explicitly interpreted by the initiators. When words come, it seems to be an after thought. This is not only because it is being drowned out by louder voices of opposition, but also that may be part of the reason.

Recently the local NPR affiliate radio station here did a story on some arrests of protesters at a federal detention facility downtown. The reporter who covered the action seems to be a progressive and enlightened about what the basic issues are. But there was no articulation of how these arrests where directed at anything going on within the detention facilities, which I assume houses people picked up in ICE raids awaiting hearing or not and departure from the USA. There was nothing available on the website of the organization whose representative was quoted by the reporter. The representative called the action civil disobedience as the arrests were anticipated. But nothing beyond that was offered. Let’s not undervalue the importance of adding meaning with explicit descriptions of how the actions are to be interpreted.  I wrote about this here and here.

#

I am not always hopeful. Sometimes I am near despair. There is so much injustice that remains. The opposing voices are so loud, disturbing, ubiquitous. I borrow hope from the words of Dr. King: “This movement is a movement based on faith in the future. It is a movement based on a philosophy, the possibility of the future bringing into being something real and meaningful. It is a movement based on hope.” I mentioned this to someone recently and he reminded me that Dr. King caught a bullet. Little has changed, he said.  I know that.

King reminds us “. . .that [the] students [of his day] had faith in the future. That the movement was based on hope, that this movement had something within it that says somehow even though the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice. And I think this should be a challenge to all others who are struggling to transform the dangling discords of our Southland into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” Today the discords of our Southland are on our southern border. The symphony may be made up of mariachis.

Dr. King was able to say this when his home had been bombed and churches were bombed. And people died. It is not be easy, but there is hope. Changing people’s hearts will change systems; changing systems changes the future.

###

Note: for an easy to understand and compelling description of the different kinds of love to which Dr. King alludes: storge (affection), phileo (friendship), eros (romantic love), and agape (charity or God-love) see C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (1960).

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”

From a Birmingham Jail to Georgia and Alabama

Guest blog: Lessons from “A Letter from Birmingham Jail”

From Robert Chao Romero

“I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’… I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?’… Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church.”

 These words, penned by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, still ring unfortunately true today. In his day, Dr. King was the leading Christian voice protesting the unjust Southern laws which enforced unbiblical segregation between blacks and whites.   Citing St. Augustine, Dr. King asserted that unjust laws are not really laws at all because they stand in contradiction to God’s eternal Law.   He found himself deeply disappointed with most evangelical and fundamentalist churches of the South because they failed to  publicly   challenge the southern segregation laws which stood in direct opposition to the biblical truth that all men and women, regardless of ethnic background, are made equally in the image of God.  

Many applications from “A Letter from Birmingham Jail” can be made with regards to undocumented immigration issues in the South today.   The state legislatures of Alabama and Georgia have once again penned some of the most hateful and unbiblical laws targeting ethnic minorities—in this case, undocumented immigrants from Latin America.   These laws are like Arizona SB-1070 on steroids.  The Alabama laws, passed earlier this month, bar undocumented immigrants from attending college, prohibit undocumented immigrants from applying for or soliciting work, and criminalize the rental of residential property to undocumented immigrants.  The Georgia legislation, signed by state governor Nathan Deal in May, authorizes police officers to question individuals about their immigration status in certain criminal investigations and threatens to fine undocumented immigrants $250,000, or send them to jail for 15 years, for using fake identifications in search of employment. 

This mean-spirited racist legislation from Alabama and Georgia violates both the letter and spirit of several biblical principles: 

1. God commands that immigrants are not to be mistreated or oppressed.  Exodus 22:21
2. God loves immigrants.  He provides for their needs.  Deuteronomy 10:18;
3. God calls us to advocate for immigrants and to defend their rights.  Proverbs 31:8-9. 
4. Jesus teaches that if we love him we will love immigrants.  When we love immigrants, we are actually loving him.  Matthew 25: 34, 35, 38, 40. 

 It is immoral and unjust to benefit from the labor of undocumented immigrants and simultaneously to blame them for all of our society’s social ills.   Undocumented immigrants contribute more than 2 trillion dollars to the U.S. Gross Domestic Product every year.  Our economy is entirely dependent upon them.   They pick our fields, raise our kids, and clean our homes.  They mow our lawns, fix our drywall, and renovate our homes.  They cook our food at American, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian restaurants, and when we’re done they wash our dishes as well.  They work in our factories, coffee shops, and every fast food establishment you could imagine.  They clean our workplaces and office buildings long after everyone has gone home to have dinner with the kids.

It is a sin to be ungrateful.  I think that it is especially a sin to benefit from all of the hard work and economic contributions of undocumented immigrants  and at the same time to scapegoat them for our nation’s, or our state’s, economic woes.   This is biblical mistreatment and oppression.  

It is also immoral to deny a university education to the children of undocumented immigrants.   Although this may be a popular position in Alabama, such denial of educational opportunity is utterly unbiblical and unjust.  A fundamental biblical principle is that no one should be punished for an action for which they had no control  (Deuteronomy 24:16).   To use a biblical analogy, if the parents eat sour grapes the children’s teeth should not be set on edge (Jeremiah 31:39).

In the same way, undocumented college students should not be punished for  crossing a border when they had no decision in the matter.   Most undocumented college students were brought to the United States when they were just small children or infants.  In fact, 60,000 such undocumented students graduate from high school each year in the United States.   Many of them are valedictorians and at the top of their class.  Tragically, thousands of these students are denied a college education because of state laws which bar them from the university.

As in Dr. Martin Luther King’s Day, I ask, where is the Southern Church?  “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of [Governor Deal] dripped with words of interposition and nullification” in May? “Where were they when [Governor Bentley] “gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred” less than two weeks ago?

Like Dr. King, I weep for the Southern Church.  I am a pastor and the grandson of a pastor.  I love the Church. My heart breaks, however, when I see the name of Jesus misrepresented by Christians who support or fail to challenge unbiblical laws such as those recently passed in Alabama and Georgia.

On a positive note, I am encouraged by the Southern Baptist Convention, which recently passed a resolution in support of  "a just and compassionate path to legal status, with appropriate restitutionary measures, for those undocumented immigrants already living in our country."  The resolution falls short of explicitly condemning the racist laws of Georgia and Alabama, but it is a step in the right direction.   As the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, and a prominent religious institution in the South, the Convention’s statement will hopefully prompt many Southern Christians to reconsider their perspectives on immigration in light of the biblical admonition to love immigrants and speak out on their behalf.

Robert Chao Romero is an Assistant Professor in the UCLA César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o Studies.  He received his J.D. from U.C. Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Latin American History from UCLA.  He is the author of The Chinese in Mexico, 1882-1940 and various articles related to race in Latin America and the United States.   He is Founder and President of Christian Students of Conscience, a ministry devoted to training and mobilizing university students around issues of race and justice from a biblical perspective (cscrevolution.org).  

Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.