Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

For the past four years, every Thursday morning of Holy Week, a few of us from our Mennonite community have gathered with Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists and Quakers, among other Christians, for a foot-washing worship service. We set up two chairs at the gate of the local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center—the gate through which federal officers escort members of our community who are arrested for not having the paperwork that would authorize their presence in the United States, members of our churches and neighborhoods who are undocumented residents. In front of the detention center, we worship; we pray and sing and read from the Bible. “Do not put your trust in princes, in whom there is no help,” we hear as someone reads from Psalm 146. “The Lord sets the prisoners free. … The Lord watches over the foreigners.” Another person takes her Bible and reads from Isaiah 61; we focus our hope on the promises of the Word of God as we “proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners,” the promises of “the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God.” Before we wash feet, I explain why we use one chair and leave another vacant. “This chair here will remain empty as a sign of all the people that law enforcement agents tear away from our communities and churches and families,” I say, “a sign of absence, of missing bodies.” With the empty chair, we remember the wives and husbands, the mothers and fathers, the sisters and brothers of some of the people who gather with us for worship, for protest, for crying out to God. We make the pain visible. We’ve been saying the same words in the same place with some of the same people for the past four years, and nothing seems to change. Year after year, political leaders ignore God’s call to set these captives free. Year after year, presidents and police impose a strategy of deportation that tears apart families by banishing mothers and fathers from their households. “We must put border security first,” the politicians say, as the rest of us are left to console children in grief and to sustain neighbors who live in fear—to suffer with those who suffer. In this country I’ve found a home in the Mennonite church, in the Anabaptist tradition, where we reach back to the wisdom of communities who have endured exile and arrest, immigration and deportation—people who remember the violence of princes who claimed to own the earth, people who remember political leaders who claimed the right to police borders established by bloodshed. Anabaptists and Mennonites have offered words of worship and protest from Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” As the Mennonite historian John D. Roth explains, for the early Anabaptists “the claim that the earth is the Lord’s was a form of resistance, especially to the political rulers of their day … the appeal to Psalm 24:1 was a powerful statement of a different allegiance and loyalty.” To worship the God of the Psalmist involves a protest against political authorities that try to usurp God’s dominion over the earth. “Nobody should take what is God’s,” wrote Peter Walpot, a 16th-century Anabaptist who lived in the context of the Christianized powers of Europe as kings and bishops divided up the globe by inventing borders on their maps of “the Americas,” which they claimed as their property. Today we live with the legacy of their maps; we live under the dominion of colonialism’s borders. Arguments about U.S. immigration policy and border security assume the legitimacy of a geography invented by colonialism, a world invented by rulers who craved divine power over creation. Since these borders won’t go away anytime soon, we will plan on gathering again at the ICE detention center on Thursday during Holy Week next year. We will worship and protest, joining our voices to the Anabaptists and Mennonites who have proclaimed the good news of Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.”