A Day on the Hill: Lutherans #StandforWelcome

Lutheran Prayer breakfast: also the room for Watergate hearings
and formation of the ACA, among other historic events

Yesterday we arrived in Washington D.C. for a two day visit (the Lutheran Immigration Leadership Summit) on Capitol Hill. The first day, we spent time with clergy, bishops, community leaders and staff from three Lutheran denominations--the ELCA, the LCMS, and the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America--centering our message for visits with congresspeople and senators.

We brought two core asks:

1) Maintain the United States' position as the world leader in protecting the most vulnerable: ensure the full and continued operation of the refugee resettlement program.

2) Support compassionate policies that provide immediate protection for Central American children and families, and faithful solutions to the conditions that cause people to flee.

The facts get complicated at some points, but essentially we had the job of disambiguating refugee resettlement from immigration. As people of faith, we advocate for welcome and safety for both refugees and immigrants, but the policies and appropriations are different and distinct, even if in popular media they get confused.

Our concern remains that in 2017 the federal government (as a result of Executive Orders from the president) reduced the target for admission of refugees from 110,000 to 50,000. We believe this is far too low, harming refugees who were already prepared to come here, and undermining the work of refugee resettlement agencies. So our target ask was for our elected officials to aim for at least 75,000 admissions in 2017.

In addition, we are concerned that elected officials spuriously imply that refugees are an unsafe population that need even more vetting (thus the call for a 120 day "pause"), when in fact refugees are the most vetted population of people coming into the United States, and historically are the least violent population of people in our country.

One result of this spurious targeting of the most vulnerable is our own practice as a nation (a widespread practice of DHS) of separating families who arrive at our border as a "Consequence Delivery System" in order to supposedly deter more families from seeking safe-haven at our borders. The problem with such practices of family separation are manifold. First, they don't deter immigration. Second, they harm children. It's a heinous practice. We incarcerate children, separate them from their families, and they do not supply them with lawyers to help them navigate the legal system that can free them. To read more: http://lirs.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/LIRS_BetrayingFamilyValues_Feb2017.pdf

In addition, we are increasing laws in our nation that make those seeking asylum in our country fearful of pursuing such asylum. We are a nation that has historically wanted those who need asylum to seek it with us. Now, we are establishing laws that might further harm them.

I could go on, but this gives you a taste of the magnitude of the issues and concerns. If you really want to take a deep dive to learn more, visit this list of resources.

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Today, we visited four senators in their offices. Our delegation included Emily Crane Linn (the resettlement director for Canopy NWA), Michael Girlinghouse (the bishop of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod), a staffer from LIRS, and myself. Tom Cotton met with us personally, as did John Boozman. The senators from Oklahoma scheduled time for us with some of their legislative staff and aids.

In our meeting with Tom Cotton, although he was (as are all our elected officials) supportive of us and our work on an individual level, he mentioned a number of resigns why he wants to reduce immigration levels by half, and refugee admissions down to 50,000. His main one is supposed wage suppression. He believes immigrants depress low-income wages.

The problem: the facts aren't in his favor. As just one example, you can read this fascinating study from MIT, which analyzes the long-run impact of immigration on employment, productivity, and its skill bias. Using "the existence of immigrant communities across U.S. states before 1960 and the distance from the Mexican border as instruments for immigration flows. [They] find no evidence that immigrants crowded out employment. At the same time, [they] find that immigration had a strong, positive association with total factor productivity and a negative association with the high skill bias of production technologies. The results are consistent with the idea that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP, and also promoted the adoption of unskilled-efficient technologies."

In other words, immigration has a net positive effect on wages AND on the diversification of low-skill and high skill employment. And here's a fun story. While we were at a banquet last night, a lobbyist for BPS (one of the meat packing giants) stopped in to chat. I took notes, because he really knew how to do his job. Inside of five minutes, he'd established a rapport with all of us, including mentioning his wife was originally a Lutheran from Lanesboro, MN. 

He told us the same thing the poultry industry has been telling us all along: employers are DESPERATE for entry-level workers. Nothing in our economy supports Tom Cotton's theory on wages and immigration, which does make you wonder why he continues to hold to his opinion in spite of the evidence.

Our meeting with Senator Tom Cotton, Arkansas

Senator John Boozman, Arkansas

The staffers with the Oklahoma offices were incredibly kind, listened to our asks, and took our packets, promising to follow up and talk with their senators. It's hard to say how much change or movement we might see out of those conversations, but it did open a door with senators who I believe haven't had many direct visits from advocates for refugee resettlement.

Finally, we met with Senator Boozman. Boozman was far more focused on the appropriateness of the travel bans on the six countries, and the 120 day pause on resettlement. Again in spite of all evidence to the contrary, he holds to the belief that refugees may pose a security threat. Although we have many counter-arguments to this claim (just talk to UNHCR staff about the current vetting done with all refugees using highly advanced biometrics), one of the least remarked seems to be the security threat we cause to ourselves by NOT resettling refugees.

Not only do we weaken our allies by not taking in the refugees we have promised to resettle: we also perpetuate, both abroad and at home, the conditions for radicalization, perhaps especially in this nationalist climate radicalizing white supremacists in particular.

After these meetings, just for fun I jumped in on one more meeting, a delegation who met with Chuck Grassley. Grassley has been a senator for decades. Back when my grandfather was a state representative in Iowa, I used to visit Senator Grassley in his office, and see him on the campaign trail. Stopping in today was really nice. He asked about my family, whether they still farm, etc.

I disagree with Chuck Grassley on virtually every single political issue I can think of, but it did remind me that in the end, politicians are simply people. They play a rather strange game in D.C., and they live in an odd political rally, but they are people.

Some additional notes from the day. First, a staffer from Representative Steve Womack's office went out of her way to come sit with us during the opening Lutheran Prayer Breakfast. That was a promising. Second, I took a quick trip over to the Folger Shakespeare Library during our lunch break. Amazing! Had the chance to read some pages from an original copy of The Canterbury Tales, some ancient copies of the Erasmus translation of the Bible, an early copy of Piers Plowman, and much more.

It was nice, in the midst of a political day, to relax for a bit under the guidance of an historically informed docent, who told us everything we'd ever want to know about Shakespeare folios and quartos.

If you're ever in D.C., I recommend this museum.

Oh, and some very cool people things. I hung out with my former youth pastor, Mike Rinehart, who is now the bishop of the Gulf Coast synod of the ELCA, and a former camper of mine, Paul Bailie, who is now a pastor at the border in Eagle Pass, Texas. Many generations of Lutherans advocating to #StandforWelcome.

On the way back to my apartment, stopped in at Kramer Book Store. Very well curated. Found a couple of books I've been wanting to read, so I end by providing links to them.

Twenty works on theology and religion everyone should read

I have a slew of friends headed to seminary this coming fall, and some of them have been asking for reading recommendations. Of course, they'll be buried in reading assignments once they get their syllabi, but in the meantime, I thought I'd post a suggested reading list. No claims to any kinds of comprehensiveness here, there's so much I've left off, but I hope this is idiosyncratic and inspiring enough to get you started (or continuing) a lifetime of reading that takes the top off your head (Emily Dickinson).

1. Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology, Volumes 1 & 2: I start with systematic theology, not because it is the end-all-be-all of theology and religion, but because it is sometimes the most startlingly clear, and in the case of Jenson, it also happens to be the most beautiful. You can learn from Jenson not only how to write theology, but also how to construct prose.

2. Andrew Pettegree's Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--and Started the Protestant Reformation: The title pretty much says it all, but in this 500th anniversary of the Reformation, this one, more than any other book, will connect the dots between our century and Luther's.

3. James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree: Every book by Cone is worth reading, but this one is easily the most accessible, and life-changing. You'll never see the cross, or race in America, the same way again.

4. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins: There are many incredible works of feminist theology, but this one is the most I read as I started seminary that taught me that re-interpreting the faith in light of feminism (and against patriarchy) means reading all the way back to the origins.

5. Gerhard Forde's On Being a Theologian of the Cross: My theological mentor, Forde taught me Lutheran theology, and this book does it more clearly than any other.

6. Fink and Starke's The Churching of America: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy: Almost everything we think we know about the development of Christianity in America is wrong, and these two authors show us why.

7. Ellen Davis's Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible: I wanted to list Wendell Berry here, but he's theology "adjacent" rather than theology straight up, but his closest theological reader and biblical scholar is Ellen Davis, and this commentary will knock your socks off.

8. J.R.R. Tolkien's On Fairy Stories: Okay, this isn't theology per se, but to understand the theological underpinnings of the greatest myth outside the Bible, this is the work of Tolkien to read.

9. Athanasius's On the Incarnation: I needed to list one church "father," so I chose this one, which I do genuinely love. Christ crucified in the air.

10. Tex Sample, Earthy Mysticism: Spirituality for Unspiritual People: Tex gets Christianity and class issues better than anyone else. Take a deep dive into all his stuff, especially writings on the working class.

11. Colin Gunton's Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: There are many ways into the revival in Trinitarian theology, but I just can't get enough of Gunton, who died too soon, and left us a legacy of beautiful written reflections on the Trinity.

12. James Alison's  On Being Liked: A Catholic theologian who takes Girardian theology and makes it accessible, especially transforming the way we think about sexuality and gender. Read lots of him.

13. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness: Well, it's not theology straight up, but the apprehending of black bodies is the THE theological heresy of our era, in our nation, and Alexander is the voice that changed the conversation.

14. James Kugel's, How To Read the Bible: Kugel is a modern biblical scholar and Harvard AND an Orthodox Jew. He holds these in tension in his reading of Scripture, and leaves you the reader in the tension also. This is a VERY long book, and totally worth all the time you give to it.

15. Eugene F. Rogers After the Spirit: If you're going to read theology, you should probably at some point read a pneumatology. A constructive proposal for an "embodied pneumatology" that is uniquely scriptural and liturgical, one that post-critically mines the riches of the tradition (writ large) while speaking in a fresh voice that moves us beyond the impasse of much modern thought on the Spirit.

16. Elizabeth Johnson's Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints: I love Mary, and love that many of my neighbors in faith (Catholics and Orthodox) TRULY love Mary. This is a beautiful catholic and feminist exploration of such love.

17. Edwin Friedman's A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix: So many books about leadership, but really pretty much this one covers it all. Then go back and read his stuff on family systems theory.

18. Martin Luther's Freedom of a Christian. Then, Walter Altmann's Luther and Liberation: A Latin American Perspective: If you're going to read theology, you're going to want to read liberation theology, and if you're Lutheran, you're going to want some tools for connecting Lutheranism and liberation. This book does the job, and then some.

19. Friedrich Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith: If we're talking history of influence, this book, and this author, have probably had more impact on Christian theology today than anyone else.

20. Leslie Newbigin's Foolishness to the Greeks: A classic in missiology that invests the majority of its energy in reframing how those who wish to be on mission are shaped by their Western culture.

Having completed the list, I'm already thinking of all I've left off: Marilynne Robinson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sertillanges book on The Intellectual Life, and on and on. But this is a start. Please, add more suggestions in the comments.

Surely we aren't blind, are we?

Jesus said, "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, "Surely we are not blind, are we?" Jesus said to them, "If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, "We see,' your sin remains. (John 9:39-41)

Surely we are not blind, are we? This is the question of the day. There's enough gas-lighting and counter-blaming in our daily lives, the nightly news, and the early morning Twitter feeds to leave us wondering if anyone can see clearly.

Doublespeak. Shaping facts selectively. Blocking through obfuscation things that do not fit our agenda. To defend the indefensible such willful evasion is required.

Jesus encounters the blind man and heals him. The entire narrative as John tells it is profoundly polysemous. It offers succinct answers to deep and abiding theological questions, like:

• Can we name direct causation between sin and punishment? Answer: No.
• Specifically, is sickness related to sin? Answer: No.
• Is some of our pain and marginalization the result of our parents' sin? Answer: Sometimes, although this is a result of the way the world works, not divine intervention by God. And furthermore, in those instances, the suffering that comes from sin can sometimes be the very context for God's liberating and healing work.
• Are we permanently bound in our sin or blindness? Answer: No. Except perhaps if we are convinced we aren't blind, then it's hard to be freed from it.

In this gospel, Jesus is active on all sides of the equation. Like the God of Moses, hardening the heart of Pharaoh, Jesus heals the blind that they might see, and blinds those who believe they see.

This should cause everyone pause. Everyone. Is our confidence in our sight a form of blindness?

That being said, the text is also incredibly clear-eyed. There are people who see, and people who don't, and just think they do, and the story teaches us how to distinguish them. The text names them: the blind man is freed from sin AND healed. The Pharisees on the other hand believe they see when in fact they are blind.

I can think of no better example of this than the perspective of white evangelicals on discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community. Like the Pharisees, they think they should stand apart from the world, but rather than standing apart in ways that heal and care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, they try to stand apart in self-righteous (willfully blind) ways.

In my own life, I think my willful blindness remains present, especially in view of the various levels of my own privilege. I fund a military state that destabilizes regions all over the world; I benefit from an economy that leaves billions impoverished; I have a station in life that is not earned but rather a privileged by-product of my gender and race.

Like the Pharisees, I still at times look at other individuals, other communities, and ask, "Who sinned, that they are in that situation?"

And in so doing, I fail to open my eyes and see that it is me.

This is how sin works. 

Finally, it's worth noting that the most common interpretation of this text is blind man as sign of the early Christian community. That is, the early Christians are those who have been given sight through their faith in Christ. In the meantime, the world around them, their cousins in faith in particular, are perplexed by their new sight, and busy with questions. 

This is a worthwhile symbolic reading of the text. In what ways is our faith in Christ healing us of our blindness? In what ways are we, like the blind man, asking others, "Do you also want to become his disciples?"

What We Have Meant by Resurrection

As a pastor and theologian, I'm not sure there's anything I can do that might convince readers that observing Holy Week is as crucial as entering a bracket for March Madness.

So, as a theologian, I'll double down. If some people can memorize stats for colleges they've never laid eyes on, I figure theologians can dance around a bit in the esoterica of theologizing.

Here goes.

The cross and resurrection are stunning in their mundane implausibility. That the world would reject the full presence of God in the full humanity of Jesus Christ is unsurprising. Like Col. Jessep's response in A Few Good Men, "You can't handle the truth!"--so too the world (and therefore us, I) have never been able to handle the truth of God in Christ... and so we kill him.

As Luther wrote in the Heidelberg Disputation, that person deserves to be called a theologian who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross.

Which is to say, Christ died on the cross because he was fully God, and the cross was humanity's response to God made manifest.

The cross is the central and most important story. The gospel of Mark gets this best, by ending near the cross, and re-centering readers on the life of Christ itself, always telling the ending as it does, with a word pointing ahead to the Christ, but no visible sign of his appearing, only the promise, and then these words, "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid" (Mark 16:8).

Yet, although the cross is the most important word, it is no word at all without its completion, and the completion of cross is resurrection. Resurrection is not at all a replacement for the cross, or its usurpation. Far too many approaches to the resurrection are supersessionist, implying that somehow in the resurrection the cross either didn't happen, or is of no account, or is no longer central.

That simply can't be true. But if we take resurrection as it gives itself, it is the completion of the cross in quite a different manner, as its deepening.

The resurrection is mundane in quite the same way as the cross. Christ was raised on the third day because he was fully human, and the resurrection was God's response to full humanity made manifest.

The cross is humanity's response to God. The resurrection is God's response to humanity. They complete each other. They are both completely natural outcomes if we take the subjects for who they are. Humanity kills. God is alive. They are completely implausible if we take the objects for who they are. God does not die. Humanity does.

So why does this all matter for our Lenten observances, and why should we devote an entire Holy Week to it?

Well, once we consider the full magnitude of these two events in their coupling, that the fully God and fully human both died and rose again, participating in both, the paradox of it all, then a number of considerations follow.

First, we are offered in the cross and resurrection a much more embodied theology. We encounter insights from, among others, the profound eco-feminists like Rosemary Radford Ruether, who connect the resurrection of the body to the deep sense of God filling the whole cosmos.

But we also open space for exploring the resurrection not just as something that happens historically "in Christ," but rather resurrection as shared experience of the whole community, perhaps even exclusively as this, like in the sermons and writings of Friedrich Schleiermacher.

Countering this, but equally compelling, some of our best theologians have argued that the resurrection is thoroughly reasonable both on scientific and historical grounds. The best on this is that great systematician Wolfhart Pannenberg.

Or finally, we might consider that in the resurrection the oppressed are freed for struggle, that the resurrection is more than just experience, or science, or history... that the resurrection is praxis, revolution. 

The cross and resurrection of Jesus stand at the center of the New Testament story, without which nothing is revealed that was not already known in the Old Testament. In the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection, his earthly life achieves a radical significance not otherwise possible. The cross-resurrection events mean that we now know that Jesus’ ministry with the poor and the wretched was God effecting the divine will to liberate the oppressed. The Jesus story is the poor person’s story, because God in Christ becomes poor and weak in order that the oppressed might become liberated from poverty and powerlessness. God becomes the victim in their place and thus transforms the condition of slavery into the battleground for the struggle of freedom. This is what Christ’s resurrection means. The oppressed are freed for struggle, for battle in the pursuit of humanity. 

Jesus was not simply a nice fellow who happened to like the poor. Rather his actions have their origin in God’s eternal being. They represent a new vision of divine freedom, climaxed with the cross and the resurrection, wherein God breaks into history for the liberation of slaves from societal oppression. Jesus’ actions represent God’s will not to let his creation be destroyed by non-creative powers. The cross and the resurrection show that freedom promised is now fully available in Jesus Christ. This is the essence of the New Testament story without which Christian theology is impossible (James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 73-74).

I hope everyone will commit to worship during the Sundays of Lent, and Holy Week, because of their intrinsic value (this year, Holy Week worship in our congregation includes Maundy Thursday (April 13th, 6:30 p.m.), Good Friday (April 14th, 6:30 p.m.), and Easter Vigil (April 15th, 6:30 p.m.), plus Palm Sunday April 9th and Easter Sunday April 16th. I'll just remind everyone that it's the full week, and all the services, that will ground you in the cross and resurrection more than any other set of liturgies you might attend the rest of the year.