Arizona’s Opportunity to Really Challenge the Immigration Crisis

David R. Weiss, July 23, 2010

Exactly seventy years ago, in northern Indiana, on a hot July night, my great-grandmother endured yet another insult to her heritage. It was during World War II, and neighborhood kids—or men, for all she knew—regularly scrawled “Nazi” on the stone wall that bordered the front yard. Great-grandma Weiss had no sympathy for Hitler. But she spoke German, and in those days of patriotic fervor, her language alone was enough to identify her as “the enemy” in the eyes of her neighbors.

On July 29 Arizona’s new immigration law will make every Spanish-speaking person in the state “the enemy.” Every one of them will be required to carry proof of their immigration status—and to show it to any police officer who asks to see it.

My uncle, who now resides in Arizona, will also technically be required to carry proof of his immigration status. But as a third-generation German immigrant, who doesn’t speak any German and who would never be mistaken for Hispanic, the odds are miniscule that he’ll ever be asked to show his. He’ll never feel the threat of his ethnic heritage hang over him the way my great-grandmother did. I wonder how he feels about this new law that will cloak other grandmothers in the same fear that cloaked his own just two generations ago.

Having lived the last two decades in Iowa and Minnesota, where migrant labor is common, I know that we desperately need immigration reform. Although, truth be told, I doubt many of us northerners would line up each morning to toil in the fields or slaughterhouses in exchange for the working conditions and wages that our migrant laborers enjoy.

And unquestionably in Arizona the press of undocumented persons across the border makes the brokenness of our immigration policy visible in ways that cry out for response. But to respond by crafting a law that will inevitably erase the dignity and eventually the humanity of a whole category of people—and will aim to cloak them all in fear—this will solve nothing.

It will instead betray the ideals on which our nation was founded. In the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [persons] are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These truths are just as self-evident and these rights are just as unalienable for undocumented persons as for U.S. citizens.

If we are honest today, however, it is not persons but wealth—factories, commodities, capital—that moves freely across borders in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness (or, put into plain English: in pursuit of free trade, low wages, and unfettered profit).

Actually, I’d welcome Arizona taking a bold position of leadership on immigration reform. But I’d like to see it address the roots of the immigration crisis rather than the symptoms. And the roots of the crisis lie in U.S. economic policies that despoil the countries south of our borders and impoverish their people—and do so in order to make most of us live better and more cheaply and to make a few of us obscenely rich.

The “way of life” we so prize is affordable to us only by making life abjectly miserable for others elsewhere on the globe. It is a closed circle, and as long as we make life unbearable for people to our south, some portion of them will do their best to come north, showing the same courage, ingenuity, fortitude, and sheer passion that we so honor in the immigrants whose bloodline we happen to share.

So I hope Arizona makes a real stand. I’d like to see them require that all goods imported into the state be produced under conditions that pay a fair wage to the workers, show stewardship of the land, and respect the integrity of the communities—especially in the lands that lie to their south. And even to be relentless and annoying if necessary, in pressing for full documentation of all goods entering Arizona. To do otherwise is to engage in licensed piracy. As a nation we obviously have the power to get away with that. But we have no right. Absolutely none.

If Arizona does this, they might even spark a national conversation around and reform of the inhumane trade policies that drive the immigration crisis. Then Arizona could rightfully and proudly claim to have made a real contribution toward a just immigration policy. As it stands, they’re only making it open season on people like my great-grandmother. And there’s nothing to be proud in that.

David R. Weiss is the author of To the Tune of a Welcoming God: Lyrical reflections on sexuality, spirituality and the wideness of God’s welcome (2008, Langdon Street Press). A theologian, writer, poet and hymnist committed to doing “public theology,” David lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and is a self-employed speaker and writer around issues of sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. You can reach him at drw59@comcast.net and at http://tothetune.wordpress.com.

The Confession We Seem Reluctant to Make

David R. Weiss, July 14, 2010

I am impatient with confession. That’s putting it too politely, but the moment I try to state the matter more clearly it just gets messy: I do not enjoy starting my worship experience by reminding myself (and everyone else) that I am sinful. Well, doesn’t that sound a little suspicious? Isn’t the whole point of confession that we ought to come before God by first acknowledging—confessing—the deepest and most vulnerable truth about ourselves? And doesn’t my discomfort with that merely prove its importance … and reveal my own rebellious nature?

No.

My brothers and sisters who have written Liberation, Feminist, Womanist, Black, and Queer Theology have made a strong case that our God-language has often been pressed into the service of power dynamics that are appalling to the God thus named. And I am persuaded that the same is true of how the Confession functions in our worship.

While I don’t know the whole history of confession in spiritual life, I have a suspicion that it has almost always served the interests of the powerful more than it has served the needs of the poor. That its place in the liturgy, however it has been theologically justified, has worked foremost to insure that the haves continue to have, and the have-nots continue to have not.

Indeed I am convinced that at present the Confession serves primarily to quietly disempower us and to alienate us from our bodies, from the goodness in which and for which God created us—and from the Spirit who longs to take on our flesh in transforming service to the world. In this sense, while claiming to position us honestly us before God, the Confession instead betrays us into a place where grace is merely a salve for broken hearts but hardly the power of God to change the world.

I grew up in the 1960’s. At my German Lutheran church in northwest Indiana we used the red Service Book and Hymnal. As a precocious child in a family that was in church (and near the front) every Sunday, I was eager to share in the liturgy as soon as I could read. So, sometime before I had even celebrated my sixth birthday, I began rehearsing my own utter sinfulness every Sunday. With fervor that probably went well beyond my parents and fellow parishioners (isn’t that why Jesus blessed the children?) I named myself a “poor sinner”; I invoked Sunday after Sunday after Sunday over my own dawning self-awareness the phrase “by nature sinful and unclean.” I was certain these words held some great power, and I wanted to inhabit them. Sadly, I succeeded all too well.

In the years since we Lutherans have chosen somewhat more merciful language, confessing that “we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves,” but we have remained largely steadfast that the first word we need to speak in worship names our sinfulness, our bondage, our weakness, our nothingness. (In Evangelical Lutheran Worship, released by the ELCA in 2006, the Confession can be replaced with a Thanksgiving for Baptism, an improvement of sorts, but one that still assumes everything in the unsaid confession as the context for our thanksgiving.) And while the words have softened, many of us 40 and older have the imprint of that confession of our childhood written well into our hearts quite beyond any updating of the language.

We can’t afford this anymore. We never could, as far as I’m concerned, but the evidence is fast reaching a breaking point. We have confessed ourselves into alienation from our own bodies and from the earth and we have confessed ourselves into a sense of powerlessness that leaves us unable to imagine that we have the power to challenge the systems that threaten the planet and create suffering for so many.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. We are sinners. Mostly broken in our wills as well as in our dreams. Prone to mean-spiritedness in our hurt and selfishness in our wants. Entangled in our temptations. And even more entangled in the distorted systems—the mass media, the consumer economy, the political forces, the church structures, and the dysfunctional families in which, from our birth onward, we find ourselves embedded.

I am not claiming that sin has no power over us. And I fully agree that it is a dangerous thing—a very dangerous thing even—to belittle the forces of death that are at play in the world. Although I would suggest that these forces are far more social and systemic than they are individual—and that their social and systemic reach only lengthens the more we frame them as individual choices we make.

But here is the thing: we fail to confess the ongoing resilience and the super-abundant goodness of God as Creator when we believe the Tempter’s lie that we have somehow been clean cut off from the words spoken timelessly by God over us, from the first mythic moment in the Garden to the present multiple moments of our lives today, “And God saw everything that had been made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen. 1:31).

And in this failing, we choose to be too little to hold within our lungs the breath of God—although God is striving still to breathe into us. We choose to be too little to lift within our fingertips the touch of God—although God is striving still to reach out in tenderness to others through us. We choose to be too little to know within our own bodies the full joy of God—although God is longing still to feel the sheer goodness of creation in us. And we choose to be too little in our imaginations to dare the dream of a world made fresh by justice—although God is longing still to catch fire in the very synapses of our minds.

Of course, in the rest of our worship, we say that we desire all these things, but we unwittingly use the Confession at the start of worship to inoculate ourselves against the indwelling presence of God. We insist that unworthiness is the first truth to be spoken, and that only in the midst of our complete unworthiness is grace really grace. But in so doing we presume that God needs a scarcity of goodness to be God. And we feign ignorance of the power these words have to misshape us—though if we heard a parent trying to instill such a message as this in his or her children we would rightly cringe.

Well, let us talk about the perniciousness of sin during our worship services, for we need to resist it in ourselves and in our society. And let us be far more attentive in naming its social and systemic character than we have been in the past, for only so is the injustice of the world challenged and changed.

But let us begin by confessing—by naming with humble vulnerability—the grace that frames our lives from first to last, from Alpha to Omega, from long before our salvation to well into our sanctification. To do so is not to deny sin, but to acknowledge in each and every moment that the goodness of God infects us always and even now—and is just waiting to burst into flame. This is what I confess:

I confess that each one of us is a shimmering echo of God’s love. I confess that we are powerful—beyond measure. Powerful both in our individual uniqueness and creativity, and especially in our united diversity. I confess that we are good—beyond measure. Gifted with an unlimited—and often untapped—potential for justice, mercy, and compassion. I confess that each of us is also twisted and distorted by forces within and without. And that these forces often thwart our power and undercut our goodness. And yet, these forces are not ultimate, not even in this life. So I confess that our challenge is less to avoid evil than to embrace good. Less to confess sin than to confess the truth of our power and our goodness—and to unleash that truth in our lives. Amen.

Confession that fails to name our potential for being imago Dei not only betrays the truth of who we are; it equally betrays the sheer, abundant, and gracious goodness of God.

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David R. Weiss is the author of To the Tune of a Welcoming God: Lyrical reflections on sexuality, spirituality and the wideness of God’s welcome (2008, Langdon Street Press). A theologian, writer, poet and hymnist committed to doing “public theology” around issues of sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace, David lives in St. Paul, Minnesota and is a self-employed speaker and writer on the intersection of sexuality & spirituality. You can reach him at drw59@comcast.net and at http://tothetune.wordpress.com.