Finding Jesus at the Border , livre ebook

Cover
Endorsements
“At a time when many Christians say that the US has no responsibility to house refugees fleeing war and violence in their home countries, Finding Jesus at the Border feels like a breath of fresh air. Regardless of your religious beliefs, Julia Lambert Fogg has done all of us a service by asking, ‘What would Jesus do?’ were he confronted with the inhumanity of our current immigration laws.”
— Reza Aslan , author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
“A beautifully written, well-researched, painfully moving book that invites all believers to read Scripture in a new way. Reading this book involves pain, hope, and challenge. Any church community that reads it prayerfully will never be the same again!”
— Justo L. González , immigrant, church historian, and theologian
“Jesus’s exhortation to love one’s neighbor as oneself is the simplest and most profound spiritual teaching in human history. His story and teachings dovetail with the journeys of so many of our immigrant neighbors, as Julia Lambert Fogg explores with such compassion in her expert and moving book. Jesus came from a family of immigrants, after all, and as he famously said, ‘I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.’”
— Rainn Wilson , actor and writer
“This is a moving account of a personal journey into the immigrant world and how it led to a new understanding of Christian faith and Scripture. Fogg creatively interweaves immigrant stories with biblical passages, showing how those experiences can help us read the Bible with fresh eyes. But the goal is not just to inform her readers; she wants to motivate them into action. A challenging read indeed!”
— M. Daniel Carroll R. , Wheaton College; author of The Bible and Borders
“The issue of immigrant rights, like that of economic justice, requires little translation between the Bible and our time. Vulnerable people who are pushed and pulled by the tidal forces of powerful empires are central subjects of both Testaments. Fogg’s work is an engaging addition to the literature that reads Word and world with attention to the displaced and dispossessed who are forced to cross borders.”
— Ched Myers , coauthor of Our God Is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Julia Lambert Fogg
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2015-5
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
All names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved, with the exception of Hugo Mejia in chap. 5, whose story is in the public record.
Dedication
For Sergio and all the young people whose dreaming is making these United States of America a home for all of us.
Epigraph
Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous; and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.
Matthew 10:40–42
Contents
Cover 1
Endorsements 2
Title Page 3
Copyright Page 4
Dedication 5
Epigraph 6
Acknowledgments 9
1. Walk This Way: Approaching the Border 11
2. Fleeing without Papers: Matthew 2:1–23 27
3. Vantage Points and Borders—Where We Stand Shapes How We See: Mark 12:41–44 45
4. Challenging Border Wall Mentalities: Ruth and Mark 7:24–30 69
5. Letters from Behind Prison Walls: Philippians 1:12–30 93
6. Seeking Asylum at the US Border: Philippians 2:5–11 119
7. Standing before ICE: John 11:1–34 141
8. Where Do We Go from Here? Border Crossing as Praxis: John 1:1–5, 14 169
For Further Reading 181
Notes 185
Back Cover 209
Acknowledgments
D ear reader, I’m so glad you are here. Thank you for coming and listening with open ears. There are so many people who have made your reading possible. I cannot name them all here, but I am grateful to each one for their contributions.
First and foremost I want to thank Marja Mogk. She has read every paragraph of every chapter in this book through almost every iteration I have written over the past five years. And with every (patient) reading, she made the structure more solid, the prose cleaner, and my voice stronger. She has been more than a careful editor and friend; she has tended the very soul of this work. Thank you.
I also want to thank my writing partners from the NCFDD (National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity) boot camp, Maylei Blackwell, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and now Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Mujeres, has it been four years now? Five? Thank you for all of your advice, grounding, encouragement for self-care, and celebration of every win—great and small—toward the long goal. Se hace camino al andar .
Thank you, Messiah-Mesías Lutheran Church, for welcoming me, encouraging me, and teaching me through what were some of the more difficult times in the life of the congregation. You have been a blessing to me.
Thank you to my mentors with CLUE-VC, especially chairs Vanessa Frank, Betty Stapleford, and Nan Waltman. Thank you to Ched Myers for his early feedback and advice on chapters 1 and 2. And a special thank you to the Brazos team of editors, careful readers, and promoters. It is a pleasure to work with all of you.
Thank you to Tatiana, Diego, and Christine, owners and now friends at the cafés where I fueled and refueled, wrote, revised, and re-revised—where would I be without your hospitality, your conversations, and your coffee?
I also want to thank my parents. Mom and Dad, you paved the road for me to do this work by valuing learning, prioritizing education, and giving me opportunities to explore the world. You never said no when I told you about another border I wanted to cross. I know that was scary for you. Thank you for letting me go.
Chris and Sam, Emma, Ian and Jacob, you bring me life and hope. I cannot wait for the world you are shaping to come into full bloom. It is already a world of advocacy and justice that I am impatient to live in now.
Kenneth Paul, you are the music in my life and my partner in the dance. You are my heart, my joy, my home. Thank you for everything.
1 Walk This Way: Approaching the Border
My Story
I am a fifteenth-generation East Coast American of mixed European and Anglo descent. My ancestors crossed the ocean—and many other barriers, borders, and boundaries going back to the time of William Penn—to come to these shores. 1 But most of those stories of journey and arrival are lost to my generation. We didn’t personally cross those borders, and neither did our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents. Immigrant consciousness disappeared from my family’s sense of identity generations ago. Our European ancestors planted their roots firmly in the East Coast soil through deaths and burials, births and baptisms, farming, building, ranching, mining, and yes, serving in political office and as lawyers, educators, engineers, and artists.
Although my own generation was not aware of our immigrant status, I was aware of the presence of more recent arrivals in my hometown. For example, the mushroom workers in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, came as immigrant farm workers. As they followed the crops from south to north up the Eastern seaboard, many of these farm workers planted themselves in Pennsylvania soil, settled, and became our neighbors. Others kept moving through the towns around us, following the seasonal work and harvest times. But our new neighbors were invisible to us. We rarely met, and our lives seldom connected. The children of these immigrants weren’t in the same public school with me or my brother; their moms didn’t shop in the grocery stores we frequented. I had little awareness of national borders, but there were plenty of local borders in the mostly white, semi-rural, suburban regions of southeastern Pennsylvania.
We were more aware of another immigrant group who also farmed for a living, the Pennsylvania Dutch and Amish who lived down the road. We bought fresh corn, string beans, and tomatoes from them. But they weren’t new immigrants, and they owned or leased their farmland. Their families had also been in the area for generations. My great-great-grandmother grew from their roots. In middle school, I met some first- and second-generation German, English, Italian, and Irish immigrant children. We all developed the same local American accent, but our names were different. I had no sense of where their families had come from, or which borders their parents had crossed to get here. I do remember that my mother was sad when my friend Tommy’s family emigrated to Pakistan. I learned the names of places people left our area for , but not the names of the places my friends’ parents had come from .
Although I grew up regularly going to Sunday school and learning Bible stories on old-school felt boards, I never heard those sacred stories as narratives of border crossing. Instead, what I knew of border crossing came from aunts, uncles, and cousins talking about their time in the Peace Corps or the American Friends Service. I knew their stories, like Tommy’s, of crossing borders to live abroad, t