I
In the summer of 2013, I returned from my first year in seminary to work at a factory near my home in the suburbs of Chicago. Most of my co-workers that summer were immigrants from South and Central America, or children of immigrants, many who like me had recently received work permits thanks to the new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy.
That summer I was surprised at how many of the conversations I had in the factory were inflected with profound piety and an abiding sense of God’s providence. Those who had made a gruelling journey across the border described in detail how Diosito and la Virgencita had protected them through many dangers. For my immigrant siblings, life was not to be taken for granted; being an immigrant meant receiving each day of work and each meal as a gift of grace. As I reflect on that summer, I now recognize that what I witnessed on the factory floor was a kind of liturgy of migration and home.
Bearing testimony to the home left behind was a critical component of the factory liturgy. The older women and men would share their reasons for coming to the United States and how they hoped, with God’s grace, to return to their homelands one day. Everyone was saving to send money back home to a child, spouse, or parent they had left behind. The very thing they had sacrificed to provide for their families was life with their families. Along with the remittances they sent to help sustain their families, many would send money to buy a “little house” back home where they hoped to retire. Though they lived with one foot firmly planted in their Latin American homes and one in their US American home, they never imagined a future in which their children returned to Latin America with them.
This is the challenging demand placed on many today who are raised by immigrant parents: how to be faithful and responsible to two nations, peoples, and cultures; how to carry two homes with you throughout your life.
Like these elders at the factory, my parents had sacrificed lives with their families when they left Peru to provide my sister and me with the American dream of a good education and a prosperous career. However, my parents also strived to inculcate in us as much of our Peruvian culture as possible. They demanded that we not only speak, write, and read in Spanish at home but also celebrate national holidays in the house. They regularly told us stories around the dinner table about life back home. One of their most frequent refrains was Nunca te olvides que eres Peruano, “Never forget that you are Peruvian.” They would finish stories urging my sister and me to keep a vow: Cuando me muera, entierrenme en mi tierra, “When I die, bury me in my homeland.” They too wanted my sister and me to have one foot firmly planted in our Latin American home and one in our US American home. Never did they ask who would put flowers on their graves if we buried them in Peru but stayed in the United States to live out our prosperous American dream. This is the challenging demand placed on many today who are raised by immigrant parents: how to be faithful and responsible to two nations, peoples, and cultures; how to carry two homes with you throughout your life.
As I returned to seminary after that summer, I began to ask myself what Scripture and the theological tradition had to say about the liturgy of migration and home that I had experienced at the factory. What does it look like to be faithful to God as an immigrant? What ethical responsibilities do we immigrants have to the people and places we left behind? And how are these realities part of what it means to inhabit a Christian story of creation, fall, reconciliation, and new creation? As I dove into the literature on the theology and ethics of migration, it quickly became clear that most engagement with this topic focuses on the responsibilities of the host nations and their citizens but rarely on the calling and responsibilities of migrants. Somehow, in the attempt to be hospitable and just amid the reality of migration, the church and the academy have obscured the agency and responsibility of migrants themselves. So, what role do migrants have in this divine drama playing out in history?
As I’ve reflected on my time at the factory that summer, I have slowly realized that the migrant’s experience of home is key to understanding what God is doing in the world. Our world is increasingly inhabited by displaced peoples. Many, whether displaced or not, express a profound sense of existential rootlessness and a lack of belonging. Our lifestyles render ecosystems uninhabitable, forcing entire species into ecological homelessness. Xenophobic nationalism is on the rise. In such a world, thinking about faithful, hopeful, loving ways of being at home in the world is of dire importance. Though it may seem paradoxical, migrants, particularly vulnerable migrants, precisely because they have experienced a traumatic loss of home, have a high calling to help point the church toward better ways of being at home in the world. Migration is a sign of the times, a kind of prism through which we can see in unique ways God’s work to bring about redemption and reconciliation in creation.
To explore what immigrants have to offer, I first want to look at a popular liturgy that is at play in many churches in the North American context, a liturgy that tries to cultivate a sense of belonging and home around a theology that disconnects people from land and culture. I also want to offer the rituals of migration and home I found at the factory as an alternative liturgy that invites people into a shared sense of home and belonging in the world. This invitation is extended not despite our cultural differences or by erasing our relationship to the lands that gave birth to us but rather through bringing our cultures and lands as gifts to be shared around a common table. These gifts, I contend, are the very things the Holy Spirit uses to weave together new social, political, and cultural forms of life that offer a foretaste of the new creation.
A Liturgy of Belonging Through Displacement
Growing up as a first-generation immigrant in the suburbs of Chicago, my home church was the first place where I experienced a profound sense of belonging. Of the trials and obstacles of living as an irregular immigrant in the United States, one of the most troubling, especially for children and adolescents, is the crisis of unbelonging. Beyond the racial and social class indicators that mark many of us as outsiders, immigrant children also face the trial of having to explain why they can’t make the trip with their soccer team that involves going across a US border, why they are unable to get a driver’s licence sophomore year of high school like the rest of their peers, why they can’t pick up a part-time job at the local movie theatre, why they can’t have a bank card, and (at least until DACA) why they can’t participate in the college search process with most of their peers. By the time I graduated high school, it had begun to set in heavily in my soul that I at least “legally” did not belong in this place, among these people.
Amid these socio-economic and political trials, my home church, a Christian and Missionary Alliance church, became a haven for me, a sanctuary where I felt like I genuinely belonged. At church, I did not need a work permit to volunteer in service projects with the youth group; I did not need a driver’s licence, because my friends and the pastor were delighted to give me a ride for Bible study and for a coffee; I did not need a bank card to tithe my allowance; and whenever Communion was served, I did not need a social security number to know that I belonged around the table with my siblings in Christ. I can recall one Sunday evening before the rest of the youth group arrived looking at pictures on the wall of my friends and pastors and me, I was filled with a powerful sense that this place, this church, was truly my home. Our shared life trying to live out our callings as disciples of Jesus had rendered a liturgy of belonging that arrested the constant feeling of alienation and homelessness I experienced beyond the church doors.
This very liturgy of belonging, however, centred as it was on our shared love for God and each other, was premised on the idea that where we came from didn’t matter to our faith. Throughout my young life, I therefore experienced a deep tension in church. I sought belonging by learning to hide my Peruvian identity, even growing ashamed of aspects of it. In my teen years, I began to grow distant from my parents, and even more distant from my family in Peru. Like many immigrant children, I began to forget my native tongue, I began to grow bitter about any cultural traditions that marked me as different from my peers, and I began to lose a part of myself in order precisely to maintain a sense of belonging and home. My family joked that I had become “Americano,” something I found bitterly ironic given the constant reminder outside the walls of my house that I didn’t belong in “America.” At school, where hardly anybody had heard of Peru or cared where I was from, I was forced to undergo a transformation from Peruvian to Hispanic, a transition that gave me a clear place in the North American caste system but one premised on the erasure of my belonging to the people and land of Peru. Somehow, my experience in church was synergistic with this process.
I began to lose a part of myself in order precisely to maintain a sense of belonging and home.
While I was becoming “Hispanic” in order to become American, at church I was becoming a “Hispanic Christian.” I contributed by adding a diversity quota to our pamphlets and advertisements, and by becoming the chosen representative to offer an “opinion from the Hispanic perspective.” Let the reader understand: this was not done with evil intentions. My church was not deliberately trying to instrumentalize me or my body for self-serving ends. The problem was that, absent spaces to share my story of migration, to contribute something of my Peruvian identity, or to wrestle with the tensions of living between two homes, being asked to represent the “Hispanic community” in a variety of tacit and explicit ways contributed to the erasure of my Peruvian identity.
Supporting this transformation from Peruvian to Hispanic was a theology of identity and belonging that engendered displacement. The church had formed me to understand that my identity was rooted singularly in Jesus Christ, and that meant that I needed to surrender any belonging to place or people here in this earthly realm. The tacit claim here was that a sense of belonging to a people, a land, and a culture did not matter to God because as Christians we were all called to be pilgrims whose true home lies not in any earthly place but in the heavenly city of God. The only kind of culture that mattered was Christian culture. I often found this kind of sentiment on the lips of well-intentioned folks who wanted immigrants to feel included and welcomed, but the logic of that inclusion was nefarious—it meant forgetting about our native homes and therefore denying a crucial aspect of our identities.
But only for non-Americans. The US flag in the corner of the sanctuary; the services around the Fourth of July and Veterans Day; the cultural traditions expressed each day, like those delicious Midwestern casseroles and Easter hams; the very language we spoke—all these things made it painfully obvious that we were in a US church practicing a US kind of Christianity. Indeed, it was much easier to be a Christian if one would just embrace being “American,” and for me that meant embracing being Hispanic. The notion that one could embrace an identity in Christ and leave behind one’s sense of place and cultural identity was, in the end, a delusion. The liturgy of belonging through displacement could no longer make sense of my story or the story that I found about God and God’s people in the pages of Scripture.
God Assumes a Home in Creation
The great Eastern church father Gregory of Nazianzus famously argued that what the Son has assumed in the incarnation he has also redeemed in himself. To put it simply, every aspect of Christ’s life, from his birth to his death, resurrection, and ascension, has salvific power. And as the Mexican American theologian Virgil Elizondo reminds us, when the eternal Word took on flesh, he also took on a culture—and, I would add, a homeland and a people. Jesus’s assumption of a Galilean hometown is of saving significance. Jesus’s home life—his dwelling in intimacy with his family, with his barrio, with the people of Israel—all these realities are for us and for our salvation. And what you see in the life of Jesus is a deep love for Galilee, for the land, and for its people, expressed in his every word and deed. The Gospels do not downplay, set aside, or minimize the importance of Jesus’s hometown. They do not imply that his message might be better received if he could pass as someone from a more powerful or prominent village or city. Each time those with power question Jesus’s authority, each time the crowd murmurs in disbelief, “Isn’t he from Nazareth?” and “Is he not Joseph’s son?” it is not primarily to raise doubt about his divine status. This would be an unfortunate anachronistic reading. Rather, they are questioning his human status, his authority among the people of Israel, and the viability of a political and religious leader emerging from an unimportant and perhaps even sinful region and people (given that Galilee shared a border with Gentile lands, resulting in religious and cultural intermixing). Yet Christ embraces his Galilean identity, so much so that his ministry is almost entirely devoted to this place and its people. Jesus begins his ministry preaching in the local synagogues, and he calls most if not all of his disciples from among the local folks; one might say he chooses from among his homies.
It is this love that we can trace all the way to the cross, and it is out of this profound love for the people of Galilee that Christ is revealed as divine.
More fundamentally, Jesus reveals the mysteries of the kingdom of God by using the common language forged in the daily experiences of his hometown—the language of fishermen, farmers, homemakers, and so on. Jesus drinks from the wells of knowledge and wisdom of his family and local culture, and through these he also learns his identity as a Jew. From dwelling deeply with his people and in his land, Jesus learned to speak and therefore understand the world around him using the local language, which he then used to communicate to the Jews and Gentiles the grace and profound goodness that is life with his Father and in the Spirit. Christ’s love for Galilee is love from within; it is the love of a paisano, of a native. It is not merely the love of a passerby filled with pity; it is intimacy. It is this love that we can trace all the way to the cross, and it is out of this profound love for the people of Galilee that Christ is revealed as divine.
God’s love for all of creation is concentrated and powerfully displayed in Christ’s love for the Galilean people, culture, and land. You can’t love the Galilean Jesus without loving Galilee. And what is Galilean identity apart from the land, the sea, the accents, the buildings, the social structures, the landmarks, and the meshwork of entanglements that made Galilee a home for a particular people?
Now, of course, God’s indwelling in the land of Galilee through the incarnate Son is simultaneously, as Karl Barth puts it, the Son of God’s journey into the far country. Jesus suffers rejection not only at the hands of the socio-religious elite in Jerusalem but also in his hometown and indeed even in his own family. The very same people whom God embraced as his own, as paisanos, as his own hometown family, people who suffered rejection by their compatriots in the centres of power—these same people also rejected Jesus. So powerful is this episode of hometown rejection that it is recorded in every one of the Synoptic Gospels. Before Jesus ever taught anything in Jerusalem, his words inflicted such a crisis in his hometown people that they were ready to throw him off a cliff. One need not leave one’s home to experience violence and the threat of death. In assuming a hometown in the world, Jesus assumes not only the goodness of home but also the deep woundedness that many associate with home.
In assuming a hometown in the world, Jesus assumes not only the goodness of home but also the deep woundedness that many associate with home.
If we are to be disciples of Jesus, if we are to grow in his likeness and be shaped and formed by his life and ministry, then we as a church cannot afford to be tempted by visions of belonging that deny the goodness of home and eschew the deep forms of intimacy we share with our families, neighbourhoods, and even the land. This would be to deny a fundamental aspect of the human experience that God embraces and redeems from within the person of his Son, Jesus Christ. It is precisely the denial of a healthy love for home that distorts it and often leads to violence and to fear and hate of foreigners, as we see in vicious forms of xenophobic nationalism on the rise today. The calling of the church is not to erase the cultural identity of her children or to eschew any sense of home in earthly places but rather to reorient our need and dependence on home toward the love of God, who sent his Son to earth that we might one day share a common home with our Lord, as Revelation 21:3 so aptly describes. Once we recognize that our desire for belonging and home is rooted in God’s desire to dwell within creation through the person of Jesus Christ, we are freed to love our earthly homes, peoples, lands, and cultures as gifts from God to be received with open hands and not as limited resources to be wrenched from others, fenced, and fearfully protected.
If this is the kind of story we all find ourselves in, what role do immigrants have in pointing the church to a proper love of home?
An Alternative Liturgy of Migration and Home
At the heart of the factory’s liturgy was the lunchtime meal. On my first day at lunch, I was reprimanded by one of the elder women when I started to eat my lunch before offering what I had brought to the others at the table. The gratitude toward God shared by my fellow workers expressed itself powerfully when all would gather around the table and each person shared a part of their meal with the others. A Peruvian, I had never had pupusas or corn tortillas, and when I showed them my Peruvian ceviche, they all looked at me with uncertainty. Why was there no shrimp in it? Where was the tomato sauce?—a good reminder that “Latin America” is not singular but a region with a vast diversity of cultures and peoples.
By the end of my summer at the factory, the liturgy had done its job. I felt for the first time in my life what my parents had been trying to inculcate in me for many years: that I belonged here in this place and among these immigrants from Latin America, and that I belonged to them precisely because I was Peruvian. Being Peruvian was what I contributed to this community forged in the suburbs of Chicago. What I had to offer I offered by way of stories and food. The stories and food I brought to the table represented the fragments of my Peruvian home that I carried with me everywhere I went. The fragments of all our homes, shared in the shape of stories and food, were the very means by which new stories, new food, and a new sense of home were being cultivated with others around me.
Perhaps what nagged at me most concerned the irony of finding belonging and a sense of home in the United States by embracing my Peruvian identity among a group of immigrants who, to many around us, did not belong, because they spoke the wrong language or spoke it with the wrong accent, or because they practiced the wrong religion, or simply because their skin looked the wrong way. This was not the liturgy I had experienced in my church, one that provoked a sense of belonging but also a sense of displacement and even alienation. The liturgy I found at the factory was formed around gratitude to God for the gifts of our homelands and cultures. It then turned outward, toward the formation of a community centred on the sharing of gifts at the table. This liturgy seemed to me an icon of the Christ described in the Gospels. We brought the fragments of the homes we left behind to the table, where the Spirit weaved them together into new forms of life, new forms of communion, all in anticipation and as a foretaste of the great homecoming when Christ returns to make out of the earth God’s eternal dwelling place.
I want to end with a note to my fellow immigrants from all the nations. Our homes are not containers that hold our lives, even our lives with God. They are much more than that. Our earthly homes are the meshwork of intimate relationships among land, family, people, and culture that make us who we are and that give us an identity and purpose. As the Spirit hovered over the waters of creation, weaving all things in and through Christ, and as the Spirit hovered over our mother’s wombs, weaving us together in the maternal waters, so too, after we are born, the Spirit continues to weave us together into the fabric of creation in and through Christ, who holds all things together. Imagine, then, the deep loss of being ripped away from these life-giving relationships when we migrate. We as a church have not done enough to wrestle with that deep loss and the trauma it provokes in us and in our parents—and will in many generations to come. The good news is that the same Spirit who weaved us together in our homelands is able to take the fragments of the homes we carry with us to weave together a new creation, a new home. To cooperate with the Spirit, we need to embrace the home we left behind, appreciate the ways in which God blessed us through it, and bring those gifts—the gifts of food, music, art, language, cultural traditions, and even our very bodies—to the table where they might be joined together with the gifts of others in the forging of new homes for our children and our children’s children. This is our witness to the world, but it is not our work; it is the work of the Triune God in us.