As I was growing up safe and sound in the middle of the United States during the 1980s, our siblings to the south in countries like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatamala were facing totalitarian regimes that sought to control their people by any means necessary. This included making those who disagreed with their regimes disappear and never return.
In response, the common people found hope from the justice they saw in their religious texts. This included especially the gospel of Luke with Mary's song of praise to God. Even though we are just a month or two out from the holiday season, here's a bit of a refresher:
"God has shown God's strength, scattering the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty." (Luke 1:51-53)
The power of this song was so great that the Guatamalan regime literally banned it. It was dangerous and seditious to tyrants who wished to hold onto their power. To the wealthy oligarchs who could not stand to hear that God might not favor the rich and wealthy.
And what is incredibly ironic is that the majority of the United States churches lived in fear of the liberation theology that was so potent and prevalent in South and Mesoamerica, that it might pick up steam here. Giving the poor and the oppressed within our own borders a way to hope and a message of comfort.
It is ironic because among the source-work those theologians used was a well-known Reformed theologian, Jürgen Moltmann. In his seminal work, "The Crucified God," Moltmann reminded us: "God allows God's self to be humiliated and crucified in the Son, in order to free the oppressors and the oppressed from opression and to open up to them the situation of free, sympathetic humanity... It is true that in a world of high consumption, where anything and everything is possible, nothing is so humanizing as love, and a conscious interest in the life of others, particularly in the life of the oppressed. For love leaves us open to wounding and disappointment." God sits not enthroned as the almighty and powerful, as did the gods of the ancients, but God instead choosing suffering and death to show us our own inhumanity toward one another.
Having been born in Germany in 1926, Moltmann had been drafted into the German army at 16. Eventually taken as a prisoner of war and transported to the British Isles, he and his fellow prisoners then came face to face with the realities of the concentration and death camps through pictures and news articles from the Allies. Following the war, he studied at Gottingen under professors who were students of Karl Barth. From there he went to use his life experience to write a theology of hope that would serve the oppressed and to teach the Western Church how to support those whom God sought out most.
The lessons of Barth and Moltmann, Germany and South Africa, have often been lost on our churches, especially the mainline, because white Americans did not have to live under a regime that intentionally targetted people who looked like us. Many became the moderates that the Rev. Dr. King called out in his "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" - those who are more devoted to the status quo than to justice, those who would seek out a lack of tension rather than true peace where God's equity and justice are present.
And now, as the streets of our own city are watching as neighbor turns on neighbor, turning in those who might be "illegal," where our children are asking their teachers what ICE is and living in tangible fear of their families and lives being destroyed - many in the Church would rather bury their heads in the sand and claim ignorance for the sake of "tolerance."
But lest we forget, anyone who is cast out, who is hungry or unhoused, who is a stranger or foreigner, anyone who is considered "unworthy" or least by the world, and most especially by the Church - those people and places are precisely where Christ will stand.
The question is, will we stand with Jesus? Or against him?
Blessings,
Rev. Janie
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