The Border, Immigration and Christian Spirituality

 

1 Praying at the wall for migrants and comprehensive immigration reform.

I have been bringing students and travel seminar participants to Mexico since 1985. Since 2003, my focus has been on bringing people to the US/Mexico borderlands of El Paso, Tx; Las Cruces, NM; and Juarez, Mexico. I just completed leading a group of a dozen members from the Rocky Mountain Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which included our bishop, and two other synod staff members, to this area the first week of November.

The goal of these Border Immersions is to give participants the opportunity to go underneath all the rhetoric, posturing, and fake news and fake video to see what is really happening on the border. We do this by providing participants the opportunity to meet and talk with people who live and work on the border so that they have a chance to reassess their theology and moral and political views about immigration, walls, and how we are to respond to God’s call to welcome and love our neighbors. 

 

 This year we met and interviewed the Catholic Bishop of El Paso, (see the picture below), the director  for 40 years of shelters and immigration centers in El Paso, and another priest  in Juarez who has spent most of his life working with immigrants in the borderlands. We visited three shelters that house asylum seekers and talked with their staff (in Juarez, El Paso and Las Cruces). There was a stark difference in  these shelters compared to a similar trip I led last year, as the shelters now are essentially empty, as hardly anyone is now being allowed to apply for asylum. 

We also heard from an immigration attorney, who gave a presentation on our complicated immigration system, and from a former Border Patrol officer, who worked for 30 years in the El Paso sector and gave a PowerPoint on how things have changed over the years. [Normally we visit the Border Patrol, but they are no longer receiving groups.] We attended a Deportation Hearing at the courthouse in Las Cruces and were able to visit with and ask questions of the judge after the proceedings. 

Most importantly, we visited with migrants seeking asylum: this year we interviewed a woman left for dead in South America by her accuser because she filed a complaint against him for sexually abusing young women.  On a similar trip last year, we met a typical colonia (poor, rural communities often without water or sewer) family. The mother and father had come to El Paso  30 years ago with their infant son--and then had two American-born children. When the father went back to Mexico for his mother’s funeral, he was not allowed back into the US because the “work papers” in his wallet were no longer considered valid. Also last year, at a shelter in Juarez, I met a 19 year-old gay man from Central America who said he was threatened with death almost every day and a married father with 3 children who was shot 8 times in Mexico because he did not have the “protection money” demanded by a drug cartel.

 We also heard from folks who have tried to visit in local detention facilities. They have seen children sleeping on floors, lights on all night long, not allowed enough water or restroom visits.  Some are not allowed to bathe. One pastor said she met a youth who had been in detention 2 weeks and never allowed to shower. The stench was so bad she had to burn his clothes. 

 2We attended a march and worship service celebrating the Día de los Muertos, (Day of the Dead,) which includes the Mexican spiritual belief that the monarchs that return to Mexico Nov. 2 are the souls of the dead returning to comfort us.

As followers of Jesus, how are we to respond to what I have described above? Where does our spirituality lead us? The director of shelters mentioned above, at a time when his shelters were completely full, held a summit for  the churches in El Paso, asking them to begin to welcome immigrants into their church buildings for food, shelter, and assistance in how to apply for asylum. A few churches responded right away, but most did not. And so he called another meeting six months later, looked at the gathered clergy and church leaders, and simply said: “Jesus has been knocking on your doors for six months. Are you ever going to let him in?”

The spirituality of this moment in history is not complicated for me. Jesus put it about as clearly as one could: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison, and you came to me.” [Matthew 25:35-36]

One of the failures of what we call mainline Christianity in America is that we never found a way to effectively challenge the theology of the Moral Majority that went public in 1979, based on Christian fundamentalism and Christian nationalism. We were seldom able to find effective ways of getting our theology into public discussion. We are now seeing the results of that failure. However, in just the last month both United States Lutheran and Catholic Bishops have come out with powerful statements on immigration, and they provide the theological and pastoral basis as to why we have throughout all these years welcomed refugees and immigrants into our families, communities, and religious communities. 

                                   3 Bishop Meghan Johnston Aelabouni of the Rocky Mountain Synod who attended the entire Immersion.

 

From the US Lutheran Bishops on October 8, 2025:

 

As bishops of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), we write to you in this moment of national and global tension with clarity and conviction. Our faith compels us to stand where Jesus stands—with and for those whom society often seeks to exclude, erase, or diminish.

Our shared confession that every person is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27) grounds us in the conviction that all people possess inherent dignity. The incarnation of Jesus Christ reveals God’s profound solidarity with humanity—especially with those who are marginalized or oppressed. The gospel we proclaim insists that our neighbor’s need is the occasion for our love and that our public life is shaped by justice, mercy, and a commitment to the common good.

We are to respond to newcomers as we would to Christ—welcoming them, meeting their immediate needs, and advocating for justice in our laws and policies.

We are living through a time when vulnerable communities are being scapegoated and attacked. Immigrants and refugees are vilified, though Scripture commands us to welcome the stranger.

 In this time of division and fear, we, as people grounded in our faith, insist on love. This commitment flows from our faith in Christ crucified and risen—the One whose love breaks down barriers, confronts hatred, and transforms hearts.

 

Bishop. Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, speaking during the Nov. 11, 2025 session of the fall general assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore. Credit: OSV News, photo/Bob Ro.

The US Catholic Bishops’ statement, which came out last week, begins with a profound pastoral orientation:

 

We are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants. We are concerned about the conditions in detention centers and the lack of access to pastoral care. We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status. We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools. We are grieved when we meet parents who fear being detained when taking their children to school and when we try to console family members who have already been separated from their loved ones. Despite obstacles and prejudices, generations of immigrants have made enormous contributions to the well-being of our nation.

 

The bishops then go on to proclaim their Christian convictions:

 

The Church’s teaching rests on the foundational concern for the human person, as created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). As pastors, we look to Sacred Scripture and the example of the Lord Himself, where we find the wisdom of God’s compassion. The priority of the Lord, as the Prophets remind us, is for those who are most vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger (Zechariah 7:10). In the Lord Jesus, we see the One who became poor for our sake (2 Corinthians 8:9), we see the Good Samaritan who lifts us from the dust (Luke 10:30–37), and we see the One who is found in the least of these (Matthew 25). The Church’s concern for neighbor and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as He has loved us (John 13:34).

4 Our group visiting long-time friends in Juarez.

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part X: Latin American Liberation Theology

My first eight posts in this series articulate the theological ways I searched to find meaning again, and a positive relationship with God, in response to the grief that consumed much of my life after the deaths of my parents when I was in high school, and my first wife, Pauline, after ten years of marriage.

 

In my last post, on Feminist Theology, I described another way in which our theology can change. It is not in response to our own painful experience, but to the painful experiences of others that is shared with us when we have an open mind and heart. The remainder of my posts in this series will be of this type, and most of them fall into the category of what we call “liberation” theologies,” which search to free us from old ways that no longer work, if they ever did. 

 

Traditional theology, which we often call Orthodoxy, begins “above” with traditional interpretations of theology and with the teachings of the church and then applies those understandings to our life in the world.  Liberation theologies always begin “below,” in our lived experiences, or as we learn of the lived experiences of others and then turn to the tradition for insight and guidance.

 

One of the primary ways in which this happened for me was on my first trip to the interior of Mexico in December 1983. The travel seminar began in Mexico City where two Catholic Sisters took us to a massive landfill on the outskirts of the city, the fourth largest city in the world with a population over 23 million people. Our van stopped at the top of the dump ground so we could get out and look down into the landfill. It was massive, with garbage piled high and deep as far as you could see, and an odor so strong it made your eyes water. 

 

Photo taken by me, December 1983

We drove down into the landfill where we found families living in lean-to homes, made from whatever materials they might find, and making their living by sorting through the garbage, for food to eat and for items they might sell. And right in the middle of this massive landfill was a soccer field for the kids to play on. We also saw large garbage bags that were turquoise in color. When we asked the Sisters why they were that color, they told us it was because that was how they got rid of hospital garbage, and the turquoise color was so that people would know not to go through it. 

However, driving a little further, we saw children going through the turquoise bags. We could not believe what we were witnessing! It was impossible to hold back the tears. The Sisters then explained that the poverty is so great that there is a waiting list of people who hope to live in the landfill one day. A child may be born in the landfill, grow up there and have children of their own, and then die there. It may be the only life some people ever know.

 

In the months to follow, that painful and bewildering experience haunted my dreams and my theological reflection. How can someone see, smell and feel such a painful reality and not respond in some way? Two years later, when we had moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico to live and teach, I began to find an answer. 

 

Dr. Mark W. Thomsen was the Director of the Division for World Mission, and he had an idea for a theological conference at our Lutheran seminary in Mexico City, which was scheduled for December of 1985. The American Lutheran Church invited 14 South American theologians and 14 North American theologians to gather to discuss the meaning of Lutheran theology for the contemporary era, especially as it pertained to the massive poverty throughout the southern hemisphere. The plan was to take 14 themes of Lutheran theology, with 7 major presentations made by Southern and 7 by Northern theologians, with another theologian from the opposite hemisphere responding to each lecture. 

 

Invitations were sent to 28 Lutheran theologians, 14 From North America and 14 from Central and South America. Every single one accepted the invitation, anxious to begin what we all knew would be a profound dialogue. 

 

Dr. Milton Schwantes

I remember vividly the beginning of the conference. It felt like being at the United Nations. Everyone had headsets, as all presentations and discussions would be translated into Spanish, Portuguese and English. As the conference was about to begin, a profound theologian from Brazil, Dr. Milton Schwantes, asked to speak. First, he thanked the planners for the invitation to come and he stated how pleased he and the other southern theologians were to be part of such a dialogue. Then he went on to say, “However, we have a problem with how this conference is set up. You are starting with doctrines of Lutheranism, and we are asking what these teachings mean for us today. However, that is not the way we do theology in the South. We begin with the pain and suffering of our people, and then ask what our theology and the church has to say to them.”

 

For a few moments, the conference fell into stunned silence. With those few words Dr. Schwantes had captured the challenge before us. He was advocating for  “theology from below,” the beginning of all liberation theologies. This was the answer to my intuition that the spiritual journey does not begin with doctrine, but with our quest to find meaning and hope in the midst of the suffering we ourselves experience, and the suffering we encounter all around us in the world. 

 

It was time for me to think through again the meaning of “salvation,” which, for me, growing up in the church, was our primary goal and included two elements: living in the forgiveness of sins in this life, and the hoped-for entrance into a life after death in the presence of God. However, that was not the primary understanding in the biblical world. The Greek soteria meant "deliverance from powers of harm, which included rescue from serious peril,  being saved from sin through forgiveness, and experiencing health and well-being. [See Shirley Paulson, The Bible and Beyond Blog]  

 

Focusing on the teachings of Jesus, one can readily see this understanding: he focused on freeing people from illness, racism, poverty, loneliness, and then invites his followers into a Movement built on equality, mercy, compassion, reconciliation, love and hope in the midst of the many calamities of life. For liberation theology, this means calling the church to include in its understanding of salvation the freeing of persons from the many ways in which they are oppressed, abused, marginalized and discounted in the earthly realm. As such, this approach searches for a true and whole freedom not only from spiritual sin, but from the many ways people are imprisoned by the conditions in their lives.

Last October Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, called the “father of liberation theology,” died at age 96. In 1971 he had published A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, which grew out of his concern for people experiencing economic poverty amid the collapse of political projects in the 1960s that tried to modernize the region, exacerbated by the political repression by military juntas in several South and Central American countries. The result was widespread violence and poverty—something that, for Gutiérrez and his colleagues, was not natural, but produced by severe social and economic inequality. 

Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, explains his understanding of this new theology: “That was the innovation introduced by Gustavo Gutiérrez and others—including myself—when we conceived theology starting from the suffering and oppression faced by the great majority of the Latin American people. The poor are oppressed, and all oppression cries for liberation,” [See Eduardo Campos Lima, The Christian Century, November 1, 2024.]

 

Liberation theology proposes to fight poverty by addressing its alleged source, the sin of greed. In so doing, it explores the relationship between Christian theology (especially Roman Catholic) and political activism, especially in relation to economic justice, poverty, and human rights. The principal methodological innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed. For example, Jon Sobrino, of El Salvador, argues that the poor are a privileged channel of God's grace. According to Gutiérrez, God is revealed as the One with deep concern for those people who are "insignificant", "marginalized", "unimportant", "needy", "despised", and "defenseless". Moreover, he makes clear that the terminology of "the poor" in the Christian Bible has social and economic connotations that etymologically go back to the Greek word ptōchos, explaining: "Preference implies the universality of God's love, which excludes no one. It is only within the framework of this universality that we can understand the preference, that is, 'what comes first'." [Gutierrez,The God of Life, p. 112.] 

I was blessed living in Mexico to see liberation theology at work in the lives of the poor. I attended many Bible studies, called Base Christian Communities, where folks in poor neighborhoods gather to explore the relationship of God and the Bible to their poverty. I marveled at people’s generosity with each other, in spite of their great poverty, and their commitment to support each other and then work together to confront the ways both church and government often ignored them and even at times took advantage of them. 

These powerful experiences became the basis of my Doctor of Ministry thesis on Liberation Theology and the Base Christian Community Movement, and this new theological orientation would eventually change not only how I understood the world but also the ways in which I would do ministry. From preaching to confirmation to adult education I tried to begin with the pain and suffering and joys of the people with whom I worked as together we searched our rich and powerful Biblical and theological traditions for insight, guidance and inspiration. [For further study, see my recent book available from Amazon: Freed to Love and Live Again: My Journey through Grief to Wounded Healing, a Liberating Theology and Social Justice Ministry, especially Chapters 3-4.]

 

St. Paul talks about the power of faith, hope and love, and I saw in these Base Communities all three, including an unrelenting hope stronger than suffering and even death. As Rubem Alves of Brazil wrote in his book, Tomorrow’s Child:

 

What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination
is more real and reality is less real than it looks.
It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality
of facts that oppress and repress us
is not the last word.
It is the suspicion that reality is more complex
than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not
determined by the limits of the actual;
and in a miraculous and unexplained way
life is opening up creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection –
but the two – suffering and hope
must live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté
and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates
even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
That is the secret discipline.
It is the refusal to let our creative act
be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience
and is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints,
the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hopes.

This hope grows out of an unrelenting focus on the love of God for the whole world and a trust not only in God, but in the community of love that surrounds each of us. This deep spiritual understanding is expressed powerfully in the poetry of Julia Esquivel of Guatemala, who was an elementary school teacher who also studied theology:

Mary Erickson, Guatemala, 1986

I am no longer afraid of death

I know well

Its dark and cold corridors

Leading to life.

I am afraid rather of that life

Which does not come out of death,

Which cramps our hands

And slows our march.

I am afraid of my fear

And even more of the fear of others,

Who do not know where they are going,

Who continue clinging

To what they think is life

Which we know to be death!

I live each day to kill death;

I die each day to give birth to life,

And in this death of death,

I die a thousand times

And am reborn another thousand

Through that love

From my People

Which nourishes hope!

—From Threatened with Resurrection

Picture of Christ Figure: Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons