So, I just realized that my first post left a lot of gray area in terms of what I am doing this year. So, I wanted to share with everyone something that I wrote for a sermon at my church a few Sundays ago. It is where I got the title for my blog. (And apologies to people that have heard this many times already!) Feel free to click on the links, too! They are helpful with background information...
Strangers and Soulquakes.
Sermon from Sunday August 9, 2009
Elsbeth Pollack
So, I hope that all of you have caught onto the theme of today’s service, on overall message that we are trying to share with you? Maybe about seeing the image of God in everyone, about finding justice in our lives, about the treatment of strangers and the oppressed? And in fact, how a society treats strangers, foreigners and resident aliens is arguably a major focus, even preoccupation, of the Bible. The scriptures have a lot to say about these “resident aliens,” “foreigners in your midst,” “sojourners and strangers among you.”
The overall theme of the Bible’s teaching on how to treat the stranger is summed up in Exodus 22:21, “Don’t abuse or take advantage of strangers, you, remember, were once strangers in Egypt.”
Reminding the people of biblical Israel that they had been slaves, the Hebrews are enjoined to treat aliens, foreigners, and sojourners in their midst fairly and with respect. Leviticus 4:9 states, in similar language, “Don’t take advantage of a stranger. You know what it’s like to be a stranger; you were strangers in Egypt.”
And Leviticus 19:33-34 echoes and expands upon this teaching, “When a foreigner lives with you in your land, don’t take advantage of him. Treat the foreigner the same as a native. Love him like one of your own. Remember that you were once foreigners in Egypt.”
In Deuteronomy 24:17-18, we are told, “Make sure foreigners and orphans get their just rights. Don’t take the cloak of a widow as security for a loan. Don’t ever forget that you were once slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there.”
And to push the point, from the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews 13:1-3, we are told to “stay on good terms with each other, held together by love. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some have entertained angels unawares.” And I could quote from the Beatitudes, the Acts of the Apostles…getting the idea?
But why this fascination with the stranger? Why should the matter of the immigrant or the foreigner be such a concern of the Christian faith?
God didn’t want the ancient Hebrews to forget where they had come from, or how they had gotten where they were, to the Promised Land. Now that they had land and wealth they shouldn’t forget what it was like to be exploited and taken advantage of. They had come from slavery in Egypt. They knew what it was like to be exploited and taken advantage of. They knew what it was like to not belong.
And we all know what it’s like to not belong, don’t we? Whether it’s feeling out of place with groups in school, moving from city to city, meeting new people, joining a new church, or any number of other situations, we’ve all gone through times of being a “stranger,” of not quite fitting in. And God doesn’t want US to forget where we have been, what experiences we have been through that have challenged us, pushed us, made us uncomfortable, and made us who we are today.
And I am who I am today, obviously, because of my experiences at Waverly and in life, that have consistently pushed me to extend hospitality and to remember the stories of where I and others have come from and where we are going.
And so, this is a short reflection on some of the experiences that I’ve had.
I first came to Waverly as a three-year old to attend the preschool program, where I got to paint and play with the sand, make new friends, and sing silly songs. For my parents, newly moved into Pittsburgh, Waverly provided a safe and welcoming community for their young family. We were invited to attend worship services and happily went, my parents with their three young girls in tow. Even though we were not members and my parents, are, I’ll admit it, a bit skeptical about religion, we were treated not as strangers, but as members, as natives, as family. (I’d say living up to the Biblical call to welcome the stranger and to extend hospitality.) I remember going up to the front steps and singing songs under the direction of Mrs. Bird and trying to read along with my dad in the bulletin during the services. I loved learning about all of the Bible stories, and to this day, I can name the disciples in alphabetical order, even with a little rap beat behind it. Growing up in Waverly, I felt like a member of the community.
That wasn’t made official, however, until I was eight. I had been attending a private Catholic school at the time and day after day I sat in the pews in the large gothic church watching the Catholic students practice for their first communion—the day when they became members of the church, initiated into this tight, loving, community. Even in second grade, I felt the importance of this act. So, I talked with Carol Roth about baptism, not a usual step in our denomination. I was thinking deeply about the stories in the Old and New Testament, about God’s promises of community and love and Jesus’ teachings and parables. I wanted to be an official member of the Waverly community because of the love and support that I felt from the people. So, on one Sunday, I was baptized, along with my sisters into the church.
I like to say that from there, my involvement and faith have bloomed (although there have been some rough patches along the way). I have been a member of the Waverly Youth Group, taken part in five different Opera Houses, participated in several mission programs, and attended the
Summer Youth Institute at the
Pittsburgh Theological Seminary during high school. The most formative part of my life thus far, however, has been my four years at
Beloit College, a small liberal arts school in Wisconsin.
I graduated this past May after writing a thesis on the
Sanctuary Movement: Engaging the Power of Language and the Language of Power. The thesis and the events leading up to it, were my soulquake, as African American liberation theologian
James Cone puts it, one of those moments when my soul awoke to reality and I discovered something that moved me to new depths.
I first heard about the Sanctuary Movement during my semester of study abroad in Ciudad Juarez, Cuernavaca, and El Salvador. In
the program, which broadly focused on Gender and Social Change in Mesoamerica, I took classes on liberation theologies and political movements in Central America. I learned about Base Christian Communities and gained a deep respect for struggling grassroots groups working to better their lives. In El Salvador, we learned about the twelve year civil war and the thousands of migrants that left for the United States, and then we got a brief history of the Sanctuary Movement. Finally, here was a group of committed Americans working against empiricism and taking into consideration the lives and troubles of a “strange” people. I found a community in Tucson, Arizona struggling with questions of, “what is our community and how might that community be reconciled with our freedom? How far do our obligations reach? How do we transform mere power into justice, mere sentiments into love?” The movement consisted of religious organizations that came together to grant sanctuary and asylum to Central Americans migrants fleeing U.S-aided civil wars in their countries during the 1980’s. The scripturally grounded call to love the neighbor and take care of the stranger compelled the movement to embody a sense of ethical stewardship, bringing to the public attention the question of national conscience in regards to governmental actions. This was what my faith was about. Living in Mexico and El Salvador was a turning point for me, which lead me to write a
Lenten reflection this past year for
Presbyterian Peacemakers on responding to torture:
As I think back on my experiences and understandings of Lent, I immediately think of my time in Catholic school. Every Friday of each Lenten season, my classmates and I left our classes to go over to the church for the Stations of the Cross, which walked us through, step by step, the journey of Jesus to his crucifixion and resurrection. The stations were usually led by an old white priest with a nasally droning voice that nearly put me to sleep every time. The only exception to this boring repetition for me was the last Friday before Easter, when the eighth graders put on the living stations where we voted on who would be each character. All of the girls wanted to be Mary because that meant that people thought you were pretty and popular. And Jesus was always the most attractive guy in the class. So I was a bit disappointed in eighth grade when I was picked as a reader. I didn’t get to sit, as Mary did, with a half naked Jesus on my lap in the station when he is taken down from the cross. Poor eighth grade me.
This was my idea of Lent growing up. Missing my last two periods of Friday class to go to Mass, where I would sit, stand, kneel, sing, respond, and repeat in a monotonous manner. The ritual of remembrance meant very little to me.
I continued into high school and college with this disconnected relationship with Lent, usually with the focus on the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday, when I would get candy and see my friends and family.
But then, last year, I went to El Salvador as part of my study abroad program. Before going down to El Salvador, torture was an abstract concept, something that I heard about but never came into contact with. But there, I was bombarded with stories and images of massacres, rapes, and tortures. We learned about the twelve year war between the right-wing government and the left-wing guerrillas and the massacres at places like
El Mozote and the assassination of
Archbishop Romero and other priests and nuns. And even then, hearing about those situations, I was able to think about it in the abstract, as something happening to other people. It was something that I could disconnect from.
On a trip to La Universitaria Centroamericana, the site of the murder of six Jesuit priests and two servants, however, I had a harsh realization. We went on a tour of the campus, where students were milling about on their way to classes. Led into a tiny, unassuming chapel, our guide told us about the beautiful banner in the front with depictions of doves, and peace. We found a memorial to Archbishop Romero at the side of the chapel and we talked about the importance of remembering those that we have lost. Then our guide told us to turn around and face the back of the chapel.
It’s hard for me to describe how I felt at that moment. I remember being dumbfounded and saddened. Sick to my stomach, wanting to cry, aching with pain.
On the back wall, on plain white canvas, hung twelve black and white drawings of, naked, bound, whipped, stabbed, and tortured Salvadorans, meant to represent the Stations of the Cross.
I stood in shock.
The Stations of the Cross! The same stations that I sat through for countless hours during elementary school. The same stations that I complained about with my friends every Friday. The same stations that I was angry about because I didn’t get to be Mary. The same stations that we mentioned in Sunday school before going on to talk about the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.
The
drawings showed the pain, anguish and deprivation of tortured persons, the brutality that humanity can inflict on its own, and the recklessness with which we interact with divinely created life. They showed the power of hate, anger and evil that exists in the world. Turning around from a banner of peace and hope to a red brick wall filled with images of brutal torture was a shock that did something to me, changed something in me.
In that contrast of hope and sorrow, I was shocked into an awareness of the reality of torture in our everyday lives and into the reality of what it must have been like for Jesus to hang upon the cross for us, for our sins, for all of the wrong that we have done to the world and to each other. The Stations of the Cross, the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, has taken on an incredibly different meaning from my disconnected relationship of the past. I see now the pain and suffering of being whipped and tortured and made to carry a heavy cross over a long distance, of being hung on a cross by your hands and feet, having a crown of thorns stuck onto your head, being stabbed in the side a few times, surrounded by blood and pain and a sense of, I would have to think, helplessness. Jesus died in that horrible manner so that we would not have to.
In the linkage of those nameless people to the image and reality of Jesus Christ, I am forced to confront the harsh truth of torture in our society. There are still people who walk the way of the cross every day, denied justice, dignity, and respect. People are still killed in massacres. People are still raped. People are still brutally murdered. People are still tortured. But the reality of torture shouldn’t, and doesn’t have to, exist. Jesus died on the cross—he was whipped, stabbed, bound, and tortured—so that we could be redeemed, so that we (and this is the collective “we” of humanity) would not have to go through this pain and suffering. We must live out our faith in the power of the crucifixion and resurrection, sustained by the memory, hope, and presence of this tortured and risen Christ. And that means looking upon people as our brothers and sisters, regardless of our differences.
“We have a responsibility,” a Salvadoran woman told me, “to do justice through our words and actions, to the names we know and those we don’t know.” Those nameless people on the wall of the chapel in El Salvador stick with me. In their pain and anguish, I am reminded of those other anguished people who have suffered and are suffering from torture. But I am also reminded of how Christ came to redeem us from that reality. Wherever torture still occurs, we are not living out Christ’s message of redeeming grace.
Going back to school after such an intense semester really did a number on me. I started to really assess what my values were and what I wanted to do in the future, what kind of person I wanted to be. I decided to live in the Peace and Justice House on campus, filled with yes, the quintessential “hippies” at times, but also with many intelligent and passionate young people who brought up thought-provoking issues and ideas. I traveled to an annual protest and vigil to close the
School of the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, raped, assassinated, and “disappeared,” by those trained at the School. The vigil is a gathering of torture survivors, social movement leaders, civil rights activists, grandmothers, anti-war veterans, students, members of Congress, and many more that come together to take a stand against the violence and racism that the School of the Americas represents. I also started a Books to Prisoners program, involving students, faculty, and staff in collecting and sending out books, as well as creating pen pal relationships with prisoners across the country. I found ways to work for what I believed in.
And then, it was time to graduate and to figure out what I was going to do with myself after 16 years of education in traditional schools, a decent amount of debt, and a heart full of enthusiasm and passion for people.
And this is what really brings me to share this message with you.
I remember first hearing about the
Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) program a few years ago when Waverly hosted a couple of newly returned young adults to speak during worship. I recall being in awe of the work that they did and of the fact that they would leave their friends and family to go off to a new place, to live simply, and to, in a sense, give it up to God, to see what was in store for them. I remember taking a brochure and thinking that sometime in the far-distant future, I would maybe consider the program.
And today, after many twists and turns and thought-provoking adventures, is that day. On August 24, I fly up to New York for orientation for my year of service with the Young Adult Volunteers. The YAV program, run through the PC(USA), provides opportunities for young adults to experience living in intentional Christian community, to focus on spiritual formation, to engage in the mission of the church, to be mentored in vocational discernment, and to be present in communities of need.
I will be living in Tucson, Arizona and working at BorderLinks, a bi-national organization that grew out of the Sanctuary Movement. Today it still carries on some of the movement’s key values while responding to the current political, economic, and social situations on the border. BorderLinks works to encourage cross-cultural understanding about border issues and to promote leadership, education, community development, and social change on both sides of the border.
As a
BorderLinks volunteer, I will be taking part in and leading delegation trips and experiential education seminars along the border. Guided by
Paulo Freire’s philosophy of popular education for social change, the trips focus on the model of “see-think-act.” The delegations of universities, churches and other organizations visit agencies and individuals on both sides of the border to engage with a variety of perspectives on migration and international economic policy. We dialogue and interact with those that the media ignores, and participate in hands-on exercises to better understand the issues. The hope, at the end of each of the trips, is that participants will share these experiences with others in their home communities and that they will act upon whatever thoughts and emotions come out of their experiences.
Borderlinks and other organizations on the border demonstrate a continued commitment to grappling with those same questions that I find so intriguing. Who is my neighbor? What is our community? What are my obligations to other people? How do I share the love?
I look forward to my time on the border, to the spiritual growth, the community of engaged and thoughtful young adults. I look forward to grappling with my role in the complex and emotional climate of the borderlands. In this grappling, I will carry with me God’s call to love my neighbor as I love myself, to remember that I have often been the stranger, that an injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. And I look forward, especially to sharing my experiences and my adventures with those questions, with my Waverly family and friends, all of you!, who have fostered in me the importance of dignity, love, respect, and a sense of joy at engaging with people on so many levels.
Amen and amen.
I hope that helps to explain a bit more about what I will be doing this year and some of the influences on my decision. I am still at
Stony Point in New York State, going through orientation. There is a great group of people here, who through conversations, smiles, and singing bring me closer into community everyday. That's all for now, but I will be back soon.
Thinking of everyone. One love.
