Thoughts on ICE, DHS, and Minneapolis

I’ve been considering the current events unfolding in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and our nation in general this past week. We live in wild times, honestly. Never would I have imagined that my life would overlap significant events in American history—the kinds you read about in history books—but, here we are. Whenever I am stressed out and trying to figure out how to navigate what to do when everything is fucked, I contemplate the vastness of time, namely time from the perspective of God. Where have we come from? What lies ahead in light of what came before? And how are we just repeating the same things over and over, like the inept creatures we are. Juvenal, the Roman poet attributed with saying, “The people, who once cast votes, high office, legions, everything, now restrain themselves and anxiously hope for just two things: bread and circuses," cynically implies that people will trade away their society and ability to participate in it for comfort and entertainment, and with the Super Bowl on the Horizon, has anything honestly changed in the last 1,900 years? The notion of an immigration crisis, however, is as old as human civilization itself. What has lead to goosestepping ICE agents patrolling our streets, I think, comes from the oldest and greatest fear: one of the sojourner and of our neighbor.

All that said, I’m reminded of a bible study where I taught out of the book of Esther (from the Old Testament), where a very similar immigration crisis was taking place. (I recognize that some of you reading this may know nothing about Esther or the writings of the Old Testament, but stay with me and see what I mean.)

The character of Esther in her eponymous book is rather archetypal: a rags-to-riches orphan, who becomes King Ahasuerus’ Queen by standing out among the other members of his harem. After wooing him and winning the crown, there is a great celebration throughout the land and, for a time, things seem rather peaceful, all things considered. But then we are introduced to Haman:

After these things King Ahasuerus promoted Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, and advanced him and set his throne above all the officials who were with him. And all the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate bowed down and paid homage to Haman, for the king had so commanded concerning him. But Mordecai did not bow down or pay homage. Then the king’s servants who were at the king’s gate said to Mordecai, “Why do you transgress the king’s command?” And when they spoke to him day after day and he would not listen to them, they told Haman, in order to see whether Mordecai’s words would stand, for he had told them that he was a Jew. And when Haman saw that Mordecai did not bow down or pay homage to him, Haman was filled with fury. But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone. So, as they had made known to him the people of Mordecai, Haman sought to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus. Esther 3:1–6 (ESV)

So, you know, genocide stuff…

What’s fascinating about this passage isn’t exactly Mordecai (Esther’s older cousin who becomes her adoptive father) upholding his religious convictions in front of King Ahasuerus (aka Xerxes I, of Frank Miller’s 300 fame) and his court, but Haman’s anger at seeing a foreigner defy him and his king. To a 21st century reader, this is seemingly all nonsense, but the background here is that the events of Ester took place in the period of exile, during which the Jews were refugees, kicked out of their own land for the repeated, and often flagrant, violations YHWH’s covenant law. The exile, also, is an important component to the Jewish identity in both ancient and modern times, if only because the question “are the Jews still ‘wandering in the desert’?” persisted in meaningful sociological and theological ways back then, as well as today. So, as a stranger in a strange land, Mordecai not bowing to the head of state would have been perceived as an act of defiance, an unwillingness to assimilate into the society he new occupied.

You know, that Xerxes…

In Haman’s case, seeing Esther rise to prominence is one thing, but being defied by Mordecai is another. In most Ancient Near East kingdoms, the Royal family were considered authorized agents of the gods that sponsored the city state; therefore, to bow to them was considered an acknowledgement of their pseudo divinity granted to them by the Gods. In the Book of Esther, Haman considers this lack of fealty as a sign of instability, a threat to the current attitude of who’s in charge:

Then Haman said to King Ahasuerus, “There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom. Their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not to the king’s profit to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be decreed that they be destroyed, and I will pay 10,000 talents of silver into the hands of those who have charge of the king’s business, that they may put it into the king’s treasuries.” Esther 3:8–9 (ESV)

The sections in bold describe the reasons why Haman fears the Jews and their (to him, at least) alien customs. Specifically, he says that “Their laws** are different from those of every other people,” which, for the non-ancient Near-Eastern individual, meant that the Jewish cultural identity and worldview was incompatible with that of ancient Persian society. And not much has changed since. Our fear of immigrants and others with markedly different cultures, from Anticatholic nativism to islamophobia to segregation, is as much an American pastime as is the NFL and fireworks. So, despite the events of Esther taking place almost 2,500 years ago, we still are afraid of the outside influence of other cultures on our society. Matters of national security notwithstanding, arresting women and children seems counter productive in the face of many other more pressing matters.

(**Understand that a “law” in the sense that a Greco-Roman, Western Civilization minded person would imagine was just not around yet in human consciousness. “Laws” in the Ancient Near East context served as examples of what it meant to be a “good” and “ordered” member of that society. In other words: the boundary marker that determined if a person was a Jew, or not a Jew, a Persian, or not a Persian, etc.)

One of the reasons I quit social media was the perceived futility of the discussions being had there. Friends arguing with their relatives, ex-employees arguing with their previous managers, children arguing with their parents, it all means nothing if there’s no follow-up engagement. Without living with or walking with your neighbors in community, your words will always just be that of the “other,” whatever the “other” is to the opposing person. I personally believe that only the Gospel can build meaningful communities built on forgiveness and patience. And without it, we start looking to other ideologies that may hold us together. And in those frameworks we perceive an ideal the promotes stability and what may be seen as a threat to it. Friends, we are seeing the same thing right now in the United States with the increasing paranoia and suspicion of immigrants and of those who are “not like us.” We are obsessed with something that can’t save us. (In my opinion, that is.) The demonization and systematic persecution of immigrants over perceived slights is, as we see in Esther, not a productive way to deal with those we don’t understand or don’t have the inclination to. The fear that drives this administration to persist in this foolishness so aggressively, of not wanting to be supplanted by immigrants, is a shortsighted one. As history marches on, things will change. National borders, societies, relationships, governments, values, notwithstanding. The only thing that does not change, that will not change, is God and His sovereign will. Therefore, we should live without some apocalyptic fear that the world will end if ______ happens. That is all in God’s control. (Again, in my opinion.) That we, as Americans, think we can somehow alter the course of our history with acts of violence and suppression is anathema to the Gospel and defiance against God.

But, I’m rambling now…

Without the willingness to see the MAGA hat-wearing, gun-toting, Republican-voting individual as a person made in the image and likeness of God, we are not likely to recognize them as someone we should be willing to dialogue with. Likewise, without the understanding that we can have for the LBGTQ flag-bearing, EV-driving, Democrat-voting neighbor, and their value as someone God loves, the same is also the case. We need to understand that working with someone is not expressing tacit approval for their values and behavior, it’s just the reality of the world we live in. Armchair prognostications aside, if we continue along without changing our attitudes, I think it’s likely that there will be some kind of cultural upheaval on the horizon to address the anxiety and fears of everyone caught up in this moment. Whether that is an authoritarian, expansionist US, a catastrophic world war, or a concerted effort to rediscover that a constitutional democracy, although far from being perfect, still remains worthy of our investment, I am comforted by the fact that my true comfort comes from the unchanging and everlasting nature of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Does that mean that I should fiddle on the roof of my house as the US burns to the ground? By no means! It means that I must remain invested in this democracy because order and society is a gift from God that we need to cherish. Most importantly, It’s also our duty to steward the world and it’s affairs until Jesus returns.