Tag Archives: statue of liberty

Is legality the highest value?

20 Wednesday Jun 2018

Posted by in Politics, Theology

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I have a question for those who believe that fulfilling the law is of utmost importance.

Imagine it is 1861 and you live in Maryland.  A fugitive slave family has escaped slavery in the South.  They come onto your land and seek safe passage.  You encounter them.

What do you do?

Do you fulfill the law of the land that states that a fugitive slave shall be returned to their masters – knowing that this will lead to severe punishment, possibly death, and maybe even the separation of families?  Or do you give safe passage to the family on their journey to freedom, thus disobeying the law because you recognize it as immoral and destructive?  Or do you do something else?

It’s easy to point out the differences in this situation with the current immigration mess.  It’s easy to make excuses and dismiss the example I provided.  In fact, it’s easy to decide to see the world in black and white – to separate things into issues and people’s lives and believe that the two are not related – missing the messiness of the impact of this way of thinking on people’s lives.  But are you willing to answer the question given your current logical reasoning?  Are you willing to be the one who enforces this law?  If not, why not?  It’s not your job?  That’s a cop-out.  Are you willing to take a look at how the situations are similar?  To be uncomfortable?  Are you willing to be consistent in your thinking that the obeying and fulfilling the law is of utmost importance – regardless of the morality of the law?

Or how about this situation – you are Jew in Bethlehem during the reign of King Herod – the ruler of the land you reside in.  Herod declares that all male babies two years old or younger shall be killed.  The reasoning doesn’t matter.  You have a one year old.  Would you willingly hand over your child to the soldiers in order to fulfill and obey the law and the governing authorities?  What if you didn’t have a child, but you knew a traveling family passing through did?  Would you turn them in?  Why?  Or would you do what you had to do to disobey this decree in order to save the life of your child or any child?

Now imagine you are a refugee, or even just an immigrant from Central America.  Seriously, put yourself in their just a small section of their shoes.  And don’t give me the nice neat answer of “I would obey the law and follow the rules.”  You are still thinking from the safety of your life.  Imagine that the situation in your own country is not good.  Your family is in danger if they stay – you and your family could end up dead.  You decided to leave and make a journey north to America – a land known as a place of opportunity.  While so much is unknown, you determine that it has to be better than where you are right now.  You make the trip and get to the border.  What you do is illegal, but staying within the law means almost certain death.  What do you do?  What do you hope will happen?

It’s not so easy when we move past black and white thinking is it?  It’s rather messy.  Life is messy.  Law does not equal morality.  This isn’t an argument for lawlessness.  This is an argument about the morality of certain laws and what we are supposed to obey when those laws are suspect or outright immoral – regardless of who passed them or when.  This isn’t an argument about Republicans and Democrats – of who should get the blame.  That doesn’t resolve anything and is a distraction.

What we are dealing with is a difference of image – not the skin deep images of celebrity and consumerism.  No, deeper images – ones that define and shape who we are.

Is our national image shaped by this and what it stands for:

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Or this and the poem which is associated with it:

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Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(Source: the New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, 1883)

Which image will we embrace?

The first image is an image of the law – cold, heartless, and concerned with security, safety, and control for some.

The second image is an image of risk, welcome, and uncertainty for all.

We can do so many things that try to make us more secure, safer, and give us the false sense of control over our lives.

The disciples in this coming Sunday’s Gospel passage are all on board with that.  They are in the sea, in a boat.  And there is a great storm brewing.  They are scared and they seek safety.  They wake Jesus up because they feel insecure and unsafe.  They are not in control.  They worry about the bad things that will happen to them.  And they ask Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38, NRSV).

Jesus doesn’t answer their question.  He doesn’t give the answer they want – “of course I don’t want you to perish.”  Nope.  He doesn’t say anything.  Hardly comforting.  Later he will call on his disciples to pick up their cross and follow him, to deny themselves.  To die.

Yet, death does not have the final say.  After Jesus calms the storms around the boat, he asks the disciples these questions – Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?

These are deep questions for us.  And they are Gospel too.  Why are we afraid?  What do we fear?  Do we believe that Jesus walks with us – with all of us?  Do we believe that Jesus walks with these refugees too?  Or is Jesus just reserved for us on this side of the wall?

What does it mean to follow Jesus?  What does it mean to love our neighbors?  To welcome the stranger?  When have we been strangers and been rejected?

What is Jesus calling us to?

Have you still no faith?  Guess what – we can’t have enough faith on our own.  If it’s about us and our faith, what we know about God, our safety, our security, our control – then we’ll just end up failing and dead.

Faith is a gift from God.  It comes to us because we can’t go to it.  Faith isn’t just head knowledge, but it moves through us and causes us to respond.  To pick up our cross and follow Jesus.  Especially in the storms of life.  When there is danger all around us.  Faith moves us forward – in risk, in welcome, and in uncertainty.  Faith means we are not in control and we aren’t going to fool ourselves into believing we are.  We are safe, but in a different way – we are in God’s hands. That regardless what happens to us, God will not forget us.  And God offers us a promise – resurrection.  New life.  Transformed life.  Changed life.  Risky life.  Invitational life.  Life.

Should we return the Statue of Liberty?

30 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by in Politics

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Should we return the Statue of Liberty to France?  We don’t seem interested in using it or what it stands for lately.

According to the National Park service:

What does the torch represent? The torch is a symbol of enlightenment. The Statue of Liberty’s torch lights the way to freedom showing us the path to Liberty. Even the Statue’s official name represents her most important symbol “Liberty Enlightening the World”.

(Source: Click here)

Of course, I’m asking a ridiculous question in order to talk about an important issue – immigration.

Immigration has been a divisive issue since people started coming to this continent from other continents – whether by choice or by force.

Over the decades different groups of people have been looked down upon and degraded because of where they are from, what language they spoke, what they looked like, and what they believed.  And yet, people still come.

One of the reasons they keep coming is the hope for a better life that is expressed in the sonnet that has been associated with the Statue of Liberty:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

(Source: Click here)

What does it mean to give us “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.”  This is an important question in the current immigration debate.  We hear some make the arguments that we only want wealthy, successful, and well-educated people.  Yet, how does that match up with the sonnet?  Of course the sonnet isn’t the law of the land.  And neither is the Statue of Liberty for that matter.  But it is symbolic of what we supposedly stand for.

So what about illegal immigration.  Let’s get right to it.  I don’t need to rehash all the arguments that have been made about illegal immigration.  You’ve heard and read many of them and may have even used them in arguments about immigration.

I know that facts don’t persuade people anymore, but just in case you actually care about the numbers of illegal immigrants in the country and where they are from, you can read the Pew Research information from last year.  http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/ It’s got lot’s of good information about how illegal immigration is changing in the US.

If facts aren’t your thing, then maybe you’ll consider stories.  The BBC ran a pretty good eight minute video on the consequences of the recent immigration enforcement.  You can watch it here.

I don’t pretend to have the answer to illegal immigration.  I see it as very complex.  It’s not a cut and dry issue for me.  It’s not just an issue of someone breaking the law, so send them back.  If you read the Pew findings, the obvious question will be – send them back where?  For many illegal immigrants, they don’t have a home anywhere else.  There isn’t a home or family just waiting for them.  Are we going to deport people to places they know nothing about?  Are we going to send people into homelessness and destitution, to places that persecute people because of religion and political identity?  Is that what our we are about?

Should we replace the Statue of Liberty and the sonnet associated with it with something else – a guy carrying a sign that says “Keep Out!”

Maybe I’m confusing things though.  Those that are opposed to illegal immigration aren’t claiming to be against all immigration – but rather that the rules be followed to enter the country.  I think there is some truth in this.  Yet, we have a problem.  We have millions of people who have entered the country illegally.  What do we do with them?  The short answer is I don’t know.

The longer answer is that if we attempt to deal with immigration as a separate concern, apart from any other issue, we will fail.  Immigration isn’t a stand alone issue.  No issue is stand alone.  It’s complex and deals with people and their lives.  While I don’t have political solution to this, I do know this much – we are called to welcome the stranger, to offer hospitality.  To be Christ’s presence in their lives.  To proclaim good news to the poor, the homeless, the lost, the widow, the orphan – the very people the sonnet offer a welcome to and call out to come to these shores for a better opportunity.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

If we aren’t careful, the sonnet will be meaningless because of our own doing.

At the Statue

03 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in Travel

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I’ve been to the Statue of Liberty a couple of times before.  Once, we even go to go up to the crown.  Each time I’ve gone, I can’t help be a little sad feeling that the reality of the nation and culture is different than the ideals set forth in the symbolism of the statue.

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But that’s always going to be the challenge – the reality vs. the ideal.

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It’s similar to the view of the city from the statue.  There is the ideal of the city that we see from afar.

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And then there is the reality – the up close view, where we see and experience all the imperfections and sins of the people.  And we are left with a choice – what do we focus on?  Many spend too much time focusing on the negatives and choose to condemn and divide.  That’s a place I cannot go.  The message is all doom and gloom.

Instead, I choose to take a different path and cross a different bridge.  I’d much rather focus on the ideal while not ignoring the reality that exists. But the ideal is gives us direction and something and somewhere to go.  It’s not about reaching the ideal as if it were a destination. No the ideal is a way of life to be lived instead.

NYC Skyline

02 Monday May 2016

Posted by in Travel

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Just a couple of weekends ago, we were part of a church trip to NYC.

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I love NYC.  It’s my favorite American city.  I’ve been there numerous times (enough times that I can’t remember how many times now).  Each time I go, there’s still something new to see, and there are still new things to take in.  And familiar things too, like the skyline.

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This time we had our entire family with us.  The last time we came to visit the city was almost two years ago.  We made a trip to NYC so that we could go to the Finnish consulate to do an interview with Finnish authorities, pay fees, etc. – all so we could receive resident permits so we could live in Finland for a year of exchange studies.

Now we were back in the US, and coming to a city that has accepted people from foreign places for a long time.  And the statue has become the symbol of welcome to so many.

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Yet we find our country in the midst of tearing itself apart over who it is, what it stands for and if the symbols and principles that have guided us for so long will remain.  We have one candidate from this noble city running for office that now only sees the markers of the skyline as just familiar landmarks – devoid of meaning.  And many throw themselves down in what is essentially worship of him and what he stands for.  It’s rather shameful really.

And yet, I can’t help but think about all the people who came here, by boat, and saw this symbol of freedom and pointed and took a sigh of relief – they came somewhere for a better chance at life.  I wonder how many more will have the opportunity to do so in the future.  I wonder how many will want to come.  I wonder if the thin veneer of civility will hold up.  Or will our darker sinful desires bring about our own downfall.

In the meantime, we can point to principles that have guided us.  They haven’t been easy, but they have made us who we are.

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