Over the last few months, we’ve been mobilizing evangelicals in Denver, Colorado, to raise a public voice on behalf of reforming the immigration system in the United States. Ours is a nation of immigrants and their descendants. But the system of laws that govern immigration into our country is complicated and unhelpful for immigrants, for businesses who would like to hire them, and for the cohesiveness of our communities. As a result nearly 12 million undocumented immigrants live in the shadows of American society. Many of these are my neighbors, and a handful are my friends.

There are followers of Jesus who have been advocating on behalf of immigrants for years – Roman Catholics, Quakers, and many others. But evangelicals, the Word-centered folks with whom I have fellowshipped for 30 years, have been mostly silent.
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The following article by Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke appears as part of The Global Conversation in the April 2010 Christianity Today. Please visit www.christianitytoday.com/globalconversation to read comments from other readers and writers around the globe who respond to Joel and Kris’s article.

The psalmist asks, “How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4). It’s a beautiful question springing from the heart of a poet struggling creatively to live out in a strange land (Babylon) what he knows to be true in another, more familiar context (Jerusalem). English poet e. e. cummings once wrote that the beautiful answer is always preceded by the more beautiful question, and in this psalm we discover a beautiful question. It has given theological roots to missional communities of grassroots leaders in six countries throughout Latin America (as well as in urban centers in the Caribbean, Kenya, and North America) under the banner of the Center for Transforming Mission (CTM).

We are learning how to read the Bible not to or even for those we serve, but with those we serve—those who have been wrongly labeled the least, last, and lost. Sustaining this approach is the belief that grace is like water: it flows downhill and pools up in the lowest places. We are learning to see God’s grace pooling up in places of extreme poverty and violence.

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I want to invite you to subscribe to Geography of Grace. Whether you have just discovered us or you are a long-time reader, you are warmly invited to enter into the stories, articles, reflections, and poetry written by and for those who serve in high-risk communities. It doubles as an online library for students enrolled in our masters program in partnership with Bakke Graduate University.

Geography of Grace is the visible work of a rather invisible group of people. For the past five years this group has quietly been discerning its call and identity. The group transcends organizational boundaries, but it is nurtured within Center for Transforming Mission and is the DNA of our work. This community of friends has discerned that we share a common call – the call to develop grassroots leaders who teach and preach Good News from below. Our task is to see God at work in the world and to celebrate what we see God doing. We are committed to a life of Action, Reflection and Discernment with and for those who have been labeled the least.

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During this recent Lenten season some friends and I spent time reading through John 20:19-29 as a Lectio Divina practice. As I’ve carefully read through this passage several times now, one distinct theme has been coming into focus similar to the way the picture within the picture emerges after you’ve stared at one of those 3D images for a time. Based on this narrative I’d say God gets a good kick out of us when we pay attention to our world via the senses he created within us. I wonder what the look is on God’s face when we resign our theological development only to traditional environments such as church pews and seminary classrooms?

Yes, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed, but the story crescendoing toward this concluding statement tells of a God who desires to engage the treasured soul of his children through the beauty of their senses…

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Editor’s Note – During this Holy Week, Geography of Grace is publishing thoughts from several Street Psalms – A Community of the Incarnation members. Look for more information on this community in an upcoming post.

“I know that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I and not another. How my heart yearns within me.”
Job 19:25-27

WE MADE IT!! For us as a community, this Easter declaration of Job in the midst of his intense suffering, pain and loss is a fitting viewfinder through which to conclude our Semana Santa reflections. We began this Lenten journey 5 weeks ago and have persevered through a long, arduous journey towards and through the cross. Today is Easter Sunday and we resolutely declare with S. Lewis Johnson that “The resurrection is God’s Amen! to Jesus’ statement, “It is finished.” The intense birthing pains and excruciating suffering of Friday has now yielded to and given birth this day to the resolute hope that we find in an open and empty tomb.

Job’s declaration above is a resignation to joy. He has lost all else and thus resigns himself to seize the only thing that yet remains: “I know that my Goel (Kinsman, Avenger) liveth.”Job realizes that while his “friends” have been a complete failure to him and even his wife has told him to curse God and die, Yahweh is his personal Kinsman Redeemer. The kind of suffering that Job has experienced has “gifted” him with the ability to live in an elevated awareness of truth. It is this “gifting” that allowed Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga to describe the murder of his friend, “A Beautiful Gospel Time” - His friend being a fellow priest who had been killed at a police station where he had gone to condemn the mistreatment of two indigenous women.
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Joshua Station is a transitional housing ministry for homeless families in Denver. For Holy Week, our friends Penny Salazar and Kathy Escobar set up an interactive prayer experience in one of the rooms of this converted motel. It includes scripture readings, poetry, places to write prayers. It also includes a pile of coals and ashes, a bucket of dirt, and a door in the middle of the room – each item designed to help us interact with the various aspects of the story upon which Holy Week is built.

Penny and Kathy created this space because they knew that the people of Joshua Station, who live with the daily pain of deep poverty, needed to be invited to bring their heartache before God as part of the experience of Holy Week.

For Saturday, they created a “wailing wall,” where people could write out their prayers of lament. Next to the wailing wall, Penny and Kathy placed three placards, each with thoughts for Holy Saturday – the “in-between” day.

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Among the bleakest words in scripture are these: “Then everyone deserted him and fled” (Mark 14:50).

Along with the physical wounds suffered by Jesus in his darkest hours, there were inflicted wounds that reached deeper than thorns, nails or spear. His cry “I thirst” surely was not limited to cravings a damp sponge could alleviate. This is not to minimize the impact of physical trauma on the whole human psyche. But added to his afflictions is this trauma: to be deserted, alone in extremis, in the most vulnerable moments of his life!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer begins his book Life Together, a treatise on community, with the startling reminder that Jesus suffered and died bereft of the community he held dear. The crowds turned on him in the end; ok, everyone knows fame is fickle. And from the day of his first public sermon, he had enemies. But his closest friends had shared the intimacy of a long meal just the evening before. The “one whom Jesus loved” had leaned against his breast. Others pledged their undying loyalty. In less than a day they were gone—every single one of them.
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Editor’s Note – For the next four days of Holy Week, Geography of Grace is publishing thoughts from several Street Psalms – A Community of the Incarnation members. Look for more information on this community in an upcoming post.

Today is Maundy Thursday and I am reminded of how grateful I am for the friendships within this community. In our Street Psalms literature, we describe ourselves as a community of “friends who have experienced a deep sense of gratitude in being together and learning from one another.”

Popular tradition has it that Maundy Thursday is derived from the Latin novum mandatum…the “new commandment” of Jesus in John 13:34. After washing his disciple’s feet, Jesus reflects on this sacred theater and speaks of a new commandment – a new mandate…”to love one another as I have loved you.” In chapter 15 Jesus fills the new commandment with meaning when he says that his love finds it fullest expression in…friendship! In the economy of God’s kingdom the highest form of love is friendship – the kind of friendship in which we lay down our lives for one another.

I have so much to learn about what it means to be a friend. I confess that my timid heart sometimes prefers a disembodied form of “agape” to a full-bodied form of “philo.” Tomorrow we will stand before the full expression of friendship where we will find the courage and the power to be friends to one another and the people we serve.

Kris Rocke
Serves as director of Center for Transforming Mission
Bumps into Reality by accident, most of the time
Heard God laugh once