When I was working with refugees in Lebanon and Turkey and the Iraqi crisis, Rwanda, other places—you know, when everything’s taken away from you, God is all you have left. So we need a way to speak about who God is and who we are before God, and I think theology gives us a way of doing that.
I’ve noticed something similar in debates around homelessness and immigration: the church does enormous amounts of work on the ground, but theological questions seem to have been pushed out of the broader public discourse.
I did my graduate work at Berkeley, so when I was in California, I can remember one day I woke up and, literally, on the other side of the bed where I slept, outside the window, was a homeless person. And for me that began a long journey of trying to understand theology from the other side of the wall—not just from the perspective of a library or a room but from the streets and from the people who are living on the edge.
What you see in the church’s teachings called the seamless garment of life runs through homelessness, runs through immigration, runs through the elderly, runs through all other life issues. When I spend time speaking to migrants at borders around the world, I often ask them, What is it that you would want people to hear? Or if you could preach on Sunday, what would you want people to know? And often it’s about dignity. It’s about saying, We’re human beings here, and you’re treating us like we’re dogs.
The issue is these people have become nonpersons. I mean, they’re just not even seen. And I think part of the work of the church is saying, Actually, these people belong in a human community, and they belong to be seen, and therefore they belong in the discourse as well.
You make this core argument that all people are created in the image of God, Imago Dei. That’s something that many people would say they believe. But when you see the news right now, the horrific videos coming out, the responses to them—do you feel that idea is in crisis?
What we’ve also included in that understanding is that in the fall, we lost the likeness, but we never lose the image. There’s a deep core within us that’s indestructible—our worth and our value before God.
One of the things I often say is that if we can’t see in the immigrant or in the homeless or in people who are considered different from us something of ourselves, we’ve lost touch with our humanity. So I think that’s what’s at stake. We’ve deported our own soul, if we’ve really lost touch with our own humanity.
You argue that every person should have everything necessary for living a truly human life. What does that look like in practice if it’s not simply open borders?
The church recognizes that nations have the right to control their borders, but it’s not an absolute right. It’s subjugated to a larger sense of what’s called the universal destination of all goods. And what does the church mean by that? In practice, that everything belongs to God, and when we die, we’re gonna have to give up everything anyway. So there’s a way in which we’re, at best, stewards in this life, not owners of anything in an absolute way. And even our nationalities and our national identities have only a relative importance in light of a larger vision of what the kingdom of God is about.
The question is, what’s the narrative that shapes our consciousness on this? If the narrative is, This is my stuff, this is my country, this is where I belong, this is what I own, and I have to defend it and protect it—that’s one way of understanding it. But if the narrative is, Everything I have is a gift, and when I die, I’m going to give everything up, that I’m a steward and not an owner, and I can be judged by how I use what I’ve been given—that’s a different way of inhabiting the world. If the narrative is about how do we move closer to communion with God, and in closer connection with each other, with a life and a faith that does justice, in terms of caring for one another, that’s a very different way of inhabiting the world.
