Migrants from Haiti and Around the World Build Up at Southern Border of Mexico

 

A focus of my doctoral work on missiology and intercultural studies is to consider how the church can engage with global migration as millions of people are on the move around the world. While this blog is primarily for devotional insights, it might be helpful to me to share thoughts on the topic of my studies as well. I’m convinced that global mission isn’t just about sending and going to the people “over there,” but it’s also about welcoming and receiving those who come to us from all over the world. Every town is a border town in that there are people there from many of the nations of the earth. But, for those who live on and traverse actual borders, there are more intense dynamics at play. 

How does the church live and minister in the borderlands? 

One place of focus is the border of Mexico and Guatemala at Tapachula in the state of Chiapas. Migrants from Central and South America and around the world have been coming though this border crossing for years.But, Mexico, doing work for the United States, has cracked down and is making it much harder to get across. The LA Times reports:

Southern Mexico has for decades been a way station for Central American migrants seeking to make their way to the United States. But in the last decade or so, Mexico has emerged as a signature transit country for migrants from across the globe, including the Caribbean, South America, Asia and Africa. About 40% of the migrants stuck in Tapachula hail from Haiti, where a series of natural disasters and political unrest over the last year have caused a mass exodus.

In an attempt to quell the near-daily protests in Tapachula, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador visited the city last week. He was greeted with a phalanx of migrants holding large wooden crosses, comparing their situation there to a crucifixion. 

López Obrador promised to grant roughly 950 humanitarian visas to migrants. The visa would allow migrants to stay in Mexico for a year and can be obtained only if a migrant has been granted refugee status. According to UNICEF, there are currently 30,000 migrants in Tapachula awaiting refugee status. The process can take many months.

The reality is that the movement of people through migration is a complicated process for the migrants, the countries they are passing through, and their destination countries. There is much anguish and pain encountered from leaving their homes to the journey to their destination. How can churches minister along the way? How can churches provide comfort and resources to people on the move? How can they show who Jesus is? That is happening in Chiapas and all along the migration routes in Mexico and at the U.S. - Mexico Border. I hear the stories. We have much to learn from these ministries. More on that later …

International Students in the U.S. a Legacy of International Mission Work?

 “Mission societies also sponsored the first international students to gain a higher education in Europe and the United States.”

Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion 1st Edition by Dana L. Robert

I’m reading this morning about the history and development of Christian mission around the world and I ran across this statement. There are around one international students in the United States today with around half of them coming from India and China. It has been said repeatedly that 75-80% of international students are never invited into an American home. I have been told that we are to welcome and minister to international students as a form of Christian hospitality, but I never considered that the whole program was started by Christian missionaries overseas years ago. When you see international students in the United States, also see that as a legacy of Christian foreign missions. 

Much of the world as we experience it now was shaped by Christians following the mission of God to take the gospel to the ends of the earth and who did hard work in various and diverse years ago. Now the nations have come to us and people are on the move all over the world with cultures colliding, what does that mean for Christian mission today? How should be see and receive people? What is God doing in these days to expand and replenish then church?

A Cross-Centered Theology for Suffering and Loss

Ray and Ruth Bozeman were an incredible couple. He was a World War Two veteran who served in the Pacific Theater in the Navy, was lost at sea, rescued, and was one of the first Americans on shore in the invasion of Okinawa. He returned home to Montgomery, Alabama and married the girl next door, Ruth Greene. They had to children and then in 1952, Ruth tragically contracted polio and was paralyzed in her legs and mostly paralyzed in her arms. She spent the rest of her life in a wheel chair. I say tragically, but Ruth's perspective on her predicament was that she was "blessed by polio" because it brought her closer to Jesus and taught her to trust God and live each day in the light of His blessing and strength, instead of her own. Ray and Ruth went on to live normal, yet remarkable lives as the loved God and loved people. 

I wrote a book about them published in 2015 called Joy Persevering: The Ray and Ruth Bozeman Story of Living in the Better Way of Jesus. In it, I tell their story and blend it with theological reflections on how they were able to live for Jesus and overcome adversity. There is a lot of narrative in the book as it really is a biography, but I also look for the work of God in their lives and dig down into how and why they were able to live the way they did. What follows is chapter 7 of the book, which explains how they were able to not just survive, but thrive in the midst of great suffering and difficulty. I hope that this can also help us think through what God is up to in the midst of what appears to be great defeat. 

Joy Persevering to Hope - Chapter 7 of Ray and Ruth Bozeman’s Story, Joy Persevering. 

Ray and Ruth continued to trust God and embrace life and the call to love God and love people sacrificially even though they faced real obstacles that would have caused many to give up or to withdraw into themselves and live small lives. When so many would have been overwhelmed, Ray and Ruth kept going, kept loving, and kept looking for what God had for them and how God wanted them to serve others. 

My premise is that Ray and Ruth lived this way because their perspective was rooted in seeking where God was working in and through all things instead of simply trying to figure out how they could make their lives better. This is why Ruth was able to say that she was "blessed by polio." Instead of seeing polio as a disability, she saw the difficulty as opening many more doors to knowing God and seeing life in a whole new way. Ruth would not have been Ruth without the polio just like Ray would not have been Ray without the obstacles he faced in the war and without Ruth's polio. Instead of seeing difficulty as something to run from and try to escape, they saw it as a refining fire that opened up possibilities to meet with God and be transformed by Him.

Our theology is important. We are all theologians because we all have a perspective and a belief about who God is and how He works. Being a theologian simply means that you are one who pursues a knowledge (ology) about God (Theos). We all do this whether we are aware of it or not. Ray and Ruth very clearly expressed and lived from a belief that God could be known through suffering and that life and joy could come out of suffering because God was at work to bring beauty out of ashes (Isaiah 61:3). Knowing Ray and Ruth as long as I have, I don't think that they simply clung to this belief as a comfort in hard times, but rather, I think that their knowledge of God as being most revealed in and through suffering was something that was at the bedrock of their faith. Otherwise, how can one say for over 60 years that they were blessed by polio and paralysis? 

Romans 8:26-31 gives a perspective on the Christian life that I believe Ray and Ruth embodied. It says, 

In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us?

The prior section of Paul's letter to the Romans that begins with verse 18 says that the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. It goes on to say that all of creation is subjected to frustration and groaning and is in bondage to decay. Why do bad things happen in the world? Why are there earthquakes and storms and disease and death? Why is there so much suffering? Because sin entered the world and with it, death. All of creation reflects this futility. We are broken and bad things happen. It isn't because of something that we did personally, necessarily. It is because the world we live in is broken down because of the presence of sin in it. When Adam and Eve sinned, they introduced death to the world and it has been wreaking havoc ever since. 

Jesus entered into that world and saves the world through His own suffering on the Cross. Jesus entered into our suffering, our pain, and our sin and took it upon Himself and broke the power of it. So, when we experience suffering and pain and sin, we have the opportunity to meet Christ who entered into all of that to save us in it, from it, and through it. Knowing Christ does not take away all suffering. Rather, He redeems suffering and turns it around. So, all of creation is waiting for redemption, which will happen when those who belong to God are revealed (Rom. 8:19, 23).

So, we are to live in hope because we know that God is at work in everything - even the difficulties and the groaning and the suffering. This perspective leads us to the verses that I quoted above in Romans 8:26-31. Because of all that God is doing, the Spirit helps us in our weakness (v. 26). We are weak. We do not see things as we should. We want relief and success and freedom from pain and suffering. But, we can't get it. We cannot secure the life we always wanted. Difficulties keep arising because we live in a broken world and we are a part of that broken world. So, what do we do? The Spirit of God prays for us with groanings too deep for words (8:26). You think that creation is groaning under the weight of present difficulty and expectation of future redemption? Yes, but the Spirit groans even deeper in prayer for us! We are not left alone in our difficulties.

It goes on to say that the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to God's will (8:27). I think that what is happening here is that the Holy Spirit prays for us in ways deeper than we can articulate and searches the mind and will of God and prays that we would know God's will and that our lives would be wrapped up in His purposes in spite of the broken world that we live in - actually, in the midst of the broken world so that the light of Christ can shine even brighter. 

Now we get to the core of it all. In verse 28 we see this amazing truth presented, that for those who love God and are called according to His purpose, all things work together for good. This does not at all mean that all things are good. There is evil and there is bad in the world and God is not the source of evil. There are things that happen that are terrible because of the world we live in. But, it means that for those who are in God, that all things are turned around so that good can come out of them. In other words, what we see here is the Cross event being placed into the middle of every bad thing for the believer so that good can come out of it. The Cross was a terrible event. The murder of the Son of God was the greatest sin ever committed. It was the greatest injustice ever perpetrated. But, the death of Jesus led to the salvation of the world. Good came out of bad. Life came out of death. Because the Cross revealed the very heart and character of God, the same thing will happen to those who are included in God and who have the Holy Spirit interceding for them. 

We then see that God has foreknown and predestined us to be conformed to the image of Christ so that we can be a part of God's family. We were predestined, called, justified, and glorified (Rom. 8:28-29). This is what God is doing. The purpose of our call and all that happens to us is so that we may be conformed to the image of Christ. We are to be like Christ. The good that comes out of the bad things that we go through is that God is working in our hearts to cherish Him more than the world, getting our way, having comfort, safety, security, prosperity, or health. There are greater things than the blessings we seek. Being conformed to the image of Christ is what we were created for and God will work good out of bad so that the result is that we belong to Him and find our home in His family. 

When difficulty comes and we yell out in pain and frustration to God, "Why are you letting this happen to me?!?" we reveal that our hope is not in God but in God causing our lives to go well. Now, I am not saying that we are wrong to want things to go well or that it is wrong to want to be blessed. God made us to want good things. Those desires are not wrong and can often lead us to God, if we understand them correctly. But, what I am saying is that we need to rightly see the world and our situation. Things are broken and we are not yet where we will one day be. Jesus entered into this broken world to bring salvation, but that looks different from what we expect. His salvation is not in keeping anything bad from ever happening to us, but it is revealed in meeting us in the difficulty and revealing Himself to us as the Creator and Sustainer God right there. God is greater than the blessings we seek. And, suffering in this broken world is the exact place where God reveals who He is so that we can know Him better.

Our vision is too narrow. On our own, we see only in the moment and we think that what is happening to us right then is the most real thing. This is why temptation to run after sin and other gods and other ways of living is so strong. We are constantly looking for relief and pleasure and satisfaction and our sinful nature has no ability to see where true salvation is found. So temptation to give up and live for ourselves is there when we face any kind of difficulty. But, God speaks something different. He says that we were made for more and in that moment of suffering and temptation when we are so prone to run to some lesser god, the Creator of the universe is praying for us and calling us to trust Him. The suffering is an occasion to trust God and be conformed to Him and for our character to be strengthened through valuing and worshiping God over anything else. It is in difficulty that this is revealed and where we meet with Christ who has overcome the world.  

This is why sacrificial love is so important. Scripture says that God so loved the world that he gave His only Son for the salvation of all who believe in Him (John 3:16). God loved so much that He gave His Son sacrificially as an atonement for our sin. This is not just an action of God. It is the very character of God made manifest. 1 Peter 1:18-21 says that Jesus was known before the foundation of the world but was made manifest to us in these last days as He shed His blood as a ransom for sinners so that our faith and hope would be in God and not in anything else. God revealed His heart and character through the sacrificial love and death of Jesus on the Cross and He wants us to see that love and entrust ourselves fully to Him. But, this is who God has been all along. Jesus, the lamb of God, was slain before the foundations of world were laid (Rev. 13:8) for sinners who would ultimately rebel against Him. This is what love is and the Cross of Christ is how God demonstrates His love to us (Rom. 5:8).  Since "God is love" (1 John 4:16), and His love was poured out to us through His suffering on our behalf and that love was present in God before the foundations of creation, we see suffering, sin, and difficulty as the occasions for that love to be made manifest. Likewise, we know that when we, as God's children, suffer in our own lives, we are in position to experience God's love in deeper and higher ways (Rom. 8:39) because the Spirit is praying for us in our weaknesses to reveal Christ to us. This is why we can count it all joy when we experience trials and suffer because the testing of our faith produces perseverance (James 1:2-3) and perseverance produces character and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:2-5). So, in effect, it is through suffering that our misplaced passions are burned out of us and we most clearly come to know God and experience His love, which is greater than anything else.

When Ray and Ruth tapped into that fact and began to live according to the victory of Christ over darkness and suffering by joining Him in the suffering and giving their lives to Him and then loving one another and others sacrificially, they began to live according to God's design and will and were conformed to the "image of the Son." So, in their weakness, God's strength was revealed. This is God's plan for all of us. Then, Polio became a blessing instead of a curse as God redeemed the disease and used it for His glory and their good. 

All of this is counterintuitive to us. We can only see polio and paralysis as a blessing if we see God's revelation and the world according to the reality of how God revealed Himself on the Cross. The German theologian Martin Luther becomes helpful to us again at this point.  Luther came to so clearly see that God worked most through suffering because of the revelation of His character on the Cross that he called this perspective, the Theology of the Cross. Theologian Carl Trueman, in his essay, "Luther's Theology of the Cross" explains it this way:

The cross is paradigmatic [explains the way of understanding] for how God will deal with believers who are united to Christ by faith. In short, great blessing will come through great suffering.

This point is hard for those of us in the affluent West to swallow. For example, some years ago I lectured at a church gathering on this topic and pointed out that the cross was not simply an atonement, but a revelation of how God deals with those whom he loves. I was challenged afterwards by an individual who said that Luther's theology of the cross did not give enough weight to the fact that the cross and resurrection marked the start of the reversal of the curse, and that great blessings should thus be expected; to focus on suffering and weakness was therefore to miss the eschatological significance of Christ's ministry.

Of course, this individual had failed to apply Luther's theology of the cross as thoroughly as he should have done. All that he said was true, but he failed to understand what he was saying in light of the cross. Yes, Luther would agree, the curse is being rolled back, but that rollback is demonstrated by the fact that, thanks to the cross, evil is now utterly subverted in the cause of good. If the cross of Christ, the most evil act in human history, can be in line with God's will and be the source of the decisive defeat of the very evil that caused it, then any other evil can also be subverted to the cause of good.

Trueman is saying that the result of the Cross is not the absence or the removal of suffering from the experience of the believer, but rather, it is the subversion of evil as God causes good to come out of every situation and out of all suffering according to God's purpose of conforming us to the image of Christ. The Cross stands over suffering, failure, brokenness, rejection, and evil and subverts it and overcomes it and turns it upside down and inside out, causing all things to work for good for those who love God and are called by Him (Rom. 8:28-29).

Trueman goes on,

More than that, if the death of Christ is mysteriously a blessing, then any evil that the believer experiences can be a blessing too. Yes, the curse is reversed; yes, blessings will flow; but who declared that these blessings have to be in accordance with the aspirations and expectations of affluent America? The lesson of the cross for Luther is that the most blessed person upon earth, Jesus Christ himself, was revealed as blessed precisely in his suffering and death. And if that is the way that God deals with his beloved son, have those who are united to him by faith any right to expect anything different?

This makes it practical. When my eyes have been opened by the Spirit to what is happening in my life and the world around me, I become the most hopeful of all people. There is no defeat because no matter what takes place, God is working good out of it. Actually, it is in the difficulty that I will meet God and the most good will arise as I come to know Him better. This is why Paul could say in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 that God's grace is sufficient because His power is made perfect in weakness and we are to boast in our weaknesses so that the power of Christ may rest on us even more. He says that it is because of Christ that he can be "content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong." This only makes sense if we work from a theology of the cross where life comes out of death. 

Trueman concludes:

Indeed, when it is grasped that the death of Christ, the greatest crime in history, was itself willed in a deep and mysterious way by the triune God, yet without involving God in any kind of moral guilt, we see the solution to the age-old problem of absolving an all-powerful God of responsibility for evil. The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good. Romans 8:28 is true because of the cross of Christ: if God can take the greatest of evils and turn it to the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well...The cross is not simply the point at which God atones for sin; it is also a profound revelation of who God is and how he acts toward his creation.

One time when I was meeting with Ray and Ruth and their children, Barbara and Mike, and I was talking with them about the book, Mike looked at me and said that he did not understand why his parents, as good as they were, had suffered so much. Why did God let people like them go through what they have been through? He said that it troubled him all his life and he could not understand it. In that moment, I felt the weight of the question that he was asking. It is a question that we all ask and a question that I myself have wrestled with my entire life as I have seen people that I love suffer greatly.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Well, first of all, none of us are good apart from God. So, there's that. But, to get at the question, it is a mystery. And, that is ok. At least for me. I don't always even know why I do what I do. If I can't know my own mind, then how can I understand the workings of all creation? And, God does not reveal this to us. Scripture never tells us where evil comes from or why some get sick and others live a long, healthy life. But, what God does reveal is that for those who love Him and who are called according to His purpose, He will bring good out of bad things. Because of the Cross, He is always bringing life out of death and it is in the suffering that we learn to trust Him because He is there suffering with us and giving us His comfort, grace, strength, power, and love. If we belong to God, where else would we rather be than in His presence as He prepares a table before us in the midst of our enemies (Ps. 23:5)?

When I am trying to understand everything and pinpoint the origin of this good thing or that bad thing, what I am really saying is that I want to regain some form of control. If I can explain something, then I can understand it. And, if I can understand it, then I can regain a sense of control in the midst of chaos. But, God doesn't want us to be in control. He wants us to trust Him, even when things aren't going well for us. Especially then.

A.W. Tozer once said, "When I understand that everything happening to me is to make me more Christlike, it solves a great deal of anxiety.” We might not know why things happen, but if we turn to Christ, we can say along with Ruth that the thing that has happened, whether it is paralysis from polio or something else unforeseen, can actually turn into a blessing because Christ has been revealed to us in it and through it and "in His presence there is fullness of joy" (Ps. 16:11). Each difficulty and hardship is another chance for God to demonstrate His love and care for us if we would see it that way. This perspective might be shocking to others, but for the child of God, it is simply the way that we trust God day by day. 

None of this means that the difficulty that we are facing is not severe or not heartbreaking. The Bible never denies that life is hard. It also doesn't mean that God does not heal or miraculously change our circumstances. Of course He does! We see that all through Scripture as well. I am in no way advocating a grim fatalism that simply accepts our circumstances as inevitable while we try to just get along and grin and bear it. Ray and Ruth would not call for that either. They are two of the most dedicated and sincere prayer warriors that I know. They both constantly pray for people to be healed, to receive comfort, and for God to change circumstances for the better. And, they have seen many prayers answered! However, their faith is not in the circumstances changing or the prayers being answered the way they want. Rather, their faith is in God and they find their rest in Him. From that place of trust, they are able to ask for mercy and intervention. 

If polio has been any kind of blessing at all, it has been so that Ruth and Ray can know God better, learn to trust Him, and live with Christ as their focus. And, they have learned that to be the greatest blessing of all. 

How Jesus Shakes the Kingdoms of the World

Back in January, I was preaching about the Visit of the Magi and their worship of Baby Jesus. In the message, it was the first time I’d ever deeply connected Herod’s response to hearing about Jesus being born as the “king of the Jews” in Matthew 2 with the response of the chief priests and Pharisees in John 19 when Pilate says Jesus is the king of the Jews and they say, “we have no king but Caesar.” The Messiah/Christ was the hope of Israel, but when he came, Herod (the political leader who rebuilt the Temple) wanted to kill him as a baby. And then, the religious leaders wanted to kill him as an adult. The false combination of state-religion always wants to kill Jesus, put him away, or distort him because he is a threat to them protecting/promoting their “way of life,” or to their grasping for provision and their pursuit of power and prominence (see the cosmic and eschatological implications of this in Revelation 12). The Better Way of Jesus is the humble way of sacrificial love and laying power and prominence down in exchange for participation in the kingdom of God. The state-religion kingdoms of this world see this threat and always try to neutralize it, either through coercion or manipulation.

For those who say Jesus isn’t political, he’s not - not in the way we are. He doesn’t directly confront the worldly powers with an army or an overthrow or an election. But, his presence and ethics sure do make the political and earthly and religious leaders (whose focus is on their own kingdoms) tremble in denial and rage. And thus, he dramatically affects the political, religious, and cultural spheres, not by grabbing power through worldly means of violence or force, but by bringing a whole different kingdom of his own through the sacrificial love, peace, and reconciliation that flows from the Cross.

When the Magi bowed to worship Jesus, they represented the kings and philosophers of nations of the earth that will one day all bow before the King of Kings (Isaiah 60:1-6). We shouldn't fear what we see happening around us in culture and in the news. Rather, we should know that Jesus is breaking in and making all things new - and there will be a reaction that.