I think the wording bothers me because it seems to say that the government alone has been the culprit in the death of Christ, when we all have. The words were antagonistic and provactive, but not healing. Your attempt was to bring to light the situation but I fear all it may have done was rub salt in the word, not put a bandage on it.

We need to move beyond accusation, and trump oppression with radical signs of humility.

(I must be in one of my “liberal” moods today…)

Tim B, thank you for your comment as well. I am glad that you are also concerned about this issue. And I also appreciate that you care so much about the purity of Christ’s mission–that we not get the gospel entangled in our own pet projects. I am not sure what you mean by the ideologies that were at work in my attempt to do the work of Christ through footwashing. Lots of forces tear apart the assembly of the body of Christ. As you note, for centuries the church has had to deal with worldly policies that divide the body of Christ. If we believe that the church is the body of Christ, and that we re-present the presence of Jesus to one another through our bodies, then it is a very serious issue for governments to take people away from our churches. Our country has honored the church’s need to be present with one another in the way they allow us to visit people in prison. Ministers are allowed to visit members of their congregation who have been incarcerated, and offer communion, etc. But, for some strange reason, the federal government will not let ministers care for members of the church once they are taken into ICE detention centers. That seems very wrong to me–an infringement of our freedom of religion, because we are commanded to visit prisoners. When bodies are taken from the body of the church and made to disappear from us, the body of Christ is severed. And if we do not try to be the church for those people who have been stolen from our body, then I think we are chastised by the apostle Paul, when he says: “For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves” (I Cor. 11:29).

Our footwashing worship service was a theological argument–an conviction about the nature of God in Christ, made present in the church through the power of the Holy Spirit, that was spoken through our Christian bodies.

There’s no doubt that the government and their secret police are up to no good (They’ve been up to no good for, like, 2 centuries) but the wording here is troubling.

I skimmed the Nation article and was blown away by the first line in particular:

“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” - James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE)

I’ve heard horror stories about ICE for years, from the school bus full of mothers snatched in California to the parents sent away from their children in Goshen, Indiana. But this blatant use of terminology from Latin America’s dirty ward is horrifying.

I didn’t know about sub-offices that hold detainees in un-disclosed, unmarked locations. I imagine there are quite a few of them in Chicago.

Your sermon speaks to the power and intimacy of foot washing as I experienced it during our foot washing service on Thursday night. As you say, foot washing reminds us that love is an embodied emotion, not some flighty, abstract thing. And it grounds us in our own bodies.

Blessings in your embodied resistance to the dis-embodying work of ICE.