Empire and Church:
Pitfalls and Priorities for the Presbyterian Church in a Time of Globalization

Speech by Rick Ufford-Chase; May 28, 2003
Presbyterian Peace Fellowship Breakfast, 215th General Assembly, Denver

We live in the time of empire.

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit with the members of a newly formed Presbyterian the coffee growing region of the volcanic mountain chain, called the Boca Costa, in southwestern Guatemala. I was accompanying a delegation from Immanuel Presbyterian Church in McLean, Virginia. As we arrived at the Presbyterian Church in the town of Chocolá, Suchitepequez, twenty-five or thirty men and women and young people came forward to greet us under a large sign that said welcome in English, Spanish, and Quiché. They sang a hymn to welcome us in both Spanish and Quiché, and then invited us to sit around a table that stretched some fifty feet on the veranda in front of the church. As they served us bowls of fresh mango, papaya, banana, and watermelon, they told us their story.

"This is a region where we have always worked on the coffee plantations." explained Cristobal Escobar, the moderator of the small, new Presbytery of just seven churches. "Life has always been hard here. But in the last few years, the price of coffee in the world market has fallen so low that it doesn't pay the plantation owners even to harvest the crop of coffee beans." If you manage to find a job working on a plantation, the typical wage is 15 to 25 quetzales a day, or roughly two to three dollars. The challenge confronted by Presbyterians in this rural community became clearer as one of the women explained that many of the young people are leaving. There is nothing for them in the piedmont region of Guatemala's volcanoes, so as they become teenagers, they leave for Guatemala City.

When they arrive in the city, they find jobs in the factories of the global economy, especially in the textile or food processing industry, which pay a subsistence wage. That wage might be enough to send a little bit of money home, but their parents are extremely worried about the dangers of the big city are putting their kids at risk. They fear for their children because of the high level of violent crime. In Guatemala City it is a routine occurrence for someone to be brutally murdered for a cell phone. The gang activity is an every day fact of life for all of us who live in the city, because as urban teenagers confront the reality that they have no future, many opt out, making crime the biggest growth industry. As in so many other places, the temptations of prostitution as a way to make money fast are often irresistible. If they do manage to find a job in one of the factories producing for export, they are paid roughly 300 quetzales a week, about forty U.S. dollars. To give you a sense of perspective, that's how much my wife and I are paying for a very simple, small apartment with two rooms and no hot water. The young adults of the Boca Costa quickly learn the brutal lessons of urban poverty. You can choose to pay the rent, or buy food to eat, but too often, you can't afford to do both.

These problems may seem like an abstraction, but later, as I spoke with him in private, Cristobal wept as he told me about his nineteen-year-old daughter who went to the city last year was hit by a car on and killed at the end of July.

Guatemala is on the leading edge of the same, massive, rural to urban, and south to north, migration that I have witnessed in Mexico over the last twenty years. Thirty years ago, Mexico's population was 75% rural. Today it is 75% urban. Where I work on the U.S./Mexico border that means life in a one or two room house you build yourself out of wood pallets and cardboard, on a twenty by sixty foot plot of land, on the side of a ravine. It means you work 48 hours a week for a paycheck of about fifty dollars (including bonuses) as a line worker in the global factory. Or, maybe, if you have a family, you are more like my friends Martin and Leticia who live in Agua Prieta, Sonora with their three daughters. While Martin's mother takes care of the girls, he works ninety hours a week, and for Leticia seventy-five hours a week is typical. Between them their take home pay is still less than $200 per week. The real problem is that in addition to becoming a global laborer, they have also become global consumers as they have moved to the city, creating an untenable situation in which they are paid in pesos, but they consume in dollars. For example, in Nogales, a gallon of milk costs more than three dollars, or roughly three hour's wage. In Guatemala City, a large box of corn flakes costs about 26 quetzales, almost a full day's wage.

These are the signs of empire in our time. Countries across Latin America are lining up to sign free trade agreements with the empire, eliminating trade barriers to foreign corporations full access to their markets, while tariffs and industries heavily subsidized by the Governments in the U.S. or Canada make it impossible for them to open new markets themselves. This creates the cruelest of ironies; even as a country's macroeconomic stability grows and their gross domestic product rises under the conditions of free trade, more and more people end up living in poverty, or, like the people of the Boca Costa, in misery.

A Presbyterian Elder named Rodrigo whom I met a few weeks ago explained that even in the United States there are complaints about the openness to public participation, transparency, and democratic process, or lack of those things, in the Free Trade Negotiations. But in his country, with high levels of illiteracy, the legacy of impunity and lack of accountability of governmental officials, and civil society's inability to give their input in decision making, those who will be most affected by the agreements have no voice at all in the negotiations.

Here's the problem with the way free trade typically plays out. Just up the road about fifty kilometers from the coffee region of the Boca Costa, I met another group of Presbyterian Women in a small community near Quetzaltenango. A few years ago, supported by a Presbyterian sponsored development program, the women began cultivating one acre gardens with potatoes, on the theory that potatoes were a cash crop with a local market that could provide supplemental income for their families. However, in the last year the market has been flooded with cheap potatoes from Canada, and these local families are discovering that once again they are left with a crop that has little or no value.

On May 5, three articles ran side-by-side in Guatemala's largest newspaper, La Prensa. On page 6: a picture of four malnourished children, one of them carrying a baby, on a plantation in the Boca Costa region. The title was, "Abandoned on the Farms" and the sub-title "Forgotten on the coffee plantations of San Marcos, hundreds suffer from hunger, malnutrition, sickness and unemployment." On page 5: a story about the investigation of President Portillo in Guatemala, and a dozen or so other high level government officials, for diverting millions of government dollars to private bank accounts in Panama. And on page 28: a picture of the Pope with the headline "Globalization should seek the common good," and a box highlighting the Pope's words, "Personal interests and the demands of the market frequently overshadow the concept of the common good. We must have controls and rules in order to convert the process of globalization into a benefit for all of humanity."

This is the face of empire in our time, and it is entirely dependent on the force of military power that backs it up. There is a reason the phrase "military industrial complex" has become a common part of our lexicon. In the words of Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, McDonalds must be backed up by McDonald Douglas.

There is no more powerful symbol of that military might and how it protects our economic interests in the world today, than the U.S./Mexico border. Some 10,000 Border Patrol agents, sixteen foot high steel barriers, and thousands of four-while drive vehicles are employed in my part of the world in order to, in the words of several Border Patrol Agents with whom I've spoken, "protect your way of life." They are clear, even if you and I are not, about the relationship between our standard of living in the United States and the show of force necessary not only to protect us from the desperate hordes who would threaten us, but also to keep those people in the 2/3's, undeveloped world where they will be willing to work for poverty wages in the fields, the greenhouses and the factories of the empire.

In early March, I received a phone call from yet another Presbyterian woman who lives in the village of Zunil, very near the women who are growing potatoes to support their families. She had learned that I work on the U.S./Mexico border, and she was calling to ask for help with her seventeen year-old son. He had decided to go north to the United States to look for work because he was unable to support their family. A friend of a friend of a friend from the next village was a "coyote", a paid smuggler, who wanted thirty thousand quetzales (almost four thousand dollars) to take him to Los Angeles. In the conversation, it became obvious that she was really hoping I could offer to help him get to the United States safely and for much less money. Instead, I tried to convince her to continue to look for options for her son in their own community, no matter how difficult things might get. She grew silent as I shared the reality for migrants in the brutal desert of the Arizona borderlands.

Last year more than 200 people from Mexico and Central America lost their lives trying to hike across the Sonoran desert of the Arizona borderlands in order to enter the U.S. without documents. That's 200 people just on the Arizona border, just in one year. Many others had near death experiences. In August, I was called by a nurse in a Tucson hospital to provide pastoral care to a woman named Veronica, who was about my age and who had come north from Mexico City. A single mother herself, she had left her fourteen-year-old son with her mother and come north with her nephew looking for the job that would allow her to provide her son with a future. After hiking more than twenty miles through 110 degree heat, she began suffering from dehydration and she fell behind. When the coyote refused to slow down to help her, her nephew stayed with her and carried her for more than twelve hours until they finally came to a road where someone picked them up. She was taken to the hospital in Tucson where she went into cardiac arrest twice in the emergency room. She suffered damage to her cerebral cortex, making it impossible to swallow. When I first met her in the hospital a week later, her tongue and lips were completely black, and she was still being fed intravenously. Miraculously, within two weeks she had recovered her ability to swallow, and she could carry on a conversation. I was with her, there in the hospital room, as she cried through her first phone call to her son on his birthday, and I took her to the airport to send her home to her family. When I asked her at the airport why she had risked so much, Veronica's answer was simple. "I knew the trip was dangerous, but if I don't find a way out, my son has no future anyway."

There is a Presbyterian Church in Nogales Sonora, pastored by Dr. Jorge Pasos who is here with us this morning. Sol de Justicia Church provides a meal five nights a week for deported migrants. These are men and women who have been picked up by the Border Patrol and returned to the city of Nogales, Sonora. They have nothing: no money, no options, and no place to go. Worst of all, their dignity has been robbed and many lack the courage to return to families whose hopes had been pinned on their success.

This is what it means to be one of those on the margins of the empire.

The border that Veronica almost died trying to cross is the gulf that divides the twenty percent of the world's population, that's you and me, who will have a seat at the table of globalization, from the remaining eighty percent of the world's population who are the laborers who will serve our interests. If you are on the wrong side of that border, you are the people living under occupation, serving the interests of the empire of the first world. The Presbyterians of the Boca Costa, Martin and Leticia in Agua Prieta, the woman whose son was headed north, and Veronica; these are the human faces of those who serve the empire.

The question, for all of us, is how must we be church in the heart of that empire? This is where I would like to turn to the story of the Geresene Demoniac.

This story begins with the words, "They came to the other side of the sea. . . " Jesus and his disciples are moving out into the world of the unknown, the world of the gentiles. Even getting here has been scary for them, as they've passed through a tremendous storm on the sea in the middle of the night, and have almost foundered. And now, at Jesus' insistence, they are about to go against everything they have been taught. The gentiles are heathen, they are unclean, they are not God's chosen people, and the Hebrew people are to have nothing to do with them.

And immediately as they step out of the boat, they are met by a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit. The danger they feared has already found them. And what is the danger? A terrifying, overpowering man who cannot be restrained. "Many times they had bound him in chains, but chains he wrenched apart and shackles he broke into pieces."

What the story immediately brings to mind in a post 9-11 world is the violence of terrorism. This man inhabits the unknown world of the tombs. He lives by himself, and no one really knows what goes on up there on the hill. The man is angry, raging, and his violence is beyond anything that these people have experienced before, beyond anything they know how to cope with. Perhaps, reflecting on Mark's words that he was always howling and bruising himself with stones, it might bring the incomprehensible actions of the suicide bomber to mind. It is what we don't understand about the Geresene Demoniac that makes him genuinely terrifying.

And so we try to subdue him with shackles and chains, with bombs and tanks and economic sanctions and homeland security, but no matter what we do, it just gets scarier. Why? I believe it is because we are dealing with symptoms - the Gerasene's violent behavior. And as we have responded with violence, much like the story of the Gerasene Demoniac, things have only gotten worse. We don't feel any safer.

I want to share to share the words of Jean Paul Lederach, in his essay "The Challenge of Terror," written the week after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The first and most important question to pose to ourselves is relatively simple though not easy to answer: How do people reach this level of anger, hatred and frustration? (To say) that they are brainwashed by a perverted leader who holds some kind of magical power over them is an escapist simplification and will inevitably lead us to very wrong-headed responses. Anger of this sort, what we could call generational, identity-based anger, is constructed over time through a combination of historical events, a deep sense of threat to identity, and direct experiences of sustained exclusion. . . We should be careful to pursue one and only one thing as the strategic guidepost of our response: Avoid doing what they expect. What they expect from us is the lashing out of the giant against the weak, the many against the few. This will reinforce their capacity to perpetuate the myth they carefully seek to sustain: That they are under threat, fighting an irrational and mad system that has never taken them seriously and wishes to destroy them and their people. What we need to destroy is their myth - not their people.

Lederach's words give me new insight into Jesus' actions in our story. Think about how radical Jesus' response is. Instead of helping to restrain the demoniac, Jesus names the evil that is tormenting the man. Its name is Legion, the name of the occupying military of the Roman Empire, the military might necessary to back up an insatiable force seeking power and wealth. This is a military that occupies the land, represses the people, and directs the entire economy - all the means of the generation of wealth - for the enrichment of the empire. Sounds to me like a good description of economic globalization in our time.

And so the demon, the forces of empire, begs Jesus not to send them "out of the country." We can reach an agreement, the demon says, we can occupy your land in a less violent and less-abusive way. Don't make us give up the foundation of our wealth, the core of what we perceive to be not just our well-being, but the well-being of everyone. If you'll be patient, the way of empire will turn out to be good for all of us. Besides, who can really imagine anything else?

Jesus can. He casts out the demon into a herd of two thousand swine, and in so doing, he calls into question the very basis of the empire economy. The swine, cared for by a people under occupation, probably the lowest of the low in that society, and owned by wealthy Gerasenes who have figured out how to grow rich in an empire economy, are sent over a cliff to drown in the sea. And in that moment, Jesus becomes a dangerous subversive, not just among the religious leaders of his own people, but now as an enemy of empire. He will be feared by the poor, people like Leticia and Martin, because they are right on the edge of desperation and they'll be afraid of anything that might further threaten their ability to care for their family. If there are no swine, what do the swineherds do? He will be despised by the powerful among those under occupation, the President Portillos, because they have found a way to be big winners as the agents of empire. What will the owners of the swine do? Most of all, he will be seen as a radical and the worst kind of subversive by the rulers of the empire, those who have the most to lose if there is no longer a way to pacify the Gerasenes through military domination.

So the question for all of us is "What would it mean today to grasp Jesus' vision of the Gerasene who is clothed and in his right mind? What would it mean to cast out the demon of empire backed up by total, overwhelming military domination - the military of shock and awe, or as Indonesia named its own military offensive in a copycat move this week, "Hunt and Crush"? Get ready, because following Jesus down this path is going to call into question the foundation of everything that you and I, the children and the church of empire, have been taught to believe. It's going to demand the courage to follow Jesus Christ, to rethink who we are as people of faith. We will have to become protagonists in building a new economic paradigm in which there is enough for everyone, and all of us - all of us - feel secure.

I believe these are the foundational principles of that paradigm:

In a secure world, a day's wage will be enough to provide for the basic needs of one's family, everywhere, period.

In a secure world, my use of the world's resources will be appropriate and measured so that I am not destroying the environment where someone else lives, or where our children or our grandchildren will live.

In a secure world, my lifestyle in the United States will be balanced and sane so that there can be no perception that my family's well being has come at the expense of another family on the other side of the world.

In a secure world, our country's notion of justice will change. As Quaker philosopher/rancher Jim Corbett would have said, we will need to create community based on the values of cohesion rather than community built on coercion. Gently put, we will learn the art of negotiation and consensus building. We will forego the too-easy solutions that come with the threat of a gun.

In a secure world, there will be no profit in providing military, police, prison and guard "security" to protect us. We will begin to put those profits into the things that really do build strong, safe, communities. Good housing, basic education, good health care, community infrastructure - and we will work to make that happen for everyone, all over the world.
That's what security is all about.

So as church in the heart of the empire, if that is the world we desire, what is our task?

First, we must stand for basic, uncompromising, economic security - for all the world's citizens - in the midst of globalization. How we respond to economic empire building is going to be the defining moral challenge of our time. The church, our church, must be in the center of that debate. We should be on the streets of Seattle and Quebec to insist on democratic participation in shaping our economic relationships. We must be sitting at the conference tables of the wealthy nations as they negotiate the rules of free trade agreements. We'll need to be at the workshops of Porto Allegre, Brazil with eighty thousand people from across the world as they dare to imagine that "Another World is Possible." We need to be a voice of reason and conscience in the board rooms of the corporations to stand firm for the values of equity and dignity for all of us. Most importantly, we must do the hard work of educating Presbyterians about the Biblical mandate for economic justice and Jesus' radical notions of security. It's called MAKING DISCIPLES!

Second, we must stand for non-violence in a world of terrorism. No one in this room is any safer today than we were on September 12th, 2001. We are not safer because of the war against terrorism. We are not safer because of the war against Osama Bin Laden. We are no safer because of the War against Iraq. The myth that we are more secure is the worst kind of lie that depends on a hollow, me first kind of patriotism and a blind obedience to authority that is the antithesis of the very core of what it means to be a Christian.

I have no illusions that the Presbyterian Church (USA) is going to become a peace church, or a pacifist community, any time soon, although I dare to dream that day is in my future. However, we can and should be creating new, viable, non-violent alternatives to militarization. Our Church can and should be a voice of reason holding our nation to the highest standard of proof that there IS NO OTHER WAY before it uses military force. Our Church can and should help to build a non-violent peace army that is willing to stand in the midst of violence, putting our own lives at risk in the same way that we expect our soldiers to. In doing so, we will force the proponents of violence to think twice about what they are doing, and bring a new level of consequence to their actions. There are thirty-five wars being fought right now in different parts of the war, and the Presbyterian Church, (USA) should be there as a nonviolent, direct intervention on behalf of peace. When things become dangerous, Presbyterians should be flocking to those places to insist that every life of every child in Iraq, or Palestine, or Israel, or Colombia, anywhere in the world, is just as sacred as the life of my own son, Teo. Until we are willing to show that kind of courage, there can be no casting out of the demon of military backed empire.

Michael Nagler, in his book Is There No Other Way? describes the situation in 1942, when India was cowering before the prospect of a Japanese invasion. He writes that Gandhi startled everyone by proposing that India could defend herself with nonviolent armies of peace. While Churchill was trying to prepare Roosevelt for a British collapse, Gandhi was "preparing his unarmed countrymen to resist to the last man rather than submit, if the Japanese had landed on Indian soil." He was never given a chance to put this bold vision to the test. As Nagler says, the British put him in prison, conveniently, for most of the war years, and even most of his own Congress Party members found they were not ready to follow him that far. Historically, Nagler reflects, wars always thin the ranks of pacifists. When danger stares one in the face, it is difficult to keep faith with an untested future. (page 242)

Our task as the faithful church in the heart of empire will be not only to keep faith with an untested future, but to create new possibilities so that there are an array of possible responses beyond "Shock and Awe."

And look at Mark's vision for what might happen if we live into that future. How do the people react to Jesus' radical act of attacking the empire economy? They come from the towns and the villages to see what Jesus has done, and they find the man formerly possessed by demons now unchained, clothed, calm, and in his right mind. He is no longer threatened by the empire's military. His reason for that unbelievable, unreasoning rage has left him, and there is no violence left in him.

Unfortunately for the people of the surrounding towns and villages, that means there is also nothing left to be afraid of. And it makes them more afraid, doesn't it? The distraction of terrorism is gone. There is nothing left to mask the reality, which is that they are a people living under the domination of empire as well, and that any ability they themselves had carved out to make a way of life in that system is no longer secure. No wonder they felt threatened. For some of them, they have quite a bit to lose. The owners of the swine, the investors in the defense corporations that were subsidized by empire, the consumers of the cheap goods of the global economy, those of us whose lives are connected in unseen ways to the producers in the global supermarket and the workers of the global factory. It's going to take real courage to imagine our lives without the benefits we receive from the empire.

Even more challenging, the Geresene, formerly possessed by the demon, is now in his right mind. He wants to join Jesus on the journey, but Jesus' tells him his task is elsewhere. His responsibility is to share the message of what God has done for him with his friends. What a curious statement. I assumed that this man had no friends. Remember, he had been isolated, wild and uncontrollable, and no one could go near him. So where is Jesus sending him?

I think he's been sent into the land of the military occupation, to the few winners and the many losers of the project of empire building, to tell the story of Jesus' critique and the drowning of the pigs. Jesus is asking him to become an evangelist in the most risky and daring sense of the word: to share Jesus' message of salvation; a new kind of relationship with God; liberation in the heart of the empire.

In our world, Jesus is asking us in the church to take similar risks. Jesus image of wholeness, of the Geresene clothed and in his right mind, is attainable. All we have to do to get there is to have the courage, here in the heart of empire, to stand against the notion of a global economy without the responsibility of a global community.

The good news is that this is what the gospel is all about. This is the message that so excited the early church. Jesus did preach good news, and the good news was that God wants us - all of us - to have life, and life abundantly. As we become enthusiastic evangelists who are unafraid to share what really is the good news of Jesus Christ, the church around us will come alive. We will be on fire with the Christ-centered vision of our faith, our church and our world.

The good news of Jesus, shared unabashedly, is that security will never be found at the barrel of a gun: not in Iraq, not in Colombia, not on the U.S./Mexico border, and not in our own communities. The kind of security we seek can only be claimed as we adopt Jesus' command to first remove the log from our own eye, and to examine the violence we perpetrate all over the world in everyday ways that are unseen to us, but completely obvious to our brothers and sisters all over the world who are our unintended victims.

The good news of Jesus Christ, shared without reservation, is that Jesus dared to imagine a world in which there was basic economic fairness and security. Isn't it amazing that in our Presbyterian Church USA that statement borders on the heretical. We've been taught a theology of economics that in many ways is the antithesis of the theology of Jesus Christ. That there are always winners and losers. That there is no need to examine where our wealth comes from as long as we share it generously with those who are less fortunate. In many churches, we're exposed week after week to a theology of entitlement, seeking always to interpret our scripture in a way that won't call into question our pre-existing values.

In the end, however, that theology leaves us feeling strangely empty, wondering if there isn't more, and watching as other congregants leave to look elsewhere for meaning in their lives. There is good news for the poor in the gospel of Jesus Christ. And if we believe in Jesus' message of the power of grace, it is also good news for all of us who are not poor, but who are willing to ask profound and difficult questions about how we live our lives and who God is calling us to be. If we can let go of the piece of the empire we've managed to grab, perhaps there is something deeper out there for us; perhaps the longing we feel for meaning and community can be satisfied.

Finally, what I most appreciate about this story is that it is simultaneously profoundly personal and radically corporate. The story of the Gerasene Demoniac is, in the end, a story of personal salvation. It is a moving story about that one-on-one relationship in which Jesus restores the Geresene to wholeness, creates a place for him in community, and responds to the violence of empire all at the same time. The exciting message of Jesus is that my own personal spirituality is inextricably intertwined with my ability to do justice in the world. There could be no better news for a church in the heart of empire. You and I, insofar as we are willing to risk a new way of being in relationship, insofar as we are willing to struggle to challenge the demon of empire, have a chance at that good news too. Nothing could be more liberating, nothing could be more fulfilling, than that.

I'd like to close with the words of Guatemalan Poet Julia Esquivel, written when state terrorism at the service of empire was unleashed against her people in the early 1980's in the most brutal way imaginable.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Chosen

I will remain with my people
The dispossessed
The deceived
The persecuted
The bargained-for.
With the people who have never been considered
Human
But who keep standing up
And surviving
And beginning again …

I will remain with the ones
Who have been three times dispossessed,
Forced off their land.
The ones who have been chased like deer
Through forests and jungles.

I will remain with the silent people …
Who guard in the intimacy of their hearts
The last word.
I remain with the elderly,
With the widows
And the orphans.

In the crushed hearts
Of the weak
God finds Strength

Yes, I will remain with my people.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I am indebted to Ched Myers and his work in Binding the Strong Man and Who Will Roll Away the Stone?, Gloria and Ross Kinsler and their book The Biblical Jubilee and the Struggle for Life, Michael Hagler and his book Is There No Other Way?, Jean Paul Lederach and many of his writings including his essay "The Challenge of Terror," and Julia Esquivel for all of her poetry, especially The Certainty of Spring.

~ Rick Ufford-Chase, Denver - May 2003

Your reactions and ideas are encouraged.
Please email or call (888) 728-7228 x5388.

Prepared by Andrew Kang Bartlett
Associate for National Hunger Concerns