The Gospel vs. Human Trafficking

A few times recently, people have asked me to share more of my personal philosophy on this blog. Almost exactly one year ago (April 30, 2009), I gave a speech to about 40 people at Brown University to finish an event raising awareness about human trafficking and giving the Christian perspective on this atrocity that unfortunately occurs in many parts of the U.S. and world. It, I think, is the best explanation that I have of the personal philosophy that motivated me to join the Peace Corps. I should mention that it is only that - my personal philosophy - and has absolutely nothing to do with the Peace Corps as an institution, nor necessarily with the form of my work as a Peace Corps Volunteer. You will note that the invitations at the end have been stricken in order to avoid any confusion.

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So I’m going to speak from the heart tonight, and it’s my hope that what I say be challenging to all of us that are here, and for that reason I’m going to invite us all at the end to take the next step in our spiritual journey and in our journey for social justice.

We know that the issue of human trafficking is gaining traction in our state. At the rally last week we hearda testimony from Tina Frundt:

Tina grew up in Chicago, and when she was fourteen she met a man twice her age who hung out by her corner store and kept buying her candy. She had some family problems…you know how young teenagers are, so she ran away from home with this man, her new boyfriend. They talked settling down together, of buying a house, but after a little while the man said, “If you love me, you will make some money for us.” And then he took her to Cleveland, introduced her to some of his friends, and told her to have sex with one of them. She said absolutely not, but he didn’t care, and so they raped her. She was convinced it was her fault. Then her “boyfriend” put her in a house with other women that he was pimping out. He put her on the streets at night, and she was forced to make $500 a night, and when she didn’t he would hit her. Fear, isolation and kept her like this for two years, enslaved.

How can a relationship turn so bad? She, like all of us, was just looking for an authentic relationship – was looking for love. She, in fact, was in love with the pimp. But he misused that love horribly. There’s something so insidious about this that it just makes you shudder, isn’t there? Love cuts to the center of who we are.

Our misplaced search for love in fact can leave us not only victims of human trafficking, but it can implicate us in it as well. You don’t even have to order up an enslaved prostitute, your porn subscription might feed money straight to sex traffickers.

The truth is, this is a problem which is fed by dollars, and by technology, and by government policies, and by geopolitical realities, but it goes beyond even those things. This is a problem of the human heart – a spiritual problem.

So what does God have to say about this?

Well, Scripture says God is love. Just like love has been misused, God has been misused. And usually for reasons of power – people seeking to justify their own power by invoking the name of God.

And in the Christian story, it was this thirst for power which spoiled the relationship between God and humans. It was so bad that God put rules into place to check humans’ power against each other. One of these rules was called the jubilee year. Every fifty years, the Israelites were to return all property to its original owners, free all indentured servants and forgive all debts. Think about that! That means every 50 years all wealth - and power - would be equalized!

The sad story, of course, is that world history doesn’t reflect that jubilee year. Even the Israelites, just like everyone else, never really practiced it. And slavery is quite possibly the worst incarnation of this thirst for power. It destroys the other person’s identity, destroys their spirit.

It’s one of the saddest occurrences of history that Christians defended slavery through the Civil War. Another example of religion defending the powerful. Defending the status quo. James Cone says from the perspective of the black freedom struggle in the ‘60s that “if God is not for us, if God is not against white racists, then God is a murderer and we had better kill God.” Okay, admittedly, the language is a little intense, but I want to show you tonight that God is a God of liberation, a God who understands and sides with the oppressed, with the enslaved, with women and men who are caught in human trafficking.

And to do that, I’m going to read from the account of Jesus written by the doctor Luke. Jesus says this just as he’s beginning his ministry. It’s sort of his inaugural address or his statement of purpose. He says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This is Jesus’ purpose – to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, which is Guess what? The jubilee year. To those in captivity, in slavery, Jesus seeks to set them free. To the oppressed everywhere – the poor, the racial minorities, the untouchables, women in abusive relationships, Jesus says things are going to be different now. I’m starting a new movement to liberate you. And it’s not even just them. Jesus also proclaims recovery of sight to the blind. That includes those of us who are blind to what is going on around us, like the human trafficking that’s going on a few minutes away. This is the meaning of Jesus’ “good news to the poor.” This is the meaning of the Christian gospel.

And Jesus did other things to let us know that he wasn’t just for the oppressed, but with the oppressed too. He was constantly eating with tax collectors and prostitutes, the scum of the earth as far as the outside society and the religious authorities were concerned. Makes you think – I’m sure that if he were here today he would be hanging out with trafficked persons as well. Let’s think about who he even was! Christians say that Jesus was the essence of God – high and mighty and all of that, but he was born in a pig’s feeding trough to a single mom in a barn. During his ministry, he angered all the authorities – Jewish and Roman. That’s why they conspired to kill him. The very essence of God Almighty entered into a person who cried, who was homeless, beaten, betrayed, persecuted for his beliefs, and executed. In the story of his death, Jesus identified with our suffering and the suffering of the oppressed and enslaved. And that’s a great thing to know. Thing is though – the story doesn’t end there. In death, he confronted the insurmountable oppression. And on the third day he improbably rose from the dead, proclaiming victory over that oppression which killed him, and setting the precedent for all the rest of us to experience and be agents of liberation today.

The great thing about Brown students is that we get it, by and large, we get it. We all want to do what we can to stop slavery. Look at all the student groups we have here to advocate on social justice issues. That’s part of the reason I love this place.

Over the past four years, I’ve had the great pleasure of being able to serve in STAND, formerly the Darfur Action Network. Of late we had been struggling to do meaningful things, and so a few weeks ago, I tried to give the group a motivational speech to cheer us up. You know, blah blah blah, we can do this, we have to believe in ourselves, et cetera, et cetera. But as I was giving this speech, I looked out at the members of our group and I realized something – these people aren’t burnt out like me, they are actually trying incredibly hard. Struggling, and struggling, and coming to frustration with this new, this ugly reality - We have few places to go on Darfur. There aren’t really any small victories to be won. The problem just seems too big, we seem too small. We are coming to grips with our limits.

We do have to face the facts that when we try to love others, try to serve them, it isn’t always what we wish it could be. You know, a couple of years ago I was in a serious relationship that was ending. I had loved this girl very much. And yet as things began to worsen, I found that I just couldn’t love her as much anymore. I tried and tried, but instead of love, all that was filling my heart was fear. And one day I went out to Prospect Park and I just cried. Sorrow just overcame me as I realized that I couldn’t, that I didn’t have it in me, I wasn’t strong enough to love her like she deserved.

When we are weak, when our relationships falter, when we cannot stop human trafficking in a house a ten-minute walk from here, let alone in Cambodia, it is a sign that all is not right with the cosmic relationship, that our relationship with God is broken too, that we are not the people God intends for us to be. Luckily for us, Jesus came to repair that relationship, to bring us back to God. And he did it with a love that is infinite, much greater than our loves. So great that he would even die for us.

And so giving that motivational speech, a feeling just came on me. I really wanted to just tell them, “You are loved!” And this is a message that we should all take home tonight – no matter what we accomplish or don’t, we have a giving father, a compassionate mother who loves us. The apostle Paul says, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

How powerful is that! What does that say to the trafficked woman, sitting in a brothel with some mattresses strewn about the floor? Even though many men may come through the door and quote-unquote “make love” with you, even though your pimp, like Tina’s, may pretend to be your boyfriend, even though this “Land of Opportunity” is the worst you’ve ever known, you have an eternal father who does really loves you, who even knows the struggles you are going through.

So how does that help us who want to be world changers, who want to affect this issue of human trafficking here in Rhode Island? Well, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Not learn about the change, not even do the change or enact the change, but be the change. More than intellectual, more than volitional, it’s spiritual. Our spiritual problem demands a holistic solution – a spiritual solution. What does it really mean to be a change?

To the Christian, Jesus WAS that change. Jesus inaugurated a whole new humanity Instead of being a power-hungry person, Jesus actually relinquished his power in order to be in radical solidarity with us, with the oppressed. Up on the cross, the soldiers yelled to him, “Save yourself!” But he didn’t – not until later, anyway. To have power, we must relinquish some of our own power.

I want to tell you a story about a man who did just that in the face of all that seemed good and sensible. (and I apologize to those of you who have heard this many times.) Mariano Puga was born to a family in Chile which owned what is today the third-largest vineyard in the world. Go to any liquor store, you’ll find a wine from the Viña Concha y Toro. That’s his family’s old vineyard. Obviously, he grew up with great wealth and attended the best schools, the best university. He was at the Catholic University, the same school I studied at while I was abroad, studying architecture and there he met a priest who became a mentor to him. He said, Mariano, I know you’re a religious guy and all, but you really need to forget all that you ever knew about Catholicism, or Christianity, and just start reading about Jesus. So he did. One day he set out to read all of the Gospels and he later told me, in his words, “I fell in love with Jesus that day and I’ve never fallen out of love with him since then.” So he decided to become a priest. His father knew that Mariano had a real heart for Jesus’ message of social justice, and he was a very good man, but he didn’t want Mariano to be a priest. Obviously he was a very rich man and so he told Mariano, “Please, please just remain an architect. If you do that, I will build you, I will pay for, affordable housing for the poor if you design it.” Incredibly, Mariano said no. He became a priest in the north of the country in a mining town. Up there none of the miners would really come to mass, so he decided to go to them. He went and worked in the mines himself. Fourteen hour days, six days a week, then gave mass on Sunday. Later, he moved back to the city of Santiago and instead of moving back into his parents’ neighborhood, he moved to one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, living in a little dumpy shack and refusing to accept money from the church. He worked as a painter to offset his meager costs. In that neighborhood he served as parish priest, advocating for the people there. And during this period there was a military dictatorship in Chile – the Pinochet dictatorship – that was very hard on the poor. Father Mariano spoke out against them, one of the few opposition leaders known in the city, and for that he was thrown in jail seven times, and tortured once for a month and a half. Yet I knew that at the same time, despite this hardship he was having incredible impact. Because I had been led by God to go to that church – he had actually moved on by this point – but all the parishoners would tell me, “If it wasn’t for Mariano, I wouldn’t still be with my husband,” “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have started our organization” or like my friend Pato “Before I met Mariano, I was a materialist, atheist leftist, and after I met Mariano I was a Christian leftist.” In any case, you can see what this guy meant to them. He trusted God and gave up his power, like Jesus he moved from the very top of the totem pole to the very bottom, aligned himself with the poor and with Jesus’ message of liberation, and allowed God’s power to work through him. As Jesus said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (For more on the story of Mariano: Off on a Spiritual Journey

It is my prayer tonight that we would be like Mariano, be like Jesus in spreading his gospel of liberation to those who are kept in inexcusable bondage here in Rhode Island and around the world. It is my prayer that a movement would arise, that this movement would strengthen, not from a paternalistic position but from a position that says to today’s slaves we are here with you and we love you, just as God loves you. And it is my prayer that we let go of whatever is holding us back, let go of our own desires for power and let God take them, let God, who has the power, turn us into world changers for the good of the world.

I want to create a space for you to respond to what you’ve experienced tonight. Let these things that you’ve seen, felt and heard about human trafficking and about the Christian story dwell within you. Over the next little while, see what you think: do you agree with me? Disagree? And come tell me about it. But I also have three invitations for those who feel moved to commit themselves to something. In just a moment, we will pray and you will have an opportunity to respond, but first let me say what the three invitations are...