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Dialog: A Journal of Theology • Volume 53, Number 2 • Summer 2014 • June
The Sign of Unity and the Bond of Charity: On the Eucharist as a “Taskmaster” in the Context of Global Migration By Kristine Suna-Koro Abstract: What does the Eucharist—seen as the source and summit of Christian life and the “meeting-
point on which all the issues of theology converge” (Y.Brilioth) have to do with migrants and refugees? Regardless of how we celebrate the Eucharist, we all have to negotiate ways of living together within the interdependent destiny of globalization. Precisely within this global conviviality, the sacramental and mystical radicalism of unity and love that Martin Luther advocated in his eucharistic theology invites serious consideration but also equally serious contextualization. Key Terms: migration, sacramentality, Eucharist, sacramental fellowship, solidarity
The Eucharist and Migration What does the Eucharist have to do with migrants and migration?1 In fact, a few years ago I was asked rather pointedly on Facebook by a theologian friend, what, on earth, does migration have to do with theology? With less ideological chagrin but with more genuine perplexity a similar question often hangs in the air among my students at the beginning of a course I teach on theology, migration, and ethics. Historically various interfaith communities and spiritual traditions have been wrestling with the second question amidst the ever-increasing complexities, challenges, hopes, and horrors of human migration, particularly throughout the era of Western colonial modernity. In the United States, whose history is inseparable from the history of colonial
conquest and modern mass migration, this is felt with a particular cultural poignancy since, in the memorable yet often disregarded words of Oscar Handlin, “the immigrants were American history.”2 From monotheistic perspectives, the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reflect the profound spiritual and ethical conundrums surrounding strangers, aliens, exiles, sojourners and migration across millennia. Realistically acknowledging the deeply ingrained and often corruptive inertias of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance, these texts also reflect the unambiguous divine “preferential option” for hospitality, compassion, and justice. The three virtues express the unambiguous salvific will of the God revealed in the scriptures—most earnestly toward those “wretched of the earth” (Franz Fanon) who were and still are despised as strangers, ghettoized as aliens and refugees, detained and deported as illegal, but more
Rev. Dr. Kristine Suna-Koro is a Latvian-American diasporic theologian and Lutheran pastor. She is Assistant Professor of Theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS). C 2014 Wiley Periodicals and Dialog, Inc.