Who Gets To Exist

This week, friends and colleagues of mine were bearing witness at naturalization ceremonies in Boston and Minneapolis. These were rooms filled with people from all over the world who had done everything this country asked of them. They had waited for years, followed every rule, learned English, paid taxes, raised families, and lived the story we tell ourselves about how belonging is earned.

And then, as they stood in line to become citizens, some were pulled out.

No warning.

No explanation.

Removed from the room, from their jobs, from their families and communities.

As of today, they are simply … gone.

It is tempting to talk about this as “immigration policy,” but that language is too small. What is happening is an existential and theological struggle over who gets to exist at all: who is allowed to stand in the light as a full human being made in the image of God.

We often reach for protest as our first response. Protest matters, of course. But we also need to be honest that protest permits, staying on sidewalks, and social media hashtags are not slowing down the machinery of disappearance. Every day, people are being shackled and loaded onto planes, treated in ways that would not allow them to save themselves if something went wrong mid-flight. Human beings are being turned into freight, moved from detention center to detention center by for-profit companies (sometimes financed by our own pension funds), vanishing into bureaucratic black holes as dark as the tinted windows of the vehicles taking them away.

So, the question becomes sharper for those of us living a life of faith: What does resistance mean in this moment of terror and disappearances?

There is an ancient word for resistance: resistentia. It does not mean shouting or spectacle, nor does it primarily refer to protest. It means to stand firm: to refuse to be moved when systems are working to extinguish whole communities or people groups.  It names a body, an individual or community, that chooses to be visible even when the system is designed to make their presence vanish.  

The early Church used the word to describe how believers refused to disappear under the weight of empire. They stand in a long lineage of communities who practiced the same courage: Jewish communities who held their identity under Roman occupation, enslaved Africans who preserved culture and faith in the face of dehumanization, Indigenous peoples resisting the erasure of language and land, the Black Church proclaiming liberation in the shadow of Jim Crow, the villagers of Le Chambon who hid Jewish children during the Holocaust, and the base Christian communities of Latin America who gathered in homes and chapels to read Scripture through the eyes of the poor and refused to let authoritarian regimes silence them. All of them chose presence over disappearance.

The theological heart of resistentia is this: It is a refusal to accept someone’s erasure as morally neutral. It is the conviction that human dignity is not granted by the state and cannot be revoked by it. It is the belief that existence, our own and our neighbor’s, is a sacred gift entrusted to our care.

And if that’s what resistentia means, what does it look like?

It is rarely dramatic. And while at times it is a moment that makes the news, it is more often the long, disciplined work of refusing to let fear, bureaucracy, or cruelty decide who counts as human. 

Faithful resistentia is not symbolic.  It is relational and structural.

It looks like accompaniment: showing up for hearings, sitting with families when someone is taken, being physically present so people are not alone in the most frightening moments of their lives. 

It looks like keeping stories alive, refusing to let anyone’s name be erased. 

It looks like congregations that serve as anchors; places where people are more than documents or case numbers or “risk profiles,” where their humanity is recognized without condition.

And there is a third part of this work: practices that help us remain human inside systems that want to turn all of us into cargo, data points, or bots. Resistentia calls us to strengthen the muscles that bureaucratic cruelty works so hard to numb - empathy, presence, imagination, and moral attention. It calls us to stay human through community, by tending to each other’s grief, fear, and hope. And by staying human - choosing connection over abstraction or refusing to let anyone’s suffering become “background noise,"

We live resistentia when we honor one another’s bodies, boundaries, and stories.

As Christians, we know this story. Jesus was arrested at night, disappeared through secret proceedings, executed under state power. God’s response to that disappearance was not resignation. It was resurrection - the divine refusal to let empire decide whose body counts and whose does not.

We may not yet be at the worst moment in this authoritarian slide, but the Gospel has never instructed us to wait for the worst before practicing faithfulness. Right now, we are being trained to normalize what should never be normal.

To comply in advance.

To turn away.

To imagine that this cannot happen to us.

Resistentia begins when we refuse that training. It begins when we say, in word and action:

You are not a number.

You are not cargo.

You are not disposable.

You are my neighbor.

You are kin.

You are beloved.

And, I will not act as though your disappearance is acceptable or inevitable.

We do not stay human by accident. We stay human by choosing to show up, again and again, for those our society is working so hard to disappear.

In this season of Advent, a season of watching and waiting, of preparing for divine presence in vulnerable human flesh, we are called to more than bystanding or passive hope.

Let us choose the sacred work of resistentia, for ourselves, for our neighbors, and for all whom this world tries to erase.

In solidarity and hope,

Pastor Robin