Over the past week, cities across the United States have erupted with protests and riots in response to recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions—particularly in Los Angeles, where tensions boiled over after a series of aggressive raids. These aren’t just political flashpoints. They are sacred cries rising from the streets, echoing with grief, anger, hope, and the longing for justice.
As one who seeks to follow in the Way of Jesus I find myself asking, “Where is Christ present in all this?” What does it mean to pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” ?
Scripture consistently demonstrates that G-d’s will is not abstract. It is deeply incarnational. G-d’s will looks like the welcome of strangers. It sounds like justice rolling down like waters. It smells like bread shared across boundaries. It feels like freedom in the bones of those long held captive. Sight for the blind. Movement for those who’ve been paralyzed. The law and the prophets are summed up, Jesus says, in love of G-d, love of neighbor, love of self—and Jesus makes clear that our neighbor includes the widow, the orphan, and the foreigner among us. This love, according to Jesus, even extends to our enemies!
It is no accident that G-d’s concern for the stranger is repeated so often in the Hebrew scriptures. Nor is it a surprise that Jesus himself was a refugee child, fleeing violence with his parents. The Holy Family knew the fear of borders and the threat of empire. So when we see families today torn apart by ICE raids, children traumatized, and neighbors living in constant fear, we must ask what it means to see them not just as “them,” but as us—as part of the body of Christ.
The anti-ICE riots, painful and complicated as they are, reveal something raw and real. They lay bare the dissonance between our national policies and the gospel’s call to hospitality. They call attention to the powers that dehumanize—and they reveal communities rising up in resistance, not just politically, but spiritually. For many, this is not about partisanship. It’s about sacred worth, about who belongs, and about the kind of world we dare to believe is possible.
To open ourselves to G-d in this moment is not to retreat into silence or neutrality. It is to lean in—to pray with our feet, to organize with love, to protect the vulnerable, and to tell the truth, even when it costs us. It is to remember that G-d locates G-dself among the powerless, not enthroned in marble halls, but walking the hot sidewalks with the undocumented and the afraid.
Let us be found there too.
May we be a people who risk welcome, who pray with open doors, and who live toward the world Christ imagined—on earth as it is in heaven.
Peace, dwight
