MM

what or towards what do we seek liberation?
From
does the text, and maybe more importantly today, what might M. M.
What
have to say to us?
Thomas
need to start out by saying that I was raised in a Mar Thoma, Jacobite, CSI home. We were
I
until I was a teenager. What I teamed from growing up within those communities was that
undecided
community was very inward looking and striving to ensure economic security and some status or
the
I suspect many who were invisible or silent in the churches were also struggling simply to
prestige.
on modest wages or public benefits; many were committing and surviving acts of violence and
survive
many were struggling to survive psychological distress; and many must have been
abuse;
racism and anti-immigrant sentiment.
encountering
noticed as a child the difference between what little my parents said about the churches they had
I
up in in India, and the churches we now attended. M.M. Thomas was the youth leader in my
grown
youth group in Kuviyoor. My mother remembers reading pieces written for teenagers and
father's
adults in general publications. Liberation Theology was a part of the formation of young Malayali
young
in the 1950's and 60's. It is hard to believe that those same people founded the kinds of
Christians
communities I was raised in and from whose children and grandchildren I regularly hear that
Christian
l am no scholar of M. M. Thomas, I thought I would bring today's world into this conversation,
Since
we can all pretend M. M. Thomas is here to provoke us to join these struggles for justice today.
and
should never become a permanent order." [p. 24]
“Slavery
would say slavery should never be. But may be Exodus only goes so far as to say it should not be
We
permanent condition. We do not have slavery per se in the United States nor in India, but by default,
a
do. We have traces of it in our social order.
we
the United States, it is the prison industrial complex that replicates the conditions of slavery. If the
In
of the text is that all human life is redeemable and no debt should eliminate a person's hope fora
intent
life with dignity, the criminalization and imprisonment of the poor. Over whelmingly young men
decent
women who are black, Latino, or Native American is our modern day rendition of slavery.
and
wonder what M. M. Thomas would expect of the church in the United States in response to the
I
crisis in policing and prisons?
current
a student at the Union Theological Seminary, someone would usually link me to new students from
As
who were coming to do an STM at Union in preparation for a Ph.D. Many of them had been
Kerala
of M. M.Thomas. Some had lived in rural villages for many years alongside poor villagers with
students
evangelical agenda but to accompany them, seeing the face of Christ in them and finding
no
as outsiders, not the people they went to live with, changed, coming to a greater
themselves
of their humanity and the humanity of these their new neighbors, an understanding that
understanding
deeply challenging to the traditions of the communities they had come from. I wonder what a
was
of teaching ike that would look like here. We cannot very well enter prisons and live among
model
accompanying them in their daily life without a marked power differential. We can go and
prisoners,
in communities in which the police treat the community more like a prison than a neighborhood.
live
can live in rural and urban areas in which Americans and American children go to bed hungry
We
night We can find communities of migrant workers here in New Jersey and in NewYork. where
every
have even fewer rights, barely ciinging to the edge of survival while participating in every step of
they
production of the clean, cheap and nutritious food we have come to this country to have in great
the
they can find no place for their interest in social justice in their Congregations.
Prisons/Policing
abundance. We should hope for our young adults that companionship with those most on the margins