The great vision for the United States was that we would be a great “melting pot.” A vision in which many different people could live together in one place. The phrase evokes a great homogenizing into a singular culture. But it also evokes another. A land without borders. No English state and French state with a line to separate.

When Jesus enter the borderlands, we can hardly understand what is happening.

We don’t have borderlands. But they are the space between spaces. It isn’t just a road or a river that makes a border. But “empty” land that buffers.

Borderlands are never empty, however. They are full of people who are cast out. Made refugees by war or cynical governments; by ill health or demonic possession; poverty or politics. Our division creates an entire ecosystem of the rejected.