Photograph by Adam Śmigielski via Unsplash

This month, the latest adventure of Paddington Bear was released in cinemas. While I went for something to do with my family on a long weekend, I was surprised to find that “Paddington in Peru” has plenty to reflect on for a person of faith during these difficult times.

While the film’s cast of characters returns the Brown family and the famous marmalade-loving bear, Paddington, from previous installments, much of the movie centers around a home for retired bears run by nuns. There are saints’ medals passed out, habits worn, and plenty of dance numbers, but despite the relatively high religiosity of the film, the true religious message comes from an unlikely source – Mr. Brown himself.

Mr. Brown is in the insurance business, and he spends considerable time figuring out risk assessments for everything. For the trip to Peru, his triple-laminated binder includes his greatest fear, a purple-haired tarantula. At the start of the movie, he gets a new American boss who encourages him to embrace risk as part of life and his profession, forcing him to confront his normally risk-averse strategy for going through life.

Throughout the film, Mr. Brown must confront risk and his relationships to it. Will he be willing to lead a rescue mission in the Peruvian Amazon? Can he confront his direst fears in the form of spiders and deadly rivers? From the outset, the answers to these questions look doubtful, but over the course of the movie, he learns to risk it all for the sake of his family, biological and adopted. Perhaps the most enduring message from the film is that there are risks worth taking.

It strikes me that this is a particularly important lesson for individuals and churches during these early days of Donald Trump’s second term. There has already been a flurry of changes to our present social order, including the removal of ICE’s “sensitive locations” memo that protected schools, hospitals, and houses of worship from ICE enforcement. The president has removed temporary protected status from some 350,000 Venezuelan migrants, and has promised to permanently change our social order.

Churches like mine, which are part of the sanctuary movement and have committed to protecting immigrants, undocumented and documented, from deportation, face plenty of risks for standing up against what they consider to be unjust laws. It is possible that sanctuary churches could become targets of the Trump administration’s ire. Opposing power always comes with risk; there is no escaping that fundamental reality. The question is what houses of worship will consider a risk worth taking.

One of my favorite books of all time is Sharon Welch’s “A Feminist Ethic of Risk.” In that book, Welch offers a paradigm for what it means to engage in such an ethic: “The ethic of risk is characterized by three elements, each of which is essential to maintain resistance in the face of overwhelming odds: a redefinition of responsible action, grounding in community, and strategic risk-taking.”[i] Writing against white middle-class ethics of despair, Welch argues that we need to move beyond understanding risk as being worth it only when we can be reasonably sure of the outcome. For Welch, “responsible action does not mean the certain achievement of desired ends but the creation of a matrix in which further actions are possible, the creation of the conditions of possibility for desired changes.”[ii]

In these times, churches must be like Mr. Brown – they must embrace risk for the sake of something greater. We know that success is not guaranteed, and we cannot know what repercussions might manifest from opposing naked cruelty. What matters is not success, but the building of a scaffolding from which further ethical action can take place. The most vulnerable in our midst are not just political pawns to be bargained for, they are the beloved of God, and they are worth the risk.

The most important thing is to not give in to despair, the feeling that nothing can change, or that even if it can, we cannot effect such change. Oddly enough, I was reminded of this by Mr. Brown and his journey from risk-averse to willing to risk it all for the sake of something bigger than himself. Inspiration comes from myriad sources, including regular insurance executives who are challenged, grow, and become brave.