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“For Remember . . .”
Scott Hoezee
Dordt College Immigration Conference
September 25, 2010
Why did God bring salvation the way he did? That is what they refer to in the
Children and Worship program as “a wondering question.”
Wondering questions are
good ways to probe the familiar in ways that may open up new insights of
understanding—insights we may have been missing all along precisely because we are
overly familiar with a certain story, a certain incident, a certain set of ideas.
In this case I am wondering why God brought salvation to the world the way he
did. We all know the big story. We all know it began with the Call of Abram, with the
establishment of the covenant, and then with the subsequent history of Israel, culminating
in the advent of Jesus. We know what happened and we have a decent idea of how it all
unfolded. But why did it go the way it did? And what does all of that have to say about
our identity as God’s people even yet today?
Specifically, I am wondering why salvation had to begin with a call for someone
to leave behind everything that was familiar so as to become a homeless wanderer on the
earth. From the biblical text of Genesis 12, it appears that Abram is already well situated
and content living in the land of Haran. Abram and his father’s household appear wellestablished and fairly wealthy, possessing significant land and also many possessions,
flocks, herds, and other goods. If I were Joel Osteen surveying Abram’s lot in life, I’d
flash a big toothy grin to declare that Abram most certainly had “his best life now.” God
had clearly blessed Abram and he could, thus, expect a long and good life under the
umbrella of God’s grace right there in Haran.
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So it would have made perfect sense had Yahweh come to Abram and said, “Stay
right where you are. You’re already off to a good start, but I will increase your flocks
and herds and land holdings and I will grant to you a family even in your old age so that
there, in Haran, I can begin my renewal of all things.”
But, of course, God said no such thing. Instead, the very first word God speaks to
Abram is “Leave” (Genesis 12:1).
Get out. Pull up stakes.
Heave ho and go!
God
would do a mighty work and would multiply Abram’s descendants beyond the telling of
it but for some reason the first step in all that was for Abram to hit the road and become a
wanderer in a new land, a migrant person who had to leave all that he had in order to start
from scratch in a land far away and where he would have no prior claims whatsoever.
I wonder why God did it this way.
Because like all immigrant and refugee peoples thereafter, so Abram would be
cast out into a place that would make him vulnerable. Indeed, a scant ten verses into the
story of Abram we discover that the land to which God had directed him was enduring a
famine. With no stockpiles of resources to fall back on, Abram and company had to
leave for Egypt “because the famine was severe” in the very place to which God had
directed them (Genesis 12:10).
Do you ever wonder if Abram had times of wanting to say to God, “Thanks a
whole bunch! How lucky I am to have been plucked out of prosperity so as to be thrown
into poverty!”
easier.
Sometimes being the bull’s-eye of divine favor makes life harder, not
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In any event, Abram and Sarai end up in Egypt, but once again they find
themselves strangers in a stranger land, with all the vulnerability that attends such a
status. When the Egyptians noted that Sarai was attractive and so suggested her to the
Pharaoh as a new member of his harem, Abram resorts to lying to try to save them. But
Abram’s lack of trust in God’s providence brought about God’s displeasure and this, in
turn, brought disease on Pharaoh’s household. As a result, Abram was once again forced
to hit the road after being exiled from Egypt by a Pharaoh who was angry at Abram’s
deception. If you are keeping count, that’s now two times Abram has had to hit the road
because of God’s working in his life.
But now please notice something else: All of this takes place in one short biblical
chapter. In the course of just 20 verses we see Abram forced to become a migrant and
see immediately the multiple vulnerabilities that this new status brought to a man who,
previously in his life, would have been safe and secure from all such threats.
I wonder why God did it the way he did.
But whatever the exact reason, it
appears that God wanted the experience of being a stranger in a strange land to be deeply
embedded in the identity of his people.
Perhaps that explains why in the rest of Scripture—in both the Old and New
Testaments—a concern to care for those who are also vulnerable due to being displaced
occurs again and again and again.
The experience of being displaced, of becoming in
essence a migrant and a refugee, lies at the very heart of the biblical narrative.
Before
the Abraham cycle of stories concludes—in a passage that is often underappreciated in
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terms of its poignancy—Abraham purchases his very first piece of Canaan when he
bargains to purchase a plot of land to bury the love of his life, Sarah.
“I am an alien and a stranger among you. Sell me some property for a burial site
here so I can bury my dead” (Genesis 23:3). When you are an alien in a land not your
own, you are forced—even in a time of death and grief—to rely on the kindness of
strangers. Again, this experience is seared deep into the consciousness of Jews and
Christians alike from all that father Abraham went through as a result of the divine
election of his becoming the founder of the renewal of all the earth.
But before the Book of Genesis is finished, we will be introduced to a situation
that will ultimately become even more pivotal and foundational for the nation of Israel.
Several generations after Abraham purchased his first piece of Canaan to bury Sarah, his
descendants once again became strangers in a strange land when famine led them once
more to Egypt where Joseph had become the Pharaoh’s right-hand man.
Through the
strange providence of God, the rotten actions of Joseph’s brothers yielded a situation that
finally saved not only the family of Jacob but untold other people in Egypt and many
surrounding nations. God’s promise that Abram and his kin would become a blessing to
the entire earth had its first glimmer of fulfillment through Joseph’s superintending of
food distribution in a time of severe famine throughout that region of the earth.
But for the family members of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, being in Egypt set up a
longer term situation that would ultimately turn sour. The final phrase of the Book of
Genesis is “a coffin in Egypt” (Genesis 50:26). But we know that the story won’t end in
Egypt because just a few verses prior to the report of Joseph’s being placed “in a coffin in
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Egypt” Joseph had prophesied that the day would come when the family would return to
the land of promise and that when they did, they needed to return his bones to be properly
buried there.
It would be over four centuries before that would take place.
The intervening
time represents a cruel and dark chapter in the history of God’s people as they became
enslaved to Egyptians who came to fear the Hebrew people as a potential threat in their
midst.
But in and through all that happened, God’s promises were also marching
forward. By the time biblical readers arrive at Exodus 1, the people of Israel are referred
to (for the first time in the Bible) as “a nation” or ‘am in Hebrew. Once again, the
experience of being an alien people in a strange land is seared deeply into the
consciousness of all subsequent generations.
This is why so much of the Pentateuch concerns itself with laws and practices for
Israel that are designed both to build on their collective experience of having been
strangers who were once oppressed in a foreign land and to make sure that Israel itself
never became guilty of similar oppression of the strangers and aliens in her midst. That
is why I entitled this lecture “For Remember . . .” because in essence that is what God
says over and over again. “For remember that you were slaves in Egypt . . . remember all
the rotten things that were done to you so you don’t do them to others, remember where
Father Abraham came from.”
In fact, by the time the Ten Commandments are repeated to Israel in the Book of
Deuteronomy, the entire basis of the Sabbath gets grounded in Israel’s experience as an
oppressed people in Egypt. Whereas the text of Exodus 20:11 grounded the practice of
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Sabbath in creation and the Lord’s having taken a day of rest, the text of Deuteronomy
5:15 grounds Sabbath in the Israelite experience of being an oppressed people in Egypt
who were never given rest.
“For remember that you were slaves in Egypt” God declared.
Curiously, this is
the only significant variation in the two versions of the Ten Commandments in Exodus
20 and Deuteronomy 5. Among other things, this may indicate that Sabbath has roots in
both Creation and Redemption. But it may also indicate that as the time drew closer for
the Israelites to return to the Promised Land of Canaan, the importance of remembering
their slave experience became increasingly acute. The Israelites who heard the law
repeated on the Plains of Moab in Deuteronomy represented a new generation that did not
recall slavery in Egypt on a firsthand basis. Their lack of active experience with being
oppressed did not, however, relieve them of the need to recall that experience and let it
set the tone for all generations to come.
In Moses’ grand sermon that constitutes the bulk of the text in Deuteronomy, the
people of Israel are reminded repeatedly to remember their collective experience as
slaves even as they are also reminded that the land they will soon enter is a sheer gift of
divine grace. As the writer of Psalm 24 would later write, so Moses in essence told the
people, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.”
The land and all its goodness
represent a divine bequest that the Israelites would occupy as a kind of tenant. It was not
finally theirs to hoard—its riches had to be shared with all, including to chiefly the
strangers and aliens in their midst.
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But these final reminders in Deuteronomy represent only the culmination of the
many laws that had been given to the generation of the exodus in Exodus and Leviticus.
The verses that most clearly reveal the heart of God and that summarize what God desires
to characterize his people come in Leviticus 19:33-34: “When an alien lives with you in
your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your
native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your
God.”
Those two verses are the clearest summary of many similar verses scattered
throughout the Pentateuch.
The Hebrew word for “alien” occurs twenty-nine times in
Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers and in nearly every instance the text makes clear that the
benefits of the promised land are to be extended to strangers as well as to the Israelites
themselves even as strangers are to be offered the same protections as the Israelites
enjoyed.
In sum, there was no significant difference between God’s desire for the Israelites
as they enjoyed their lives in the land flowing with milk and honey and God’s desire for
the strangers and aliens in the midst of Israel. But this is not surprising when we read
these words from Leviticus 25:23: “The land [of Canaan] must not be sold permanently
because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants.” In other words, God
desired Israel to extend the strangers in their midst every kindness and courtesy because
in so doing, the Israelites would be mirroring their God who extended his grace, his
lovingkindness, to the Israelites who were just as much an immigrant people in God’s
eyes as anyone else on the earth. In fact, the Israelites were to go beyond merely offering
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strangers the same benefits and protections as the rest of the people enjoyed. To shore
up the life of strangers even more, the Israelites were required actively to provide extra
protections.
Throughout the Old Testament, God makes clear that there is a special place
reserved in the divine heart for the most vulnerable members of society: widows,
orphans, and aliens. As David Holwerda once summarized it, God’s abiding concern for
that triplet of widows, orphans, and aliens reveals a fundamental fact: “God hates poverty
and desires its abolition.”
Under ordinary circumstances, these three groups of people
represented the most vulnerable members of society. In a patriarchal society like ancient
Israel, women and children who lacked the protection and status of a male head of the
family (a husband and/or a father) were liable to become invisible to the rest of society
and could easily have fallen through the social cracks as a result.
Similarly, resident aliens who lacked formal citizenship and any claim to land
were also liable to mistreatment and had few prospects unless special provision was
made. Hence, God repeatedly told the Israelites to make just such special provisions
through things like gleaner laws that instructed farmers and vintners to intentionally leave
portions of their fields and vineyards unharvested so that widows and orphans and aliens
could come by and gather up provisions for themselves.
Just before the new generation of Israelites moved in to take the Promised Land
for themselves, God reminded them of what is sometimes called God’s “preferential
option for the poor” through these soaring words in Deuteronomy 10:17-20: “For the
LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome,
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who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and
the widow and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those
who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt. Fear the LORD your God and
serve him.”
I wonder why God brought salvation the way he did. I think we are beginning to
arrive at an answer: God wanted us to have hearts as tender and gracious as his own
heart. God wanted us to see how we benefit from God’s care of the stranger so that we’d
treat the stranger well, too.
These themes weave through the entire Old Testament. By the time the biblical
reader arrives at prophetic books like Amos, Micah, and Isaiah, God’s love for the
vulnerable becomes clear in a new way as the prophets indicted Israel for precisely their
failure to extend special courtesy to the vulnerable. “They sell the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample the heads of the poor as upon the dust
of the ground and deny justice to the oppressed” (Amos 2:6b-7a). “Your hands are full
of blood; wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop
doing wrong; learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage the oppressed, defend the case of
the fatherless, plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:15-17).
God had asked the formerly oppressed Israelites to remember the horrors of
oppression as a reason never to oppress the vulnerable in their midst. But if history has
taught us anything, it is that those who were once oppressed often turn their anger over
such mistreatment into a license to then oppress some other group. As someone once
noted, the most recent group to finally get admitted to the country club often becomes the
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most vocal about keeping out the next discriminated group. God wanted to snap this
cycle of oppression.
Alas, for ancient Israel, the sinful tendency to perpetuate the
exploitation of the vulnerable won out over God’s grander vision of inclusivity as part of
the path that would lead to the global salvation first promised to Abram in Genesis 12.
The fact that God retains this desire for his people to reach out in love to all people
will continue to be revealed in the witness of the New Testament. But before leaving this
summary of salient features of the Old Testament, we must be reminded of the premiere
example of what can happen when the alien in one’s midst is treated with love and
justice: Ruth. As narrated by the Book of Ruth, Ruth’s story presents us with a character
who was vulnerable on multiple fronts. First, she was from Moab and so was a foreign
stranger in Israel when she arrived in Bethlehem with her mother-in-law Naomi. Second,
although she had married an Israelite man, she was a widow without formal claim to any
land or possessions in Israel. Third, she was poor on account of these other two strikes
against her and so could survive only if others took some extra care to provide for her.
Ruth’s only hope, in other words, was if the people of Israel followed God’s heart in how
to treat strangers and aliens.
The story of Ruth begins with emptiness and bitterness and with a high probability
of ending badly. The fact that the story has a “happy ending” occurs only because in this
case, God’s commands to Israel were heeded. Boaz makes sure that the gleaning laws
are followed so that poor persons like Ruth would be able to find plenty of grain. Boaz
also recognized Ruth’s vulnerability to rape and other mistreatment and so extended a
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special invitation that she glean in no one else’s fields but his own so that through his
influence over his own workers she could be kept safe.
And finally, despite the dangers that could be associated with intermarriage in
Israel, Boaz went the extra mile to become the kinsman-redeemer who could marry Ruth
and so give her a reliable and solid future in Israel. Like so many others in Israel, Boaz
could have gone another way. He could have ignored God’s injunctions to give special
treatment to the alien and the widow and the poor. But by following God’s ways Boaz
not only saved Ruth and Naomi from a dire fate, he became a key player in the line of
people who would one day produce no less than the Christ of God as Ruth and Boaz
became the great-great grandparents of King David.
And thus it is no surprise that by the time we come to the New Testament and its
presentation of Jesus, we find all of these various threads coming together. Like his
ancestors in Israel, so Jesus’ advent into this world represented a profound experience in
being a stranger in a strange land. All of the gospels have their unique ways of bringing
this out. The Apostle John told us that although the whole world had been made through
Jesus, when Jesus got to this world, no one recognized him. No one understood him.
His family didn’t. His disciples didn’t. The religious authorities didn’t. He came unto
that which was his own, and his own people knew him not.
To quote a song by The
Beatles, Jesus was the ultimate “nowhere man.”
Matthew, Mark, and Luke each show us this in various ways, too.
For his part,
Matthew introduces this theme as overtly as anyone just by how he constructed the
family tree of Jesus that makes up his first chapter--you know, the part we always skip
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when reading the Bible for devotions!
For centuries now Matthew has, for all intents
and purposes, started in Matthew 2:1! But it’s a mistake to begin Matthew with chapter
2. We need chapter 1. Matthew knew that this genealogy was not only necessary for
his Jewish readers to establish Jesus’ credentials as a true son of David, it was also
necessary as a way to set up a gospel that will seek to reach beyond just Israel to include
all peoples.
A typical Jewish genealogy did not include the names of any women. If a family
tree did include any female names, they would be limited to the great matriarchs of Israel:
Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, and Leah.
But Matthew takes pains to mention—or directly
refer to—four very different women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.
Strikingly,
each of these women came from outside Israel and three of the four have something more
than vaguely scandalous associated with them. Tamar played the harlot with her fatherin-law Judah. Rahab was the Jerichoite who, when we first meet her, is the head of a
brothel in the doomed city of Jericho. Bathsheba is the wife of Uriah the Hittite who
became Solomon’s mother only after the adulterous liaison forced on her by King David
(who then as much as had Uriah killed to cover up his egregious sins). Since Matthew
was under no obligation to mention any women in this genealogy, it is remarkable that he
brought out these foreign women who, in addition to their non-Israelite background, also
conjure up in the reader’s mind what could be regarded as “skeletons” in Jesus’ family
closet.
What was Matthew’s point?
Perhaps to begin his gospel with a series of
reminders that the story of God’s people had always been wider than Israel alone, that it
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had often been moved forward in history by the good treatment of aliens in Israel’s midst
(Ruth being the premiere example), and that even the Christ of God could not emerge
into history without a familial past in need of forgiveness and redemption.
By
constructing his genealogy of Jesus the way he did, Matthew is sounding an inclusive
note to his gospel at the very outset. For those with theological eyes to see, Matthew’s
opening chapter is not a stale and dull family tree but something that bristles with hints
that this gospel is going to contain some surprises in the direction of inclusivity and a
wide-reaching grace.
But you cannot miss that point even if you do skip over Matthew 1 so as to start
the gospel in chapter 2. Because even there Matthew hits the reader over the top of the
head by bringing stargazers from the east to the cradle of the Christ. To Jewish readers in
Matthew’s day, the presence of the Magi would not have represented an infusion of
exotic color and spice into the Christmas story the way many in the church today regard
the Magi.
The Magi represented a foreign presence and a sinful presence. And yet Matthew
makes a point of bringing them to the cradle of baby Jesus as yet another early signal in
this gospel that whatever else Immanuel, “God with us,” would mean, it would have
meaning for all the people of the earth and not just those already on the inside of certain
religious communities.
No sooner do the Magi exit the stage and the series of calamitous events their visit
to Herod set off force Mary and Joseph to take their child and flee to Egypt. As many in
church history have noted, this makes the Holy Family itself an emblem of all refugee
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peoples ever since. The flight into Egypt mirrors Abram’s flight there in Genesis 12 as
well as Israel’s own history of being forced to flee to, and then remain for a time in, that
foreign land. Presumably, Mary, Joseph, and their infant child survived their time in
Egypt because they themselves found some kind of a welcome from the Egyptians, who
must have also provided some kind of lodging and sustenance that preserved the life of
no less than God’s own Son. Again, early in his gospel Matthew is hitting on themes and
sounding various theological notes calculated to get our attention and to force us to widen
our vision of who Jesus is, where he came from, and what he came to this world to do.
And then there is the Gospel of Luke, which so memorably drives home the idea
that salvation seeks out the least likely people and most especially the strangers in our
midst. Luke is at his best in reconstructing for us some of Jesus’ parables, two of which
deserve brief mention today. The first is the parable “The Rich Man and Lazarus” (Luke
16:19-31).
We all know the story but what we may not always notice is that this is the
only parable in the entire Bible that has a character with a name.
The poor, Luke is
saying, the people who go unnoticed by us in the rush of daily life, they are real people,
they have names, and God knows those names.
But Luke’s greatest contribution to a “theology of the stranger” comes in his
reporting of Jesus’ landmark “Parable of the Good Samaritan” in Luke 10:25-37.
It was
an expert in the law who kicked off what has become one of the most famous parables of
all time.
Jesus reminded this man of the biblical injunction “to love your neighbor as
yourself,” which prompted this man to inquire “And who is my neighbor?” As our
summary of the Old Testament made clear, the answer to this question is “just about
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anybody you meet.” The reach of God’s love is wide, not narrow; is as all-inclusive as
possible, not exclusivist.
But the very premise of a question like “And who is my
neighbor?” is that there must be relevant restrictions that apply so as to shrink the pool of
potential neighbors whom we’d be obligated to love. To explode that kind of thinking,
Jesus tells a story.
He begins it in Luke 10:30 with as broad a term as he could find. Jesus says that
“A certain man” was traveling to Jericho. In Greek the phrase is anthropos tis, which
could be loosely translated “Some guy.” He didn’t tell us it was some Jewish guy. No,
it’s just some guy who fell into the hands of robbers and so needed assistance to live.
The man in the ditch at the side of the road could be anybody. And he is, which was just
Jesus’ point.
Upon encountering the man, the unlikely hero of the story—the Samaritan—does
not calculate his actions, he just acts. He does not inspect the man to see if his ethnicity,
socio-economic status, or religion is “right” as a precondition to reaching out to him. He
does not launch an investigation to see if his having fallen into the hands of robbers was
somehow the victim’s fault (“Were you traveling at a safe time of the day? Did you
consider bringing along some traveling companions—there’s safety in numbers, you
know?!”). The Good Samaritan does not ask questions, consult a checklist, or launch an
investigation to see if this man at the roadside was worthy of help. He simply sees needs
and meets them.
But before Jesus finishes this parable, he pulls the rug out from underneath his
initial conversation partner and all of us who read the story.
This parable is Jesus’
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extended answer to the law expert’s question, “And who is my neighbor?”
When
reading the parable, we think the bottom line is that the man in the ditch is the neighbor.
“Who is your neighbor?” Jesus could have said to the law expert. “Well, your neighbor
is that anonymous guy in the ditch. That’s the neighbor whom you are to love as
yourself.”
But that’s not quite what Jesus says. Instead in Luke 10:36 he asks who was the
neighbor to the man in the ditch. This turns the law expert’s question back on him.
Based on the Law of God in the Old Testament in places like Leviticus and
Deuteronomy, our task is not to figure out who “out there” in the wider world is our
neighbor. Instead, it’s our job to recognize that wherever we are, we are the neighbor, we
are the alien in the presence of other people and we act lovingly.
We are supposed to
represent no less than God and if we look at the world that way, we won’t wonder about
how to treat others because we’ll know: we treat others with love because that’s how God
already treated us. Our job is just to be a chip off the divine block.
Well, this is a whirlwind tour of the Bible that reveals what I believe is a
constitutive theme of Scripture.
I’ve left out far more than I have included, but even
with just this much material before us, let me return to the wondering question I posed at
the outset today: Why did God perform salvation the way he did? And what does God’s
having accomplished it just this way tell us about our identity as God’s people even yet
today? Let me propose several things for your consideration as I conclude this talk.
First, I believe we are supposed to regard every person we meet—no matter how
different from us, no matter how strange, no matter how foreign—as a potential object of
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God’s love and as deserving of our love.
In her book Dakota, Kathleen Norris speaks
often of monasteries and the fabled hospitality of monks. St. Benedict himself in the
sixth century admonished all monks to receive all guests as Christ. According to a story
that Norris says originated in a Russian Orthodox monastery, an older monk says to a
younger monk, “I have finally learned to accept people as they are. Whatever they are in
the world, a prostitute, a prime minister, it all the same to me.
But sometimes I see a
stranger coming up the road and I say, ‘Oh, dear Jesus Christ, is it you again?’”
Hospitality, Norris goes on to note, is the way monks live out the very gospel and
imitate Jesus’ own ways when he was in this world.
I think that from the eviction of
Abram from Haran to the incarnation of Jesus, we are being shown in the Bible to receive
each stranger the way we want to be received by God and by others. I think one reason
God accomplished salvation the way he did is because fundamental to how we must
understand the nature of sin is that it made us strangers to God. Adam and Eve had to
leave the Garden where once they had walked with God. That was not just a punishment
to keep them from living in a really spiffy location but a symbol of the chasm that had
yawned open between God and humanity.
Salvation had to involve the experience of being immigrants, strangers in strange
lands, because coming back together with our great God would require exactly our
overcoming the alienation sin had brought to the world. Salvation emerges from the
experience of being the stranger—culminating in the divine Son of God being treated like
a stranger in this sinful world—because this gets at a fundamental dynamic of our
relationship with God. We treat others well not because we are the known commodity
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and they are the strangers but because we are all strangers.
We treat others well not
because we see them as our neighbor but because we want to be a neighbor to them.
A second consideration: obviously the church today is not the equivalent of the
theocratic nation that was Ancient Israel. And obviously aliens from other nations in this
day and age have to countenance and navigate laws and policies and restrictions that did
not per se exist in Old Testament times. But such laws do exist today in ways that
inevitably bring up other issues that impinge on the relationship between the Christian
and the law, the church and the state.
Nothing I have said today has been designed to
answer every possible question that could come up in this regard. There are no easy
ways to lift out of the Bible passages or themes that automatically point to comprehensive
immigration reform.
But what our survey of Scripture can do is suggest a set of yearnings and desires
within us as believers. Christian people can debate as long and as fiercely as anyone the
various ins and outs of specific immigration policies. But if we are going to bring into
the debate the broad outlines of our faith, then it seems to me we can speak of some
broadly desired outcomes when trying to figure out how to deal with strangers in our
midst today.
What might some of those outcomes be? Well, with all due allowance for having
laws to punish those who truly deserve to be punished for crimes and the like, we should
hope that for the ordinary immigrant, policies can be structured in ways that promote
deference and understanding and that seek to understand why a given person or family
made the choices they did to come to another country such as the USA. We should hope
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for a system that is not excessively punitive and that is not so daunting as to make it
undesireable even to attempt to follow the law. We should hope for a system that can
find the immigration law equivalent of leaving some gleanings at the edges of the fields
such that those caught up in trying to get to this country—or trying to become legal in
this country—have at least a reasonable chance for success by virtue of having some
extra help provided along the way.
It is amazing how far out of their way the Israelites were supposed to go in helping
out the stranger within their gates. Again, in our modern context that fact from Ancient
Israel does not mean we drop all immigration laws and make it “anything goes.”
However, what it may mean is that we aim for structures that are fair and that are even—
here and there at least—downright convenient and user-friendly for those who must
navigate their way through the system.
A third consideration that is in some ways related to my first: when talking about
immigration policy—much less when dealing with concrete instances of having strangers
in our midst—we need to move beyond the ugly shouting, the racially-laden slurs, and
the general categorizing and stereotyping of migrant people that we have seen too much
of in the media and at various rallies and demonstrations.
We need to remember the
lesson of Luke’s parable on the Rich Man and Lazarus. There is a reason Luke did not
write down the parable of the Rich Man and the Poor Man. The poor have names. They
have stories. They have hopes and dreams and aspirations.
One of the most brutal things that happens during times of war is the way the
enemy gets reduced to a caricature. In World War II all Japanese people were reduced to
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the pictures you could see on lots of pro-American war posters: sinister-looking people
with slanty eyes, arched black eyebrows, and outsized buck teeth. We dehumanize those
we wish to kill. And too often this happens in the immigration debate, too.
We may
not be able to prevent others from doing this but we in the church need to do our best to
keep the human face, the human names, the human stories in front of others.
There is no one-size-fits-all description of people who come over the border. We
will find that out if we actually meet and listen to such persons. But even as Luke shows
us how Jesus gave the poor man a name in that parable and even as Matthew was careful
to include the names of the foreign women in Jesus’ family tree, so we need to keep
names and faces and stories in front of others as well. Doing so is one of the ways we
bear a truthful witness to the world. We bear false witness against our neighbors when
we perpetuate—or allow others to perpetuate—images that detract from people’s true
humanity.
When God told the Israelites what to do when faced with the stranger within their
gates, he told them as often as not “For remember who you are and were and then go
from there.”
We in the church today do well to remember who also we are, who our
Savior is, and what that implies for how we treat all whom we meet.
I will close my talk this morning the same way I closed my portion of the
synodical study committee report with these lyric words from Hebrews 11:
“By faith Abraham . . . was enabled to become a father because he considered him
faithful who made the promise. And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came
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descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the
seashore. All these people were still living by faith when they died . . . and they admitted
they were aliens and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are
looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left,
they would have had opportunity to return. Instead they were longing for a better
country—a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he
has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:11-16).