When “Stranger” and “Neighbor” Become Synonyms

Refugees, Immigration, and Faith Informing Our Politics

“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Deuteronomy 10:17–19

Now we’re locking down the borders and we’re filling up the jails
And we say they don’t belong
How conveniently do we forget
That we’ve all come to sing the same sweet song

Will the dream, survive the strain
Will huddled masses have a chance to learn it’s sweet refrain
Or will we fall, into our fears
And turn our backs against the Lady of the Harbor.

And she welcomes them with open arms
she says let my children in
Shine on, Shine on
Oh you Lady of the Harbor -from “Lady of the Harbor” by Joe Jencks

Do you know what brought your ancestors to this country? I’m guessing that not many of us are of Native American heritage, so if we didn’t come to America ourselves, then our forefathers and foremothers did. They either chose to come to this country or were forced to do so. Do you know any of the stories?

From what we can tell, most of my ancestors were Scotch-Irish Protestants, several actually being ministers. While we don’t know that they came to America seeking the freedom to worship as they pleased, I imagine that religious liberty at least played a role in their desire to make the trip across an ocean to an unknown land.

We also know that one of my great-great grandfathers immigrated from Italy. According to the family story, he was a spaghetti farmer, which tells you something about my family and the kinds of stories that they tell. My Dad, whose gotten quite interested in researching our genealogy in his retirement, recently read that there was some sort of war or conflict happening in Northern Italy during the time that my great-great grandfather and his brother left behind the spaghetti farm to come to South Carolina, where they started growing asparagus.

Whether they came to America because they wanted to or because they had to, many of us have ancestors who experienced coming to a new place as strangers and trying to create a sense of “place” for themselves in an unfamiliar land.

Immigration and the welcome of refugees are two hot button issues right now. In between the travel ban for some predominantly Muslim countries, the future of DACA being up in the air, increased ICE raids, and the quest to find funding for the wall, there’s no shortage of opinions about who should be allowed to come or stay in our country and who should be denied entry or be forced to leave. For some, these are clear cut issues, and for others, they are more grey. There must be ways to balance national security, the rule of law, and fairness with protecting children, keeping families together, and taking responsibility for ways in which our country has played a role in creating some of the circumstances causing refugees to flee war-torn areas or in draining natural resources and the economies of certain countries.

I certainly don’t have the answers, but as I read all sorts of essays about immigration in preparation for this message, a couple of odd observations struck me. On the one hand, when it comes to immigration, people who don’t claim to have any faith whatsoever, suddenly love to quote scripture about welcoming the stranger in order to support their stance. On the other hand, some Christian leaders who loudly proclaim their love for the Bible and deem it to be inerrant and infallible are surprisingly quick to dismiss those exact same verses.

These ironies led me to spend some time thinking about the fact that people of faith don’t always reflect theologically about issues that we consider to be political in nature. Many churches have so narrowly focused theological thinking toward personal salvation and the afterlife, that it’s easy to forget that salvation is also about communal wholeness and impacts life here and now. While we as Baptists strongly advocate for the separation of church and state, a person’s faith certainly should shape their politics- even though that does not mean that all Christians will ever agree on any political issue.

When we reflect on issues theologically, it’s important to remember that we need to take into consideration the Bible as a whole as well as our understanding of the nature of God. The Bible is not going to explicitly address all of the issues we face today because, in many ways, our world is radically different from the one in which the ancient biblical writers lived. We also can’t cherry pick scripture, which means taking a verse from here and a verse from there and pull them out of context in order to prove our point. If we take that approach, we can make the Bible say just about anything we want it to say. We need to look for over arching themes in scripture and also hold them in tandem with who we trust God to be.

While it’s unfair to expect the Bible give us policy guidelines, our ancient faith book can inform our ideas about political issues, including issues like immigration, refugees, welcome, and safety. As I sought to reflect theologically about those political issues these past couple of weeks, I was struck by the realization that the Bible is filled with story after story after story of God’s people leaving what had been “home” and trusting God to help them find a new place. The Bible is filled with stories of refugees and immigrants.

Adam and Eve don’t spend much time at all in Eden before their own sinful actions cause them to be expelled from the Garden. Only three chapters into the Bible, God’s first two people are searching the unknown for a place to call “home”.

It only takes a few more chapters for humanity to become so corrupt that God sends a natural disaster, a great flood, that wipes out all of humanity except for Noah and his family- along with a couple of every species of animal, who take refuge on a great ark that God told Noah to build. They remain in this temporary housing filled with rats, all sorts of predators, and other lovely animal housemates until the rains stop and the waters finally recede. Then the family steps onto dry land in an unknown place and begins the process of starting over. Alone.

Not long after that, God’s people once again get a little too big for their britches. This time they attempt to build a tower that will reach all the way to God. To confuse them, God gives the people different languages to speak. No longer able to communicate with one another, the people scatter eventually settling in different regions so that they can create their own place.

In the very next chapter of the Bible, Abraham’s saga begins. God tells him and his wife Sarah to leave behind the land where they had grown-up and to trust God to lead them to a new place. They spend the rest of their lives searching for this place. Then their grandson Jacob pushes his brother Esau too far putting Jacob’s life in danger. He flees seeking asylum with his uncle until he acquires enough that he can set out and look for a place of his own.

Jacob’s sons inherit the sibling disfunction in their family heritage. Joseph, the youngest, is his father’s favorite. The others become jealous, so they band together and sell their littlest brother into slavery. Joseph is trafficked into Egypt where he manages to work and charm his way from prisoner to trusted advisor to the Pharaoh. Joseph talks the Pharaoh into storing food for a famine that the young dreamer envisions is coming. When it does, Joseph’s family travels to Egypt knowing that they will starve if they stay put. When they arrive in Egypt, who do they have to ask permission to stay in the country? None other than the brother they scorned, and he welcomes them.

After several generations, there are so many Hebrew people living in Egypt that the Pharaoh becomes threatened that they could overtake his empire. In order to suppress the Hebrews, he enslaves them. God’s people are forced to live as strangers in a land that is not their own. Eventually God calls Moses to deliver the Hebrew people from slavery. But then they wander through the desert as refugees searching for the place where God wants them to settle.

Later in the Bible, we find the story of Ruth, a foreigner who sneaks into Israel and works as a field laborer as she tries to make a place a refuge for herself. Ruth is a foremother of both King David and Jesus.

From the prophets we learn about many Hebrew people who are forced out of Israel, their home, during the Babylonian invasion. While some stay and live as prisoners in their homeland, others, like Daniel, are driven out of Israel and into exile. Like the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, they live as strangers in a land that is not their own.

And then we get to the New Testament, and there’s Jesus. According to Matthew’s gospel, He himself becomes a refugee, because King Herod wants him killed for political reasons.

Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, variations of the Hebrew word ger, which means “stranger, alien, or foreigner”, occurs 92 times. 50 of those occur in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. The Torah, which means “Law” is the section of the Hebrew Bible in which God gives instructions about how God desires for His children to relate to the Divine and how we should treat one another. The command to care for the orphans, widows, and strangers is the second most common phrase in the Bible, so it must be important. And perhaps God desires for us care for the strangers to the same extent we do widows and orphans.

While welcoming strangers is one of the most prominent laws in the Old Testament, something interesting happens in the New Testament. In Luke, Jesus tells a story about a Samaritan who helps a Jewish man who lies wounded on the side of the road. Despite the fact that many Jewish people and many Samaritans saw each other as enemies, this Samaritan has compassion on the injured man. He stops, bandages his wounds, puts him on his donkey and carries the man to a place where he can receive long-term care. Not only does the Samaritan help the Jewish man in the moment, but he later returns to check on him and to pay for any medical expenses he acquired. Jesus tells this story in response the question, “Who is my neighbor?” In the New Testament, there is no distinction between strangers and neighbors.

Then in Matthew 25, right before the resurrected Jesus ascends into heaven, he shares his encore sermon with his disciples. In the last words Jesus speaks to his followers, He describes the final judgment. Jesus says, “I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” When asked when exactly people did these things for Jesus, he responds, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did also for Me.” In the Gospels, the words “stranger” and “neighbor” become synonyms and whenever we actively care for a stranger/neighbor, we actively care for Jesus.

When we think about the politics of refugee resettlement and immigration, our starting point as Christians is that these strangers are neighbors who bear the image of God. Like the greatest heroes in our Bible, like our ancestors, like each of us- they are people searching for a place.

22.5 million people worldwide are refugees, over half of them being children. Six out of every 10 Syrians are now refugees. Realistically, we can’t welcome 22.5 million people in our country, but if we see these people as neighbors, we won’t let fear keep us from welcoming any of them. We’ll welcome who we can and find ways to not neglect those we can’t accept.

As we have begun partnering with Historic Christ Church’s Refugee Resettlement Program, I have learned so much about what it’s like to be a refugee. I received an email last week saying that a new refugee family had arrived in our city. Since several of their family members in Afghanistan had recently been murdered for working for our government, the family had to leave quickly- with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They had to come before all of their paperwork could be finalized, which means they will be in the US for 45 days before they qualify for SNAP, Medicaid, or temporary housing assistance and before either adult can even begin applying for jobs. 45 days. Christ Church sent out a list of the family’s immediate needs, and we used some of the church mission funds that you give through your offerings to purchase the children’s needed school supplies and enough groceries to help the family set up an empty kitchen.

Allowing strangers to become neighbors is also a good place to start trying to grasp the experiences of immigrants. When we distribute groceries for Alive (Alexandrians Involved Ecumenically), we don’t ask anyone why or how they came to America. We simply want our neighbors to have enough food to eat. It should concern us that the number of families we serve through Alive has dropped since the massive ICE raids that happened in Northern Virginia last winter. Certainly the number of immigrants in our community hasn’t dropped that drastically, so that must mean that people are simply more afraid to seek assistance. If that’s true, neighbors who live right in our community are going hungry unnecessarily. The food has been donated. If people don’t feel safe to come take it, the food sits in warehouse until the next month.

We know we can’t take in everyone, but scripture tells us that everyone needs a place and is our neighbor. If we can at least start there, then we won’t fall into our fears and send people away unnecessarily. We’ll greet everyone we encounter here with welcome and not perpetuate the crude, discriminatory behavior that has increased among us. When we see strangers as neighbors, the light of welcome shines more brightly than any fear.

Shine on. Shine on.