When God spoke to Abram, Abram was promised a future, a heritage, God’s blessing, and even a purpose: Through Abram, all the world would be blessed. What was Abram’s end of the deal? What was required of him in order to receive this future, this heritage, this blessing, this purpose? He had to leave his home. It’s not just that he had to move out of the building, tribe, or even town in which he grew up: No, he had to leave his homeland completely – to move to another country, a foreign land. Abram had to become an immigrant. It’s not a byproduct of the deal with God, or a minor side effect of a larger plan – it is a major plank in the platform of God’s act of blessing the whole world. Abram had to emigrate. God insisted upon it.
So Abram did it. He and his wife Sarai left their homeland. They made themselves vulnerable, made themselves foreigners. They were immigrants and strangers at the mercy of those among whom they now dwelled – not despite God’s plan, but as a part of it. At different times in their journey, they even became refugees, risking their lives for the sake of their lives.
Like many immigrants and refugees since, they even had their names changed. Sarai became Sarah, and Abram became Abraham. You may know them better that way. We often call them the mother and father of our faith, the founders of many faiths even. And we call the commitment God made to Abram a covenant. In Christianity, we see this covenant as foundational to our faith. It is a watershed moment in our spiritual history, a cornerstone event.
To call yourself a Christian is to find your blessing – your divine destiny – inextricably linked to the life and witness of an immigrant, a refugee, a stranger.
Moses was born in Egypt, like generations of his people who were nevertheless never thought of as Egyptians. They were called Hebrews. Their people had come to Egypt as refugees and were even at one point welcomed. Even though they were never truly considered citizens of Egypt, they were for a while honored and acknowledged as having a place in the country. Times changed, leadership changed, and the Egyptians were taught to fear and loathe them, to behold them as other, to dehumanize them, and eventually to enslave them. Moses, himself a child of that racial and cultural persecution, managed at first to assimilate into the dominant culture and even benefit from it. But this was short-lived, and he fled Egypt as a refugee. He emigrated to a new country, alone and vulnerable. He was known to refer to himself there as a stranger in a strange land. It was there that God first spoke to him.
God’s commitment to Moses was similar to the covenant with Abraham: in that it meant a future and great blessing not only for him but for many. But it would require Moses to emigrate again. And you probably know the story so well I don’t need to share it all, but Moses returned to Egypt and freed all the Hebrew slaves. And while God’s command was for Moses to lead them back to their so-called native land, it cannot be lost on us today that the land they called home had not been theirs for 400 years: Not one person heading to their promised land was actually born there or had even visited it. They followed Moses, the perpetual immigrant and refugee, the stranger in a strange land into freedom. They followed him and received through him God’s law that would define their culture and identity and would come to be foundational to Christianity as well. Running throughout that law is the divine reminder to treat the immigrant and stranger as if they are one of you “for you were strangers yourselves.”
To call yourself a Christian is to recognize the liberating leadership and identity forming authority of an immigrant, a refugee, a stranger.
Ruth married an immigrant. She loved him and she loved his family. His immigrant mother became her own mother. And then the unthinkable happened: Her husband and father-in-law died. And her mother-in-law, Naomi, decided to return to her homeland. But to Ruth, Naomi was not an in-law, she was family. Ruth said to her mother Naomi, “Wherever you go, I go.” And soon Ruth was the immigrant. She moved to a country where many considered her inferior based simply on her native land. She and Naomi were poor immigrants too. They had nothing. They worked menial jobs at terrible hours and had to rely on scraps and the generosity of others to get by. Until one of those others married Ruth the immigrant. She would go on to be known and honored as the great-grandmother of David, the King of Israel, the carrier of God’s covenant. Her name would be intentionally listed in David’s lineage, and then in Jesus’ lineage – not as a source of shame, but as one of pride and joy.
To call yourself a Christian is to see as your own flesh and blood the immigrant, the refugee, the stranger.
Jesus was a refugee and immigrant before he ever got to his hometown of Nazareth. We call him Jesus of Nazareth because that is where his parents were from, and where he was raised. But he was born in Bethlehem due to the arbitrary demands of the empire that occupied his country. Shortly after his birth his life was threatened by the king of his own people, and his parents took him and fled to Egypt. They made themselves vulnerable foreigners, risking their lives to save their lives. We Christians now know Jesus as savior, as Christ, as the very Son of the living God. But before his miracles, before his ministry, before his teachings, before he could even walk or talk, Jesus was an immigrant and a refugee and a stranger. One of the hallmarks of his ministry was to locate God’s blessing among outsiders, immigrants, strangers, those of different cultures. After his resurrection, many of his closest followers made themselves immigrants – making themselves vulnerable in strange lands, even unto death, for the sake of loving the foreigner and stranger the way that Jesus had loved them.
To call yourself a Christian is to say you are saved by and willing to follow and serve even unto death the immigrant, the refugee, the stranger.
The life and witness of the immigrant, the refugee, the stranger – this is the true heritage of the Chrisitan.
If you are reading this, you are likely American, and you are likely Christian. Or at least you are connected to America and to Christianity in some way. So let me ask you: How do you see immigrants being treated by Christians in America today?
If we do not understand, hallow, love, and honor the experiences of the immigrants among us here and now, if we fail to see them as our own flesh and blood, if we fail to recognize their belonging to us and ours to them, we fundamentally misunderstand our God, our covenant, our salvation, our liberation, our history – we completely misunderstand our very selves.
This Fall, members of our church will be taking a pilgrimage to the border between the US and Mexico. It is a pilgrimage, not a mission trip, because we are acknowledging the holiness of those who have taken the path of the immigrant, the refugee, and the stranger. We will – even just for a couple short days – set foot on foreign land, not so that we may pretend we know what it’s like to be them, but so that we may honor their life and witness. And I would say this: So that we may better understand our heritage. ther you plan on coming with us on our pilgrimage to the borderlands or not, come learn with us about the borderlands and the impacts of a wall on the natural environment and its effects on immigration.
