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| Fr. Robert Lentz, Christ of Maryknoll |
Ninth Sunday after
Pentecost
Did you know that close to seventy Bible verses summon us to care for the refugee, the alien, the sojourner, and
the stranger? It’s true. Most of the references are found in the Old
Testament, but the New certainly has its share. A classic example is found in Deuteronomy
10.
Here in our text, we learn that a
replicate of the original stone tablets of the Law (the Ten Commandments or
Decalogue) was placed in the ark of the covenant. You’ll recall that Moses smashed the original
tablets in a fit of rage (Exodus 32:19). With a new version of the original
Decalogue, representing the covenant between Yahweh and the people Israel, it
was a time for Israel to reaffirm its relationship with Yahweh, and recommit to
the obligations that come with the relationship.
“So now, O Israel, what does Yahweh
require of you?” In other words, what
have they agreed to in the covenant? Fear
Yahweh; that is, stand in awe before God.
Walk in the ways of God. Love
God. Serve God with all your heart and
soul—that is, serve from the core, the depth of your being, with all your
passion—and keep the commandments. And why
does God require this? It’s there in the text: for your own well-being. The covenant, the commandments were not given to
make their lives more difficult, they were all given in love, for their own
well-being!
There’s one more thing to do. The God who calls us into covenantal
relationship is a God “who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, loves
the stranger, providing for them food and clothing. You shall also love the
stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18-19).
Israel has a responsibility to care
for the weakest, most vulnerable members of society, such as the orphan and the
widow, because they know what it’s like to be absent parental love and support,
they know what it’s like to be alone in the world. And Israel has a responsibility to the
stranger, the sojourner, because they know what it’s like to be strangers in a
strange land, in Egypt. They know the
hardships of being landless, without country, far from home, in an alien
country, surrounded by an alien religion, unwanted, scared, used as slaves, used
for cheap labor, used. They know what
that feels like. Therefore, they shall
have compassion toward the stranger, the resident alien.
This is the biblical, theological mandate
to God’s people, to Israel, and to the Church.
Despite the laws of any given nation, whatever the country might be,
God’s people (you and me) have an obligation to care for the refugee, the
stranger, the alien. We have a sacred obligation to execute justice—meaning,
fairness, wholeness, healing—on their behalf.
We have to protect them, provide for them, provide sanctuary, safety,
help. We risk caring for them for no
other reason than that they are vulnerable and need our help.
All of this sounds oddly relevant
today, doesn’t it? As we know, immigration and refugee policies are politically
and emotionally charged issues in the United States these days. You know the story: we have proposed travel
bans, the construction of a wall on the Mexico border (which will cost around
$12 billion dollars, although estimates are as high as $21 billion
dollars). This past week a new
immigration bill was introduced that wants to restrict legal immigration to
English-speaking, skilled workers and to cut the number of legal immigrations
by fifty-percent, to so-called “historic levels.” According to the Migration Policy Institute,
there were “1.3 million immigrants in
1907, about a quarter of a million more than in 2015. Immigration relative to the US population
peaked in 1890, when immigrants made up nearly 15% of the population.” Immigration numbers have ebbed and flowed,
especially during times of national crisis.
Whether we like it or not, the words of Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) remain
part of our narrative:
Give
me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”[1]
We must be very wary of those who want to separate this vision from what we
mean by liberty. The progressive-evangelical pastor/writer, Rob Bell said
recently, “When a
nation of immigrants starts putting up travel bans, you have officially lost
the plot.”
Yes, all that I just shared about
immigration and refugees is politically charged—and it’s complicated. But, I want to return to the plot. Not the nation’s plot, but the plot of the
church, our story, our mandate, our obligation, the work that we’re called to
do within the body politic. If the
church’s work to care for the immigrant and the refugee is politically charged,
don’t blame the church for being “political.”
If our mandate puts us at odds with society around us, then so be
it. We don’t really have a choice, if we
say we’re in covenantal relationship with God, then we have an obligation to
act. We are called to act justly.
Old
Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “Yahweh’s justice does indeed
have a preferential inclination for the poor and the marginated. This preferential option that is mandated to
Israel is rooted in Yahweh’s own practice and inclination, so that in the
practice of justice Israel is indeed to imitate Yahweh.”[2]
Israel has an obligation to the poor and those pushed to the margins. God assumes that the wealth and social resources
of Israel do not belong to them in a privatistic or acquisitive way; the “common
resources…are to be managed and deployed for the enhancement of the community
by the enhancement of its weakest and most disadvantaged members.”[3]
“The
command to justice,” Brueggemann insists, “is understood as marking the polity
of the community of Israel. That is,
justice is not charity, nor is it romantic do-goodism. It is rather a mandate to order public
policy, public practice, and public institutions for the common good and in
resistance to the kind of greedy initiative that damages the community.”[4]
Yes,
God commands us to do justice for the most vulnerable, toward the widow, the
orphan, and the stranger. Actually, we
are called to “love the stranger.” Why the stranger? Yes, Israel was once a stranger in
Egypt (Deut. 10:19). But there’s another
reason. Did you catch it? “God loves the
stranger!” That’s a remarkable
declaration. It’s a window into the
heart or being of God. God loves the
stranger! This means that God’s people
love the stranger too!
How
do we begin to fathom this aspect of God?
How can we love the stranger when we’re taught to be afraid of strangers
and the strange? How can we love the
stranger when we never put ourselves out there to encounter the stranger? The strange, the different, the other often
scares us (and sometimes for good reason).
Still, we prefer to stay with the familiar, the known, the safe. It’s tough to know how to love the stranger
if you’ve never known what it’s like to be viewed as a stranger or
strange. That’s tough to do if you spend
most or all of your time as part of the dominant culture.
Is there a time when you were considered strange, odd, different other? (O, perhaps you’re still considered strange, odd, or different.) A time when you were in the minority, when you felt that everyone was looking at you suspiciously because you looked different, dressed different, spoke different, smelled different? How did you feel? A time when you felt vulnerable and unsure of yourself because you were in unfamiliar territory, a neighborhood, a country with different customs and languages and religion, where you felt displaced? A time when you were considered strange because you thought or believed differently, that you loved differently from the dominant culture?
Is there a time when you were considered strange, odd, different other? (O, perhaps you’re still considered strange, odd, or different.) A time when you were in the minority, when you felt that everyone was looking at you suspiciously because you looked different, dressed different, spoke different, smelled different? How did you feel? A time when you felt vulnerable and unsure of yourself because you were in unfamiliar territory, a neighborhood, a country with different customs and languages and religion, where you felt displaced? A time when you were considered strange because you thought or believed differently, that you loved differently from the dominant culture?
Instead
of avoiding or being wary of the stranger or strange, we discover, from a
biblical perspective, that God loves the stranger and God loves the
strange. If you think about it, an
encounter with God is always “strange” for us; Abraham and Sarah, Moses had no
idea what to make of Yahweh. The first
encounter is always strange. In fact, the
strangeness of God is part of God’s divine holiness, the divine is always other.
God encounters us as strange and remains, in many respects a stranger to
us. God can never be “absorbed into our categories of experience,” we can’t
manage God’s strangeness or even remove it.
In fact, our encounter with the strangeness of God, that is, our
relative ease in the presence of God’s strangeness, being comfortable with the
strangeness of God, “prepares people for the new and unexpected.”[5]
I’m
grateful for the work of German theologian Theo Sundermeier, who has explored
this theme of strangeness. The strange
God comes to us in Jesus Christ, yet Christ is always a stranger to us. Christ is the “strange guest,” the one who
came to his own, as the Gospel of John says, but was neither recognized nor
accepted (John 1:10-11). According to
Luke, “Jesus is the strange guest in the house of the tax collector” (Luke
19:1-10). “Christ is the stranger who welcomes all strangers as his
friends. The gospel is essentially
concerned with hospitality, with a company of strangers who are the friends of
God and thus of each other.” The German
word for hospitality, Gastfreundschaft,
literally means, “friends with guests.” “The
gospel declares to people who are estranged from God and from their fellow human
beings…that they have a right to live, and grants them a space to live.” The estranged of God become friends, because
God loves strangers. And then Jesus, in
his life and teaching, intensifies the command to love the stranger, because
according to Matthew 25, Jesus identifies himself with the strangers of the
world. He places himself in the strange
and the stranger, so that the “stranger is indeed the Christus praesens”—the presence of Christ.[6] And he invites us to love him through loving
the stranger. We love Jesus by loving the stranger. “Come, blessed of my
Father…I was a stranger and you welcomed me" (Mt. 25:33, 35).
I
was reminded this week of a contemporary icon, known as Christ of
Maryknoll. It was painted by Br. Robert
Lentz, a Franciscan. You see a
dark-skinned young man with piercing eyes, wearing an olive-drab t-shirt. There’s barbed wire in front of him and he’s
trying to lift it, as if to get through.
It could be any man, but then you notice his hands: they both have
wounds, they're the wounds of the Christ. Br.
Lentz worked for many years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and cared the people
seeking refuge. He was inspired by
Matthew 25, “As you did it to one of the least of my
brothers, you did to me" (Mt. 25:40).
Lentz explains, “Our earth today is crisscrossed with our walls and fences. Our intention is to keep out undesirable people. If we took the time to gaze into the eyes of these people and recognize their humanity, we might be as surprised…to find in them Christ.” Like most icons, this one is multi-dimensional, unsettling, even a little strange. Jesus has pleading, piercing eyes. You see the barbed wire in front of Jesus, but you can’t tell whether he’s trying to come in, but the barbed wire is keeping him out, or whether he’s fenced in and wants to be set free. Have we put up the fence and imprisoned Christ? Or have we imprisoned ourselves? Lentz says, “Ironically, our fences imprison us. In the eyes of every person we try to exclude, Christ asks us ‘Why?’ Will we avert our eyes in discomfort so that we escape his gaze? Perhaps, even worse, will we find some way to scratch out his eyes? When even our religion becomes a fence we use to protect ourselves from people who are different from us, when we stop seeing in one another God’s image and likeness, that is precisely what we do.”[7]
Lentz explains, “Our earth today is crisscrossed with our walls and fences. Our intention is to keep out undesirable people. If we took the time to gaze into the eyes of these people and recognize their humanity, we might be as surprised…to find in them Christ.” Like most icons, this one is multi-dimensional, unsettling, even a little strange. Jesus has pleading, piercing eyes. You see the barbed wire in front of Jesus, but you can’t tell whether he’s trying to come in, but the barbed wire is keeping him out, or whether he’s fenced in and wants to be set free. Have we put up the fence and imprisoned Christ? Or have we imprisoned ourselves? Lentz says, “Ironically, our fences imprison us. In the eyes of every person we try to exclude, Christ asks us ‘Why?’ Will we avert our eyes in discomfort so that we escape his gaze? Perhaps, even worse, will we find some way to scratch out his eyes? When even our religion becomes a fence we use to protect ourselves from people who are different from us, when we stop seeing in one another God’s image and likeness, that is precisely what we do.”[7]
We
are the strange strangers that God loves, called to love strangers and the
strange. For the “strange God meets us
in the strange neighbor.”[8]
This is a strong, sobering, demanding message
for us today. But, as we know, this is
what compassion looks like. Despite the political storms swirling all around us,
as Christians, we know what we must do.
We Choose Welcome.
At Catonsville Presbyterian Church, we are reaching out to the stranger, the
refugee in our midst. We are serving
Christ in our neighbor, it doesn’t matter if our neighbor is Muslim, because we
are all created in the image of the same God.
You’ll have to talk to the members of the Refugee Relief Group to hear
all that this church has done in the last three weeks. Two weeks ago, I shared that we are caring
for a family that lost everything in Aleppo, then lived in a refugee camp in
Turkey for several years, and then came to the Catonsville area, knowing very
little English, with little money, looking for work. The children have been bullied. Their daughter, Aya, was assaulted in
school, leaving her with a serious concussion.*
It’s not safe to play in the streets where they live. They are being picked on for being other,
strange, different. Through generous
donations and help from our Child Care Center, the children are participating
in our summer program. They love it here
at the church. They love playing in our
playground. Last week, a teacher stopped by my study to tell me something that happened that day. One of the teachers asked Aya if she liked
America. She replied, “No.” She said people had been mean to her and her
family. But then she said, referring to
the Center, being at the Church, playing in the playground, “This is my
America.” At the end of that week, Aya's mother baked bread for the teachers of the Center.
I’m grateful that Aya discovered “America” here, on
this corner of God’s Kingdom. America,
yes, but even more, I like to think that she’s experienced again (or maybe for
the first time), something of God’s grace and love for her, expressed through the teachers of the Center. I like to think that after so much trauma and fear, hunger and suffering, she knows, through us, that God loves the stranger, the refugee, the immigrant,
the resident alien in our midst. Those
that love God can do no less.
+ + + +
*Not her real name.
[1] Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus. These lines appear on a
bronze plaque on the base of the Statue of Liberty, placed in 1903. The sonnet
was written in 1883 and donated to an auction, conducted by the Art Loan Fund
Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue
of Liberty, to raise funds to build the pedestal.
[2] Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony,
Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 422.
[3] Brueggemann, 422.
[4] Brueggemann, 423.
[5] Theo Sundermeier, Den Fremden verstehen: Eine praktische Hermeneutik (Understanding the Stranger: A Practical Hermeneutic), (Göttingen, 1996), 207, cited in David W. Congdon, The God Who Saves (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 48-49. I’m grateful to Congdon for introducing me to the writings and theories of Sundermeier.
[5] Theo Sundermeier, Den Fremden verstehen: Eine praktische Hermeneutik (Understanding the Stranger: A Practical Hermeneutic), (Göttingen, 1996), 207, cited in David W. Congdon, The God Who Saves (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2016), 48-49. I’m grateful to Congdon for introducing me to the writings and theories of Sundermeier.
[6] Citations from
Sundermeier (208-209), see Congdon, 49.
[8] Congdon, 187.
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