Hilton Head Island, SC – February 17, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Ruth 1:1-5, 4:18-20; Deuteronomy 10:12-19
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” – Deuteronomy 10:18-19 (RSV)
This sermon shall be largely devoted to a summary of how the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, understood the subject of what the Bible calls “strangers” or “sojourners.” In our terminology, we call such people either “immigrants” or “refugees.” But as we consider how God directed the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews to treat immigrants or refugees, we need also to ask ourselves, “How does the USA --- or the world --- treat strangers or refugees from Central America, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere?”
In the Hebrew language, the Hebrews called themselves Habiru. This word essentially means “Wanderers” or “Nomads.” The Arabic word Bedouin means the same thing. Up until the establishment of the Israelite monarchy in 1000 BCE under King Saul and King David, the Hebrews were a pastoral people who led their flocks of sheep and goats to wherever they could find good pasturage for them. Therefore they were strangers and sojourners to everyone else. In the ancient Middle East, there were no official borders, and thus no official nation-states as we understand borders and countries in the contemporary world.
From the time of Abraham in the late nineteenth century BCE, almost two thousand years before the time of Jesus, until the time of Joshua six hundred years later, the Israelites had no land they could call their own. This reality is plaintively given expression in one of the songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In the song Close Every Door to Me, Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph sings, “For we know we shall find/ Our own peace of mind/ For we have been promised/ A land of our own.” But of course had Joseph actually sung that song, it would have been five hundred years before they conquered the land of Israel as their homeland.
Three or four thousand years ago, when agriculture was not yet widely practiced at the eastern end of the Mediterranean region, various peoples and ethnic groups wandered from place to place, seeking green grass for their flocks. The seasons as well as the day-to-day weather also caused them to move about. This pattern went on for centuries. Many peoples were regularly moving through what we now know as Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt. Thus they came into contact with other ethnic groups speaking other languages and living under other cultures.
After Moses led the Israelites out of their slavery in Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE, the book of Exodus says he took them on a long, slow journey through the Sinai Desert and into what we now call the Kingdom of Jordan on the east side of the Jordan River. Along the way Moses was given the Torah, the Ten Commandments and the rest of the entire Mosaic law that is written in the Books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
In the Bible, and especially in the Torah, there are literally hundreds of references to strangers, sojourners, aliens, and foreigners. Some of the usages of those words are pejorative and negative. They speak of the neighbors of the Israelites or Jews in a demeaning or derogatory manner. But in most of the passages which refer to strangers or wanderers, God Himself commands the Israelites to have special regard for them, because – quote - “you were strangers and sojourners in Egypt.” Five verses in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy use those exact words. Listen to our text from Deuteronomy. Moses says of God, “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:1819). Leviticus 19:34 contains the same admirable sentiment in slightly different words: “The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”
Because God was God, and because the Jews perceived themselves spiritually to be the sons and daughters of God, they were to have special regard for the strangers, the non-Jews, who lived among them. They were to love them as they loved one another, if only because they themselves had once been strangers and sojourners in Egypt as slaves. It is extremely difficult to leave or to be driven from your homeland into the homeland of someone else, and they knew it.
Perspective greatly affects how we see things. If we see ourselves as deserving settlers in our own land, we may feel differently about people who are poor immigrant newcomers. We may see ourselves as being superior to the newcomers. In that regard, there may some native-born people on this island whose forebears lived here for six or eight generations who do not think as highly of us newcomers as we perceive ourselves. How we see things may be determined by the angle from which we look at them, rather than by what they truly are.
The Book of Ruth is one of the shortest books in the Old Testament. It is an odd little book oddly placed in the History Section of the Old Testament. It is inserted between Judges, which tells the end of the story of the period when there was no king, and the establishment of the monarchy, and that is told about in the next book, I Samuel. The oddest thing about Ruth is that Ruth was not a Jew; she was a Moabite, or, on a contemporary map, a Jordanian.
The story begins by telling that there was famine around Bethlehem, the town of Jesus’ birth. A family in Bethlehem heard there was still green grass on the other side of the Dead Sea. Therefore they went over to Moab, which that land was then called. They were a man named Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two grown sons, Mahlon and Chilion.
After they had been in Moab for a few years, Elimelech died. The two sons married Moabite women. The first was named Orpah, and the second one was Ruth. (Oprah Winfrey is named after Orpah, by the way, but apparently either her mother or the attending nurse at her birth misspelled it. But that tidbit of trivia won’t be on the final exam.)
Not so long after Mahlon and Chilion married Orpah and Ruth, both brothers, like their father, also up and died. This provoked an inevitable crisis for the three surviving women - Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth. In the traditional Middle East, three thousand years ago, as perhaps now, women without the protection of a male relative were in great jeopardy. Knowing this, Naomi decided to return to Bethlehem, hoping the famine was over and that her kinsmen would take her in again. The two daughters-in-law said they would go with her, but Naomi insisted they should stay with their kinfolk. Orpah reluctantly did this, but Ruth refused to leave Naomi. She said those famous lines which used to be sung fairly frequently at weddings forty or fifty years ago: “Entreat me not to leave thee, or to refrain from following after thee: for whither thou goest” [which, in Latin, is Quo Vadis, but that won’t be on the test either] “I will go, and whither thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God” (Ruth 1:16).
So Ruth went with Naomi to Bethlehem. There she met a relative of Naomi’s, a man named Boaz. And, as you heard in the second short reading from Ruth, Ruth had a son by Boaz, which pleased both Ruth and Naomi, because now both women had males to solidify their positions in that highly male-dominated culture. The baby’s name was Obed, and Obed became the father of Jesse, and Jesse was the father of David, who became the greatest king of the Israelites.
Jews who heard this story thirty centuries ago, or thirty minutes ago, would be surprised and even shocked by it. But Gentile Christians need to be reminded about why it is so shocking.
Ruth was a stranger in Bethlehem, a sojourner in Israel, a foreigner in Judah. Nevertheless, she, a Gentile outsider, became the grandmother of King David, reckoned by nearly all Jews and Christians to be the greatest of the kings. David was an octoroon; he was one-eighth Gentile.
Everybody everyplace has ancestors who were strangers and sojourners someplace. Nobody is free of forebears all of whom always lived in one place for a hundred generations. Every American descended from immigrants who came to America from someplace else. And most of them came here because they were desperate to get away from wherever it was they came from. Even people with names like Abraham Runninghorse or Sarah Whitefeather had ancestors who emigrated across the land bridge from Siberia thirteen thousand years ago. All of these people heard the alluring song of that giant lady standing in the New York harbor who says, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/ Send them, the tempest-tossed to me/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Some immigrants to America are not tired, or poor, nor are they part of the huddled masses. In fact, people who have assets or five or ten million dollars, or a hundred million or a billion, are more likely to get to the front of the waiting line than most of the others. It has always been that way. We have always contributed to the brain drain from other lands. That is why there are so many strange-sounding names in the news these days who are famous scientists or doctors or lawyers or CEOs or high-ranking military officers. They have odd monikers like Elon Musk or Preet Bharara or General John Shalikashvili. (How could someone with the Georgian name of Shalikashvili [not the American state, but the Caucasus country] and the English given name John, born in Warsaw, Poland, who married a woman named, of all names, Gunhild Bartsch, rise to become the first foreign-born Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? It probably helped that his father was a prince of the Georgian royal family, and that he had outstanding genes.
However, most immigrants are not like that. Many are simply hoping for a better life. Others are like the people pushing up out of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, places where life is nasty, brutish, and short. They are seeking safety, because the life they have known is so grim and dangerous and dicey. They are like the million Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Kurds, and others who streamed into Germany a couple of years ago, likely shortening and ending the Chancellorship of the magnificent if dowdy and understated Angela Merkel. She bravely followed what she learned from her Lutheran pastor father in East Germany fifty years ago about what the Bible said God wants us to do about strangers and sojourners.
Nobody leaves home because home is better than the place to which they are headed. Most of them go elsewhere because “here” is horrible, and surely somewhere else must be better. The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave sounds like the best to many immigrants.
Still, it is much easier for an immigrant to become a citizen of the USA if he or she has an impressive academic or business resume’. As of last week, the President ordered the Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to hasten the process by which high-ranking foreign-born business executives can take the oath of citizenship. The President looks more kindly on that type of immigrant than the ones Emma Lazarus’s poem welcomed at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island more than a hundred years ago.
Sarah Saldanya is the former Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). She said Congress always urged her to use the money wisely that was allocated to them. But a recent policy-change requires “zero-tolerance” of immigrant infractions. She says, “Every dollar spent by the U.S. government in pursuit of criminal misdemeanor immigration cases is wholly contrary to that mandate.” When people who oppose immigration are put in charge of immigration, it makes immigration very difficult, if not impossible. (TIME, July 2, 2018)
Robert Brack is a U.S. District Court judge in New Mexico. He wrote an essay in Time Magazine several months ago (July 2, 2018). He said, “For the most part, the defendants in my court are not really criminals. Many of them have worked hard. But they are not well-educated, and they certainly don’t know how quickly the rules change. So they make bad decisions. And they suffer consequences I just can’t get my head around./ Last week I had a couple of fathers from Guatemala who had come with their sons who were 7 and 12 years old… whom they hadn’t heard from in a couple of months. They didn’t know where their children were. We can’t keep enough Kleenex in the courtroom./ Those who attack the immigrant population as being lawbreakers don’t recognize that for years we left these laws unprosecuted, in part because of our insatiable demand for cheap labor. For a long time we have benefitted from their presence. I can’t help but wonder, as we prosecute these people: Do we really have the moral and legal high ground?”
The Pew Research Center states that 51% of Americans think we have a responsibility to admit refugees. These are not simply willing and able workers; they are refugees! We should be appalled that figure is as low as 51%. The group least likely to want refugees allowed into our country, says the Pew Center, are white evangelical Christians, at 25%. It is astonishing that the people most likely to read the Bible are the least likely to do what the Bible says about refugees, strangers, and sojourners. Many people who never read the Bible nor believe what it says are more likely to want to do what the Bible says. This is an everlasting enigma.
Refugees seeking asylum have long been protected under international humanitarian laws. Many of them are being prevented from being interviewed as to whether they qualify as refugees. Only one American is primarily responsible for that hard-hearted partisan policy. It is he who reflects the official American position on refugees and immigration to the world.
If we are at all familiar with the God who is revealed by means of the Bible, we should know that He has a special concern for the disadvantaged, disabled, disestablished, disinherited, and socially or culturally dismissed. In the Hebrew scriptures, perhaps the greatest of all God’s concerns is for what are called strangers and sojourners, and what we call refugees and immigrants. Nearly every nation everywhere through all of history has resisted all immigrants except the ones who are widely perceived to be the most advantageous to the homeland.
Is it possible that the United States of America, a nation ultimately composed 100% of immigrants, might treat the refugees and immigrants who are begging to come here with more biblical compassion and respect than we are currently showing them?