Hilton Head Island, SC – September 1, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Genesis 12:1-9; Hebrews 11:1-3,8-13,39-40
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised. – Hebrews 11:39 (RSV)
The history of the human race is in part a history of the movement of individual people or entire peoples (plural) from one place to another. According to the anthropologists and ethnologists, humanity --- at least our particular species of hominids --- originated in East Africa. For whatever reasons, for millennia on end, small groups of people began to move west and south from East Africa, but mainly to the north. Once they uprooted from where they had been born, they were in a land we might call Nowhereland until they finally got to where they believed it was good to put down roots again.
Once our very distant ancestors got to the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, they began to branch out in different directions. Some moved east into Asia, some northeast into what are now the steppes of Russia and the central Asian nations, and some to the west, into Europe. Of those, some of them settled in eastern, central, northern, or western Europe, or in the British Isles. But until all of them got to where they wanted to settle down, they were all still in Nowhereland.
Perhaps more than any other nation on earth, the United States of America is currently the primary Nation of Immigrants. There are slightly more than two hundred nations on Planet Earth, and over the past two-plus centuries, people from virtually all two hundred of those nations have emigrated to the USA. Most immigrants to America up until a century ago came from Europe. Since then, people have come here from nearly every other nation on earth.
Why do people move from the homelands in which they were born in the first place? There are many reasons: droughts, floods, or the soil becomes unfertile. Political, economic, or social conditions become untenable. Family members move to other countries and they convince relatives to move there as well. Ethnic unrest forces whole peoples to flee their homeland to seek another homeland in a safer, more prosperous place; they think the grass is greener elsewhere.
When I was a young man, almost all news stories from European countries had surnames of people which were familiar in those nations. Stories from Poland had Polish names, from France there were French names, from Germany, German names, from England, English names. Now there are native Poles, French, Germans, and English who have Arabic or Japanese or Chinese or Russian or South Asian or African or Pacific islander surnames. America has been like that for at least five generations, but this is new for Europe --- or Australia --- or South America. For everyone who feels permanently settled anywhere, Nowhere was “back there,” on the route to Somewhere or in an immigration camp somewhere, and Home is “here,” wherever “here” is now.
The New York Times recently quoted a young American named Natalie Yang. One day, in an apparent fit of pique, a student in her school told her she should go back to China. Her parents were born in Taiwan and Japan, and came to the US as children, but Natalie was born here. She has never been to China, Taiwan, or Japan. She said, “We grew up in a predominantly white suburb of Chicago, and though I knew we were Asian, it had never occurred to me until then that we might be seen as different or strange in the only home we had ever known.”
Nowhere is not the place to be when you think you may have found Somewhere. After the end of World War II, and again since the end of several wars in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa, hundreds of millions of people have re-settled in lands far from the lands of their birth.
For nearly a thousand years, the Hebrews, also known as the people of Israel, had no land of their own. They originated in southern Mesopotamia, or modern-day Iraq, when a man named Abram (Avram), whom God later named Abraham, moved with his family to the land of Haran, which was in modern-day southern Turkey, near the Syrian border.
According to Old Testament scholars, the proper noun “Hebrews” means “Wanderers.” The Arabs have an Arabic word which means the same thing: “Bedouin.” The Greeks called such peoples “nomads.” It means “to pasture.” The earliest Hebrews or bedouin or nomads were pastoral people who were not originally farmers; they were herders of sheep and goats. In order to find sufficient pasturage for their animals, they had to move from one place to another as the seasons changed. In other words, all these early peoples constantly lived in Nowhereland. Then they eventually became farmers, and settled down in one place, which became their homeland.
While Abraham and his relatives were still in Haran, God told him that He would give his descendants a land of their own in a place called Canaan, which was south of Haran about five hundred miles. I’m not totally certain that God really told Abraham that, but Abraham certainly thought He did. However, the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews did not take permanent possession of Canaan for another eight hundred years. In a sense, for those eight centuries they still lived in Nowhereland, whether it was Canaan for a couple of centuries or Egypt for nearly four and a half centuries as slaves or back in Canaan again, fighting the Canaanites to take control of what they came to call the land of Israel, a land they believed had been promised to them by God through their patriarch Abraham.
This sermon was inspired a few weeks ago by a long magazine article about a people called the Rohingya, who have lived for several centuries in Burma, which is now called Myanmar. Because I have always been skeptical of the military leaders who took control of the Burmese government years ago and changed the name of the country, I still resist calling it the new name, and stick with Burma. Since I don’t work for the State Department or the US government, I assume I am allowed to maintain that objection.
Burma is a Buddhist-majority country, and has been for a long, long time. Buddhists are peaceable people, but the brutal Burmese government doesn’t want peace with the Rohingya. The Rohingya are southeast Asian Muslims. There are more than two million of them. Nearly all of them have been driven out of Burma and into Bangladesh by the autocratic Burmese government.
Bangladesh is very much a Muslim-majority nation, but it is also one of the poorest nations in the world. The Bangladeshi government and people feel they cannot accommodate so many refugees, but they also are politically and militarily too weak to keep them out. Therefore the Rohingya are in one huge, squalid refugee camp at the border of Bangladesh and Burma. They cannot return to their homeland, nor can they remain indefinitely in the nightmare of their newly created semi-prison compound. Technically, all of the Rohingya now have no citizenship in any nation. Several thousand babies have been born in the camp, and officially they especially are citizens of Nowhereland. It is one of the greatest tragedies of our lifetime, and almost nothing politically is being done to improve their status. It is like Rwanda, except that hundreds of thousands aren’t being killed. They just are being given almost no help. Were it not for foreign non-governmental aid organizations, they would all be starving to death.
Two weeks ago I officiated at the joint Hindu-Christian wedding of two OB-GYNs. The groom was born in and grew up in Canada, and emigrated to the US over 25 years ago. The bride was born in the US of parents who emigrated from India. Both Aishwarya and Marc have gone as volunteers to under-developed nations to use their obstetrical and gynecological expertise in makeshift medical clinics. In one of my conversations with the couple before the wedding, for some reason I happened to mention the Rohginya. Aisha’s face absolutely lit up. She said that she was there in that enormous refugee camp as a volunteer doctor for two weeks this past May. She forwarded a short video she took of the conditions in which those stateless people are forced to live. It looks deplorable, but it is all they have.
In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s early musical, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, in the next-to-last song, Joseph sings a plaintive melody which ends with the words, “for we have been promised a land of our own.” Had the historical Joseph actually sung that song, however, he might have pointed out that seven centuries would pass before it happened.
There are simply too many people in the world, and too many of them are living in places which cannot or will not sustain them any longer. Politics, armies, social unrest, and climate all force millions to move elsewhere, anywhere, somewhere, where they can find a new place in which not only to live, but, they hope, to thrive. Everyone in such dire circumstances wants that. But other people in other places don’t want strangers moving into their midst. It has always been that way, and it shall continue to be that way as long as humans inhabit the earth.
Surely God wants everyone to live someplace in peace and prosperity, but He is not the one who enables that. We are. When too many Have-Nots want to move to where the Haves are, the Haves must find a way to make room for them. God is not the Cosmic Immigration Administrator in the Sky. We are the ones He commissions to make the necessary arrangements.
The darkest chapter in American history was our cowardly sanctioning of slavery in the Constitution. Many people knew better, and everyone should have known better, but we allowed ourselves to delude ourselves into thinking the peculiar institution would somehow work itself out in time. It did, but at an enormous cost, with the death of 625,000 Americans. We forced millions of Africans and their descendants to live for twelve generations in Nowhereland, and it assaulted the consciences of far too few Anglo-Saxon American citizens. For countless slaves, from 1619 to 1865, there were only two ways out of Nowhereland: the Underground Railroad, which few were able to take, or death, which was the escape for the vast majority.
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Many Negro spirituals declared that terribly somber reality. “Swing low, sweet chariot/ Comin’ for to carry me home.” “I am a poor wayfaring stranger/ A travelin’ o’er this world of woe/ But there’s no sickness, toil, or danger/ In that bright world to which I go.” “I got shoes/ You got shoes/ All God’s chillun got shoes/ When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes/ Gonna walk all over God’s heaven, heaven/ When I get to heaven gonna put on my shoes/ Gonna walk all over God’s heaven!” But all of God’s children didn’t have shoes, because they were forced to live in Nowhereland, and they went barefoot for most of their lives.
The kingdom of God, as described by Jesus, is supra-regional, supra-national, and even supra-terrestrial. Jesus also said that it exists among us. As long as anyone on earth is in Nowhereland, God’s kingdom is not fully here. Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven,” but God doesn’t make His kingdom manifest on the earth; we do. It is theological timidity to imagine that God is the earthly initiator of the kingdom of God.
Labor Day is an annual reminder of why millions of people around the world are leaving where they live for places they hope they can find work. Half the young men in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Syria under the age of 25 are unemployed. Many millions of Africans of both sexes and all ages are unemployed. Almost a quarter of young Mexican males have no jobs, along with a third or more of the young men of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. There are perhaps two hundred or more million refugees in the world, and many of them are people who hope to move from Nowhereland to find work somewhere.
The immigration crisis is most assuredly a crisis, and it will not disappear within our lifetimes. It defies easy answers. People of compassion must stick with it, and try to assist in diminishing its urgency.
The letter to the Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians at a time when it was tough to be Jewish Christians. The Romans had destroyed the homeland of the Jews, most Jews were put off by those who were Jewish Christians, and Gentiles Christians were not warmly inclined to Jewish Christians either.
The writer of the letter told of giants in the earth before there were Hebrew people: Abel and Enoch and Noah. Then he recounted Hebrew giants over the previous eighteen centuries: Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, the prophets. Eventually, he wrote, the Hebrew people entered and conquered Canaan, the Promised Land.
But that, said the anonymous writer, was not the highest promise. God’s greatest promise, he implied, was something even better. It was Jesus Christ, and the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus Christ, and the promise of eternal life with God in heaven.
Sometimes the charge is made against certain kinds of Christians that they are so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly good. That can be all too true. We must work to establish the kingdom of God on earth, and let God do whatever is necessary to establish it in heaven.
God wants everyone to live somewhere that they are happy to call “home.” However, God does not make that magically happen. Only we can do that. Such decisions do not come easily. They require patience, kindness, and clear thinking on the part of everyone.
On a small island on the New Jersey shoreline in New York harbor stands a very tall statue. She lifts a lamp toward a needy world. She is facing east, because when the French gave us that statue in the late nineteenth century, most immigrants to the USA came from Europe. But the light of her lamp shines 360 degrees all around her. The whole world is called upon to liberate everyone in Nowhereland, so that they can find somewhere to start new lives, and that is what Lady Liberty symbolizes.
We can pray to God to enable this exceedingly difficult transformation, but it is up to us to activate it. People are the most effective hands and brains God has in the earth. By Himself, He is powerless. America, the magnet for immigrants, needs to do its best on behalf of the tired, the poor, and the many millions of would-be immigrants who are yearning to breathe free.