Hilton Head Island, SC – May 21, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Deuteronomy 10:12-13,18-22; Leviticus 19:33-34
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. 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.” – Leviticus 10:33-34 (RSV)
According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, there are currently 71.7 million refugees in the world. They declare that to be the highest number of refugees the world has ever known. A refugee is someone who has left his or her country of origin, hoping to find a refuge somewhere else. A refuge is a place of safety, and by definition, where refugees had been living was not safe. There are now eight billion people in the world, according to the United Nations. That means that nearly one out of every hundred of the world’s population are refugees; one out of every hundred.
Many of the people seeking to enter the United States as immigrants are not refugees, but many others are. That is particularly true for most of the people who are now coming from Venezuela. The leader of Venezuela is a brutal dictator who has killed many of his own countrymen and imprisoned many others. For some unexplained reason, Venezuelans are not being treated like other migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Haiti, who for years have been given special consideration by our immigration authorities.
Title 42 was a regulation passed during the Trump administration to make it much more difficult for immigrants to enter the United States because of Covid. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, not taking any humanitarian concerns into account, that made sense. While Covid lasted as a major health issue, Title 42 certainly served its purpose.
On May 11, Title 42 ended. It was assumed that then there would be a much greater flood of immigrants at our southern border wanting to enter the US. Everyone was surprised that instead of increasing, the number waiting to enter actually decreased. No one knows for sure why that happened.
As the number of refugees from all over the world increased since the end of World War II, the animosity toward them has also risen. Nobody in any part of the world has ever left home and hearth for greener pastures elsewhere unless the pastures in which they had been living turned browner or drier or hotter or colder or more dangerous than they had been previously. People emigrate from one place to another for reasons; they don’t do it on whims, unless they are whimsical, and thus not serious, people. Refugees in particular leave their homelands only because conditions force them to leave: severe climate changes, such as famines, floods, or drought, or warfare, major social upheavals, or more likely still, intolerable political turmoil. Nobody is pounding on the doors to get into China, India, or Russia, but countless thousands want to get into the USA. As Americans, it behooves us to ask ourselves why that is so.
The Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, has over three hundred references to the words strangers or sojourners. In scripture, the two words are synonymous. My Bible concordance lists only about twenty of those references from the New Testament, the Greek Bible. In the Bible, strangers and sojourners invariably connote what might be described as “ethnic others,” people of other nations, cultures, or races.
To us, “strangers” are people we see whose names and identities we don’t happen to know. But in the Bible, “we” almost always means Hebrews or Israelites or Jews, and “they” are everyone else, the “ethnic others.” That distinction is not so apparent in the New Testament, because by the time of Jesus, there was much more mixing of ethnicities in Judea than in the centuries leading up to what we call the first century “AD”: Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord, or now the more sensitive “CE”: the Common Era, a term acceptable to Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians.
The first five books of the Bible, the Torah or “Law,” are especially concerned about the wellbeing of strangers and sojourners, because, as the Israelites were constantly reminded, they too were immigrant slaves in Egypt for over four centuries, and they were treated badly. Therefore God regularly commanded them to be kind to all the strangers in their midst. It is hard enough to move to distant places, but it is that much harder to be accepted there and to become adjusted to a new life among new people. The Torah says, “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall do him no wrong. 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” (Leviticus 19:33-34). The Torah also says, “(God) executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him bread and clothing. Love the sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut. 10:18-19).
The two most anti-immigrant American governors, the governors of Florida and Texas, have sent Venezuelan refugees on buses to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, sometimes cynically notifying no one that they were coming. The most brazen example of this was when Ron DeSantis sent a planeload of Venezuelans to Martha’s Vinyard last year. He and Governor Abbott of Texas have treated these people like pawns in a partisan political game, and not as fellow human beings in a crisis situation. It is true that far more migrants have appeared on the borders of certain states than all the other states, and thus it becomes more of a local issue for INS officials in those states to try to sort out which migrants have legitimate reasons for coming into the USA. Nevertheless, it is unworthy of any Americans to treat the strangers among us as though they are mere things, and not fellow human beings, all of whom are children of God.
One of our two major political parties currently is essentially anti-immigrant, and the other is more pragmatic about the issue, and tries, even if often unsuccessfully, to make the natives and the migrants happy, which can never be done to everyone’s satisfaction. A continuing flood of migrants are being sent to New York City by government officials from elsewhere. In order to stem the tide, the Democratic mayor of New York has begun to bus some of the migrants to adjoining suburban counties such as Westchester, Rockland and Orange, and the Republican county supervisors of those counties have tried to block the refugees from coming in. This whole situation is becoming not only unseemly but morally unacceptable.
In his inaugural address in 1988, President George H. W. Bush said that he wanted the United States to become “a kinder, gentler nation.” It is highly debatable that has ever happened, but we do have a neighbor to the north, Canada, that does seem to be kinder and gentler toward immigrants. Because my parents were from Canada, every summer for two weeks from the time I was born until I was a late teenager, I spent two weeks of every summer and once a whole summer in Canada. Therefore I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Canadians and for all my Canadian relatives - - - eh?
Since I was born, and up until a few years ago, by happenstance Canada always had one-tenth the population of the US, year in and year out. (Mentally I keep track of those things.) Now they have moved ahead by two full percentage points. The increase has happened because the Canadian government has intentionally allowed a higher percentage of immigrants into Canada than our government has allowed into the United States. I think perhaps Canada has done that primarily because they accept the fact that they need more foreign workers to settle in Canada if their economy is to flourish. The increased numbers of immigrants does not necessarily mean Canadians are kinder or gentler than Americans, but at least they aren’t nearly as xenophobic. Prime Minister Trudeau has said he hopes Canada will welcome 500,000 new migrants every year for the foreseeable future. If we were to do that on a similar basis, that would mean we would welcome five million immigrants per annum, but that will never happen. Nonetheless, we could accept far more, if we would budget enough money to expand the services of INS and ICE to process these people, which we won’t. Our anti-immigrant party will see to that. Canada actually has stricter immigration laws than we do, but they are more generous in allowing more immigrants into the Land of the True Patriots’ Dream. It can be done, if there is a political will to do it.
There was a lengthy interview in The Christian Century (May, 2023) with Katarina Ramos, an immigration attorney who works for the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago. Virtually all of the Venezuelans who were bussed to Chicago were seeking asylum from the repressive government of their homeland. Ms. Ramos said she was interviewing 140 people a day, which is probably at least 120 too many. Ukrainian refugees are given a year to get settled and find work, but Venezuelans have only 60 days to do that. It is very difficult to get everyone settled in so short a time.
However, there are immigrants who have a much easier time of it coming into the USA. Instead of the welcoming 19th century words of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty, the new decree seems to be, “Give me your Ph.ds, your techno-geniuses, your MBAs yearning to get richer.” But ordinary people also have unfilled jobs waiting for them in such enterprises as food service, health care, agriculture, construction, and landscaping, if they can just be allowed to enter the USA. Getting them green cards is the time-consuming, hard part. At the retirement community where we live, we could not function were it not for the many Latinos serving in positions throughout The Seabrook. Recently I read that three newly-built factories in Columbus, Ohio need 10,000 workers. The article said there are not 10,000 unemployed workers in the whole state of Ohio. Nationally, in February there were twice as many job vacancies as people available to fill them. The country is crying for workers, and at our borders many thousands of migrants are waiting to begin work.
Over ten per cent of the population of both Hilton Head and Bluffton are Latinos. We should all be grateful for that. If those people were not here, the local economy would collapse, because there would not be enough workers. With the low birth rate of Americans, we need more and more newcomers to take the many unfilled jobs we have here. Nevertheless, many politicians want to put the brakes on immigration. Furthermore, a gunman at an El Paso mall kills over twenty Latinos in a few minutes of carnage. Another kills eight outside another Texas mall in Allen, Texas, while yet another young man in Texas slays several more by ramming his car into a group of foreigners waiting at a bus stop.
What is the basis of this lethal American opposition to migrants? In a word, it is xenophobia, fear of foreigners, or strangers, or sojourners. On the lower end of the economic scale, there are many native-born Americans who fear their jobs will be taken away by the outsiders. Other xenophobes are white supremacists, who object to anyone with brown or black skin. In addition, there is a particular aversion among some Americans to Spanish- speakers, and those people insist that only English should be spoken here. Most younger immigrants want to learn English, and do so relatively quickly, but it is true that older ones have a harder time picking up a new language. Within a generation, however, the majority of migrants, especially those who arrived here as children, are quite fluent in English. Furthermore, tens of millions of native-born Americans had foreign forebears who learned English. Therefore should they not encourage those who want to enter our nation now to have the same opportunity?
When I was a boy of about fifteen or so, I remember a song that used to be sung either on the radio or on television, or maybe on both; I don’t remember which. It was probably a public service announcement, back when we had genuine public service announcements. The lyrics told how the USA was made up of many nationalities, and all of them melded together to make our country stronger. One of the verses said something like this:
Tom Paine was born an Englishman, and John Paul Jones a Scot;
Andy Jackson was a native son, but Hamilton was not.
Then the refrain said,
O I may not know a lot of things, but one thing I can state –
Both native born and foreign born have made our country great.
I also learned a song in the seventh grade chorus of the East Junior High School in Madison, Wisconsin, but I can only recall its opening line: “If I could travel swiftly on one great non-stop flight.” It told of flying very fast around the world and seeing that, though there are many nations with many different cultures and customs, we really are all one enormous human family, and everyone is related to everyone else. I loved those kinds of songs. Maybe they were seeds planted early on to turn me into an increasingly liberal geezer in my old age.
All those references in the Bible to strangers and sojourners were written from the perspective of people who knew how difficult it had been for their ancestors in Egypt, and how much the Canaanites understandably resisted the Israelite conquest of their land. To repeat, no one moves hundreds or thousands of miles from one place to another just for the adventure of the experience. They leave what is beloved and familiar for what is very unfamiliar and perhaps even frightening only because they think they have no other choice.
The last song in Fiddler on the Roof is called Anatevka. All the Jewish residents of the little village in western Russia are gathered together when the Czar’s troops have come, giving everyone just two days to pack up whatever they can and to move out. There is going to be a pogrom, and the commander of the troops is doing the Anatevkans a favor by telling them that. One of the villagers says to the rabbi, “Rabbi, wouldn’t this be a good time for the Messiah to come?” The rabbi says it would, but it probably won’t happen, “So,” he says, “let’s start packing.” Then, in one of the final scenes, they all walk out of their homes for the last time, looking back, wistfully. Everyone sings, “Soon I’ll be a stranger in a strange new place/ Looking for an old familiar face/ From Anatevka.”
More than any other nation in the history of the world, the United States of America is the classic nation of immigrants. “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong….I am the Lord your God.” May it be thus. May it ever be thus.