Strangers, Sojourners, and Aliens In Our Midst

My all-time favorite unintended satire on lousy thinking is still the in-your-face bumper sticker proclamation, “God said it; I believe it; that settles it.” Moving rapidly up to second place on my list, though, is the widely disseminating coup de grace conversation-stopper on our country’s struggles to formulate a fair and workable immigration policy:    “Illegal is illegal.” All well-formed tautologies are true, but not all are helpful.

Yes, “illegals” are people who are within our borders ill-legal-ly. Perhaps if they had been raised right and had come to possess a more law-abiding character, they wouldn’t have been so mean-spirited as to take advantage of porous borders and employers all too willing to hide and exploit them. How awful of these “aliens.” Well, now we will just have to take things into our own not-so-porous hands, and give these people the backs of them. Perhaps we could bring in consultants from Israel to show us how to replicate a wall that will keep our own version of the West Bank from overrunning God-given land. We could call it the Great Wall of the Rio Grande.

It is always an interesting question, and one that is never easy to decide, just how many immigants any one nation can welcome and assimilate without compromising its own future. Since the State of Israel has already been dragged into this discussion in a facile way, it might be appropriate to use another facet of her current condition to make a more serious point. During my several visits to that country over the past thirty years, I have noted with mounting anxiety two especially telling signs of population overload. One is declining water levels in the Sea of Galilee to the North as the water flowing into it from Mount Hermon is siphoned off to meet ever-expanding human needs elsewhere. The second is a further degradation of the Dead Sea to the south as the Jordan River is diverted away from it for more and more agricultural projects. Israel now has an altogether unwanted problem: she can no longer continue welcoming Jews from everywhere else with open arms, and survive.

It may very well be that our country, too, is rapidly reaching the point beyond which we can no longer absorb many more newcomers.Whether we are at that point or not, it certainly makes sense in the here and now to work on protecting our borders more effectively. I have to wonder, though, just how to pull off what the illegals-are-illegal-ists insist is the necessary first step. Sending eleven million unwanted people into Exile in one swoop will make the Exodus and the Babylonian Captivity seem like moving a wedding party from the Sanctuary to the Fellowship Hall.

It also makes sense to work on bringing the employment of immigrant workers under more effective law enforcement. 1200 illegal workers for a single company getting arrested across 26 states in one series of raids deserves the front page headline that this particular story got. More than likely, though, their employers will suffer far less than these workers will, to our collective shame. As raids like these continue, we can only hope that others from whose labors we benefit are equitably compensated, including being afforded all of the benefits due them. There is nothing in either of these imperatives that requires for its validation any principle other than that of applying the law fairly.

Biblical faith, though, makes all of these issues more complicated. Strangers, sojurners, and aliens --- not to mention slaves --- have always been of special concern to Jews and Christians alike, because they have been so evidently of special concern to God. God’s guidelines for dealing with them could hardly be clearer: hospitality, not rejection; respect, not exploitation; inclusion, not exclusion; love, not suspicion. What got the new settlers of the Promised Land to give even slaves a day off from work was the remembrance of their own enslavement in Egypt (Deuteronomy 5:15); what got them to be welcolming toward strangers was the remembrance of Abraham’s hospitality to men who turned out to be angels in his midst (Genesis 18:2-5). The author of I Peter addresses his readers as “aliens in a foreign land” (2:11) just after he has reminded them that they are now God’s people, not the “no people” they once were, and that they will never be outside God’s mercy again.

This land is your land; this land is my land. If it is ever to be “their” land, then “they” are going to have to work for it, and not have it just handed to “them.” Right? Or, as one Canaanite said to another…

Even Unto the Cross: an Eastertide Meditation

It never should have happened, but it did. The Messiah for the Jews, the Son of God to the Gentiles --- crucified, dead, buried, and with him the hopes of all the years. It took and takes a lot of explaining for Jesus’ followers to get people past this. That God raised him from the dead certainly helps the cause. In some ways, though, the Easter story just makes things worse. The enfleshed Logos a sacrificial lamb? Suffering a fate meted out under the requirements of a tribal mentality whose ethic of blood sacrifice was supposed to have been annulled long before the cross was even raised?

Not long after I first surveyed “the wondrous cross” for myself, I decided to give up on the kind of question that the early church kept asking, wrongly, about this ghastly event. Its question was: what made the manner of Jesus’death a necessary part of a divinely foreordained plan? My question increasingly became: how could I have expected anything else? People just like me --- self-centered, loving reluctantly and grudgingly if at all, looking for rules by which to judge others but never themselves, longing for a Paradise of their own making, contemptuous of trouble-makers --- all of a sudden had to confront a self-emptying, grace-filled, kingdom-proclaiming stonemason’s son audicious only in the confidence he had in their, and my, ability to live just like he did. Hey! Give us Barabbas, too!

The cross, then, was predictable, but never necessary. God could not have failed to anticipate the very strong possibility, probability perhaps, that his best effort to regain humankind’s loyalty would be rejected. But just as certainly, God could not have worked out the arrangement in such a way as to make rejection impossible. Not, at least, without destroying a part of God’s own nature in us, our freedom. Freedom only to say “Yes” to Christ is not freedom at all. If the price tag of getting right with God is giving back the right to stay alienated from him, then things are still not all right in the created order.

The mystery of Jesus’ suffering is not a mystery forever out of reach at the bottom of a great abyss of necessity, inevitability, or fatedness. Nor is it a prime time drama aimed at knocking off “The Ten Commandments” about a God whose hands were tied by a deal made in haste with a Denizen of the deep who once upon a time climbed down from heaven to lay in wait for a humanity created for nobler purposes. If all that Christianity can come up with by way of explaining the Cross is throwing together really dumb ideas about a divine placating of Satan and about setting the account books right on human sinfulness, then it is little wonder that its churches resort to believe-it-or-else arm-waving in order to get a hearing for it. No one in his right mind would go for it on her own.

Satan has no claims upon God to be placating. We are he (to clear up the indefinite antecedent, we delude ourselves by thinking we are the latter to avoid dealing with the reality that we are the former), and we lost the right to make demands on God long before our ancestors reached the base of Mount Sinai. God keeps no account books on obligations owed; his staff is too busy trying to track us down in our flight from him, so that he can still reach out to us, in love.

Unless handling snakes and drinking poisons and watching exorcisms still turn you on, you can probably get along at least reasonably well without a “ransom to the devil” theory of the crucifixion as an Atonement. But it still may be hard to give up the idea of his suffering and dying to make there “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the world.” Certainly it is better to think in terms of our obligations to God than of God’s obligations to Satan. But having said that, it is even better to think of God’s mercies to both. Jesus’ crucifixion is an offer of grace; it is not a collection of debt.

And this is why surveying the “wondrous” cross can be and often is so painful. The greatest invitation anybody ever gave and ever will give to a suffering humanity --- and they missed it, and we miss it still. Grace, mercy, forgiveness, love, new life, singing, rejoicing, reuniting: that’s the real deal of a lifetime --- and beyond.