All God
All God’s Children are Immigrants
By Angie Wright
The Bible is the story of the people of God. And so it is your story and my story. Those of us who have lived in the same place for most of our lives may have failed to notice that the story of God’s people is in many ways a story of immigrants. The people of Israel are often called the People of the Land, but in reality most of their story is about trying to get there or getting kicked out and trying to find their way back. In other words, it is the story of people who were led or forced by circumstances or called by God to migrate from one land to another.
The first human migration recorded in the Bible, like many, was not exactly voluntary. It occurred when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. These new immigrants had two sons: Cain, who grew up to be a farmer and Abel, who grew up to be a herdsman, which meant that he had to move around a lot. After Cain killed his brother in jealous rage, God cursed him to live the life that his brother had lived, as a wanderer, an immigrant. Yet God also promised to go with him, to protect him in this life as an immigrant.
Noah and his children became migrants when God sent them away from their homeland to build the ark to save creation from the flood.
We all know the story of the tower of Babel, when God saw that men became so full of themselves and their own power that something had to be done. God’s answer was to confound them with different languages and to scatter them across the ancient world, migrants all.
God also called Abraham and Sarah to live the lives of immigrants, to leave their home, the land of their ancestors and everything they knew. They were to go to an unknown land where they would prosper, become numerous, be blessed and be a blessing to all the nations.
Then there is the story of Joseph who, after being sold into slavery by his brothers,
ended up as an immigrant in Egypt, where he eventually became very successful. After reconciling with his brothers who were starving in Israel due to a drought, Joseph’s success enabled him to sponsor their immigration into Egypt where they too prospered and became numerous.
When an immigrant population prospers and becomes numerous, the native population often begins to feel threatened by their presence. We see this happening in our own country today. In Egypt, the more numerous the Israelite immigrants became, the more threatened the Egyptians felt by their presence. Justifying their actions by raising the threat level to red, the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrews, setting ruthless taskmasters over them, and making their lives bitter with hard service. God heard the people’s cries and used Moses to help them escape their captors, to cross the Red Sea and to live as migrants on a long journey from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Later in their history, Jerusalem was destroyed and the people of Israel were cast into exile, once again immigrants in strange lands.
During the exile, God promised that they would not be an immigrant people forever.
They would return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and become a stable community once again. It was then that God gave them a commandment to ensure that they would never forget from whence they had come. The history and identity as an immigrant people should never fade from the memory of the Jewish people.
The commandment was to give special protection to immigrants in their land:
“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” Lev 19:33-34
New Testament
In the gospels, Mary and Joseph are themselves migrants, traveling from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census while Mary is pregnant.
The magi, or wise men, are immigrants who travel long distances to bring gifts to the child.
Jesus and his parents became refugees themselves when they have to flee to Egypt for fear of King Herod’s violence.
The Apostle Paul was raised in an immigrant community, Tarsus. He lived the life of an immigrant to spread the Christian faith throughout the ancient world.
Conclusion
So the story of God’s people, our story, is the story of an immigrant people.
God used migration to accomplish God’s purposes of restoring the earth and setting things right with God’s people.
We should know these few things:
1. “The earth is God’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). Many of us in the U.S. grew up singing a song, “This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me.” Immigration battles such as Alabama’s over House Bill 56 is based on this presumption. But the land belongs to no man, only to God, and we would do well to remember that.
2. The church has a nasty history of creating boundaries and borders and barriers, deciding who is in and who is out, who is welcome and who is not, reflecting the culture rather than creating a ‘Christ-culture’ that welcomes the stranger and includes the foreigner as one of us: The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.”
3. In biblical times, God chose to move God’s people to accomplish God’s purposes, and gave special protection and blessing to those people on the move. Migration was by the hand of God. If that is so, surely it is possible that the people now living among us were brought here by the hand of God for the purposes of God and have also been given the blessing and protection of God.
4. Reading the Bible as the story of God’s people as an immigrant people moved by force, calamity, or a call by God from one land to another to prosper and multiply, how do we understand what God is doing in our current situation? The truth is God put each and every one of us here, living in Alabama, in this particular moment in time. How can we presume that God was right to put some of us here, and wrong to bring others of us here? How can we presume that some of us are here with God’s blessing, and others are not? Who are we to make such judgments? Surely we are all here as a part of God’s plan!
5. In fact we are told that it is God’s plan to bring us all together as one people! Through the prophet Isaiah, God said:
Do not be afraid, for I am with you;
I will bring your children from the east
and gather you from the west.
I will say to the north, ‘Give them up!’
and to the south, ‘Do not hold them back.’
Bring my sons from afar
and my daughters from the ends of the earth—
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made.” (Isaiah 43:5-7)
Jesus said,
I came that they may all be one. (John 17:21).
Paul said,
There is no longer Jew or Gentile,
slave or free, male and female.
For you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)
This I believe: In the eyes of God, there is no legal or illegal, no documented or undocumented, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.
Regardless of political or ideological boundaries or borders, from the standpoint of faith there can be no “us” and “them,” no insiders or outsiders.
It is the calling of the church to speak this truth to the state of Alabama and to create a climate that brings into being: We are all one.
This sermon was preached at Grace Episcopal Church, Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday, March 18, 2012 by the pastor Reverend Angie Wright.
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