Champion the Cause
of the Stranger
I was reading from Job recently and came across a section in
chapter 29 where Job makes a defense of his righteousness (with the conclusion
that he doesn’t deserve to suffer as he is), and saw some revealing things
about the ethic of that ancient people.
We see the usual items, “I delivered the poor who cried, and the orphan who had no helper. . . I caused
the widow’s heart to sing for joy. .
. . I was eyes to the blind, and feet
to the lame. I was a father to the needy . . . “ And then he says this in the NRSV
translation, “I championed the cause of
the stranger.”
I like the phrasing of the NRSV here. It occurred to me that now is a great time
for the church in the U.S. to champion the cause of strangers. There are over 37 million foreign born in the
U.S. Of those, recent estimates indicate
that about 11.7 million are not authorized to be here. Who are they?
They are our neighbors; they live among us, work with us, marry among
our families, and worship with us. About
63% of the unauthorized population has been here ten years or more. They are irretrievably embedded in our
society.
The Job passage, however, is no isolated proof text. The Hebrew scripture uses the word for “stranger,”
ger, some 92 times and abounds with instructions to care for them,
show them hospitality, and treat them as you would the native born. See, e.g. Ex. 23:9; Lev. 19:33. As in the Job passage, many texts in the
Hebrew scripture link immigrants with the widows, orphans, and poor – those
singled out for protection by Israel.
God is on their side, and the prophets condemn God’s people for, among
other things, the way they abused these groups.
See, e.g. Zech. 7:9; Mal.
3:5.
As an immigration lawyer, I spend much of my time working to
keep foreign nationals right with the law and help those who aren’t to get
there. Sometimes it’s an impossible task
because of the harshness and inflexibility (and sometimes injustice) of our
immigration laws and the agencies that enforce them. For many of our unauthorized neighbors, they
are here without legal status simply because there is no legal way to come or
to stay here, despite the presence of family and offers of employment.
But from a biblical perspective I see absolutely no
difference in how we should treat immigrants based on their legal status in the
country, and I find nothing inherently immoral about crossing a national border
to escape persecution, or work and care for one’s family. They may immigrate for various reasons, but
all are subject to the abuse that can come from being among the most powerless
members of a society.
Pity the unauthorized worker in the U.S. Abused by ruthless bosses. Afraid to show their faces in public and seek
assistance. Afraid of the police and
those we put our trust in to protect us in hard times. Families travel constantly together for fear
of separation. Children are given
instructions on what to do if Mommy and Daddy don’t come home from work that
day. In a six month span of 2011 alone,
we deported over 48,000 parents of U.S.
citizens, most of whom had no criminal record. Children are orphaned and permanently
separated from parents because of unforgiving and unmerciful laws.
And the harshest cut of all to unauthorized strangers must be
the rejection by their brothers and sisters in Christ, harboring some
misbegotten notion that they are morally unfit because of their legal status in
the U.S.
Certainly, I do not advocate lawlessness with respect to our
immigration laws, but neither do I advocate passive acceptance. Appeals to
Romans 13 are inadequate to me. In the
U.S., we have a privilege not afforded to the early Christians – we can
actually work to change unjust laws for the “least of these” immigrants among
us.
Do not make the mistake of equating our civil immigration
law to something brought down by Moses from Mt. Sinai on tablets of stone. Space does not permit me to list all of the
harshness and injustice of our current immigration laws, and in the past 12
years, the injustice has dramatically increased. Our immigration laws are often unforgiving,
unmerciful, indifferent to human suffering and basic notions of right and
wrong. But . . .
The Lord works vindication and
justice for all who are oppressed.. . . The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love. (Ps. 103:6,8)
Jesus the
Immigrant
I think it is helpful for us to consider Jesus the immigrant
and the Christian journey as an immigrant path.
First, we see that Jesus’ family fled, as immigrants, to Egypt to escape
the wrath of murderous Herod. Many of
the immigrants here also came fleeing persecution in their native lands. Many came in illegally because that was the
only option available to them. If we
turn a deaf ear to them, the scriptures suggest that God may turn a deaf ear to
us when we cry.
But I also see Jesus in Matthew 25, the story of the sheep
and the goats, the righteous and the unrighteous. Judgment is predicated on how those suffering
were treated by the people of God. The
righteous fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, and
visited the sick and the prisoners, and welcomed
the foreigner (xenos) in. The
unrighteous did not. Moreover, Jesus,
the King in the story, puts it in the first person and says, “I was naked; I was hungry; I was in
prison; I was a stranger, and you
welcomed me in. . . .” Both the
righteous and the unrighteous are ignorant of who they were either helping or
ignoring, and Jesus tells them, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of
the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (vs. 40)
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells us “Do not forget to show hospitality to
strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without
knowing it.” Heb. 13:2. God so identifies with the poor, the widow,
the orphan, the immigrant, that our help to them is a service to Him.
Lastly, however, I see the incarnation of Christ as an
immigrant story – one that we imitate as Christians on our journey. He left his home above, as the only beloved
of the Father, and “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” John 1:14.
But his kingdom was “not of this world” and he looked forward to the day
when he would return to the Father and prepare homes for us. He was willing to humble himself and journey
to his own. But rather than seeking a
better life for himself, he came that we might have life abundantly.
Similarly, as Christians, we recognize that this world is
not our true home. We are, as Peter
says, to “live out our time as foreigners
here in reverent fear,” (I Pet.
1:17) and “admit we are foreigners and strangers on
earth.” (Heb. 11:13), recognizing that our true home is elsewhere. We are the ones who are “longing for a better
country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called [our] God,
for he has prepared a city for [us].”
Heb. 11:16. I am blessed to be
born in the U.S., but my true home lies far beyond these borders.
Yet we don’t deserve this calling to a home prepared for us
by Christ. In the kingdom of heaven, we
are all illegal aliens – someone had to help us over the wall (to paraphrase
Shane Claiborne). As Paul says, at one time, we were “foreigners to the
covenants of the promise” and “separate from Christ.” Eph. 2.
Once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God, brought
near by the blood of Christ.
If, therefore, we have received mercy on our immigrant
journey to a better country, how can we fail to show mercy to those who have
journeyed to this country and are in need of our compassion. When it comes to immigration reform, it
amazes me that some Christians act as if the concept of forgiveness is totally
foreign to them.
God says to his people in Exodus, “You shall not oppress a
resident alien; you know the heart of an
alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Ex. 23.” Yes, we were aliens also. This is my prayer -- that God’s people would know the hearts of
the aliens among us. In doing so, we can
show them the mercy that God has shown us and be “champions” for their cause.
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