Sojourner

During the 2016 election campaign, I expressed concern about Donald Trump for a number of reasons, most of which were fairly widely shared by people who didn't vote for him. But there was one I said at the time I was concerned about more than any of the others, because I was concerned it offended a more important party than ourselves and would be, I believed, the hardest to counter once he was in office.

I stated that putting Donald Trump in the White House would legitimize a practice calling itself Christianity that has little, if anything, to do with Christ.  That his election would not only encourage the false teachers he surrounded himself with during his campaign, but that it would embolden a host of problems that the church was harboring and failing to address. This past Sunday, the sermon touched on one of the ways I feel that concern has been realized.

The Foreigner Among Us

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But we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing [mother] tenderly cares for her own children. Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives, because you had become very dear to us.
1 Thessalonians 2:7-8 (NASB)

For Missions Month, my church is hosting guest speakers on Sundays and Wednesdays. This past Sunday was Ralph Thompson, who previously worked among Muslims with his wife, Sandra, in Kenya. They've since returned and are now working with their missions agency to facilitate global outreach work aimed at Muslim communities. One aspect of that work is equipping Christians in the United States to reach out to the growing number of Muslims entering our nation as immigrants and refugees. This was the focus of his sermon, from 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8.

The big question of the sermon was, do we reach out to the people around us with the same love and passion that Paul is here describing? He noted that churches in America have a particular opportunity of world evangelism based on the fact that the world is coming to us, rather than requiring we go to it. And when they come here, we have an opportunity to reach out and build relationships and show the love of Christ to them by sharing, not only the gospel, but our lives with them. But, of course, that relies on us actually welcoming them. So the sermon reminded me of some things.

John Moore / Getty Images, 2014.

Now, I've heard this idea that the world is coming to us and the doors this opens to evangelism before, and one thing that has been bothering me about it is the number of people I know who would praise that statement while voting to ensure that the world does not come to us. And I mean this very directly: we cannot be both excited to show love and offer the gospel to people coming from other nations, and demanding we prevent those people from coming. We cannot lovingly open our doors to the foreigner among us while building a wall to make sure there are no foreigners among us.

It is impossible to do both. We have to decide which we're going to do: are we going to shut people out, or are we going to celebrate and embrace opportunities to live out the love and mission of Christ with the people who come in. A great deal of the people in our churches today are choosing the former, and I submit to you that this is entirely against the nature of the God we claim to serve.

God of our Sojourning

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"Thus has the LORD of hosts said, 'Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion each to his brother; and do not oppress the widow or the orphan, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise evil in your hearts against one another.'
Zechariah 7:9-10 (NASB)

Throughout scripture, God highlights a few groups of people as being of special interest to Him. In each passage they appear, they are being discussed as people who God's people must show love to, because God has a notable stake in their well-being. The English words used here vary, but one group is the foreigner, the stranger, the sojourner, the alien. The person who comes from elsewhere to dwell in the midst of God's people.

In Deuteronomy, God repeatedly makes the case that part of the reason Israel should remember to care for the sojourner among them is that they were, themselves, sojourners in Egypt. It's worth noting that, during this address, Moses isn't speaking to people who were adults in Egypt; this is after the forty years of wandering, when the generation that came from Egypt had died out. This is not a command given to the generation that remembers Egypt. Israel as a body was a sojourner, and is told here that it must never forget that fact.

He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.
Deuteronomy 10:18-19 (NASB)

So throughout the Old Testament, God reminds Israel to bless the foreigner who enters their midst, both to reflect God's love for them and in remembrance of their own time as foreigners in a strange land. But does this apply to the church today? I would argue that it does.

But you are A CHOSEN RACE, A royal PRIESTHOOD, A HOLY NATION, A PEOPLE FOR [God's] OWN POSSESSION, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were NOT A PEOPLE, but now you are THE PEOPLE OF GOD; you had NOT RECEIVED MERCY, but now you have RECEIVED MERCY. Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.
1 Peter 2:9-11 (NASB)

There are two grounds on which this argument stands. The first is that, while we are not under the Mosaic law as a people redeemed by grace, the ordinances given to Israel nevertheless point to some understanding of who God is and what His people should look like and we can learn from that; in this particular case, we need not conceptualize the lesson being given, as we may with laws like those banning mixed fabrics, since the reminder to care for the foreigner is given an explanation already.

The second is the nature of that explanation, and the fact that it has not changed. That the heart of God goes out to the foreigner remains equally true as long as God's heart remains the same, and we know that He does not change. And His call to remember the days of sojourning are true for Christians who sojourn in a fallen world just as much as it was true of Israelites who sojourned in Egypt.

We are "aliens and strangers" in this world. Our home is not here, but a Kingdom that is not yet fully realized. We wait, and walk, and live, in a place that does not share our values, our perspective, or our affections. Theologically speaking, we are no more native to the United States, even those of us born here, than the family being separated at the border. We have been rescued from a dire fate and welcomed into a new home; how can we justify turning away or mistreating those who run from a dire fate seeking refuge, especially those who do not know the worse fate that still awaits them after this life?

​How can we be the people of God if we will not act how God calls us to act, and love how He has loved us?

Objections

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Opposition to this read of the situation tends to come down to one of two arguments. One is functionally a division of personal piety from social obligation, and the other is grounded in personal and national safety.

Of the first, it should be noted that our government is not actually set up to operate that way. Whether or not the apostles would have been at the borders of the Roman Empire welcoming travelers is hardly relevant when their relationship to government was fundamentally different from ours. The simplest way to put it is this: in a governmental system designed to be of the people, for the people, and by the people, what we task the government with doing is something we are doing. This also comes up in matters of social welfare, the claim that we are called to support the widow and the orphan and help the poor, sure, but we are never called to empower a government to take our money and have them do the supporting.* But this creates a division where one does not exist. When we vote for or against a program or a candidate, we are telling the government how we want it to operate on our behalf. We are directing it to function as our arms in carrying out large-scale operations beyond the scope of what we can do individually. It is no different from giving money and input to our church, or our denomination, about things we want to see happen.

As such, there is no division. If we are going to show God's love to the sojourner among us, we have a direct responsibility to support programs that allow sojourners to exist among us. Our attempts to support programs that restrict or remove sojourners from our midst are nothing less than an act of rebellion to the mission of our God.

The second is personal/national safety and, while literally all available data shows that there is no considerable threat from allowing refugees (or immigrants in general) in, the main focus for us as Christians is that our nation ultimately doesn't matter and our lives are already lost. We owe our nation no more allegiance than we owe Kazakhstan, because, as stated above, this is not our home. We have certain obligations to respect the authority that we live under, but that does not mean we give that authority more power and worth than it deserves. Nor will it be eternal. America will fall someday, whether to mortal forces or to the coming Kingdom of our Lord. What, exactly, are we preserving? And is preserving it more important than obedience to God?

As for personal safety, this is never guaranteed to us. We walk the path of martyrs. It is better for a terrorist to walk into a church and be greeted with the gospel than to allow him to continue in ignorance of the offer of salvation, even if he destroys that church and everyone in it. It is better to lose our lives by opening our doors to the unsaved than to live a long life and stand before God having never carried out His commands because we were more afraid of man than of Him.

Do not fear those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
Matthew 10:28 (NASB)

Our personal safety is sacrificed when we accept the Lordship of Christ; our earthly lives are worth less than our Heavenly mission. Even if we were at some kind of risk by allowing refugees and immigrants into the nation--which, again, we are not--we as Christians have an obligation to take that risk in order to display the love of God to them. Our national security is of lesser importance than our mission to reach the world and welcome the foreigner. What we support from our government is an extension of our own practice. There is no grounds by which Christians can justify the behavior so many of us have shown since 2016. We have chosen the ways of the world over the ways of our God and this will not stand. If we will not testify of God's love to the world then He will remove us from our position of opportunity and find a people who will. Do not forget that God has brought these people to our door, and our refusal of them speaks volumes about how well we receive Him.

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* - Note that I am not saying we absolutely must support every idea the government has for ways to advance social welfare. There is certainly room for practical concerns about how these programs will be carried out and whether or not the function of government actually calls for them. What I am saying is that these are not theological concerns. We do not have the grounds to state that we oppose these programs because God has called us and not the government to do it, when the government is designed to be an extension of our own will; and therefore is an avenue that we must use responsibly to carry out the work we are called to do. Is our current welfare system the best way we, as a collective body, can use the resource of government to ensure we are blessing the poor? Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but we have to ask whether we're actually trying to fix this tool available to us or if we're actually trying deny that it is a valid tool at all.