Love the Stranger

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords… Who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10.17-19)

When I was a kid, I’d visit classmates whose grandparents lived with them. That felt rather odd to me, as the idea of an extended family living under one roof was foreign to my Southern roots. “Our people”—as we called kinfolk—tended to live in close proximity to one another, yet seldom in the same house. If a relative needed a place to stay, they were always welcome. But it was understood these arrangements were temporary; the whole point of welcoming them into the house was getting them back on their feet to make it on their own. So the concept of multiple generations living together was a real curiosity. What’s more, most of my friends’ grandparents came from “the old country,” a euphemism for their homelands. They spoke little, if any, English and always seemed distant from everyday American life. Yet these strange people who neither spoke America’s language nor understood its customs were revered in our community. They were heroes who left the world they knew, often at great sacrifice, to provide something better, richer, and more promising for their children. They were living proof of what America—the “land of opportunity”—was all about.

Getting to America was tough. Being allowed to stay was even tougher. The immigration maze was nearly impossible to navigate. The bureaucratic indifference was disheartening. And the overt hostility many new immigrants encountered while trying to carve out new lives was terrifying. They persevered. But they didn’t do it alone. Everyone rallied around them, driven by a common sentiment that permeated American life—the sense that we were building a new kind of nation where ethnicity and class were irrelevant. In my youth, this was the “American dream”—E pluribus unum, “one out of many”—not the fantasy of personal wealth and social advantage that many mistake it for today.

By and large this dream was made possible by a deeply religious commitment to honor Old and New Testament doctrines of welcoming the stranger. Embracing immigrants was seen as a sacred American and Christian value in response to passages like Deuteronomy 10.17-19: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, Who is not partial and takes no bribe, Who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and Who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” As second- and third-generation Americans, we could relate to the Exodus saga. We understood the Promised Land in palpable ways, as many of our ancestors had sought refuge from oppressive European regimes, with African-Americans struggling to shake the chains of slavery within our borders.

Times have changed. European dictatorships are no more. Racial progress has weakened America’s connection with its shameful past. New waves of immigrants cross our borders and light on our shores, fleeing the injustices of Latin American, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern tyranny. Like their European predecessors, they don’t speak our language. They don’t understand our culture. And they too are confronted with a labyrinthine process made nigh unto impossible to satisfy. Many don’t succeed and more than a few don’t even try. It’s all too easy to demonize them—forgetting the sacrifices they’ve made to reach for the promise we call America—and ignore our scriptural obligation to love the stranger. If we do as God asks, we will see their problems as our own, and press our leaders to find mutually beneficial ways to welcome them. Constructing walls and construing more stringent immigration policies most assuredly will reduce their numbers and may ease the burden of integrating them into American society. Yet we whose lives are governed by God’s Word must never overlook the immigration edict it issues over and over. God loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing, Deuteronomy says, charging us to do likewise. Immigration is a problem we can fix, provided we do it with love.

Zealous for Peace

The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. (Isaiah 32.17)

Yesterday our church gloried in the promise of peace. Our guest preacher, Rev. Dr. Edward Campbell—a highly regarded Bible translator and seminarian whose title belies his salt-of-the-earth pragmatism—said something that stuck with me. As we read Scripture, he said, we should remember it’s the story of people figuring out how the world is supposed to work. Thus, the tension that binds together 66 books written across centuries is manifest in a contest of wills: human will and its wantonness versus God’s will and all that God desires for, and from, us. Consequently, we’ve invented an alternate reality to accommodate weaknesses that, as Scripture persistently reminds us, bear no reflection of God’s vision. Nowhere is this discrepancy more magnified than in human proclivity to make war. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is rife with war zeal. Repeatedly, we watch Israel engage in military conflicts that lay ruin to its country and other nations. The extreme losses are plain to see. And while it’s true that God sometimes—though not always—intervenes on Israel’s behalf, no stretch of scriptural interpretation can be made to translate God’s role in human combat as a divine sanction of war. When God steps into military conflicts, miracles occur that restore peace. Peaceful cohabitation is how the world is supposed to work.  It is God’s will. Why can’t we figure that out?

I submit we have figured it out. What we’ve not yet resolved are the international, cross-cultural, and political conflicts that cause war. Proverbs 14.31-34 diagnoses our failure when it says: “Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor God. The wicked are overthrown by their evildoing, but the righteous find a refuge in their integrity. Wisdom is at home in the mind of one who has understanding, but it is not known in the heart of fools. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Emphasis added.) When we set our hearts to prove our superiority over other nations—when we advance policies and actions that promote poverty, violence, and suffering, whether abroad or at home—we forsake God’s call to righteousness. We will not live in peace. As we’ve recently experienced in a recession largely brought on by reckless war-making, the costs of militaristic bravado are enormous. Conflicts wrought of aggression inevitably exact a huge toll on the aggressors. And the prices aren’t just paid out of pocket: they’re deducted in human lives, bodies, minds, and emotions. War is not God’s will. Why can’t we figure that out?

Isaiah 32.17 says, “The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.” We are not so naïve to expect global righteousness and its peaceful effects will prevail in our present world. Yet, as Christians, we must also ponder how we can expend our resources to promote righteousness. That we need adequate defenses against malevolent powers is a given. The question is whether we permit our leaders to pursue unrighteous policies of aggression—to foster nationalistic, military bravado that is quick to pull triggers and create undue poverty, suffering, and loss of life. We must be zealous for peace at all costs, as the price of warfare is more than we can bear. We are regularly confronted with the harrowing realities of warfare, yet we cling to the myth that war can ever be just. Military aggression is the way of the world. But it’s not how God intended it to be. It’s time we figured that out.

Staying on Message

Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing: go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow Me.” (Mark 10.21)

Understanding and Internalizing

As a marketing consultant, I constantly remind clients effective communication is all about staying on message. Not only must the message remain consistent across time. It must also stay the same on a vertical plane, until everyone at every level of the company is marching to the same beat. In time, the message morphs from strategic imperative into personal commitment that alters how employees think and work. I’ve been at this a very long time and can tell you that staying on message works. I’ll also admit it’s not easy to do. By nature, we’re more attracted to novelty than consistency. Repetition reduces our curiosity with each retelling. After we get a sense of what’s supposed to change and why it’s needed, we’re eager to move on. Yet there’s a huge gap between hearing and internalizing a message, knowing and understanding. Hearing and knowing may inform behavior, but they rarely alter it. To change behavior, a message must lodge so pervasively in the hearers’ minds that it becomes first nature to them.

Check out any business school and you’ll find entire curricula and volumes of theory and case studies expounding this principle. Still, no expert I’ve found matches Jesus’s brilliance for consistently communicating change, and no book I’ve read outclasses Mark’s gospel as a case study in effective communications strategy. Mark documents the pivotal moment in Jewish and, by extension, human history. It is the culmination of Israel’s longing for change and the start of something far greater than anyone expected: the revelation of God’s kingdom in the person and teachings of Christ. Jesus arrives, declaring change: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1.15) From there, He takes every opportunity to reinforce His message—consistently emphasizing a New Order that disrupts tradition and overturns conventional wisdom: the last are first, the poor preferred, children lead adults, outcasts are welcomed, and so on.

After following the readings from Mark, hearing the same thing—often the same words—week after week, we open Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 10.17-31) to discover yet another iteration of Jesus’s message, It’s all we can do not groan, “Enough already! We get it!” And that’s probably true. We know full well what Jesus is saying. But do we understand it? Have we internalized Jesus’s good news to the point that we are changed? That’s why Jesus stays on message.

Life to the Fullest

There is something new in this weekend’s lesson, though. Previously, we’ve heard Jesus deliver His message to groups of people—often changing the subject to do so. In this case, He models vertical communication, delivering the same message to a “higher-up.” We watch a wealthy man kneel before Him and ask, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (v17) We’re not sure what’s on the man’s mind. We know what he means by “eternal life,” however. In Jesus’s time, the concept of eternal life transcends life after death; to live eternally is to experience life to the fullest now and always. The man asks about inheriting eternal life, recognizing it’s a gift (not a reward) God wills to us. He senses there’s more to life than all he possesses. Until he identifies what’s missing, he’ll be incomplete. To use a financial term often found in the gospels, this rich man wants to be made whole.

Jesus answers with a somewhat pat response: keep the commandments. “I’ve done that since my youth,” the man says, once again addressing Jesus as “Teacher.” With that a superb teaching moment arises. Jesus sees the man’s sincerity and loves him. “You lack one thing,” He says, instructing the man to “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow Me.” (v21) Once the man is relieved of his burdensome riches, he’ll access the enormity of God’s wealth and discover fullness of life. He’ll be free to follow Jesus. Mark tells us Jesus’s answer shocks the man. He leaves sorrowfully. He gives up finding the missing piece of his life because he can’t (or won’t) give up what he already has to make room for it.

This is one of the gospels’ saddest moments—one of very few episodes that end unhappily. And the disciples’ reaction gives us a taste of how rare it is. They’re stunned. But Jesus stays on message, saying, “How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!” This only confuses His followers more. They’re culturally predisposed to believe those with the greatest means have the best chances of winning divine favor. After all, they cut the most prominent profiles in the Temple; they’re the movers and shakers—elite philanthropists and entrepreneurs and job creators. How can entering God’s kingdom be so difficult for them that Jesus says it’s easier to shove a camel through a tiny door by comparison? But Jesus is adamant. Entering God’s kingdom isn’t based on what we own. It’s decided by how easily we can surrender everything we rely on: possessions, people, and even prospects. This passage ends with Jesus telling us again: “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (v31)

Divesting Every Encumbrance

In an election season fraught with cries of economic injustice and a fetishistic obsession with percentiles, how simple it would be for us to filter this text through a political lens! How smug we’d feel if all of this actually boiled down to accusing the infamous 1% of flouting Christ’s instructions! Yet Jesus stays on message to teach us—rich or poor, high or low—the life-changing power of His good news. The kingdom of God has come near. The door to eternal life is flung open. And none of us, regardless of status, can enter without first divesting every encumbrance that prevents us from following Jesus. Wealth is the rich man’s burden. But there are many burdens that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. We carry pride and intellect and relationships and popularity and sophistication and religion and advantages of every kind—including moral superiority we assume as casualties of injustice—with such ferocity that we can’t perceive life without them. We rely on them to put us ahead. But they don’t provide fullness of life. Something’s lacking. And if we’re to be made whole, we must first be willing to sacrifice everything we cherish to find it.

Let’s be real: Jesus’s message quickly loses its novelty. It’s the same thing, over and over: let go everything you think you know and understand what’s truly essential. Stop hearing and start internalizing. Once we learn to do that, we will be changed.

Jesus stays on message so that we can progress from hearing His words to internalizing them, from knowing what He says to understanding what He means.

At the Opening

Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray. (Proverbs 22.6)

We most often hear this wisdom in conjunction with faith formation. Pastors and lay leaders quote it to urge parents to invest time in teaching their children godly ways. There is a promise in this verse—a guarantee, if you will, that the child who learns to value spiritual principles at an early age will follow them for life. I can’t attest to its validity in other families. But it proved itself in my own. My folks took this promise to heart, and their two sons—along with nearly all of the 50-plus young people they welcomed into their home and nurtured as surrogate parents—grew up to be committed believers.

Still, applying this verse to a strong faith foundation and leaving it there strikes me as shallow. I’m convinced it's meant to stress the importance of an overall solid education. A better translation of the Hebrew is “Initiate the child at the opening of his/her path,” encouraging parents to ensure their children enter adulthood with a strong start. When we couple this with Christ’s repeated command that we, as individuals and a community, care for our children, we are scripturally obliged to meet their educational needs with the best we can offer.

Every child deserves a strong start. Our forebears believed this, which is why they implemented public institutions and laws to provide every American child with a quality education. Yet, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, nearly one in 10 young people drops out of school. The rate more than triples in many urban areas, meaning thousands of children never reach the opening of their paths. As the Harvard Education Letter recently described, the reasons our children aren’t in school and others receive substandard education are myriad and complex, with most of them directly tied to poverty. Combined with the runaway costs of higher education and enormous debt we inflict on university students at the opening of their paths, it’s all too evident we’ve turned our hearts from what God expects of us. We’ve abdicated our scriptural duty to remove hurdles that prevent our youth from being trained in the right way. Since our neglect isn’t a new phenomenon, we’re already coping with its toll on our young, as well as the prices we pay personally, as communities, and as a nation. We can readily trace the connections between undernourished education and the socioeconomic—and spiritual—malaise that plagues us. And this is chiefly because the American response has been to move away from areas where substandard education is the norm, rather than invest the time, energy, and money to secure first-rate educations for all young Americans.

Most often, our politicians position their education policies in the context of “competing in the global economy.” They seem to believe we can’t be moved to remedy education gaps without threatening loss of profitable trade and innovation that has held the US on the top of the heap. But there’s more to it. Providing children with a strong start is God’s will. For believers, the mandate is non-negotiable. It’s not about us—or our pocketbooks. It’s about our children. If we commit our all to initiate them at the opening of their paths, when they’re grown, they’ll walk in productive, prosperous, and healthy ways.

Substance, Not Size

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities… For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good. (Romans 13.1,3)

This election will mark the ninth time I’ve voted for president. If memory serves correctly—and I’m fairly confident it does—the size of government has been hotly debated in every contest. The candidates play to their parties’ predispositions, promising big cuts and less interference on one hand and more effective use of spending and power on the other. When elected, rarely does either side live up to its promises. And that shouldn’t surprise us, because candidates enter office with no way of knowing the challenges they’ll face. When the hoopla dissipates and the real business of running the nation takes hold, size is a phantom issue. Leaders—if they’re wise—do what must be done; expedience drives policy, not the other way around. So we should ask ourselves if all of this wrangling over size is worth the effort. Is there a better question? For believers, there is.

In Romans 13, Paul couldn’t be clearer that Christians are to respect to their leaders. This had to be tough for the Romans to swallow. At the time of his writing, they’d survived Caligula, were dealing with Claudius, and would soon endure severe persecution under Nero. Given their distrust of Caesar, Paul’s admonition that they “be subject to the governing authorities” had to sound nuts. And one struggles to imagine they found solace in his reasoning. “For there is no authority except from God,” he writes, “and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” (v1-2) Equating submission to Caesar with obedience to God’s will—and threatening judgment for resisters, no less—sure sounds like a catch-22, a real lose-lose proposition.

What do we do with this? Can we toss it out with Paul’s other cranky bits—his misogyny, for example, or comfort with slavery? Not really. Paul’s doctrine is deeply rooted in faith in God’s sovereignty above all. God sanctions human government as the penultimate authority, reserving final say for God’s Self. Without a doubt, many rulers abuse power and visit great suffering on their nations. But Paul focuses our attention on God’s intentions and our obligation to honor them. Verse 3 tells us, “For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you wish to have no fear of authority? Then do what is good.” When we see leaders defy this ideal, promoting bad conduct rather than good, Paul’s words are no easier for us to swallow than for the Romans.

Again, what do we do with this? We are exponentially more fortunate than the Romans. We are free to choose the authorities who govern us. Thus, as believers, we should first question the substance of those we elect. Can we trust them to be “not a terror to good conduct, but to bad”? Will we be able to live out our faith while complying with their principles and policies? For believers endowed with democratic privilege, substance, not size, is the deciding factor. If we let substance guide our choice, we’ll have no reason to fear those we elect.