Welcome the Stranger

In 2008 my husband, younger daughter and I visited our son Matthew in the northern reaches of Guatemala. He was serving his second year with the Peace Corps in a region ravaged by civil war, drug trafficking, erosion and mud slides. His primary missions were to help replant treacherous slopes and explore possible tourist income tracking birds endemic to that region or leading hikes up Guatemala's highest slopes. 

While we were there, members of his community joined in serving a feast of welcome: multiple chickens cooked over an open fire, dozens of tortillas made from corn ground just that morning. My daughter and I practiced our very-limited Spanish while we learned to flatten balls of tortilla dough. Matthew and Whitney (my husband) joined others to position tables, gather chairs from nearby homes and keep the fires going. 

Over the extended midday meal there were multiple speeches, all translated by our son. Speeches about how happy the village was to have him. Speeches about the honor to host a family like ours, the first gringo family to visit the town in recent memory. 

But the speech I remember most was from Matthew's landlord, a respected farmer and community leader He expressed his welcome, as he had in other ways in the days before, but then the speech took a different turn. He noted that he, and others of the town, had spent time in the United States. Sometimes as seasonal guest workers, harvesting crops. Sometimes for longer periods, digging ditches, laboring in construction. 

"No one ever invited us to dinner, No one made us a meal. No one made us feel welcome."

Matthew, a gifted translator, matched the energy and expression of his host. The
local listeners were quiet and watchful as the words were said in Spanish, then in English. We nodded, sadly. What else could we do? And the event continued, with more food, more talk, but a note of sadness sitting at the core. 

I was reminded then, as I am now, of the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:

When the Son of Man comes in his glory with all his angels, he will sit on his royal throne. The people of all nations will be brought before him, and he will separate them, as shepherds separate their sheep from their goats. He will place the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the king will say to those on his right, “My father has blessed you! Come and receive the kingdom that was prepared for you before the world was created. When I was hungry, you gave me something to eat, and when I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I was a stranger, you welcomed me, and when I was naked, you gave me clothes to wear. When I was sick, you took care of me, and when I was in jail, you visited me.”

Then the ones who pleased the Lord will ask, “When did we give you something to eat or drink? When did we welcome you as a stranger or give you clothes to wear or visit you while you were sick or in jail?”

The king will answer, “Whenever you did it for any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you did it for me.”

Then the king will say to those on his left, “Get away from me! You are under God's curse. Go into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels! I was hungry, but you did not give me anything to eat, and I was thirsty, but you did not give me anything to drink. I was a stranger, but you did not welcome me, and I was naked, but you did not give me any clothes to wear. I was sick and in jail, but you did not take care of me.”

Then the people will ask, “Lord, when did we fail to help you when you were hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in jail?”

The king will say to them, “Whenever you failed to help any of my people, no matter how unimportant they seemed, you failed to do it for me.”

Then Jesus said, “Those people will be punished forever. But the ones who pleased God will have eternal life.”

I'm not sure that passage should be taken as proof-text for everlasting fire or other spiritual realities, although that's often how it's read. Instead, I think it should be taken as a clear statement by Jesus that his followers can be known by the way they welcome strangers. All strangers. Hungry, naked, thirsty strangers. Sick, imprisoned strangers. That's how we show our love for Jesus himself, the God who himself was hungry, naked, thirsty, and imprisoned. 

I'm thankful that I've always been part of churches where immigrants are welcome. My understanding of the Christian faith has been shaped by people from other continents. 

The first church Whitney and I joined in our early marriage befriended a network of Hmong refugees, recently arrived from the hill country of Laos and Northern Vietnam. They were part of a wave of asylum seekers who had worked with the US during the Vietnam War. The Refugee Act of 1980, signed by President Jimmy Carter on March 17, 1980, finally allowed families to join the Hmong spies who had escaped as Vietnam fell. Some of those families joined our church in Philadelphia and were an active part of our church life until most relocated to Wisconsin and Minnesota. 

During those same years another refugee landed in our church. His name was Hudson. He had escaped the bloody slaughter led by Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator responsible for the death of over 300,000 of his countrymen. Hudson's family had been killed, but somehow as a teenager he found his way across borders to Philadelphia. We got to know him over Sunday lunches I helped organize every week in the church fellowship hall. When he heard I had a plot at a coop garden blocks from our church, he asked if he could help me dig and plant, and eventually joined us at our home to enjoy dinners made from the harvest. 

Hudson and our Hmong friends were about the same age as Whitney and me, young adults in our early twenties. Yet how different our journeys. They chose not to talk of the refugee camps where they'd been held, the dangerous border crossings. They didn't share the painful stories of war and death and loss. Instead, they asked for help on practical things: how to find jobs, apartments, medical care, fabric, tools, special foods. 

A decade later I did hear stories from other refugee friends:

Tran, whose daughter was in my Brownie troop, became trained to help lead our Brownie campouts. When the girls were asleep in their tents, she and I sat by the campfire, where she told me stories of life in Vietnam during the war. She was in Saigon the day it fell, then spent years in a refugee camp. She was a practical, matter-of-fact person, but sometimes she would pause in her stories, as if the memories overwhelmed her. As if there was still so much sadness and terror she would need decades more to find courage to tell the full story. 

Another mom was from an undisclosed Arab country. Her family had fled under a regime change and established a business in a neighboring country. There, their windows were broken and storefront ransacked because of ethnic prejudice, so they fled again. And again. Her young family had been in refugee camps in several countries before somehow gaining status to relocate to the US. Her daughters were now in school consistently for the first time. They were all finally beginning to feel safe. She was grateful. Grateful that they were welcome. Grateful that my daughter would be friends with hers. Grateful that I would invite her for coffee, and visit her home in return. 

There have been times in US history when immigration laws worked well, when refugees had a clear path toward legal status, and when most Americans understood the economic and social benefits of welcome and inclusion. 

There have also been ugly times of prejudice, anger and violence toward newcomers, and seasons when our immigration laws defied common sense, our own economic well-being and the international rule of law. 

We are in one of those seasons now. Immigration reforms have been blocked for years, caught in partisan accusation. Meanwhile, a steady stream of refugees is turned away in defiance of scripture and international law. 

The heartache for me is how many celebrating razor wire on the Texas border and blocking constructive immigration reform are people who claim to follow Jesus. 

Of course nations have a right to secure borders. Of course the US can't be the final destination of every troubled person around the troubled globe. 

That's where the arguments immediately go. 

I'd suggest we start elsewhere: with Jesus' comments in Matthew 25.

And with an informed understanding of what the issues are, who is blocking solutions and a refusal to be exploited by fear or prejudice. 

For anyone who wants to do as Jesus asks us, some starting places:

• The Evangelical Immigration Table
• Matthew 25 Project: Immigration: A Biblical and Theolgoical Reflection
• Migration Policy Institute: Immigration Has Been a Defining, Often Contentious, Element Throughout U.S. History

Some earlier posts on immigration:

• Walls, Welcome, Mercy, Law,  August 28, 2016
• Epiphany and Filoxenia: Entertaining Angels, January 4, 2015

Pay attention. Tell about it.

 

   Instructions for living a life:
     Pay attention.
     Be astonished.
     Tell about it. (Mary Oliver)

On my way to take the kitchen scraps to our compost pile this morning, I noticed an intricate highway of tracks crisscrossing our back yard. I spent a few minutes following them, trying to sort out the creators, then came in and spent some time on-line, googling animal tracks.

Apparently there are less deer in the yard than I thought, but with more ways in and out than I imagined. The red fox that leaves its scat along the border of our back path is still coming and going, but I hadn’t realized how easily it squeezed through a narrow place in the neighbor’s fence. And it looks like a raccoon has been visiting the locust tree nearest the compost pile, apparently with short side trips to see what’s available for dinner.

The squirrels and birds skate across the top of the snow, leaving delicate tracings of tiny prints. Our cat, Princess Fiona, rarely walks in snow, but she’s left a few tracks, near the edge of the house, where her path leads her deeper than she’d like to go.

How is it that I’ve been living here for over thirteen years, and never seen animal tracks in the snow? And how is that I’ve lived over half a century, and never noticed how weird deer tracks are? I’d heard they have cloven hooves, but had never really seen what that meant.

One of the books I’m reading this year is Barbara Taylor Brown’s An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. Her premise is that by consigning faith to church and overtly religious practices, we miss much of what God is doing in the world around us. As she says, “In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

One of the practices Taylor Brown offers is “the practice of paying attention.” For Taylor Brown, attention is closely linked to reverence: an awareness that we are not all there is. We’re not the center of the universe. We aren’t God. We’re part of God’s creation.

Annie Dillard, a strong practitioner of paying attention, caught my own attention when I was sophomore in college. I picked up Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her Pultizer Prize winning account of a year spent stalking muskrat, beauty, and God Himself, in the hills and woods around Tinker Creek, in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. I was intrigued by her attention to detail, her willingness to wait, and watch, to look beyond the disturbance on the water’s surface to see what was happening beneath.

I remember being entranced with Dillard’s desire to see God at work in his creation, to know his character through the reality of nature’s complexity and abundance. Trees, leaves, bugs, shells were all clues for her, of an invisible, powerful hand at work, through intricate processes, unexplained purposes. After pages describing textures of bird feathers, tree bark, various kinds of rocks, she paused to wonder:

“What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which I have been set down? The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knowk, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”

But seeing takes time. Even reading about seeing takes time. Taylor Brown laments this: "No one has time for this, of course. No one has time to lie on the deck watching stars, or to wonder how one’s hand came to be, or to see the soul of a stranger walking by. Small wonder we are short on reverence. 

The artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who became famous for her sensuous paintings of flowers, explained her success by saying ‘In a way, nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small, we haven’t time – and to see takes time . . . ‘”

It takes time to see animal tracks in snow, or how a flower is constructed, or what a friend might be thinking.

It also takes time to see where God might be working, to understand where he might be leading.

It’s interesting to me how much of scripture assumes an understanding of nature: descriptions of trees planted by rivers of water; psalms describing sun, moon, stars, weather, a vast array of living creatures, and what they tell us about God’s glory and power; prophecies suggesting that the health of creation is a reflection of our obedience or disobedience to God’s call; Jesus’ parables of wheat, vines, birds, flowers.

Is it possible to really hear God speak when we’re moving so fast we can’t even hear each other? Is it possible to understand what he’s doing when we’re moving too fast to see his hand in creation?
Jesus said “Consider the ravens: They do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!

He also said “Consider how the wild flowers grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.”

I went to Strong’s lexicon to see what I could find out about that word “consider.” The Greek word, katanoeÑw, means “to perceive, remark, observe, understand, to consider attentively, fix one's eyes or mind upon." In other words, pay attention.

I’ve had time lately to consider ravens, crows, flowers, butterflies, small children, tracks in the snow. And it occurs to me: when Jesus said “consider,” he didn’t mean “grab my point and move on fast.” He meant “slow down, examine, study, then follow the example of” things dear to him, parts of his creation that reflect his values, his care. That list includes ravens. Wild flowers.

Jesus said “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.” As a birdwatcher, I’ve discovered that sparrows are among the most difficult to identify, the most time-consuming of birds. If you want to get to know sparrows, you’re going to have to hunker down somewhere and wait. Many birders write them off as “LBJ”s, little brown jobs, the least interesting, least important, hardest to identify. I’m still struggling to learn them.

Yet Jesus says even sparrows are of interest to God. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.”

As we pay attention, we find ourselves drawn closer to God, his provision beyond imagining, the grandeur of his vision, and the amazing reality that the God of the universe pays attention to our needs. Our own intentions are set in perspective; his plan for us gains focus and clarity.

Consider the sparrows. The ravens. The flowers no one planted. It takes time, yet just the change of focus can make it time well spent, an avenue into closer fellowship with God, and an occasion for deeper, more honest praise and prayer.

Praying
     It doesn’t have to be
     the blue iris, it could be
     weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
     small stones; just
     pay attention, then patch
     a few words together and don’t try
     to make them elaborate, this isn’t
     a contest but the doorway
     into thanks, and a silence in which
     another voice may speak. (Mary Oliver)

Dreaming Beloved Community

I spent most of my childhood in the house my grandfather built. He was a first-generation Italian immigrant who arrived on Ellis Island in 1906 at the age of three. No birth certificate, no papers, just a weary mother and a 10-month-old sister. Maybe. The records are sketchy. HIs father and older brother arrived sometime before them.

He worked as a young man in a railroad shop, then in construction. He was a determined lifelong Democrat, in favor of unions, immigrants, and John F. Kennedy, the country's first Catholic president. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering "I Have a Dream"
at the 1963 Civil Rights March. Public Domain

I was small when I first heard Martin Luther King Junior's voice on my grandfather's transistor radio. He carried it around the house or propped it against his car when he was working in the garage. Baseball games were his top listening choice, but I can remember the drone of newscasters and the crackle of political speeches. When my grandfather stopped what he was doing to listen, I could sense something important. 

I was seven when King gave his most famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I'm not sure I heard it that day, but for sure sometime soon after. The cadence of that speech, and its echo of scriptures I'd heard in church, helped shape my heart and future. 

King was talking about race, but more than race. I had felt the sting of division, from neighbors not happy to have an Italian immigrant on their block. And from parents uneasy when their children befriended a child whose parents were inexplicably missing. I'd had people make jokes about my name (Capra. It means goat in Italian. But that's not where most jokes landed.) And I'd fielded awkward questions: where did you say your parents are? When did you say they'd be back? If it's rude to stay silent in the face of adult questioning, I fear I sometimes was rude. 

My youngest uncle was a high school classmate of Michael Schwerner, one of the three civil rights activists who vanished in Mississippi the summer I was eight. The mystery of Schwerner's disappearance rippled through our town for the 44 days of uncertainty, then exploded into grief when their bodies were found in an earthen dam. Schwerner was 24. James Earl Chaney was 21. Andrew Goodman was 20. 

In our town, civil rights questions were immediate and ever-present. I was eleven when I started junior high in the same school Schwerner and my uncle had attended. Four elementary schools funneled into that school. At that time, two were mostly wealthy and white. One was more heavily immigrant and Italian. One was African American. As students converged in one old brick building, lines were drawn all around us. Some were visible, like the stairways claimed by different groups, or the sections of the cafeteria where only some were welcome. Some lines were less visible: girls who had been my closest friends pretended they didn't know me when they realized my last name was Italian. Students walking to the chalkboard in class took odd detours to avoid walking past students who might whisper invectives, or stick out a leg to trip them. 

Bomb scares, rumbles, fights in the hallway. Night games were cancelled. Police patrolled the edges of afternoon football games. Dances were suspended. 

One day there were rumors that some students in the high school one town over had taken over the school and locked all the classroom doors, holding fellow students hostage.  Some on the lowest floor jumped out the windows and went home. Others were part of an all-day standoff. My church was once in the center of that town, torn down by the urban renewal that scattered the poor, smashed minority communities and left a simmering discontent. 

My sharpest memory from the days after Martin Luther King was assassinated is the moment of silence in my art class. The teacher asked us to stand at our tables for a minute to honor and remember. Some students stood grudgingly. Some rolled their eyes. 

My memory is of the boy on the other side of the large, square table we shared with two other students. He was African-American, a friendly, funny kid who seemed oblivious to the divisions, the quiet slurs, the not-quite-hidden hostilities. During times when we worked on our drawings or murals he entertained us with stories, jokes, bits of song. When other kids told him to shut up, he'd smile, wink and say "Shut don't GO up." Then go on with his stories. 

Just remembering him makes me smile. But that day, the day of the moment of silence, he stood at stark attention, stared straight ahead, and let the tears roll down his face. His unembarrassed sorrow spread through the room: sadness, shame, the weight of a history we had no way to cure. The teacher let the silence linger. When we all went back to our work, it was with a deeper sense of what was lost, and what it cost us all. 

King's dream was rooted in America's founding documents:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

Even more, it was rooted in the scriptures he knew and memorized:

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'

I've posted about King before:

• about his sense of call, the work of hope and his prophetic vision: Acorns, King, Beloved Community, January 20, 2014
• about his dream, setbacks and the inauguration of Barack Obama: Still Dreaming, January 15, 2017

I am certain that we are all called to some part of the work of reconciliation he envisioned. We're all called to help break down the invisible walls of division, to invite and welcome and value those different from ourselves.

As we listen, dream, hope, pray, we may find ourselves called to do even more. That's been true for me. 

Here's an interesting discussion about the way King's dream led him deeper into faith and deeper into action: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Soul of Leadership. If you've heard the voices discounting King because he fell short of moral perfection, be sure to read the comments on that, especially the reflection on the example of King David. 

We live in a divided world, still struggling with the heritage of slavery and racial oppression, still thinking some voices are more valid than others. Our daily choices and conversations can bring us closer to King's dream, closer to that beloved community King described in a conference address in 1957: The Role of the Church in Facing the Nation's Moral Dilemma:

The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. The type of love that I stress here is not eros, a sort of esthetic or romantic love; not philia, a sort of reciprocal love between personal friends; but it is agape, which is understanding goodwill for all men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God working in the lives of men. This is the love that may well be the salvation of our civilization.

Rachel Weeping

I'm normally really good at compartmentalizing. 

I acknowledge grief or anger as I read my morning scripture, pray and journal while I finish my coffee, then set feelings aside as I move on with my day. 

Some days, though, those feelings follow me through the day. Yesterday, January 6, was such a day.

I kept remembering the strangeness of January 6, 2021, playing back bits of conversations with family members who wished they could have been there, who admire others who made the journey, who think an assault on our government was a high point of Christian witness. 

Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea,
Tuscany, ca 1260

I found myself puzzling over the way Donald Trump emboldened bad behavior in other world leaders, grieving the ongoing war in Ukraine, the horrors still unfolding in Israel and Gaza. 

From there it wasn't far to lamenting the continuing tragedies at our southern border, now the world's deadliest land route for migrants.

Yesterday was Epiphany, the day liturgical churches commemorate the magi traveling to follow the star that led to Bethlehem. Normally Epiphany reminds me of light: the bright star in the darkness, the wise men carrying unexpected gifts.

This year I found myself in a darker place, thinking instead about Herod, the petty tyrant the magi visited as they traveled in search of the new-born king. I found myself thinking of the part of the Christmas story we intentionally omit when we talk about the star and shepherds and magi and angels. 

When we enact our annual Christmas Eve family pageant, we always end with Matthew 2:1-12. The magi arrive in Jerusalem, asking "Where is the One who has been born King of the Jews? We saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him.” 

The scribes, remembering the prophecy of Micah 5:2, point them toward Bethlehem, where they find Jesus and leave their gifts, then, warned by an angel, travel home by a different route. My son and two grandsons act as shepherds then magi, with paper crowns from the English Christmas crackers supplied by our English in-laws. 

We end our pageant with the first verse of "We Three Kings," then head for Christmas cookies and eggnog. 

But the story doesn't end there. The next six verses should be required reading in every church, every year, if only to shape our hearts on questions of immigration: 

When the Magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up!” he said. “Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him.”

So he got up, took the Child and His mother by night, and withdrew to Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”

When Herod saw that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was filled with rage. Sending orders, he put to death all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, according to the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was spoken through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children,
and refusing to be comforted,

because they are no more.”

No one knows how many children were slaughtered in Bethlehem. There's no historical record, but plenty of evidence attesting to other ruthless murders initiated by Herod to maintain control and eliminate competitors. 

We may also never know for sure how many children have died at the US border, or in the bloody attacks in Israel and Gaza. 

I haven't read much by Brian Zahnd, but have heard friends speak of him, and stumbled on his blog while thinking about those slaughtered children, and the refugee baby carried into Egypt. In The Slaughter of the Innocents: The Dark Side of Christmas (December 28, 2018), Zahnd says:

history books tell us that most of civilization has been lived in the time of kings like Herod — that is, in the time of tyrant kings. I’m talking about the time of Herod, the time of Pharaoh, the time of Nebuchadnezzar, the time of Augustus, the time of Nero, all the way into modern times — the time of Hitler and Mussolini, the time of Franco and Salazar, the time of Pinochet and Putin. It’s tragically true that most people have lived their lives in the time of tyrant kings. 

The post is worth reading for more background on Herod, an explanation of the reference to Rachel, and the geograhic proximity of Bethlehem and Jerusalem. 

As Zahnd reminds us, there have always been tyrant kings, ready to sacrifice others to preserve their own power. 

There have always been refugees fleeing tyrants and war. 

There has always been darkness, and danger, and death. 

But that's not the end of the story. I find hope in Zahnd's conclusion:

Jesus’ invasion by birth into the dark time of tyrant kings gives us a choice: we can trust in the armed brutality of violent power or we can trust in the naked vulnerability of love. It seems like an absurd choice, but only one of these ways is the Jesus way. We have to choose between the old way of Caesar and the new way of Christ. It’s the choice between the sword and the cross. We have to decide if we’ll pledge our allegiance to the Empire of Power or the Empire of Love, but we can’t do both.

Following the Jesus way of loving enemies and doing good to those who hate us isn’t necessarily safe and it doesn’t mean we won’t ever get hurt, but it does mean the darkness won’t prevail.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Massacre of the Innocents
Belgium, ca 1565

 Earlier Epiphany posts:

What the Magi Found, Dec 28, 2011 (on mystery, faith, poetry)
Balaam's Oracle, Magis' Star, Jan 5, 2014 (on a talking ass and other strange events)
Epiphany and Filoxenia, Jan 4, 2015 (on refugees and strangers)
A Jungle Gym Epiphany, Jan 10, 2016 (on belief and unbelief)
Epiphany: Power and Prayer, Jan 8, 2017 (new year thoughts on evil and the call to live as agents of light)

You can read Zahnd's full post here: The Slaughter of the Innocents: The Dark Side of Christmas.