Strangers in the Mirror

Strangers in the Mirror--February 20, 2019

"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." [Deuteronomy 10:17-19]

God always has a way of making us look ourselves in the eye in the mirror.  

That might just be one of the critical ways you know you are dealing with the living God and not an idol or an illusion: the false gods never make us take so honest a look at ourselves as to make us uncomfortable.  It is not in the interests of the idols to have us see the truth about ourselves, after all.

But one of the thing that the God of Sarah and Abraham, of Rebekah and Isaac, and of Jacob and Moses and Miriam is well known for in the Scriptures is compelling those who claim to be the people of God to see their own stories honestly and without convenient omissions.

And that means remembering that the story of Israel begins--even before they have that name--with a bunch of wandering migrants seeking refuge in a land that is not their own.  The people of Israel start their story as the foreigners--the "stranger," to use the language of Deuteronomy.  In other words, the group that comes to see itself as "the insiders" who have special and exclusive closeness to God actually start their story as a loose collection of "outsiders" who go to Egypt because the previous land they had been squatting on was out of food.

Let's get that much of the story clear, because God here in Deuteronomy is unapologetically blunt about that.  You know how the story goes: not only had God's voice out of the blue called to Abraham and Sarah (before they were going by those new names), summoning them to leave their own country to go to a new one, Canaan, in which they had no roots, no business, no legal stake, and no family ties, but then Abraham's grandson and great-grandchildren later found themselves starving for food in Canaan.  And that extended family--really a collection of families that argued with each other a lot and occasionally sold each other into slavery if they didn't get along with someone--goes to the wealthy, prosperous, and abundant country across the border.  Jacob and his kids go to Egypt. They had first come there just to ask for the chance to get access to some grain when a famine hit and they had no way to provide food for themselves back in Canaan (which, again, wasn't even their land yet, but was still basically land they were squatting on as they wandered from place to place).  And their long lost brother Joseph persuades the Pharaoh at the time to let all of his family stay, all out of the sheer good-will that Joseph has built up with Pharaoh himself.  The descendants of Jacob--sometimes call the Hebrews--settle down in the best of the land with Pharaoh nodding approval, and they build lives there, having been welcomed as strangers and foreigners, and keeping their own lives, culture, stories, and faith in the God of Abraham and Sarah.

But when a new Pharaoh appears on the scene, he is overcome by fear--fear of the growing number of these foreigners living on his land and within his borders, and fear of losing his power.  Pharaoh whips up the population of Egypt and peddles the fear all around, and decides that the only way to reclaim Egypt's greatness and to secure its power is to turn these foreigners into slaves.  And there they live... and die... and raise their children... with their bodies enslaved to Pharaoh.  Pharaoh never let them be considered a part of Egypt--they were always "those foreigners, the Hebrews," the "other."  And that's what made it so easy, so terribly, horribly easy, to keep them enslaved.  No one in Egypt wants to risk their own livelihood, their own comfortable gig, to stick their neck out for one of "those people." And as long as Pharaoh could succeed in peddling the fear that "those Hebrew foreigners are going to overwhelm us and overpower our way of life from within," the system of slavery would continue.  So this band of foreigners who had once been welcomed with open arms now becomes the dangerous "other" who had to be controlled and kept down, all for the sake of keeping Egypt great.

Now, if you know how the rest of that story goes, one day, generations and generations after Jacob's children all settled down as welcome guests, the same God who had first called Abraham to leave his country of origin moved again and raised up a liberator, Moses, who went toe to toe with Pharaoh and led the people out of slavery in Egypt, and on the journey once again as strangers, foreigners, and sojourners, to the land that awaited them on the horizon.  And there on the journey, in the wilderness where they were once again without a country, God gave them the instruction for how to be a free people that we sometimes call "the Law," or in Hebrew, "the Torah."  The Torah includes such greatest hits as "Do not murder," and "Do not steal," and "No other gods before me," and also the commandments about sabbath year, debt cancellation, loving your neighbor as yourself, and all sorts of curious rules about animals they could and could not eat.  But woven throughout the Torah is this recurring reminder that was the foundation for all of Israel's self-understanding:  "You know what it was like to be the unwelcomed abused foreigner--so now you are called upon to welcome and treat foreigners well."

This underlying idea is core to the Law of Moses--it is the story in the background as God gives the Ten Commandments (yeah, remember that: the Ten Commandments don't just start off with listing rules, but with God reminding the people that he had just freed them from being mistreated as slaves in Egypt).  It is the recurring refrain throughout the Torah: "you were the strangers once, and you know what it is like to be the object of fear, manipulation, and hatred, and so you should know not to do those things to others."  And the flip side was also true: the Hebrews knew in their collective memory what it was like to be the migrants seeking a better life when there were food shortages back home, and to be welcomed in to a safe and prosperous new country with no questions asked.  They knew what it was like to be the "other" and to be welcomed, as well as what it was like to be the "other" and mistreated.  So God commands them to let that memory guide their actions from then on.

God, in other words, compels those who call themselves the people of God to look in the mirror of their own history and to see that they were once the vilified foreigners, they were once seen as the dangerous outsiders, and they were the ones once exploited by a fearful Pharaoh in the name of keeping Egypt great.  God reminds them, in other words, that caring for foreigners, strangers, and wandering migrants should be in their spiritual DNA, because they know what it was like to be shunned, scapegoated, and enslaved.

And then God goes one step further, as we see here in Deuteronomy.  God takes the side of foreigners, strangers, and "the other," too.  God doesn't just command the Israelites to be good to the foreigners who show up in their towns or at their doors.  God says, in effect "I choose to care for them, too--that's why I'm commanding you to do the same."  God chooses to provide for the needs of "the stranger," the foreigner, and the outsider.  There are no further conditions here--there is no rule that these "strangers" have to get in a line or fill out paperwork; there is no insistence that they learn Hebrew or even worship the God of Israel.  The identity, the story, and the background of these foreigners is not a factor in the equation--it is simply God saying, "You know what it was like to have pled for mercy when you were hungry in Canaan and sought refuge in Egypt, and you know what it was like to have been mistreated and made into a public enemy under a rotten Pharaoh, too.  So treat other foreigners with the kindness you wish you had been given when you were enslaved."  The theoretical "worthiness" of future foreigners and strangers who come to the towns of Israel is not a factor, at least according to Deuteronomy.

It is a difficult thing, to be honest, to stare our own history in the face.  It is a difficult thing to be reminded of how mercy and grace were shown to our ancestors once upon a time.  It is a difficult thing, too, to hear God call us on it and say, "If you know what it is like to be the outsider and the other, then treat the outsider and the other who crosses your path with the same decency you wish had been given to you."

Every time the children of Israel read their own Scriptures, they were reminded that their story was one of being foreigners in one scene after another--Canaan, Egypt, Babylon, and so on.  And in the times when they were the settled ones, they were called to live in light of that history.  Well, here's the thing for any of us who call ourselves Christians--we have taken these same Scriptures as our adopted story, too.   When I look at myself in the mirror, I don't see an American or a Pennsylvania first--I am dared to remind myself that I am incorporated into a story of foreigners, strangers, and sojourners who found welcome sometimes and found abuse at other times.  And I am dared to count those wandering Arameans as my own ancestors, so that I, too, will regard the "other" with as much love as the living God does.

If we dare to call ourselves the people of God, the real and living God will make us remember that part of our story, even when we do not want to remember it.

Lord God, give us the courage to look into the mirror of our past and remember who we are, how you have loved us through being outsiders, and to show the same love to the "stranger" that you have for strangers, sojourners, foreigners, and wanderers.