Immigrant Faith--September 7, 2021

Immigrant Faith--September 7, 2021

"By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going.  By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise." [Hebrews 11:8-9]

So, here's one of those obvious Bible facts that we should probably spend more time thinking about than we currently do:  the man to whom both Christianity and Judaism look back as their founding ancestor of faith (and Islam as well, if you want to be technical about it) never owned the land he lived on. Abraham immigrated from his home country and just went to make a new life in a new country, with no authorization, no documentation, no legal right, and no demonstrable claim--and raised his children and grandchildren to do the same--all solely on the belief that God was leading him there.

I don't want to derail our conversation here into a policy discussion of the complexities of contemporary immigration policy in the United States, a subject about which I will not pretend to be an expert in at all.  About such a thorny and nuanced subject, I can only suggest as a pastor and student of the Scriptures that people who claim to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would do well to make sure that their policies would not have sent Abraham away if he showed up in our community tomorrow.  And indeed, the Scriptures do have repeated and crystal-clear commandments from God that we are to provide for the needs of foreigners without qualification, to welcome immigrants as though receiving Christ himself, and to remember that either we or our ancestors (or both) were strangers at one time.

But for now, I want us to follow the train of thought that the writer of Hebrews has traced for us, and to look at immigrant Abraham as a model of living faith for us.  We who reside in the same place for long periods of time, who live with mortgage payments or monthly rent and lease agreements, we have much to learn from the lives of Abraham and Sarah, and modern day immigrants as well, because of their willingness to stake their lives on a hope they cannot see yet.  I have been thinking a great deal these days about the courage of those Afghan families and individuals who have had their lives thrown into chaos in recent weeks, and who have nothing to start over from scratch in a new place, except the hope that they can build a new life.  Or the many people over decades who crossed over land and sea to come here in hopes of creating a better life for their children.  It takes a great deal of courage to go forward step by step into a future you can't see, simply on the promise that there is a home waiting for you.  And for us whose lives are more predictable and patterned, we may not really know what it is to have to build your life on that kind of promise.  When I head home at the end of a work day, I know there is a building where I can bring my children to eat, to rest, and to sleep; I know there will be a safe place to wake up in when the sun rises. I don't have the daily demand on me to step forward on a journey, because my daily routine brings me right back to the door where I started when I left the house.  

I need to learn from the lived experience of our migrant ancestors, like Abraham and Sarah,  Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and his family--they had to trust day by day, not only that there would be provision for their daily needs, but that the living God was really leading them on this journey and was actually taking them somewhere.  We who practice our faith in century-old buildings under respectable steeples and who reminisce (or grouse) about "how we've always done things" need to listen to the lives of sojourners and migrants like Abraham and Sarah and their descendants who rely on God's guidance day by day and who takes us to new destinations rather than leaving us in the familiar.  We who are used to routine may need to recover a sense of faith as a daring adventure, rather than a pious rut we just can't get out of.  And I suspect we need to recapture our awareness that the point, the goal, of faith isn't to make God prop up the predictability of life-as-we-know-it or to underwrite our illusions of self-sufficiency, but to lead us in new directions, trusting that the One who leads us will give us daily bread along the way.

That's at least part of why we tell the stories of Abraham and Sarah and all their immigrant progeny--so that we whose lives are in so many ways different (and so often, more complacent) compared to those ancestors in faith can learn again how to live by faith rather than mere routine, and to rely on God rather than to take God for granted like a piece of living room furniture.  We tell their stories so that we might mean the words of the well-worn prayer from the Vespers liturgy and make them our own:

"O God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand is leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord."