Encountering the Stranger: Immigrants and Memory

Transcription

1 Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:14-30 Encountering the Stranger: Immigrants and Memory A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA On February 14 th, 2016 Today I begin a series of sermons for Lent based on encountering the stranger. I chose the theme before I knew that our non-reformed brother the Pope would make heeding the call of prophets to reach out in compassion to the other, the poor, and those in pain, the focus of his Lenten message. I chose the theme because our Session, inspired first by a concern for violence perpetrated against Christians in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, adopted a resolution against violence back in April of last year. That resolution challenges us, among other things, to undertake actions consistent with breaking down the barriers between ourselves and persons who might be wrongly considered the other, such as engaging in conversation, or joining at table, or providing support to persons holding religious beliefs, and/or of ethnicities, and/or of nationalities other than our own. If Lent is a time to take on spiritual discipline, that s not a bad one to take on. The assigned Old Testament reading for today is from the book of Deuteronomy. It is a command from God to the Israelites for them, after they settle in the land of Canaan, to give of their first fruits in a thanksgiving offering to God. Listen for what they are called to say and to call to mind when they do so (when they practice stewardship) and how they are called to share with immigrants among them. When you hear the word aliens, hear immigrants. When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for God s name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us. When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and God brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me. You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house. The assigned Gospel reading for today is Luke s description of Jesus temptation in the wilderness, but I want to read the passage that immediately follows that story. It was actually assigned for a few weeks ago, when we were snowed out. Jesus comes to his hometown of Nazareth on the Sabbath and there he reads scripture from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah that said, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord s favor. Then Jesus says, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. And all goes well, he is well received, until Jesus begins to explain what that means with these words, beginning in verse 24.

2 Listen now for God s word: Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet s home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Sometime in the late 1800 s, a Swedish man named Charles (at least that s what he was called after he arrived here) boarded a ship in Stockholm to come to the United States. Charles came through Ellis Island, then went on to upstate New York to work on a farm with his cousin. The two men went to a dance one cold winter evening, and between getting sweaty at the dance and cold in the night air, Charles cousin caught pneumonia and died. An unscrupulous undertaker, knowing that Charles Carlson knew very little English and wasn t aware of the customs here, told him he had to pay for the burial and took him for all the money he had. Not sure what to do next, Charles set off on foot for Chicago from upstate New York and walked all the way there. He went to Chicago because he knew he had some other relatives there. From there he moved out to a little town north and west of the city and set up a farm, which became a fairly prosperous one as farms went back then. Charles became a respected farmer his neighbors all knew him as Honest Charlie, because he never told a lie. Charles had two special rules. One, no speaking Swedish, even in the house because if you don t speak English somebody will cheat you. And two, don t dance, because you might die. That s the story I ve always been told. You see, Charles Carlson, a wandering immigrant Swede, was my greatgrandfather. I do well to remember his story. The ancient Israelites, once they had become settled in the land of Canaan, were charged to remember something very important. It was a truth meant to be fundamental to their identity, and determinative of the way they treated others. The truth was this: They were descendants of an immigrant a wandering Aramean named Abraham and his wife Sarah. Abraham was the grandfather of Jacob and great-grandfather of Joseph and his brothers (all of whom went to Egypt in the midst of a famine). There in Egypt over a few centuries they grew in number which disturbed the Pharaoh who oppressed them and put them to hard labor. Hundreds of years later, God led their descendants out of Egypt and through the wilderness to Canaan. This was part of their story. They were supposed to never forget that they had been the newbies, the outsiders, once. So they were specifically instructed not to oppress the aliens who were residing among them. Moreover, they were instructed to share their bounty. A wandering Aramean was the Israelites ancestor, and two wandering Swedes and some German and English men and women were my ancestors. What about you? Spiritually, of course, we are all connected to the family tree of that Aramean, either naturally or through being grafted into it. But there is not a person in this room today who is not a descendant of a more recent immigrant than the man from Aram (which is what Syria came to be called in Biblical times) that is, unless you are an immigrant or a temporary visitor to this country yourself.

3 At some point in the last four centuries, you or people in your family tree came to this land from elsewhere either freely or in chains from England, Korea, Hungary, Cuba, Africa, Japan, Scotland, Italy, Lebanon, Germany, Argentina, Croatia or somewhere in Scandinavia, just to name a few places. Many of us come from a hodgepodge of ethnic backgrounds. We are descendants of immigrants from various nations. In my case, Sweden, Germany, and England. How easy it can be to forget that when we think about how we treat those who seek a home or at least a temporary refuge in this country. By the way, that is a deeply spiritual issue. Elsewhere in Deuteronomy, which is ostensibly addressed to the Israelites right before they enter the land of Canaan, it says: 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 the immigrants providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. In the New Testament, Jesus, who was chased out of Nazareth for suggesting that God loved the Syrian Naaman and the widow of Zarephath in Sidon just as much as the Israelites, tells the disciples the story of the king separating the sheep from the goats, based on how they treated him. To the sheep he says, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, hungry and thirsty and sick and in prison and you took care of me. They asked, When did we see you and do this to you? He replied, Whenever you did it to the least of these my brothers and sisters you did to me. That s a God who identifies with the immigrant, with the vulnerable one. But what about us? Can we identify with the immigrant and refugee? Can we imagine what it is like to be in his or her shoes? Fleeing from threat and hardship, seeking a better and safer life for ourselves or our children? Trying to make it in a foreign land where even if we speak Spanish in parts of the U.S. which have a high percentage of Spanish-speakers if we want to really do well, we d better learn English. I think that s the key to identify with the immigrant s plight. Or do we see immigrants as a threat, a bother? In a famous essay, called Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans Richard Rodriquez begins: There is something unsettling about immigrants because they chatter incomprehensibly and they get in everyone s way. Immigrants seem to be bent on undoing America. Just when Americans think we know who we are we are Protestants, culled from Western Europe, are we not? then new immigrants appear from Southern Europe or from Eastern Europe. We we who are already here we don t know exactly what the latest comers will mean to our community. How will they fit in with us? Thus we we who were here first we begin to question our own identity. After a generation or two, Rodriguez goes on, the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren of immigrants to the U.S. and the grandchildren of those who tried to keep immigrants out of the U.S. will romanticize the immigrant, will begin to see the immigrant as the figure who teaches us most about what it means to be an American. The immigrant, in mythic terms, travels from the outermost rind of America to the very center of American mythology. None of this, of course, can we admit to the Vietnamese immigrant who served us our breakfast at the hotel this morning. In another 40 years, we will be prepared to say to the Vietnamese immigrant that he with his breakfast tray, with his intuition

4 for travel, with his memory of tragedy, with his recognition of peerless freedoms he fulfills the meaning of America. 1 What do we do about the immigrant? That s a deeply spiritual question, and don t pretend that it s not. Do we see them as a bother, or an opportunity? Do we react to them in fear, or do we embrace them in love? I would suggest that almost every one of us rubs shoulders with immigrants every day. Think about how you treat the immigrants you meet and interact with. I know that the International Mission Committee of Immanuel, in cooperation with the International Mission Committee of Trinity in Arlington my wife Judith s church are working together on adopting a Syrian refugee family. Both committees want to make clear that this is not just the responsibility of the people on their respective committees. This is meant to be a whole church effort. A whole two church effort. At the Towers Crescent Building where I work out in the mornings, a man named Jae and his wife Helen run a little coffee shop and convenience store. I always stop in there to grab a cup of coffee and a protein drink on my way from my work-out to the church. Jae and Helen are immigrants. They came to the U.S. from Korea when they were younger. It took me about a year before I actually asked Jae his name, but I did. Since then, we are on a firstname basis and we ve become conversation partners. Jae thought about me while I was on the Camino and he asked for and read a copy of my blog. Occasionally Jae will ask me a vocabulary question, something about a word or a phrase, some American idiom that he s come across in the paper or something else he s been reading and I ll try to help him out. Friday morning he asked me about the phrase Under the aspect of eternity. Sub specie aeternitatae. How do you understand this? Jae asked. I thought, O my gosh. I said, Jae, that s a hard one. I told him that for me it meant thinking about some matter or encounter not in terms of just the moment, but what it might mean in God s eyes, or from the perspective of hundreds or thousands of years from now. Sub specie aeternitatae. Spinoza, who coined the phrase, meant it to mean that something is eternally true. Jae nodded his head. Yes. 1 Richard Rodriguez, 'Blaxicans' and Other Reinvented Americans, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2003, (

5 Under the aspect of eternity, it matters how we treat the immigrant. It matters a great deal indeed. We d better remember that. Frederick Buechner, in his book A Room Called Remember, writes: That still, light room in that house - and whatever that room represents of stillness and light and the possibility of faith, of Yes, in your own lives - is a room to find healing and hope in, but it is also a room with a view. It is a room that looks out, like the window of the train, on a landscape full of desolation - that looks out on Forty-Second Street with its crowds of hungry ones, lonely ones, sick ones, all the strangers who turn out not to be strangers after all because we are all of us seeking the same homeland together whether we know it or not, even the mad ones and lost ones who scare us half to death because in so many ways they are so much like ourselves. 2 In Jesus name. Amen. 2 Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces (HarperOne, April 1992). ISBN