Don Friesen
My grandparents were wandering Mennonites, who sojourned for a time in Poland and the Ukraine, then sailed across the sea and settled near the Red River in Canada's North West Territories. They sojourned there for only fifteen years, during which time my grandfather became the mayor of a thriving metropolis called Plum Coulee. Then they wandered west, settling near Waldheim, where my grandfather built the first Dutch-style mill in the region. When the Canadians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing linguistic restrictions on us, some of my mother's relatives wandered over to Mexico, but my paternal grandparents stayed and prospered, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our prosperity, and said, "Just remember, I brought (you) into this place and gave (you) this land, a land flowing with milk and honey and Saskatoon berries. Remember to express your gratitude by giving me a tithe of your produce.
My grandparents joined many other Mennonites leaving Russia, to be joined several decades later by another wave of migration. When in November of 1929 Mennonites were anxious to leave the Soviet Union, Mennonite Central Committee gave the Canadian government assurance of support for these refugees. (From the Files of MCC, Volume 1, page 36) Mennonite homes – "Mennonitenheime" – were established that same year in Germany as shelters for the Mennonite refugees pouring out of Russia. Toward the end of the century there was another huge Mennonite exodus from the Soviet Union.
We were refugees right from our sixteenth-century beginnings! Fleeing our homes to escape persecution and death, we moved from Switzerland to North America, from the Netherlands to Germany, from Germany to Russia, from Russia to North and South America, from North America to South America and back again, to mention just a few moves and migrations.
While we were wandering about the globe, we met other wanderers. The Russian Revolution produced one-and-a-half million refugees. Thousands of Armenians and Greeks fled Turkish atrocities in the 1920s. Jews and others fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s. Mussolini's rise to power in Italy resulted in similar flight. In 1939 Franco's victory in Spain produced another stream of refugees. World War II turned the various streams into a flood of refugees. It's estimated that in Europe the two world wars drove some 70 million people from their homes.
The fighting in Korea produced nine million refugees. In 1971 the fighting between India and Pakistan produced ten million refugees. The war in Indochina turned additional millions into refugees, some of them the "boat people" that our congregation helped in 1979, when we began the Refugee Assistance Program. Add to this stream additional refugees from Africa, and South and Central America, and it's mind-boggling. German novelist Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) described the twentieth century as "the century of prisoners and refugees," many of the refugees a product of war. (Cited by Karl L. Stumpf, in "Refugees and Human Rights," The Rotarian, January 1982)
The refugee story, I dare say, is the story of all of us here today, with ancestors that trace back to Switzerland, England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Poland, Ireland, Paraguay, Mexico, Columbia, the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and a host of other places. Sojourners in search of a home is a pattern with which we're all familiar.
A Defining Biblical Story
It's also a pattern in the Bible. The Scriptures are full of sojourners, and our reading from Deuteronomy shows the pattern embedded in liturgy. When you respond to God in worship, says the Deuteronomist, "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'" (Deuteronomy 26:5), and the liturgy then goes on to recite the salvation history of Israel, first how they were taken by force to Egypt, and then how God brought them " out of Egypt with a mighty hand...." (26:8)
The Bible doesn't speak of refugees, per se, preferring the word, "sojourner," someone who dwells somewhere temporarily. Some translations use the word, "foreigners" (e.g., CEV; NIV) or "alien" (e.g., NASB; NEB) – similar to the modern designations of "resident aliens" and nonresident aliens". What began for Abraham and Sarah as wandering soon turned into a full-fledged refugee experience that took them into Egypt, there to become a tale of torture and oppression, and finally flight and escape.
Old Testament liturgy immortalized the refugee experience, and the narrative in Deuteronomy 26 became what theologians call a defining script, instructing the heirs of the refugee experience "to rejoice in all the good which the Lord your God has given to you and to your house, you, and the Levite and the sojourner who is among you." (Deuteronomy 26:11, RSV) The text then provides instructions regarding sharing a tithe of your income, taking special care to share with: "...the Levite, ...the sojourner, ...the fatherless, and ...the widow, that they may eat ...and be filled." (26:12, ASV) The same concern for the sojourner is mentioned again in the next verse.
In remembering their sojourner past – and their miraculous rescue at the hands of God – the people of Israel realized that sojourners have a special place in God's heart, and they began to realize as well that the stranger in their midst deserved special treatment and hospitality. They were told: "...the Lord your God ...loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner therefore; for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:17-19, RSV)
The defining script in Deuteronomy 26 highlights a defining experience that was called to mind year after year, century after century, and which became even more poignant during Israel's time in Babylonian exile. There the psalmist immortalized the pathos of the refugee experience with the plaintive cry: "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange (and foreign) land?" (Psalm 137:4, KJV and RSV)
This deeply-rooted sojourner identity is reflected in the experience of Jesus, remembered in the Scriptures as one who had "no place to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20, TNIV), as well as in the New Testament letters; Peter, for example, addresses his congregation as "foreigners and exiles" (NIV), "strangers and pilgrims" (KJV), "strangers and refugees". (TEV)
Perhaps it is because of this sojourner identity that the New Testament encourages hospitality. John, for example, commends believers, saying, "You are doing a fine faithful piece of work, ...in looking after (those) who come your way, especially when you have never seen them before." (3 John 5, PHL) The Gospel of Matthew tells us that the highest service we can render is to care for strangers as if we are caring for Jesus. "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine," said Jesus, "you did for me." (Matthew 25:40, NIV) Welcome the stranger in your midst, says the New Testament, "for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it" (Hebrews 13:2) – "entertained angels unawares". (RSV)
A Defining Biblical Hope
Our New Testament reading from the book of Hebrews traces the journeys of a whole catalogue of refugees, starting with Abraham, of whom it is said: "By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents...." (Hebrews 11:9, RSV) A temporary location, in a temporary living arrangement, using a temporary form of shelter. Abraham, however, looked forward to a more permanent existence, to a city "...which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God." (11:10, RSV)
There is a curious mix of motifs in the Bible, on the one hand the sojourner experience, on the other a continual longing for home. We are sojourners in search of shelter, in search of hospitality and safety. If Old Testament liturgy immortalizes the refugee experience, the New Testament lifts up the search for our home. Home is our spiritual base, an intimation of paradise – perhaps of paradise lost, but with the promise of a paradise to be regained. Someone has written: "Because of...sin, (hu)man(kind) went into history without a home; (we were) left lonely, longing for someone to come home to.... Of all yearnings, the most powerful, ...the most beneficent is this yearning to come home." (Anthony Padovano, "Home: Yearning," Dawn without Darkness)
Our spiritual wanderings are in a sense a yearning to find our home with God, in full communion with God, a yearning to experience the full breadth of God's peace and love and justice. And as deeply as we yearn for home, God yearns for us to return home, much like the father in Jesus' parable longed for the prodigal to come home. God assures us that like the prodigal son, we will receive a warm welcome. God gathers wanderers and exiles, not only from Babylon but "from the farthest parts of the earth," say the Scriptures. (Jeremiah 31:8) There is no place on earth so desolate and forgotten that it is outside the circumference of God's love.
If Old Testament liturgy provides a defining script for sojourners, the Scriptures also provide a defining hope, a state of shalom which they often portray as a time when everyone will sit under his or her fig-tree. The prophet Micah speaks of such a state of peace and well-being, looking forward to a time when previously warring peoples "shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; (when) nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid...." (Micah 4:3-4)
This is our biblical hope, the biblical dream! We all want to sit under our fig tree, secure that no one will come and take away our family, our home, our things, our money. The biblical notion of shalom is more than inner peace, more than justice. "Shalom incorporates right relationships, ...to God, to one's fellow human beings, towards nature, and to oneself. ... Shalom incorporates delight in one's relationships." (Educating for shalom: essays on Christian higher education, by Nicholas Wolterstorff, Clarence W. Joldersma, and Gloria Goris Stronks, page 23) Shalom is peace and security and happiness, all in the broadest sense. When you can sit under your fig tree, enjoy its shade and its fruit, content, and unafraid that someone will invade your home or drive you away, you have found a generous measure of shalom.
The refugee housing ministry created by our congregation and supported by several other congregations provides homes for those who have been deprived of contentment and security. We do this work because we are grateful that God has allowed us to sit under our figurative fig trees. And like those first wandering Arameans, who offered up thanksgiving for shelter, home, and safety, we too are grateful:
grateful that God is a sheltering God:
grateful that when we are afraid, God holds us close.
grateful that when we lose our way, God gently guides us.
grateful that like a mother hen God
gathers us together;
gathers up our doubts and transforms them into confidence;
gathers our fears, and transforms them into courage and faithfulness;
gathers up our broken lives, and transforms them into Christ's body, the Church.
Thanks be to God!
Quotations of Scripture are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.