Whatever you do...

"La Sagrada Familia" by Kelly Latimore

While at Ghost Ranch recently I was reminded about a bit of philology that I had misplaced. It is the meaning of the Hebrew word ger.

It is used over ninety times in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Pentateuch, or the first five books. It refers to a stranger. A sojourner. Really a foreigner or an alien. And it is used so often because of something essential about God's people - they move a lot.

I'm not sure how much attention you have been paying throughout our series on Genesis this summer, but from the very beginning, God's people move. Adam and Eve move from the Garden (not by choice). Cain moves to Nod. Noah and crew move. Babel's people are spread to the far corners of the round earth. And Abraham and Sarah begin their story by following God as migrants... Once they start, they do not stop. Back and forth. Back and forth. It just keeps on going for each successive generation.

As the Law of God is constantly reminding the people - remember the foreigners who reside among you. Be kind to them. Welcome them. Treat them well. For you were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. (And if you didn't hear all that with a Yiddish grandparent reading it, I'm really sad for your childhood.)

The New Testament is no different. Forms of the Greek cognate for ger appear almost thirty times, most famously when Jesus says, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

But that's not what he actually says. The word there isn't actually stranger. Technically it could be translated as "outlander," but then we would all be daydreaming about Sam Heughan and that would be distracting.

Really, the word Jesus uses is foreigner. I was a foreigner. I was strange. Unfamiliar. Unwanted. And you welcomed me. Or you didn't.

The Greek word is xenos. It is where we get our English word xenophobia - our fear of the foreign or the other.

I bring all of this up right now because essential to our faith is to welcome and embrace the foreigner and the migrant - for we were all once migrants and foreigners. Not just in Egypt. But also in this land.

Not to mention, Jesus himself was a refugee. He also spent his entire adult life as a migrant, wandering around, with no adult home once he began his ministry. And he kept bringing up foreigners and those pesky Samaritans (the most hated kind of aliens living right smack within the land of ancient Israel).

God has always chosen migrants and foreigners as God's own people. So, as Jesus said in Matthew 25, "whatever you do (or do not do) to the foreigner - you do to me."

Blessings,

Rev. Janie