University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

First Sunday in Lent   February 21, 2010

            The Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor remembers a time in her early adulthood when she was struggling with what to do with her life… remembers one night when, half asleep, she prayed to God to tell her as plainly as possible what she was supposed to do. To her surprise, she actually heard an answer.

            “Anything that pleases you.”…

“What?” I said, waking up. “What kind of answer is that?”

“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me.”

That simplified things considerably. I could pump gas in Idaho or dig latrines in Pago Pago, as far as God was concerned, as long as I remembered whose I was.[1]

            In the words we read from Deuteronomy today, Moses seems to give the Hebrew people a similar word of counsel. Moses has just finished laying out the code of laws that will govern the Hebrew people in the new land that God is giving them, and he concludes it all with one brief word of ritual instruction.  He lays out for them an order of worship and says, in effect, “Remember whose you are.”

When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance… and when you settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground which you harvest from the land… put it in a basket and take it to the priest and say, “Today I declare to the Lord that I have come into the land that the Lord promised us.”  And when the priest takes the basket, you shall say, “A homeless Aramean was my father; he went down in Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number”… and so on.

The homeless Aramean was their ancestor Jacob, and the story they were to recount in this sacred offering was the story of God’s dealings with Jacob and his offspring through famine and survival, through oppression and escape, through wilderness wandering and coming into the land. This little summation is the first recorded creed in Scripture. Moses calls the people to recite it over and over again, every time they bring their first fruits, as a ritual for remembering whose they are.  That memory, he knows, will kindle their gratitude for all God has done for them, and will prompt their willingness to share the first and best fruits of the land, regardless of the shape or size of the harvest.

            Look back over the story of which you are a part, Moses says.  Remember the story.  It is a story that swings back and forth between hope and hopelessness. But look closely; it is not an account of a people overcoming great odds by sheer force of will and courage, thus triumphing over all obstacles to achieve a happy life.  No, this is not a story of sheer will, but of sheer grace.[2]  Remember the whole story, Moses reminds them.  It’s the reason behind bringing the first fruits.  Because finding your memory will bring you to gratitude… and gratitude will turn you toward ministry. 

            It is also then in that same spirit that Moses commands something else – something we sometimes miss. He instructs them to prepare a meal of celebration, but not just for themselves. It is a meal that is to be shared, not just within the community of faith, but more broadly:

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.

This meal of gratitude is meant to be shared with strangers and sojourners and exiles. Why?  Because they too were once sojourners and strangers and exiles themselves.

            The Lutheran pastor and writer Heidi Neumark, who serves a multi-cultural congregation in New York City, has written of the meaning of this passage in her own congregation, which includes a number of immigrant members. She tells especially of a young woman named Lilia. Lilia came to America desperate to make a better life for her two children. In Mexico she was earning 250 pesos a week. Diapers cost 70 pesos, shampoo 30. “You can wash or you can eat,” Lilia told Neumark. And so she and her children pushed themselves through the barbed-wire fence. She said she didn't even feel it cutting her at the time. The pain would come later, when they were treated as the unwanted. There are others like Lilia in Neumark’s parish. Neumark notes that in Spanish

the word for parish is parroquia, even closer than the English to its Greek root, paroikia. Paroikia indicates a place of exile, a place where you might find a paroikos – a stranger, a resident alien. Our parishes are intended to be places of hospitality for the paroikos [she says]. Such ministry is not a sideline but our core identity as a church — an identity with a long history, as Deuteronomy reminds us. We don't label our biblical ancestors as economic interlopers, suspect strangers or terrorists; we honor them and love them as foremothers and forefathers of our faith. We are to welcome each new paroikos in the same way.

A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien. [My ancestor, he says.] Given the surge in anti-immigrant sentiment in many parts of our nation and the challenges posed by a growing number of economic refugees, this reading seems particularly timely. We are reminded that Abraham and Sarah were immigrants who left the land of their birth and became resident aliens.

Then there was Joseph, caught up in a whirlwind of familial, economic and international conflicts as a detained alien whose traumatic journey ultimately gained him legal status and enabled him to feed his family back home. Moses, a child truly left behind, became a resident alien in Egypt and the divinely appointed coyote who led a band of desperate refugees on a desert trek toward freedom. The Israelites later spent many years living in exile, resident “aliens” all. Ruth remained with Naomi as a paroikos in Israel.[3]

            This text from Deuteronomy, says Neumark, rehearses the story of God’s people as they prepare to cross into the Promised Land. It comes in the form of liturgical instruction to the people, instruction that envisions a new danger that awaits them as they settle into the land… the danger that they will settle for something less than the vision and hope for liberation and justice that sent them forth in the first place. Neumark says, “It proved to be a valid concern. Those who entered the land did eventually settle for [and become obsessed with] their own well-being as a group, neglecting the full liberating command of jubilee. They settled as possessors who overlooked the dispossessed and disconnected [among them].”

            Take a close look at the way Palestinians are being driven out of the land today and you will see that the modern-day descendants of the people Moses addressed still want to be the possessive settlers.  But it is not just Israel to whom Moses’ words are directed.  The words are ours to hear as well, for we, too, are descendants of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and Miriam. It is our creed, too:

‘A homeless 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. ⁶When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, ⁷we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. ⁸The 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; ⁹and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. ¹⁰So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’…

Then you, [said Moses,] 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.

Who are the Levites and the aliens of our time? Well…who?  We see them every day.  Or maybe we don’t. Barbara Taylor says,

there are people in all of our communities who do not belong to any of the same groups we do…. Some of them live right down the street.  Some of them stand right in front of us at the…post office or the grocery store, where they remain largely invisible to us. 

At its most basic level, [celebrating with the strangers and sojourners among us] is the practice of loving the neighbor as the self. More intricately, it is the practice of coming face-to-face with another human being, preferably someone different enough to qualify as a capital “O” Other – and at least entertaining the possibility that this [might be] one of the faces of God….

The next time you go to the grocery store, try engaging the cashier. You do not have to invite her home for lunch or anything, but take a look at her face while she is trying to find “arugula” on her laminated list of produce.

Here is someone who exists even when she is not ringing up your groceries…. She is someone’s daughter, maybe someone’s mother as well. She has a home she returns to when she hangs up her apron here, a kitchen that smells of last night’s supper, a bed where she occasionally lies awake at night wrestling with her own [anxieties and fears]. Do not go too far with this or you risk turning her into a character in your own novel, which is a large part of the problem already. It is enough for you [simply] to acknowledge her when she hands you your change.

“You saved eleven dollars and six cents by shopping at Winn Dixie today,” she says, looking right at you. All that is required is for you to look back. Just meet her eyes for a moment when you say, “Thanks.” Sometimes that is all another person needs to know: that she has been seen – not the cashier but the person – but even if she does not seem to notice, the encounter has occurred. You noticed, and because you did, neither of you will ever quite be the same again….

In biblical tradition, the practice of encounter shows up most often as the practice of hospitality, or philoxenia. Take the word apart and you get philo, from one of the four Greek words for love, and xenia, for stranger. Love of stranger, in other words, which is about as counterintuitive as you can get. For most of us xenophobia – fear of stranger – comes much more naturally, but in that case scripture is unnatural. According to Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Great Britain, “the Hebrew Bible in one verse commands, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ but in no fewer than 36 places commands us to ‘love the stranger.’”[4]

Love the stranger.  Thirty-six times the Bible says so.  You’d think we would have figured out along the way how important such care for the aliens and sojourners and strangers among us is.  Immigrant people that we are, you’d think that those of us schooled in scripture would have been driving the welcome wagon for those who come to us as aliens and strangers. But often we are tempted to live by our fears, rather than our faith, and so we forget whose we are. As Heidi Neumark says,

After thousands of years we still haven’t got it right. Sometimes it’s tempting to settle for a lot less. And so we come [finally today to our other text and] to another alien in the desert. There at the edge, and potentially the tempting end of the wilderness experience, Jesus is given a chance to opt out. To settle for his own control and comfort. To isolate himself from wandering Arameans and [other strangers and sojourners]. But like Lilia [and so many immigrants of our own day], this immigrant is desperate to make a better life for his children. And so he takes the desert route, refusing to settle for less even at the end, when faced with a crown of thorns sharp as barbed wire.[5]