Love the Sojourner

In my morning reading recently, I came to this passage:

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear.

Deuteronomy 10:17-19

It should give us pause that in proclaiming the greatness of our God Who is awesome like no other, His love for the sojourner (aka alien, immigrant, foreigner among you) is given as a key characteristic that we are to emulate.

The backlash against immigrants has been growing through the years and particularly intensifying these past few months. On one hand, there is a realistic fear that our enemies could and would and do take advantage of lax immigration policy to infiltrate our society – so we should by no means be careless.

Conversely, we shouldn’t brand every immigrant a terrorist or threat of some sort – stripping them of decency and deporting them. Quite the opposite – we are to love them. In the simplest sense of this Old Testament teaching (Leviticus 19:33-34) which Jesus makes foundational in His teaching (Luke 10:25-37), we need only to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes – figuratively and sometimes literally.

Hypothetically speaking… imagine the USA as a corrupt and impoverished nation controlled by drug lords. Imagine that you’ve witnessed neighbors and family members abused, enslaved, murdered, or simply “disappeared”. Imagine that the threats have become overwhelming and you know that if you could just make it with your family across the southern border to Mexico and then perhaps keep going, you’d find others who had done the same and found some freedom from the terror – even hope for a chance at a better life. Most of us deny the possibility or struggle to even imagine that such an alternate reality could come to pass here in the good ole USA. But in all honesty, most of us would do what humans have done for all of history (including much of American history). We would seek hope and freedom wherever it may be and do so with a measure of desperation relative to the severity our circumstances… and none of us would want to be criminalized for doing so!

We do need to diligently protect and preserve all that makes our society a place of hope and freedom. Identify and execute justice against all who seek to destroy our nation – but never let us turn fear of this element into an excuse for criminalizing those whose desperation has brought them to us seeking that very same hope and freedom that we seek to protect and preserve. Let us love them as we love ourselves – for there was a time when we were them – and most especially because God loves the immigrant.