Around 220 million people, more than 3% of the world’s population, are currently migrants. About one-fifth of that number travel beyond their region of origin. These folks are driven by political or economic aspiration – or more often desperation. Such desperation is increasing for a number of reasons. The political reasons mostly concern war and persecution: unrest or oppression in Zimbabwe, Colombia, Afghanistan, DR Congo and Somalia, and Syria.
Some find their way to here because they want a better life. A very similar reason as to why your ancestors made their journeys.
The perceived crisis over migration arises from the assumption of Western governments and populations that the only way to deal with the symptoms of this global fallout is to shoo people away as much as possible for as long as possible.
But before we go any further, let’s identify and dispel a few influential, but inaccurate myths about immigration. First we all are sons and daughters of immigrants. You probably heard stories via grandparents or great-grandparents about their journeys migrating over sea and storm to make a new start in this country.
I use to think that the Chinese were brilliant people until a guy from China told me “Jim the best and the brightest are always on the move to the best places.” A great many of this nation’s most dynamic leaders and shapers have been immigrants or children of immigrants.
There isn’t a simple answer to the displacement of populations. Our country has much in terms of skills, culture and dynamism to gain from an influx of resourceful and community-minded new citizens. Also it’s silly to naively maintain that the government should simply remove all border controls. One unplanned side-effect of such action would be to encourage oppressive regimes to feel they could simply export trouble makers to the West.
There’s widespread resentment that immigrants displace host residents in what sometimes seems as a tight competition for housing, jobs, benefits and healthcare.
Once again migrants become the flashpoint of existing social tensions about taxation and social services. The tensions are real, and the presence of immigrants exacerbates those tensions. But the myth is that migration is really the issue. The truth is that the tensions would be there without the newcomers and the anxieties wouldn’t go away if the immigrants went away. Those who have commercial and political capital to make out of scapegoating the stranger and fomenting a climate of fear set about fanning such anxieties, but these fears are groundless.
A modest influx of migrants certainly changes a culture, but culture has always been changing and there’s no evidence that migrants change culture for the worse anymore than did your ancestors who came her years ago. For Christians the place to begin is to alter the perception that being a migrant is something unusual or unnatural.
Jesus is a displaced person in three senses. Fundamentally, he is the heavenly one who sojourned on earth. Then he finds himself a refugee in Egypt, his parents fleeing Herod’s persecution. Third, he spends his ministry as an itinerant preacher and healer, with nowhere to lay his head.
Meanwhile the story of Israel is one of migration from beginning to end. Adam and Eve leave the Garden; Noah and family sail away from destruction; Abraham follows God’s call; Joseph and family head down to Egypt; Moses leads the people back; Judah is taken into exile in Babylon; none of these people were going on a package holiday: they were all refugees.
There is precisely one verse commanding the children of Israel, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself;’ there are no less than 36 verses saying ‘love the stranger’: care of the alien is how Israel remembers its history with gratitude.
What this is telling us is that being displaced is an integral part of the whole story of the Bible, an inherent part of being God’s people. Over and over again we are shown lessons that the people of God would never have learned, without their displacements.
Israel was formed by 40 years in the wilderness and was renewed by 50 years in exile.
There’s no Old Testament without migration. In the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles in general, and the ministry of Paul in particular, is one journey after another.
You are also are on pilgrimage, we don’t get to stay here forever. Our kids are on the move and so have we been on the move. So when we are hospitable to the immigrant, we are also welcoming that part of ourselves that is always and forever on a journey, a stranger in this world, as the old hymn sings.
The crucial point about the story of Ruth is that this needy migrant becomes the source of national renewal. This tiny story epitomizes the journey about immigration we need to make today.
Around 15 times in four chapters we’re told Ruth is a foreigner, or Moabites. The Moabites were arch enemies to Israel. Ruth is like a typical immigrant: a sexually-dangerous woman from a suspicious country with a foreign religion bringing a basket-load of trouble.
It turns out she is the bringer of salvation: her son Orbed is set to become the grandfather of David, Israel’s greatest king. And if you follow the genealogies to Jesus, then Jesus came from this immigrant.
Our story of Ruth hinges on two face-to-face relationships: the sympathy between the Israelite widow, Naomi, and her daughter-in-law, the Moabite widow, Ruth; and the reciprocity between the same Moabites, Ruth, and the wealthy, but childless kinsman, Boaz. Ruth faces isolation as a foreign widow amidst a famine; she’s vulnerable to being molested in the barley field and begins the story facing humiliation and death, but she pledges her loyalty to Naomi, now and forever, and she matches her impoverishment with Boaz’ resources, his lack of an heir with her youth and attractiveness, his dilatory paralysis with her initiative and energy, her neediness with his ability to navigate the legal niceties in her favor.
There’s no need to be sentimental about Ruth’s story. She faces a terrible crisis as the story begins. It’s not necessary to portray her simply as a pious, devoted daughter-in-law who discovers an influential kinsman and patron and makes him her husband. She uses a lot to achieve what her lowly social status what never have given her.
But just as much as we shouldn’t overplay Ruth as a model of the perfect asylum-seeker, so we mustn’t miss the depth of her story. She sticks with Naomi through thick and thin. Boaz shapes his life to redeem her, and in doing so finds a blessing. Together Ruth and Boaz portray for us the faithfulness of God.
This is how God works, with steadfast love, at personal cost, facing adversity, never letting us go. Sometimes using guile, sometimes shrewdness, always disarming us with goodness and constantly pointing to a purpose beyond what we can yet see.
Ruth is Jesus, who goes into the far country and becomes one like us and brings about our salvation, but Boaz is also Jesus, for, like Jesus, Boaz takes on his shoulders the troubles of one he doesn’t need to help and brings deliverance at great cost to himself. Now this brings us to the central point: the issue of immigration is conventionally discussed as a question of duty.
What Ruth’s story shows is that the foreigner who appears to be nothing more than a bundle of trouble turns out to bring vital initiative and energy, and ultimately becomes the harbinger of the nation’s hope of renewal. And what Ruth evokes in the host country is to stir in Boaz an awareness of his own scarcity and to inspire him to actions that write his place in salvation history.
To turn our back on migrants is to forget our identity, inhibit our renewal, and deny our destiny. Again I’m not saying take away border controls, but I am saying it’s time to change our framework for this whole conversation. Migrants are not fundamentally a threat and a danger. They are first and foremost a challenge to visit our true identity and see them as a gift to the nation to rediscover its lost energy. You can have too much of a good thing, but immigrants are fundamentally a good thing.
We’re all migrants, or the sons and daughters thereof. Jesus was a migrant too. To forget that is to forget who we are and to forget who God is. I’ll bet most of you have a Boaz or two who helped your folks get a stake in the new world. Anyone here have a grandmother named Ruth?