Sermon of the Week
Words to Build a Life On:
You Shall Not Oppress the Alien
A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 19, 2018.
The seventh in a Multi-Part Sermon Series
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Mark 10:13-16
and Leviticus 19:32-37 (also found in the text below)
Good morning
We’re continuing our sermon series today
Words to Build a Life On
The most central teachings of our faith
Summarized in just a few words
–Words that you can write down and put somewhere for you to remember
–Words that can help you think critically
about the issues that impact the world today
–Words that can help you grow closer to God
–And can help you be a more loving,
more faithful, more caring human being.
Words to build a life on.
This sermon series has taken us all over the place in the bible
We’ve read from the letters of Paul
And from the Gospels: Mark and Matthew, so far
We’ve looked at some of the words of the ancient Prophets
Micah and Isaiah.
Today we’re reading from the book of Leviticus.
A quick pop quiz
For those of you who have been going to church for a long time
How many of you remember a sermon preached specifically
About a passage from the book of Leviticus?
Its ok: no need to shout Amen! or raise your hand or anything.
I’m guessing its not all that many.
I promise you: there is no one at seminary offering advice to preachers:
Stick to the good stuff
Avoid books Leviticus as much as possible.
That doesn’t happen.
Leviticus is the third book in our bible
Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,
followed by the books of Numbers and Deuteronomy
And those five, together, constitute the Pentateuch
They are the so-called Five Books of Moses
And they have an important place within the Hebrew Scriptures
Revered because they tell the story of God’s movement
from the beginning of time
God’s movement to create this world that we live in
and to call forth from the people God created
a nation that would bless the earth
because of its covenant with God.
The stories of the creation,
The promise to Abraham
The Binding of Isaac
The wrestling of Jacob
The famine during the time of Jacob and his sons
That take them all to Egypt
As refugees
The long sojourn there, hundreds of years, generations
And their mistreatment there under the Pharaoh
Leading God to rescue them with a mighty hand…
The journey in the wilderness
The encounter with God on Mount Sinai
The gift of the ten commandments
And other laws that helped organize the people as a people
And to prepare them to settle in the land of Canaan.
All of that narrative
Is here in the Pentateuch.
Given the importance of these books
You might wonder why we don’t spend more time in Leviticus.
But when you crack it open and start reading it
You begin to see why:
The book begins with nuanced instructions
About how, and when, and why
To offer burnt offerings
It starts with livestock: something from the herd or the flock.
There are specifics. Lots of specifics:
IT should be a male.
No blemishes
(sorry, you blemished ones,
your ego may be hurt
but you won’t be on the altar tonight).
The priest is supposed to put his hand on the offering just so
The wood gets arranged in a particular way
Certain parts get put up there over the fire
Its all quite nuanced, you see.
And then there are instructions about grain offerings, and sin-offerings
And offerings of well-being
And then more about instructions about purification offerings
And reparation offerings
And you begin to get the sense,
If the repetition hasn’t numbed you too much
That offerings were rather important back then, weren’t they.
One of the reasons we don’t spend a lot of time here, in Leviticus,
Is not because we find these things historically un-interesting
Or that we don’t care about our ancestors and their religious practice.
We do.
These are good passages, particularly for a bible study.
They tell us a lot about their religious motivation
The depth of their faith
The way that they wanted to make things right with their God
And how God was giving them a way of life that mattered to them.
We can learn something from that.
But there is a lot here that we no longer observe.
Some of that is because we believe that all that ritual observance
All that effort to be brought closer to God
To help form a community in the way that God wants us to be formed
Has been fulfilled,
for us,
in the person of Jesus Christ.
We no longer offer sacrifices.
The sacrificed one no longer needs them.
We no longer follow elaborate holiness rituals,
no matter what some other Christians might say
Or reject people as being unclean or unworthy
Because Jesus came and taught us some lessons about all of that
Because Jesus reminded us that all people are beloved in God’s eyes
And Jesus is the fulfillment of that ancient time and its purification code.
So it is that, most of us, no longer follow the dietary laws that you find here
We eat shellfish and bacon
and sometimes even bacon-wrapped-shrimp.
We are ok with synthetic fabrics
We might even be ok with tattoos
Or, if you aren’t,
at least you don’t turn to God as a reason for your raised eyebrow.
Fair enough.
But I offer all of that preamble
Because it is likewise easy to just disregard these parts of the bible
As no longer important.
As if our decision not to spend a lot of time with THIS book in worship
Might give the impression that there isn’t anything of value here.
That’s not quite true.
Yes: There is a lot here that we no longer consider to be binding upon us
And even some things in Leviticus that we find wrong and hurtful
Particularly as its been misinterpreted these days.
But Jesus treated a lot of this quite seriously.
We distinguish between ritualistic or cultic laws, on the one hand
And Theological commandments, on the other.
The former: Jesus said he came to help us re-interpret
To understand in a new light,
some we should reject,
and others we should apply differently.
The latter, the theological commandments: Jesus says he came to fulfill.
Maybe that is why, when you look through this particular chapter of Leviticus
The 19th chapter
You find so much that Jesus would later talk about.
You shall Love your Neighbor as Yourself.
That’s found here.
You shall not reap your harvest to the very edges…
You shall leave them for the poor
That’s found here.
The point
Is that we have to read these texts with skill and with nuance.
WE have to use the Rule of Love to see what God is getting at
And we have to pay particular attention
When we read passages from Leviticus
To themes that you find in a lot of OTHER places in the bible.
There might be no better example of that
Then the theme of how we treat the foreigner, the sojourner, the stranger in our land.
Here is our reading for the morning
From the nineteenth chapter of Leviticus
I invite you to open your hearts and your minds
To this reading from God’s word:
32 You shall rise before the aged,
and defer to the old;
and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
33 When an alien resides with you in your land,
you shall not oppress the alien.
34The alien who resides with you
shall be to you
as the citizen among you;
you shall love the alien as yourself,
for you were aliens in the land of Egypt:
I am the Lord your God.
35 You shall not cheat
in measuring length, weight, or quantity.
36You shall have honest balances, honest weights,
an honest ephah, and an honest hin:
I am the Lord your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
37You shall keep all my statutes and all my ordinances,
and observe them: I am the Lord.
And may God bless us our Reading
And our understanding
And our applying of these words
To how we live our lives. Amen.
///
I have a quick refugee story to share
Michael Birbeck once shared this story
About a documentary put together by World Vision.[1]
There’s a tent settlement in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.
If you zoom in, you will see a tent
Built with two by fours,
Some hand-stitched plastic sacks
And cardboard.
That’s the home for a mother and her six kids.
They gather around a small wood stove there in the center of the tent
And they are being interviewed for this documentary.
The youngest is four. She’s hiding sheepishly from the camera.
The oldest child is 12. He’s Adel, and he’s rather talkative.
The mother shares that their father was killed
in a bombing at the local vegetable market
and she and the kids fled Syria with nothing but the clothes on their back
for the relative safety
of this Lebanese refugee camp.
Adel talks about how he used to go to school
but the school was bombed
Now he’s the man of the house, he says
And he works from 7am til dusk chopping wood for their family.
They ask him what he wants
And Adel looks at his siblings and says
He only wants for their safety,
But that they, they just want a toy.
What do you want, they ask the youngest
That four year old lurking behind her mother’s leg.
I want an airplane! She beams.
An airplane! What would you do with this airplane?
Her reply: I’d go home. I’d fly to Syria….
///
Its not easy to leave your home and to try to make it somewhere else.
Our family just got back from a trip to New York City.
There’s nothing like a trip to New York City
To remind a family from Kansas
About just how diverse our nation really is.
We stayed in the Lower East Side
Right there on the line between Chinatown
And Little Italy
As well is just next to some of the most famous Jewish immigrant spots
Including the oldest Knish establishment in the city. So so tasty.
That was just luck, really.
It was where our airbnb happened to be.
If we had plopped down in some other part of Manhattan
There would have been other groups, other rich histories
All around us.
We saw some broadway shows. I recommend Mean Girls the musical.
We stood in the heart of Times Square near midnight
We went up the Empire State building and looked over the entire island
From the 86th floor. It was breathtaking.
One morning, we went to the Statue of Liberty
You can take an easy boat over there
Walk around the base
Take some tourist photos.
Inside, you can see the plaque
With Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus” inscribed upon it:
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free…”
Next we went to Ellis Island
And walked through the same Great Hall
Where disembarking migrants from all over the world
After months at sea in difficult conditions
Would be given health screenings and, hopefully,
Would be shown the open door to America.
Its all quite humbling, to think about it.
They say we are a nation of immigrants.
That’s definitely true.
Unless you are 100% native American
It just is a matter of how far back in your own history you go
To find the migration story of your own family.
Some in this room are newly here,
Others go back centuries.
I don’t know my full story yet,
But I don’t have to go very far back
To know that my Grandmother’s Lois’ parents
John Leonard Hermanson and Johanna Christensen
Were both born here in Kansas City, Kansas, to parents from Denmark and Sweden.
Apparently there was quite a little Norwegian community in Wyandotte county.
Have you noticed that ancestry stories are becoming more important?
Tools like ancestry.com allow you to search your past
Through census and public record data
And now you can take advantage of new DNA sequencing techniques
To get a cost effective gene analysis
That will tell you where in your past your families were from.
All of that
Makes it all the more shocking, and confusing
To see why anti-foreigner sentiment continues to be so strong among us.
Certainly, you look back through our history
And the same nation that welcomed immigrants through Ellis Island
Established Asian-American relocation camps during World War II
And harbored vicious anti-irish and anti-polish and anti-italian sentiment
at various times.
The slave trade forcibly brought over people from Africa
To work sugar and cotton plantations
And we’re still haven’t come to terms with that forcible migration yet.
In our time,
It appears to be anti-Hispanic rhetoric that is the loudest
Often coded as “Mexican” but really about anyone from south of the United States
And this summer’s crisis at our southern border
The backlog at official ports of entry
The dangerous crossing through the deserts away from the entry ports
The thousands of children removed from their parents and some still not reunited
The question of what to do with foreigners in our land
Is one of the most potent, politically charged, emotionally driven questions
of our time.
And meanwhile,
There are still refugees seeking help
More than 65 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide
About 16 million of them are refugees: because of war, or famine, or violence.
Our nation has, at times, been a leader in welcoming those refugees
Though our policies, of late, have been to be less so.
While we worked to get involved in local refugee resettlement work last year
The local agencies tell us that new federal restrictions
Have left them scrambling as fewer of them are let in the door to find safety here.
Meanwhile
There are people who are born here, US Citizens
Whose parents are having to choose between leaving them all alone
Or taking them with them to nations where they no nothing of the language or culture
As they face deportation proceedings.
Meanwhile
We are trying to figure out DREAMERS and those with Temporary Protected Status
And what terminology we should use
For people here without official papers
///
My point isn’t to minimize the difficulty of those questions
Or to fail to acknowledge the complexity that underlies them.
Sometimes, though
It feels as if we get stuck in the specifics of what are quite nuanced policy matters
That we lose the forest for the trees.
There is a basic question that our faith raises here:
How are we treating the foreigner in the land?
One day, thousands of years ago
The Hebrew people were given a system that helped define who they were.
It was a way for them to understand who was in, and who wasn’t.
An “us” and a “them.”
We are going to circumcise our boys.
We are going to follow these rituals and give offerings to God in this way
On that altar, on those specific days, for these particular purposes.
We are going to have rules about what we eat and why
And we are going to have a way to try to be as holy as we can before our God.
This way, not that way. Our way.
These commandments helped define the people of Israel.
They helped everyone know who was part of their nation, and who was not.
An “us” and a “them.”
And like many other cultures from that time:
The Assyrians, the Canaanites, the Hittites, you name it
These markers helped distinguish one group of people from another.
That was important, for a new nation
A shared sense of identity and purpose
A collective identity, and pride in being a people together.
At the same time,
When God called them together
And asked them to follow those rituals
And to engage in ethical behavior:
Use honest weights, honest measures
Don’t defraud your neighbor
Treat the deaf and the blind kindly
Save some of the extra you have for the poor, all of that
When God called them together
And asked them to find their identity through their covenant
To follow these rituals and to turn to God as their God
When God did that
God also told them something remarkable:
33 When a foreigner resides with you in your land,
you shall not oppress the foreigner.
34The foreigner who resides with you
shall be to you
as the citizen among you;
you shall love the foreigner as yourself,
for you were aliens in the land of Egypt:
I am the Lord your God.
///
We’re highlighting this
Not because it is such a politically charged topic right now
But because it is biblical to be concerned about the plight of the foreigner.
There are not many subjects more pervasively discussed in the Bible
than how people of faith are supposed to treat foreigners.
The Hebrew Bible uses the word ger more than ninety times. That’s a lot.
The word ger
means a sojourner, or a foreigner that isn’t just passing through.[2]
The translation we most often use sometimes calls them “resident aliens”
People of another place who come here, to where you are
To live among you.
And we could be here all day if we went through just a handful of those citations
But from Exodus through the prophets, how the people treated those gerim
Those foreigners in the land, was of deep and consistent concern.
One prominent example
Is from Deuteronomy, where you read this:
For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God,
Mighty and awesome,
Who is not partial and takes no bribe,
Who executes justice for the orphan and the widow,
Who loves the strangers
(that’s the gerim, the foreigner, the resident alien)
Providing them food and clothing.
YOU shall love the stranger,
For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
(Deuteronomy 10:17-19)
Its important in the New Testament, too.
Where you see the Apostle Paul saying this to the Romans:
“Welcome one another, therefore,
just as Christ has welcome you,
for the glory of God.”
(Romans 15:7)
Or the author of Hebrews reminding us:
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers
for by doing that some have entertained angels
without knowing it.”
(Hebrews 13:2)
And then there’s Jesus, and those red-letter passages.
Stories about Samaritans and Centurions and Prodigals.
Matthew himself explaining how Jesus’s mom and dad
Hearing about Herod’s plan to kill all newborns in his area
Fled for their lives
To Egypt. Jesus himself was a refugee.
All of this expounds on what we read here in Leviticus:
You shall not oppress the alien.
You shall love the alien as yourself
Treating them as a citizen among you.
///
Those are powerful words.
Do not oppress the foreigner.
Treat them justly, that means. Fairly. With respect.
Fair enough, but then there’s more:
Love the foreigner, as yourself.
The same words that are used earlier in this chapter,
where it says “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Treat them as a citizen, one of your very own kin.
///
One of my Presbyterian colleagues,
The Rev. Richard Hong, once observed
That whenever there’s an Us and a Them: Jesus wants us to side with the “them.”[3]
To have compassion for people who are hurting, and outcast
Whom society doesn’t look out for
Those that struggle to make it.
Those who don’t have the connections or the status or the prestige.
The bible often pairs these together
With commandments to have concern for
Widows and Orphans and gerim, foreigners.
All of these groups are like that: people without status
People disconnected from community.
People vulnerable and in need of special care.
You see it everywhere: in Genesis, in Revelation
From the books of Moses to the stories of Jesus.
There is not one instance that I can think of
Where Jesus teaches anyone to side with an “us” over a “them.”
Can you?
Instead, we are taught to draw the circle wider
To treat everyone as our neighbor
To welcome the children and to see, in them, the way to the Kingdom of God
And it starts, according to scripture
With how we treat the foreigner, the sojourner, the alien in the land.
How are we doing with that?
///
This morning, let us remember just how deeply our faith is teaching us
To look out at those around us and to see in them someone God loves
Someone that God cares for
Someone that we are told to care for.
Are they part of our system, our culture, our ways of doing things?
Maybe, or maybe not.
Does God say that this makes a difference?
No.
You shall not oppress the alien.
You shall love the alien as yourself.
Words to build a life on.
Where, in a world of “us” and “them,” God looks at all God’s creatures
And finds in them hope and possibility and purpose.
May we, in our own lives
Love the foreigner as well as our own kin
May we, in our land
Advocate for good treatment of those who are from other lands, other places.
May we see others as God sees them
With overflowing welcome, with limitless love.
May it be so.
Amen.
——
[1] Birbeck’s story is available at https://enactedword.com/2017/11/27/because-you-were-foreigners-leviticus-1933-35/ (accessed August 18, 2018). Information about the current refugee crisis is available at http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html
[2] New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Abingdon Press
[3] From his “Sixty-Second Sermon” introduction called “Them” for August 19, 2018. That sermon is on a different text than this one: John 6:51-58. You can see it here: https://www.facebook.com/90SecondSermon/videos/1880143738747373/ (accessed August 18, 2018)
Image Credit: UNHCR Refugee Camp, found at www.unhcr.org.
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