Be a Refuge

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Like fluttering birds, like scattered nestlings, so are the daughters of Moab at the fords of the Arnon. “Give counsel, grant justice; make your shade like night at the height of noon; hide the outcasts, do not betray the fugitive; let the outcasts of Moab settle among you; be a refuge to them from the destroyer.”
(Isaiah 16:2-4a NRSV)

While on vacation, I came upon this short excerpt from one of Isaiah’s oracles to the nations, in this case to the land of Moab. Relations between the two nations of Israel (Israel and Judah) and Moab were not always good, but Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David, was a woman of Moab who emigrated to Judah with her mother-in-law Naomi. Ruth, a young widow, survived at first and provided for Naomi by gleaning in the fields.

The destroyer of lands and peoples comes in various forms: an invading army, a plague or epidemic, a negative change in economic conditions, a revolution or civil war, religious persecution, destruction of land by “development” or mining or some other “harvesting” of its resources. Then, as Isaiah describes in the reading’s context, there is no more rejoicing over the harvest and sometimes no refuge anywhere. In the 1980’s, thousands of people fled the slaughter in El Salvador and Guatemala to a land that did not want them (the United States) because their very presence and need for sanctuary gave testimony to the horrors of regimes our government supported for its own political and economic reasons.

Today, young adults (and some not so young) risk their lives to cross a river – not the Arnon but the Rio Grande – to flee from what to what? Why do they brave the brutality of coyotes (the human kind, not the animal) and the dangers of the desert to live in the shadows of fear in a land that offers them extremely hard work at low pay in sometimes unsafe or dehumanizing conditions? Why do they leave their families and communities to endure hardship and xenophobic hatred in a foreign land?

Mexican land reform provided plots of land for the campesinos (people of the fields, peasants). Changes in economic conditions have rendered those plots insufficient for subsistence farming, and now they may be sold to private concerns. So, the people’s land is being privatized, which moves it from serving those with little to adding more wealth to those who already have much. That’s much like what some people north of the river are trying to do to public education and Social Security: take them from the people so the wealthy can exploit them to add to their wealth.

The “destroyer” from which the poor are seeking refuge is the force of crushing economic changes.

“Give counsel, grant justice; make your shade like night at the height of noon; hide the outcasts, do not betray the fugitive; let the outcasts of (the current) Moab settle among you; be a refuge to them from the destroyer.”

From Benevolence to Mutuality

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This post is the third of four written for students on an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world from which we draw much for our civilization and our ways of thinking, equality was not an ideal but a suspect notion often held in contempt. The great man (sic) used his prosperity to further his greatness by becoming a benefactor to the common people who were expected to be very grateful for his generosity. The benefactor gained honor and pride by demonstrating his greatness through charity.

That we still think somewhat the same way can be seen in our praise for philanthropists (literally “friends to humanity”), no matter how they gained their wealth. Churches continue in a lesser version of the philanthropic model by pooling their people’s offerings of money for benevolence, sometimes understood as the blessed giving to the less fortunate. If it made the ancient benefactor look good to give money to the poor, it may make the modern religious person feel good to give some to the unfortunate, often without contact and mostly without dialogue.

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The Foreigner Who Lives Among You

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This post is the first of four written for students on an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

We may be quite familiar with the command Jesus takes from chapter 19 of Leviticus, calling it the second of the two greatest commandments: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The first he takes from chapter 6 of Deuteronomy: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Binding the two commands together as inseparable, Jesus confirms that love for God cannot and must not be cordoned off as a religious or spiritual matter set apart from justice, respect, and compassion within the community.

But what are the limits? Where may God’s people draw the lines of exclusion? When an authority on biblical law asks Jesus to clarify, “Who is my neighbor?” what the man is really asking is who is not his neighbor. Whom may he righteously exclude from the command to love?

Who is not our neighbor? Leviticus answers in a surprising way by including a person quite likely to be excluded: the ger (pronounced as gair), the non-citizen.

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Thoughts on Migrant Workers and Immigrants

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Shortly, I will be part of a team hosting college students on an alternative spring break under the leadership of their chaplain for an experience provided by the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania. I have volunteered to write four blog-style pieces to serve as input for their morning reflection times during their visit.

I suggested the following four topics.

1. The biblical injunctions regarding the foreigner who lives and works among you.
2. The prophetic linkage between expressions of faith (or even thankfulness) and social justice, with the prophets’ rejection of worship without justice.
3. Thoughts on how faith changes demands for social justice from mere power struggles into models of potential mutuality and power sharing.
4. The cheap and dirty trick of preaching patient suffering to people being used and abused.

My next four posts will be my drafts for these reflection pieces.