strangers and aliens

I lived abroad for six months in 1990. It was between my first job out of college and my training for ordination. I’d been in Oxford for five years, and I was going to be in Oxford for another three (it turned out to be four) so I reckoned a change would do me good.

The change I chose was the USA. Based in Maryland, I somehow visited nineteen states in six months - and made a couple of life-long friends. There’s nothing like your first experience of living abroad. Being a foreigner is a terrific life experience. I loved it. And I had some super hosts along the way.

But I also hated it. It was a short-term experiment, and I knew it would end. I love to travel - but I love to come home too. There is something in me which does not like living permanently on someone else’s terms.

Which is ironic.

Because one of the great experiences of being gay is that you constantly feel like a foreigner, even when you are home. Brett Trapp’s great blog, Blue Babies Pink, about growing up gay as a pastor’s son in Alabama, uses this imagery again and again. It’s language I recognise because I find myself resorting to it repeatedly.

I say to straight people - I live in your world. Not mine. You set the currency. You set the culture. You set the behavioural norms. The word ‘normal’ gets to describe you, but almost everything you do looks completely strange to me, and I have to translate things time and again as I hear or watch or experience them. 

When I was a kid, I hated going to sports coaching for all sorts of reasons, but here’s two: 

Straight guys in groups are really intimidating. I never knew how to act on a sports team. I was always putting on an act when with them - translating how I felt, thought, understood life into something that approximated their language. It felt like I was speaking French in about as convincing an accent as Officer Crabtree on Allo Allo. Amazingly, straight guys are as observant as the Germans on that show, so usually I got away with it. 

I said two reasons…

The second is - every now and then you’d come across a bloke you’d want to be nowhere near. They smelled of danger. I look at the stories in the press now of kids who were abused by sports coaches and wonder - did vulnerable straight lads just not know? I could see blokes kind of like that a mile off. There was a swimming coach at my school; I never let him get near me. I saw he was charged for abuse years later. No surprise there.

But this isn’t a personal blog, it’s a Bible blog. And I haven’t mentioned any Bible yet.

No?

Then read again. Because the Bible is full of stuff about how we treat foreigners. “Aliens". Those who are different. 

In ‘the world’, the different are reviled, excluded, made fun of, hated, hunted down and persecuted. That’s the fate of foreigners from ancient history through to Hitler and now to Trump and Brexit. In the Bible, God makes us repent of such attitudes.

Even in the Torah, the Law of Moses, where God’s choice of his own people is clearest, his love of others is also shiningly clear. And with it, an expectation that this love for others will be shown by his people. 

In Deuteronomy 10.15 God’s choice of his own people is made clear. And then:

For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt. (Dt. 10.17-19)

Foreigners are gentiles. Gentiles are sinners. By their nature. They worship other gods - literally in Moses’ day - and yet God loves them and bids his people to do the same. Indeed, it is because his people are to be like him that they must behave with mercy and kindness to foreigners…

Leviticus 19 begins with a reminder of God’s holiness. ‘Be holy because I am holy.’ It’s a call to worship and a call to a life based on that worship. And amongst the commands that come from that place, these two:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord (vv9-10)

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (vv33-34)

Mercy. Love. And a reminder that God’s people were once foreigners themselves so they should remember what that feels like and embrace anyone who still feels that way.

Anyone who still feels that way.

We are not, as God’s people, to rest safe in being a privileged majority. We are to remember. And to be thankful. And to be kind and generous to those who are not privileged, not a majority, not at home and not feeling safe. 

It’s a command.

More: for when Paul issues his great Galatians 3:28 rallying cry that there is now no Jew nor Gentle, no second class, no barrier keeping foreigners at the back in worship any more, or when he writes to the Ephesians that they are “no longer foreigners and strangers but fellow citizens with God’s people”, his language was an intentional challenge. 

Because it is tough to love the foreigner as yourself. And it had been a long time since Israel had been in Egypt. And because people always tend towards the group that looks like them, and in the comfort of that group, we forget mercy and grace toward those who are different. Especially if there are fewer of them.

For the early church, Gentile and Jew together, a new paradigm emerged: the writer to the Hebrews uses it in Hebrews 11. Referring to Abel, Enoch, Noah and Abraham, he says:
All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. (Hebrews 11.13)

Not strangers from Israel; strangers on earth.

1 Peter 2.11-12 carries the same idea. The readers here are exhorted - Dear friends I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.

Christians are foreigners. We are invited to see that this broken world is not our home. We await a revealing, a redeeming, a renewing, when the world as it should be will become real. And then we will be home at last. We are foreigners; ambassadors; representatives; showing by our lives the values of our true Kingdom.

You’d think that we, of all people, would understand the feelings of other minorities then? Even minorities we don’t always see eye to eye with? We should so understand them that we can love them and treat them according to the command - love them as ourself. Because we are foreigners too. Not “were once foreigners” as in Moses, but are “foreigners and strangers on earth”. 

I saw an episode of Netflix’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy this week. Not a very Straight Guy it turns out - he had a boyfriend, and needed help and confidence to come out to his step-mother. This isn’t a Bible show. This isn’t on God TV. This is Netflix. But when the guy got to the point where he told his step mom about himself, he wept and wept and wept. Because he felt like a foreigner in his own family and didn’t know if after that point of revelation he still had a family (he did). That’s what being gay means. Even in 21st Century Feel-Good Netflix TV World. 

Well imagine, wouldn’t it be a pretty terrible thing to be a foreigner twice over? 

Imagine: 

A foreigner in the world because of being gay. 

And a foreigner in the church because of being gay. 

And everywhere, debates about walls and immigrants and quotas and permissions and no-one apparently thinking of mercy and love or even of simply obeying the command to welcome the foreigner and treat them like the native-born, because (after all) we’re all just travelling through.

***

Oh - sorry - you’re expecting me to put a bit of hope on the end of this?

OK. 

Remember that trip back in 1990, that time when I first learned what it meant to be a foreigner? I made life-long friends. 

One is very, very gay. 

One is rector of a conservative Anglican Church who disagrees with me theologically on sexuality. I feel like a foreigner in neither home. I feel like family. 

The moment we close our hearts and our hearths we lose something of the Gospel. Sometimes, it is when I have most been a stranger and an alien that I have most found a home and a resting place. I have rarely found our debates perfectly framed or answered; I have sometimes found friends who have shown a hospitality that speaks of God louder than everything else.

I’ll take that. And try to copy it. And pray it wins through.