The God of the Uprooted

A government minister announced this year that he intends to move an entire people out of their land. I’ll leave the plan and the politics to the commentators, because I’m not going to build a sermon on one man’s mouth. Scripture is the text; the news is only the occasion. But I will say this much and then get to the book: there is an old word for forcing a people out of their land, the Bible knows the word, and so do you. If such a plan ever goes forward, God will see every inch of it, the way he saw Egypt and Babylon, and the way he saw one widow walking out of Moab with two dead sons behind her.

Because that’s where the book starts with this subject. Not with a policy. With a widow.

Naomi and Ruth

The first chapter of Ruth is a refugee story, and it doesn’t soften it. There’s a famine. A man from Bethlehem takes his wife and two sons across the border to Moab looking for food. He dies. The sons marry local women, then the sons die too. And what’s left is three women and no provision: Naomi, an old woman stripped of everything, and Orpah and Ruth, two Moabite widows in a world with no safety net worth the name.

Naomi does what the desperate do. She decides to go home, because there’s nothing left where she is, and she tells her daughters-in-law to go back to their mothers’ houses. Orpah goes. That’s not a rebuke, by the way. She does the reasonable thing, kisses her mother-in-law and walks back toward her mother’s house, and the text blesses her and lets her go. Half the pew is Orpah on any given week, and the Bible does not spit on half the pew. It just makes sure we see the other sister standing at the fork in the road, and what her unreasonable choice cost her, and what it made of her. Ruth does the unreasonable thing: “Where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God” (Ruth 1:16). She ties herself to an old woman with nothing, from a country that despises hers, and walks into poverty in a land where the law says her people are not welcome.

Pay attention to what happens to this refugee. The law of Israel, given by God himself, says the stranger who sojourns with you “shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34). So when Ruth goes out to glean, stumbling along behind the harvesters, the commandment of God is standing over that field. And Boaz, a man who took the commandment seriously, lets her stay, tells his men to leave her alone, and makes sure she eats until she’s full. Stand in that field a minute. A scared foreign girl stumbling along behind the harvesters, and a landowner who walks over at lunchtime and says, don’t glean in another field, stay with my girls, I’ve told the men not to touch you, and when you’re thirsty drink from the jars. That’s what the commandment of God looked like with a face on it. And here’s what makes it astonishing. Deuteronomy 23:3 had shut Moabites out of the assembly of the Lord, even to the tenth generation. The same law that commands love for the sojourner also drew that hard border, and Ruth walked up to the border of both. What God did with her is the point: the exclusion stood in the book, and grace walked straight through it and into the family line of the Messiah. The Lord rewrote the family tree of the Messiah through this arrangement. Ruth the foreigner is the great-grandmother of David, and an ancestor of Jesus Christ. And when Matthew opens his gospel, the genealogy of the Son of God has a refugee from Moab in it, sitting right beside Tamar and Rahab, and that is clearly a pattern and not an accident. Matthew put her there on purpose.

A Law Made of Memory

Why would the law of God carry a commandment like that, love the sojourner as yourself, in the middle of an ancient tribal world? Because of memory. The law gives the reason again and again, in Leviticus, in Exodus, twice in Deuteronomy, and it’s always the same one: “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the heart of a stranger, seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9). You know the heart of a stranger. The old King James says it best, and the best Bible readers in the room just heard it in their grandmother’s voice.

Israel was commanded to run a national memory check every time a foreign family came up the road. You know what it is to be the ones nobody wants. You know the heart of a stranger, because you’ve had that heart. God built empathy into the law as a permanent institution, like the sabbath. It wasn’t a feeling. It was an obligation with an expiry date never.

And the reasoning goes all the way up to the character of God. “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). That is a plain sentence about what the Lord is like. He loves the uprooted. Not merely tolerates them while the paperwork processes. Loves them, feeds them, clothes them. And the same passage binds that love to worship: “You shall fear the LORD your God; you shall serve him and hold fast to him” (Deuteronomy 10:20). Love the sojourner, fear the Lord, serve him, hold fast to him, all in one breath of scripture. The text does not treat those as separable.

He Was One

And then the Son of God himself. Before Jesus preached a sermon or healed a leper, he was a refugee. Herod’s soldiers were coming for him as a toddler, and Joseph loaded his family in the dark and ran across a border, and the holy family lived for a season as foreigners in Egypt (Matthew 2:13-15). Matthew hears the echo of Hosea in it: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” The God who commanded Israel to remember Egyptian slavery let his own Son know what it is to sleep in a borrowed country with soldiers on the road behind him.

So when Jesus stands before the nations in Matthew 25 and separates the sheep from the goats, he does not speak in categories the church finds comfortable. He says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35). And the righteous, who had no idea they were doing anything memorable, ask when. And he answers, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Now, honest readers have argued for centuries about who “my brothers” are: whether Jesus means his disciples, or the suffering, or everybody. Good and careful people land in different places, and I’m not going to settle a debate he hasn’t settled for us. But here’s what doesn’t depend on the answer: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me” is on the list in every reading. There are six marks on that list, and welcoming the stranger is one of them, and it is not the softest one. In the story, the difference between the saved and the lost is not doctrine recited. It is food, drink, clothing, prison, and the stranger at the door. Those who saw him and welcomed him, and those who never looked.

But Here’s the Mirror

Now the mirror, and I want to hold it carefully, because fear is real and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. There are people in this room with honest concerns about security, about order, about what happens to a town when a wave of desperate people arrives. Those concerns aren’t wicked. This country has both a duty to protect its people and a God who loves the sojourner, and holding both at once is the assignment. Romans 13 says the governing authority is God’s servant for justice and order, and no sermon here undoes that. Order is a real good. It’s just not the only one God ordered. What the Lord will not let us do is let the fear rewrite the book. “Stranger” appears in the law of God dozens of times, more than a lot of doctrines we’ll fight over. If our politics of the stranger is built entirely from talk radio and not at all from Deuteronomy, we’re not being careful. We’re just scared, and scared people make cruel neighbors, and then we call the cruelty prudence.

And the mirror turns on the church. The same congregation that says “the stranger should go home legal” has a harder question waiting: has the stranger ever been home with us? When the hay crew came through the county, who ate at our tables? When the new family from the other side of the world landed in the apartment complex down the road, did they learn a single name from this church that wasn’t a landlord’s? We can love the sojourner in theory from now until the second coming and it will cost us nothing. Matthew 25 was not written to cost us nothing.

The grace in the middle of it: we are the uprooted ones, spiritually. Every one of us came to God with nothing, no papers worth anything, no claim on the house. And he welcomed us at full price, not because we documented ourselves but because he’s kind. “In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). The stranger at the border and the stranger far from God are not the same problem, but they are trained for by the same commandment, and one of them teaches us the other. The church is a house of former strangers. It always has been. There is no other kind.

So What Do We Do?

Know the heart of a stranger again. Read the Ruth chapter this week, all four parts, out loud. Ask God to give you back the memory of the times you were the outsider, because he says that memory is the whole engine of the law.

Do one welcoming thing that costs. Not a petition. A person. Help with the paperwork. Sit with the family at the apartment complex. Teach somebody English on a Tuesday night. Welcome means you show up in person, because hospitality in the New Testament is not a feeling about immigrants, it’s a door that actually opens. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Hebrews 13:2).

Pray for both peoples, by name, before God who sees both. For the people of Gaza, that God would keep them alive and give them a future. For the people of Israel, still burying their dead from a terrible day and living under real rockets, that God would give them security without cruelty and peace without lies. And for the ones who make the plans on every side, that God would turn their hearts, because he can. Pray against the cruel word wherever it’s spoken, in every capital and every language, including in rooms that claim his name, ours included.

And keep the order of the text. Fear the Lord, love the sojourner, hold fast to him. Not because the politics are easy. They’ve never been easy. Because the Lord we hold fast to loves the uprooted, and he was one, and he has never once failed to see them.