Early Christmas morning, 2018, I watched the 108th service of Lessons and Carols replayed by NBC from the Memorial Church, Harvard University, and led by the University Choir. It was a poignant entry into Christmas day, augmented with biblical immediacy by the sounds of a baby or two that made themselves known throughout the hourlong celebration.
I recognized most of the carols, sung in various languages. Some were new to me, however, especially a text written by Carl P. Daw Jr., in a hymn entitled “Gentle Joseph Heard a Warning” (Hope Publishing Company, 1990). It reads:
Gentle Joseph heard a warning,
from an angel in the night;
valiant Mary, maiden mother,
roused from sleep, prepared for flight:
thus the Christ-child’s family lived out
what the prophet had foretold,
that he might be called from Egypt
as God’s people were of old.
Targets of a tyrant’s army,
seeking safety, fleeing strife,
leaving house and land and kindred,
spurred by dreams of peaceful life;
through the desert of unknowing
and the night of doubt they went,
guided by God’s promised presence,
by that trust made confident.
Give us, God, such faith and courage
when we move from place to place,
and to those who come among us,
make us channels of your grace.
Let us see in every stranger
refugees from Bethlehem,
help us offer each one welcome
and receive the Christ in them.
The words overpowered me. Although written almost 30 years ago, their profound imagery captures this very moment in the history of global Christianity and culture, particularly in these United States. With a government now “partially shut down” in controversy over building a wall to keep out illegal immigrants, Americans are divided as to who those people are and how to respond to them. Are they “in many cases criminals, drug dealers and rapists,” “stone cold criminals,” “animals, not people” and “global terrorists,” (descriptions used by the U.S. president), or, as immigrant-related agencies and church groups suggest, are some 60 percent of them families “seeking safety, fleeing strife,” hoping for asylum?
“You can be a refugee from Bethlehem even in your own country.”
So, trudging through Epiphany 2019, let’s consider this confession: Whatever else the Jesus Story may mean, it must involve our response to “every stranger” as if they were “refugees from Bethlehem,” holy families in our midst. Is that asking too much of those who claim to follow the One who audaciously declared, “come to me, everyone who labors and is heavy laden, and I will give you rest?”
The carol is based upon that passage in chapter two of Matthew’s gospel in which Gentle Joseph is warned “in a dream”: “Rise up, take the child and his mother and escape with them to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to do away with him.” With Herod’s death, Joseph dreams again and is told to take mother and child back to “the land of Israel.” Safe at last.
Hardly, for “hearing that Archelaus had succeeded his father Herod as king of Judaea, Joseph was afraid to go there. And being warned by [another] dream, he withdrew to the region of Galilee; there he settled in a town called Nazareth.” (Matt 2:22-23) You can be a refugee from Bethlehem even in your own country. Best not to take safe places for granted, then or now.
The phrase “refugees from Bethlehem” is a reminder that Jesus was also an immigrant, an infant as vulnerable as the more than 2,600 migrant children separated from their parents by our government’s own mandate. On Epiphany Sunday, January 6, the New York Times published 10 vignettes of children from Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico reunited with their families “after several weeks or months apart.” Some of the children interviewed were teenagers; one as young as three years. Honduran 8-year-old Jostin “went quiet” when taken from his mother, “and he’s rarely spoken above a whisper since then.” A Guatemalan named Hugo, 16, “watched younger children melt into tears, bang on walls, and scream for their parents.” Jesus (yes that’s his name) a Honduran age 6, “Is too young to recount the details of his experience in a shelter for immigrant children. For now, all he can do is ask why he was taken there and remind his mother that he missed her.”
Church-related groups from across the theological and denominational spectrum have called for an end to such separation of immigrant families.
“Jesus was also an immigrant, … as vulnerable as the more than 2,600 migrant children separated from their parents by our government’s own mandate.”
Where immigrants are concerned, we Americans have a rather checkered past. In Righteous Empire, Martin Marty observed of the 19th-century Protestant response to the arrival of boatloads of European Catholics: “The Catholic immigrant was often pictured as a person of low morals and bad habits, racially inferior, congenitally alien, and historically unable to understand or contribute to free society.” Prominent Protestants like Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, led anti-Catholic protests, asserting that immigrants were part of “a Foreign Conspiracy to take over America.”
A 2015 article published online by Smithsonian.com reminds us that during World War II, “The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing that they were Nazi Spies.” Author Daniel A. Gross notes that, “In a long tradition of ‘persecuting the refugee,’ the State Department and FDR claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security.”
Gross draws parallels with current immigration difficulties: “World War II prompted the largest displacement of human beings the world has ever seen – although today’s refugee crisis is starting to approach its unprecedented scale. But even with millions of European Jews displaced from their homes, the United States had a poor track record offering asylum.”
There is hope, however. Innumerable faith communities and organizations have joined legal coalitions and other nonprofit groups in responding to the current crisis. These include Asylum Seekers Advocacy Project, Catholic Charities, United Methodist Justice for Our Neighbors, Lutheran Immigration and Relief Services and Define America. It includes Baptist groups such as American Baptist Churches USA, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Bautistas Por La Paz. These organizations are on the front lines as channels of God’s grace, offering tangible care to holy families seeking shelter and safety.
Wall or no wall, immigration reform remains as awkward, controversial and messy as it is essential. Yet neither now nor ever should such reform overlook the human/humane factor.
Gentle Joseph offers the challenge:
Let us see in every stranger
refugees from Bethlehem,
help us offer each one welcome
and receive the Christ in them.
Those words are more than a carol; they are a calling. Amen and Amen.