When I was seven, my parents moved our family from Switzerland to Canada. Even at the age of five, when my parents first planted the seed in my easily excitable mind, I dreamed of the changes and adventures of a life across an ocean I'd never even seen. Nothing could have squashed my innocent enthusiasm then. An airport just seemed like a gateway to unknown lands of adventure, and I wanted in. Little did I know then just how defining the immigrant experience would become for me.
Fortunately, my first negative experiences as a young immigrant didn't make me change averse. My first days of school didn't go too smoothly. The only words in English that I knew were "yes" and "no"...so it quickly became known that my name was "Yes". Every time I had a bad experience, I just convinced myself that there must be better schools, better friends, better countries...I just didn't know about them yet. What I really wanted, even though I would have rather died than admit this to any of my ignorant fellow third graders, was: I just wanted to be accepted.
It's only logical that the immigrant experience is the lens through which I would later also read the Bible. The Bible is full of stories about wandering foreigners in strange countries, struggling to adapt and make sense of their surroundings. I felt I could understand the tensions in the Bible, between people of different cultures and religions wanting to remain pure and undefiled by what made their neighbors different, and yet, live side by side. I liked that the story of the New Testament church was one of growing inclusiveness, because my awareness of the diversity of the world was growing too, and the stories of the Bible mirrored my own experiences.
Except....that my spiritual pedagogues told me that I had to guard against adapting to people who were not of my faith, and that it was my God-given mission to convert them to be like me. Funny how the people telling me this were the ones who never had to adapt themselves, culturally, religiously, linguistically. That never seemed right to me, even as an eleven year old, and I'm sure I pissed off many of my Sunday school teachers and pastors with my snarky objections to their well intentioned, yet misguided dogma.
Hospitality was always central to the heart of God as told through the stories of the Jewish people in the Bible. There is something about having a welcoming posture toward the stranger, with strange customs and unfamiliar ideas, that is close to the heart of God. (As an immigrant, I take comfort in that.) Jesus constantly trespassed the boundaries of socially and religiously acceptable behaviour by the kind of company he kept. In Matthew 25 those judged to be true followers of God are those that provide hospitality to the strangers, and meet the needs of the poor. (How do we miss these things?) Nowhere in the Bible do I get the impression that by providing hospitality to these strangers are we earning our place in God's Kingdom. Rather, our participation in God's hospitality takes the blinders off our culturally and religiously myopic views and helps us see the world like God sees it.
Here's where I'm at with all of this: God looks a lot like an eccentric stranger, with customs that annoy me, and views that are a shock to my sense of propriety and fairness. To welcome in that stranger, is to have my eyes opened and see God himself. To love that stranger is to love everything that God is about.
