Strange Angels
a sermon by Claire Phillips-Thoryn
given on Sunday, October 15, 2006
at The First Parish in Lincoln
First Reading – Genesis 18:1-8
The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
Second Reading – excerpt, “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through” by D.H. Lawrence
What
is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No,
no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.
Knocking. Running. Creeping. Hiding. Who is that at our door in the night? If we listen to some of our lawmakers, we are besieged by people knocking at our doors, or worse: people slipping in the back door without knocking. To hear some of our lawmakers, we must be fearful, resentful, on guard, armed against these late-night knockers, these people who want to do us harm. Strangers.
In America we use the same word for strangers as we do for non-humans. Alien. Foreign, extra-terrestrial. Aliens abduct, aliens torture. An alien stole my body parts, an alien stole my job. Alien invasion; alien immigration. Green aliens; brown aliens. Aliens with large dark eyes. Inhuman aliens; illegal aliens. They are coming for you. They will take what you do not want to give. What is the knocking at the door in the night? It is somebody wants to do us harm.
Abraham did not let the strangers knock at his door. Seeing them approach, he ran towards them, offered them water and bread, milk and meat, and shade to sit under. I imagine the world a thousand or so years before the birth of Jesus to be so sparsely populated that these strangers must have been quite an event. Perhaps there were 100 million people on earth then, or fewer. Now we have 6 billion people on earth. And apparently, they all want to come to America. What is that knocking on the door in the night? It is the world.
And of course they want to come to America. We are the land of opportunity, the land of rags to riches, the land where the streets are paved with gold, the land of milk and honey. New Canaan. Isn’t that the American script? The creation myth of America says you can start with nothing and end up a millionaire. Become a doctor, become a lawyer, become the governor of California. America the free.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”1
My ancestors did it. Ellis Island let my great grandfather in. The original ship manifest is available to view thanks to the Ellis Island foundation.2 It says, April 4th, 1914. Wasyl Thoryn. 5’7”. 28 years old. Brown hair, brown eyes. A French last name and Russian ancestry, stamped on the original ship manifest: ADMITTED. How many of us can count our ancestry back to the Native Americans? We are all immigrants in this land. We have all arrived here by boat, one way or another, knocking at the door in the night.
Abraham didn’t just give the strangers food. He sat with them while they ate, giving them companionship. As the book of Hebrews says, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it” (Hb 13:2). Genesis says that God was appearing to Abraham in the form of these three men. Three strange angels.
But now for many Americans, hearing that knocking at the door in the night makes us anxious. We hoard our riches, our milk and our honey, and we build heavier doors, taller walls. Congress just signed a bill to create a 700 mile-long double-layered fence, to stop some of the brown aliens from abducting themselves out from Mexico and into our backyards.
The story of Abraham and the three strange angels isn’t the only story about strangers or aliens in the Bible. One minister, Joan Maruskin, has called the Bible the “Ultimate Immigration Handbook: Written By, For, and About Migrants, Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers.”3 In the Bible, there are no illegal aliens, only resident aliens—people not native to a place who have somehow come to live there. Over and over again the Bible says to be kind to widows, orphans, and aliens. The Hebrew Bible calls its readers to leave the gleanings of the fields aliens to harvest. It asks us to forgive the debts of aliens. Deuteronomy says, “You shall not pervert the justice owed to an alien.” “You shall not detest an Edomite or an Egyptian, for you were an alien in his land” (Deut 23:7, 24:17).
We all have some sense of what it means to be an alien in another’s land. We have all had some experience where we weren’t sure if we were welcome, where we felt out of place, uninvited, ill-at-ease in our surroundings. At the very least, you probably have some memories of childhood, when you were the powerless kid in a world of adults, you weren’t sure what all the rules were or how to follow them or what exactly you had done wrong. You shall not detest the alien, for you too were an alien in his land.
But what about the criminals, the lawbreakers? Here’s a story of one murderer. He saw a man beating another man, and he stepped in and killed the bully. Assault with intent to kill. Murder. There were witnesses, and so this man fled to another country. There, he was given sanctuary, shelter, and food, and a neighbor became friendly with him. He married his neighbor’s daughter. Later, this man, Moses, returned to his homeland and led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and became the brave leader of a migrant people.
In today’s world, Moses would have been labeled a criminal alien, imprisoned, and deported back to Egypt. There are a number of other things we blame on aliens, legal or illegal. Many people blame the reoccurrence of some diseases on these new residents in America. The opposers of immigrants say they are bringing previously vanquished diseases back to the US: leprosy, tuberculosis, polio, malaria. How easy it seems to blame the victim of the disease for having contracted the disease. How rare it seems in this country to think that instead of blaming the person who is sick, we might look to the party who had the cure, but did not share it. If we have a cure for these diseases, why aren’t they vanquished world-wide, and not just in America? Because we kept the cure to ourselves. Because we let pharmaceutical companies charge prohibitive amounts for drugs that would keep entire populations healthy. And then, when we, the so-called “owners” of these cures refuse to share them with the rest of the world, we complain bitterly that the rest of the world continues to insist on getting sick—and coming to the very place where the cure is widely available.
Aliens are also blamed for taking jobs away from Americans.4 We say it is a sin on their shoulders that they work for wages a documented worker would not take. I have seen government officials create unconstitutional laws and “regulations” in order to stop day laborers from gathering—the same day laborers who mow their lawns and haul their mulch. In the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Malachi passes on a message from God, “Then I will draw near to you for judgment… against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien” (Malachi 3:5). It is not the migrant or illegal workers who are exploiting America. It is the American industries, corporations, and government that are exploiting the needs of these workers. Recently, along the Gulf Coast, contractors have been exposed for hiring tens of thousands of undocumented migrant workers, asking them to work for days and weeks in the moldy, dangerous environments destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and then running them off without pay, threatening to turn them in to the government to be deported. The Department of Labor estimates that there is one to three million dollars in back-pay owed to these workers.5
What is the knocking? What is the knocking at the door in the night? What is it we hear whispered on the wind, a whisper that penetrates our heaviest door, our tallest wall?
“I will draw near to you for judgment…against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages…against those who thrust aside the alien.”
“You shall not pervert the justice owed to an alien.”
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
Right now, awaiting our
President’s signature or veto is a bill to remove the prisoner’s right to
habeas corpus, and gives our government the legal right to torture. Habeas corpus essentially allows a prisoner
to say, “Hey, why am I in prison?” so that the courts can then examine if there
is truly a case against them or not.
Right now, in detainment centers, we have an unknown number of people
held without proof of any wrongdoing. If they are ever allowed to leave those
windowless warehouses, they’ll be shipped back to the country they came from, a
country they may have fled from to seek asylum. We lift our lamp beside the golden door, we hear they’re
knocking—and we turn them away.
Perhaps someday, we’ll fight so hard and for so long to keep our borders secure that we’ll all blow each other up. And then, when the real aliens come, the outerspace aliens, there will be nothing left for them to abduct, no people to implant, no planet to invade. Poet Philip Appleman wrote a poem titled “Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule” in which he envisions space aliens visiting a burned-out Earth. He writes:
“I
thought of your hovering saucers,
looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,
so it wouldn't be lost forever --
that once upon a time we had
meadows here, and astonishing things,
swans and frogs and luna moths
and blue skies that could stagger your heart.
We could have had them still,
and welcomed you to earth, but
we also had the righteous ones
who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.
When you go home to your shining galaxy,
say that what you learned
from this dead and barren place is
to beware the righteous ones.”
Beware the righteous ones; but be more aware of the fear in your heart, in all our hearts, that we have something to lose by sharing. Beware the greed and the anxiety that tells us to hold all our abundance close to our chest.
And so, I pray:
May we find a way to share. Then, O God, may we find a way to share more.
May we seek to find goodwill, similarity, humanity, in the eyes of people who seem alien to us.
May we honor, respect, and care for the widows, the orphans, the aliens.
May we take the time to rejoice in our world, and all the astonishing and beautiful things in it: meadows and frogs and luna moths and blue skies.
And when that knocking comes, on the door in the night, may we not be afraid. It is the three, the three thousand, the three million strange angels.
Admit them. Admit them.
Amen.
———————————-
1. Emma Lazarus, poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty
2. ellisisland.org
3. http://www.churchworldservice.org/Immigration/bible-as-handbook.html, and personal correspondence.
4. Why do they need jobs here? One reason might be that the huge American corporations that moved their factories from here to Mexico, have moved them again away from Mexico to places in Asia like India where they can pay even cheaper wages. Outsourcing has global effects.
5. As reported in many news sources, including ABC News, http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/07/katrina_contrac.html, and NPR, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5446965