Hospitality to a Stranger

Over the summer, I was at a get together with some family and friends, and uh one of our friends was sharing about her experience as a teacher in a very nearby school district.

And she said something that got my attention.

Her class is made up of more than 50% students who speak English as a second language.

Most of their parents don't speak English at all.

And she was sharing about the challenges of leading a classroom with this reality.

What as her over the years, her experience here in this school district, what she's noticed is that her room has become enlarged by these resident strangers.

And how does she live in this new reality?

I have to be honest with you for a moment, as she was sharing her challenges, the difficulties, the frustrations, I began to grow pretty uncomfortable.

Not because of her behavior, but just because of the reality that I don't think I even grasp.

This week at our mission group kickoff for this term, a person who's a counselor, a member here at Sacred Mission for a different neighboring school district actually affirmed that that's a very growing reality where she works as well.

If that hasn't grabbed your attention, let me share two statistics that might work to grab your attention this morning to what we need to work through together.

The first is this one out of every four people in the world is South Asian.

This is a global perspective that we have to understand.

One out of every four people in the world are South Asian.

They are the largest known diaspora to exist.

They are dwelling globally in foreign lands.

They are the largest represented people group that the world has ever known.

Another thing, if we look at this not from a global perspective, but from a national perspective of your neighborhood, of your city, Brookings Research Group says this the U.S.

will become minority white in 2045.

So 20 years from now, when some of your children are sophomores in college, the stranger will be the dominant presence in society.

So how does that make you feel?

I think for some of you that makes you feel real uncomfortable.

I think for some of you, because of the cultural moment we find ourselves in, you're afraid.

For some of you, that makes you angry.

But I don't want to be informed and discipled by the culture around us, by the propaganda that is being spewed at us, or by the headlines that are meant to cause us to respond back with hostility rather than grace.

I want us to be discipled by the inspired, living, faithful Word of God for how we ought to live.

Now I want to be honest with you, this is a complex, very large topic to address.

My hope is that we get the heart of it and we can walk through all the different nuanced realities of it together in community.

But for this morning, I want us to do something.

I want us to discover how we are to live amongst the stranger that dwells in our midst.

And I want us to see that this isn't just seen in the presence of your literal physical foreign ethnic neighbor.

But if we're honest with ourselves, we can relate to and we can perceive a growing presence of those who embody these foreign worldviews, these alien values, these strange beliefs who surround you every single day, but they look just like you do.

There is no doubt we dwell in a land of resident strangers.

This growing diversity in our communities brings to mind a key question.

How does God call us to live among and treat these strangers?

And so to answer that this morning, my hope is that we see it in the book of Leviticus.

So Leviticus is the third book of the Bible.

I think that's important because what I want to set the stage for is our understanding that this isn't something new.

Right?

I'm going to use some language and some words that the culture has kind of captured and put all these different connotations behind.

They might be trendy buzzwords to you, but I hope that we discover and see that they're actually rooted in the ancient revelation of who God is and how he desires his people to live.

So we're going all the way back to Leviticus.

And what's the soul of this book?

Right?

What's the heart of Leviticus?

I believe it's that the law of God establishes something.

It establishes that a people who have been saved by the grace and power of God in response should live holy lives.

A people have been saved and redeemed by the power and grace of God, they have an obligation to respond by holy living.

That's what Leviticus is about.

Out of Egypt, I saved you with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.

You are my people.

Live this way.

You see, many of us we could look at Leviticus as this cold book of laws and statutes.

That's not what it is, though.

It's a revealing of how God desires his people to live in response to the salvation that he has brought to them.

And this is important for us this morning.

Because we need to see that our posture and relationship with the strangers among us is actually rooted in God's desire for how we are to live.

And we're going to see something even deeper than that.

Not just this law, not this command rooted in a rhythm of do not and do, but he's actually going to establish this in the very nature of his eternal person.

Do you want to know who I am?

I am the God who loves the stranger.

And you're supposed to reflect that.

The passage functions in a negative to positive format, as I said.

The do not leading to the do, but having the whole command rooted in the why.

I think why is one of the most important questions that we could answer.

Right?

Anytime you tell your kid, you can't do that.

Why?

It's like ingrained into our DNA to ask, well, why?

We want to understand the purpose and the reason, and he's going to reveal that for us this morning.

And I hope that it actually anchors in our soul the do and do not of this command, because we're called to reflect the image of the God who has put his image on us.

We need to work to understand who the passage is specifically referring to, though, first.

When we talk about this stranger who sojourns with you, because knowing who that person is allows us to understand the admonishment that's happening in the way that we have relationship with them.

The stranger is not just this like bucket language for foreigner, right?

It's not exactly what it's talking about.

It's a little bit more precise than that.

It's a foreigner who has sought refuge and acceptance in a new land.

You see, many times they would leave their homeland under some sense of distress, causing them to seek refuge somewhere else.

But that wasn't always the reason.

Sometimes they were simply just seeking a new place to dwell.

No matter what, though, they were one who sought both acceptance and refuge.

And the charge for Israel's relationship with them was to do him no wrong.

To do him no wrong, to refuse to mistreat him, to refuse to take advantage of him, to refuse to oppress him.

You see, the native people of Israel would hold something in their relationship to the foreigner who now dwelt in their land.

They would hold power over them.

I don't know if you've ever traveled to a foreign land, but you feel the absence of your power in that place.

And they know the language, they know how the systems work, they understand how law is established and upheld here.

They know how to make things happen.

And you're just here like, hopefully, someone will be kind to me and help me.

And so they hold a power.

The native-born person holds a power that the stranger does not have.

And here's what God is saying what are you gonna do with that power?

And the admonition begins with do not mistreat him, do him no wrong.

You see, I think there are three ways that mankind can use the power that they have in any given situation.

The first thing that they do with power is they weaponize power.

They weaponize power.

They understand and realize that they have power over another individual and they exploit it for their own personal gain.

Right?

We've seen this throughout history, we've seen this throughout culture.

People who weaponize the power they have for their own good.

But some people, they don't just they don't weaponize power, they withhold power.

They withhold power.

You see, they actually impede the other person's good that they could have in their life that the power that they hold could serve to accomplish for them.

You see this in the parable of the Good Samaritan, a brother who was in the road, beaten to the point of almost death, weak and without power.

Two men withheld their power from him for his good.

How cruel is that.

Others, though, the last way I think we can use power is that people can wield power.

They can wield power.

Here's what I mean by that.

That they can actually use their power sacrificially and effectively for the ultimate good of another person.

So you and I, we have power.

Are we gonna weaponize it?

Are we gonna withhold it?

Or in holy response to who God is and what he's done for us, are we gonna wield it for the good of others?

You see, in short, we can either use our power to harm, we can use it to ignore, or we can use it to help the stranger who dwells among us.

You see, God would reveal to Israel the righteous and holy way to wield that power.

And he does so in the positive aspect of this command.

You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you.

That's the positive aspect of this.

The Israelites were called to look upon the stranger among them with equality, like a citizen of this land, to treat them that they would have treated their native-born neighbor with benevolence and loving kindness, to have their treatment of them be for their ultimate good.

You see, in a sense, this was the purpose of the law.

It's for the glory of God, but the law establishes a society that functions in a very unique way, where your good is discovered and known in your pursuit for the ultimate good of others.

That's how the church is supposed to work, that's how God's society is supposed to work, that's how the kingdom operates, that we are so preoccupied with using any sense of power that we have to accomplish our own selfish good, we actually rob ourselves of a better good that God desires for us as his people because we fail to see it and discover it and are working toward the good of those around us.

We actually settle for pathetically less than what God desires for us.

And the Lord here in Leviticus was calling his people to envelop the stranger among them into that benevolent pursuit.

In fact, the Lord establishes this command for his people on the foundation of this governing principle that kind of umbrellas all of God's law.

You shall love him as yourself.

Does that language resonate with someone?

Have you heard those words before?

You shall love him as yourself.

This is exactly what the law is summarized into.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no greater law than these.

You see, this principle is repeated again and again throughout the scriptures as a summary statement for the heart of the law that was given to Israel.

Jesus, when being questioned about the law by a scribe, says in Mark 12 these words The most important is the Shema.

We read this in child dedications.

Hero, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength.

And the second is this you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There is no other commandment greater than these.

Now, would we dare to be like the lawyer found in Luke 10 who had the audacity to try and test Jesus with such a question?

Well, who's my neighbor?

Who do I really have to live like this around?

You see, the point of the parable in Luke 10 of the Good Samaritan does something very unique.

When you and I would try to assess who's our neighbor, we're going to determine that reality by the people that we see around us.

Who is in close proximity to our existence?

Jesus doesn't define the neighbor that way.

The way that Jesus defines the neighbor is in the way that someone with power loved someone who was weaker than them.

The onus was put on the person who was called to love the other.

It wasn't on the people who just simply surrounded them in proximity.

You see, this was Jesus' response to the lawyer.

He says, Which of these three do you think actually proved to be a neighbor to this man who fell among the robbers?

This man who was jumped in the middle of his travels, who was robbed and beaten to the point of death.

Are you asking, is he the neighbor?

Because I'm going to ask, which of these men was the neighbor to him?

Jesus was defining the neighbor by the way that they treated the one who was weaker than they were.

Even the lawyers saw this.

He was able to understand this truth because he responded to Jesus.

Well, it was the one who showed him mercy.

That was the neighbor.

Jesus said, You're right.

Jesus was defining the neighbor by the way they treated the one who was weaker than they were.

The one who loved him, the one who used their power for his ultimate good.

That was the neighbor.

So we are called to love the stranger like a neighbor.

To love them as we would love ourselves.

This is something very fascinating about the Bible.

It really has no aspect of it that assumes you're going to have a hard time loving yourself.

We are, because of our sinful nature, extremely selfish, self-centered people.

We don't have problems loving ourselves.

We have problems loving others the way that we would want to be loved.

And what would that look like?

Well, for us, we who would seek to obtain our own ultimate good by wielding the power that we have available to us.

That's what we live our lives by.

Whatever power I have, I'm going to wield it for my own personal ultimate good.

And the kingdom says, no.

Take that and refocus it into the way that you're supposed to actually love other people, because in that you'll find the ultimate good you're actually looking for.

You can't fathom the good I have for you.

You see, we're to love like that.

We're called to be benevolent and compassionate, hospitable and charitable, to no longer count them as a stranger, but to count them as part of the community.

And the why behind this command, it's given to us right here at the very close of the passage.

For you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Israel, why am I calling you to live this way?

You were a stranger in the land of Egypt.

And look what I did for you.

This is why we are supposed to love the stranger with such benevolence.

God's desire for his people is to live in response to the very salvation that he has given to them and to reflect the nature of his image to those around us.

We who are in Christ, we have been delivered out of a spiritual Egypt, a land of death, where you and I were once oppressed by the tyrant Pharaoh of sin.

And Christ delivered us from that.

He brought us out of the land of death into the land of living, into his kingdom, into his family, where we are no longer oppressed by the power of sin, but we are made free and liberated to live in the liberty of Christ Himself.

This is what Ephesians 2.12 spoke of last week.

Do you remember?

Do you remember that you were at that time separated from Christ?

Alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world?

And just a few passages earlier, Paul reminded them about what God did for them.

But God, verse 4, being rich in mercy.

Why?

Because of the great love with He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

By grace you have been saved.

So what does a righteous response to the salvation that we have received in Christ look like?

To have compassion and pity on the stranger that is around us and to love them.

To love them.

And God takes it one step further.

He doesn't just simply call us to do that because of what he has done for us, but he calls us to that because of who he is in his very person.

You see, he ends this text with I am the Lord your God.

I am the Lord your God.

I am Yahweh your God.

People.

It's even quoted before he gives us the Ten Commandments later in the book of Leviticus.

He says, I am Yahweh your God.

Do you want to see what I'm like?

This is what I'm like.

Now live like my people.

It establishes authority, but it also implies that treating strangers with equity and love is not merely a social or moral obligation.

We cannot just simply allow this to fall on the ground of do's and don'ts.

It is rooted in the very character and nature of God Himself.

To love the stranger, to be like our Maker, to respond to our Savior is to live in a gratitude-filled heart of the love that we have received in Jesus.

And to reflect the image of God to a watching world around us.

But if we're honest, many of us, including myself, we fail at this.

This sounds great on paper.

Man, this is incredibly hard.

Because here's what I want us to see.

We tend to look at the stranger around us not with compassion or pity, but with hostility and contempt.

And in response to that reality, we do one of two things.

We either weaponize or we withhold the power that we have, which is meant to be wielded for their good.

You see, we treat the stranger as a hostile.

We don't love them as a neighbor, we treat them as a hostile.

For many of us, a stranger's presence, it's a threat to your power.

It's a threat to your comfort, it's a threat to your security.

And I get it, if you've read the headlines, if you've watched the propaganda video, if you've seen the debate, if you've been discipled by culture, this is probably terrifying to you.

Because we are being trained to see the stranger as a hostile every single day.

Can I say something?

That's not from the throne of God.

It's not.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have wisdom, discernment, or love, a high sense of justice for the injustices we see around us.

But can I ask a question?

Are we as filled with holy anger when we see a stranger in our midst commit such an injustice to the people we love?

Are we equally as angry when our own injustices against them have diminished or destroyed the very life that they hold?

We're okay when it doesn't happen to us.

You see, we often work harder to accomplish self-preservation rather than expressing the selfless, sacrificial love that we are called to.

We hold power.

But as we look onto the strangers around us, we see them as a threat to it, and so we treat them as a hostile.

And some of us we just weaponize our power.

We weaponize our power.

Here's the pattern of humanity.

You don't have to think real hard to understand this.

Whatever you see as hostile, you typically will engage it with hostility.

This can go from anything to a spider in your bedroom, right?

That is a hostile enemy.

I'm not going to bed tonight and that thing crawl up in my mouth.

That ain't happening.

I understand there's like four or five I do a year.

I don't have to know about it.

I'm gonna kill that thing.

I'm going to engage that spider with all the powerful hostility I can stir up.

And it's gone.

We don't just do it with pests in our bedroom, we do it with image bearers in our neighborhood.

Because we view them with hostility, because we see them as a hostile.

This we want to do whatever we can to eliminate the threat that we are feeling at the moment, and we will use our power to accomplish it.

We can see this throughout our history in so many ways, both great and small.

Our cultural history is littered with the ways that we have weaponized our power against the stranger.

It is a stain and a mar on our past.

We've done this in economic exploitation, political oppression, social marginalization.

But some of us in this room, you might not have participated in some of those macro ways, but in micro ways.

Some of us just simply do the micro ways, not microwaves.

Some of us simply do this in just the language that we use about people who are different from us.

Yeah, I'm guilty of this.

I've been wrecked this week thinking about how James, Jesus' little brother, is like your tongue.

It's a fire within you.

A fire can either purify or it can set a forest ablaze.

Are you gonna allow fresh water and bitter water to flow from the same fount?

Are you gonna praise God with one breath and curse your brother in the next?

You see, I've used my language to tear down people, to wound them and to harm them.

I've spoken about them as if they weren't image bearers inhuman.

Our language can be very seasoned with contempt for the stranger rather than the compassion that it's supposed to be filled with for their despondent state.

But no matter the magnitude, great or small, macro or micro, when we see those around us as hostile, rest assured, we're going to weaponize what power we do have to eliminate it.

But some of us, we might not resonate with that.

We might not see ourselves as people who weaponize power, but I would say almost every person in this room does struggle with withholding your power for the good of another person.

This is probably the one that resonates with us most.

You see, many of us, we refuse to engage with the stranger.

And what happens in that is that you and I are gradually becoming more and more isolated into our subculture of self-preservation.

You see, as we look around us, we discover that the people in close proximity, somehow, all of a sudden, they look a lot like we do.

They value the things that we value, they act the way that we act, they believe the way that we believe.

We feel comfortable and secure because we have worked hard in our efforts of self-preservation to secure for ourselves a homogeneous circle that we can rest in.

But I need to tell you something.

The stranger around you is increasing while your circle of self-preservation is decreasing.

I think if you're honest with yourself, you can see that.

These statistics really aren't that new that I read before we started this sermon.

Those classrooms didn't get filled up with resident strangers just the start of this school year.

It's been happening and happening and happening.

You have just turned your eyes away from it, and your circle has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller.

You see, if we were not so preoccupied with ourselves, we'd actually be able to see those around us who need our help.

Who God has called us to love and to serve.

But instead, we ignore the stranger.

We fail to engage with them and we withhold the power that we possess for their good.

We withhold our resources, our wisdom, our homes, our very presence in their life.

And I think one of the biggest ways that we have done this, and we've seen the failure of it, is in the mission of the church.

You see, there was a day in the church where if you wanted to reach strangers, you sent missionaries across the ocean to be able to preach the gospel and share the good news of Jesus with them.

Can I just say something?

You just got to go to the neighborhood park, and the nations are there.

People from every tribe, nation, and tongue, they are filling up your neighborhoods.

They are entering into your backyards, they are working with you in the office, they are here.

We don't have to go across the ocean to reach the stranger.

We have to go next door and be hospitable to our neighbor.

You see, we hold the greatest power.

We possess the greatest good.

The gospel of Jesus, the only salvation that is available to all of mankind, including the resident stranger who lives next to you that you have nothing in common with, that makes you uncomfortable, maybe a little fearful, and maybe has seasoned your language with contempt for their presence there.

Church.

Throughout the scriptures, God actually judges his people for their sinfulness toward the stranger and he called them to repent.

The majority of the time, if we look throughout the Old Testament, God actually judges his people for the way that they have treated the sojourning stranger among them.

It's fascinating.

He does something that might surprise you, he lumps that treatment of them in with the way that his people have treated the widow and the orphan also.

You see, James also talks about what is pure religion.

And many of us are like, oh yeah, pure pure.

But you don't do that anyway, if we're honest with ourselves.

But some of you do.

I'm so thankful for those who do.

Uh, to care for the orphan and widow.

But we have to understand the New Testament text is coming from a clarification of the Old Testament revelation.

They're not creating anything new.

Let me submit to you, maybe what James is actually saying is that true religion is using our power for those who are weaker among us.

For their good, for their provision, for their care, for their benevolence.

Maybe that's what he's really saying.

Because when we see this in a in a faithful hermeneutic of all of Scripture, God lumps in the sojourner, the stranger, with the widow and the orphan also.

We see this, an example of this one of many we see in Ezekiel.

God says to Israel in Ezekiel chapter 22, Behold the princes of Israel in you, everyone according to his what?

Ezekiel 22 · chapter mention

There we go.

All right, we got a little Pentecostal there.

I'm thinking you guys are growing.

According to his power.

He has been bent on shedding blood.

Father and mother are treated with contempt in you.

The sojourner suffers exhortation in your midst.

The fatherless, orphan, and the widow are wronged in you.

You have despised my holy things and profane my Sabbath, and God judges his people.

To love the stranger is to love the orphan and the widow also.

To love those weaker and in greater need than we are, to love them as we would love ourselves.

We may be a people who weaponize power, we may be a people who withhold power at the cost of others, but thank God we have a Savior who wielded his power at the expense of himself, Jesus.

Jesus wielded his power by dying as a stranger.

Here's what I keep loving about the scriptures is the way the gospel just keeps showing itself beautiful in every aspect of our lives.

You see, Jesus was a stranger, a sojourner in a foreign land.

John sets this up in the opening of his prologue.

John 1, 10 and 11 says this.

Yet the world did not know him.

You see, this was a driving theme throughout the ministry of Jesus.

The people who were supposed to be his own saw Jesus as a hostile to be eliminated rather than a hope to be embraced.

And it set the tone for his public ministry to the day that he died.

As his ministry was coming to a close, there were those who actually weaponized their power against Jesus, our Savior.

They drug him in the middle of the night to an unjust trial, and they pulled him in front of Pontius Pilate where they hailed these false accusations against him.

They wanted him dead, and they were going to use all of their power to make sure that that happened.

And then there were those others, his close and intimate friends, those whom he had spent the last three years with in ministry.

They withheld their power.

They denied even knowing who he was as Peter, standing outside of the trial of Jesus, a young girl, hears his accent and says, You sound like a Galilean.

Were you with him?

No, I don't even know who that dude is.

Peter, the one who had this fierceness about him, withheld his power and he cowered in the covering of night.

And here stands all alone Christ.

But not Christ, the powerless one.

Here stands Christ, the omnipotent God, made flesh.

He told his disciples, There is no one who takes my life.

I lay it down.

Unless you're confused and you think that here, bound in ropes, scarred by whip, crowned by thorn, if you think this is weakness, you don't understand power.

And what does Jesus do in the midst of all of that?

Omnipotent God-made flesh wields his power by sacrificially laying his life down for the ultimate good of those he loved.

He willfully endured the shame and carried his cross outside of the city gate to the Mount of Golgotha, where the public display of his estrangedness was realized.

We don't know him.

He's an alien, a stranger in this land.

Crucify him.

And Jesus, in full power, he died for you.

So what's my hope for us this morning, Sacred Mission?

My hope for us is that we would love the stranger.

We would love the stranger.

God's desire for us as his people is to live in response to the salvation that he has given to us through Jesus and to reflect the nature of his image to those around us watching.

You see, this is the beauty of sanctification.

Sanctification is taking the marred and perverted, broken image that we hold and restoring and renewing it, that we look more like Him.

We need to repent of the ways that we've weaponized or withheld our power to those around us, and we must seek the help of the Spirit to show us how we can wield that power for the good of the stranger in our midst.

Let us be a people who use our resources, our wisdom, our homes, our presence for the ultimate good of our neighbor.

Because remember this question who is your neighbor?

Who is your neighbor?

He is the image bearer that you seek to love.