I am honored to share this powerful sermon given by the Rev. BJ Hutto at the historic Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City on September 11, 2016. To see the video of the sermon, click here.
I’ve always loved the way that the book of Exodus begins. We get a handful of verses that set the stage, and then the writer drops us right in the middle of the action: “There arose a pharaoh in Egypt who knew not Joseph.” With the rise of this new pharaoh, Israel immediately goes from being a welcomed guest—it was Joseph, after all, who saved all of Egypt from a famine—to being a threatening minority. They’re feared. They’re hated. They’re persecuted. Eventually, God calls Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and—after years and years of wandering—into Canaan where they can finally settle.
Israel’s time in Egypt shaped them in lots of ways, and one of those is that it made Israel, at its root, a refugee people. Not just a traveling people—nomads who would move around every so often—but in fact a refugee people. Israel had gone into Egypt fleeing the same famine that almost killed the mighty Egyptians; Israel had to flee Egypt because of persecution and hatred; then, as Israel wandered its way through the wilderness towards the Promised Land, they were harassed and attacked time and time again by nations on all sides of them. Being refugees, needing refuge, seeking refuge is in their DNA.
This experience marks who they are, and it marks how they live once they come into their own land. They know how terrifying it is, so to speak, to live under a Pharaoh who does not know Joseph. They know what it means to be aliens, to be strangers in a strange land, and the power of this experience is evident throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: Leviticus 19.34, Exodus 22.21, Jeremiah 2.6, Amos 2.10, I Kings 12, II Kings 17, Psalm 78, Psalm 80, Psalm 81…Literally hundreds of times in the Old Testament, Israel looks back at its past in Egypt in order to understand who it is and how it’s supposed to live. Our Deuteronomy text this morning exemplifies this: “You shall love the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” You don’t love the alien because you might be a nice person, and you don’t love the alien because they might be a nice person. You love the alien because you know what it’s like to be an alien. “Remember,” God says, “Remember, and do not forget. Remember what it was like to be an alien in Egypt, and choose to take care of the aliens in your midst.”
Remembering is so important. Like Israel, if we don’t know our past, then we don’t know who we are, and if we don’t know who we are, then we don’t know how we are supposed to live.
Today, our country remembers. We remember an attack fifteen years ago that cost the lives of 3,000 civilians and first responders, an attack whose epicenter was just about three miles from right here. What’s more, we remember the two wars which that attack spawned and the tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives—American, Afghan, Iraqi, and others—that were lost. Today we remember. Today we memorialize. We thank those who threw themselves into the breach because of love of country, because of love of neighbor, and we do that thing that we who are here do in times like this: we once again commend the souls of those who have been lost to God above, praying that God will recognize them as children of his own hand, as sheep of his own flock, and as sinners of his own redeeming. And we trust that God will do this. That’s what we do. That’s our job as people of faith.
But that’s not all that we do. Just as we remember everything that happened, we remember lessons that were learned as well. In the days and weeks after 9/11, worship services swelled with people. We realized that even with all of our wealth and all of our comfort and all of our power, we could never ultimately secure our lives for ourselves, and so we leaned on God just a little bit more. In the days and weeks after 9/11, life seemed to slow down. People spoke to one another. People looked out for one another, and that sense of solidarity grew into a slogan that’s still around our city today: “If you see something, say something.”
In the days and weeks afterwards, we saw President Bush—who was no peacenik—stand up on television and proclaim that “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam….Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war…. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect. [Our Muslim neighbors] must not be intimidated in America. That's not the America I know. That's not the America I value.” George W. Bush spoke those words on September 17th, and then he hammered that message again and again in the weeks and months after the September 11th attacks because he knew that it is just as easy to learn the wrong lessons in times like that as it is to learn the right ones. Sometimes, it’s even easier.
Therefore, just as we remember the right lessons learned, we remember the wrong lessons learned as well. We remember the rumors and distrust that swept through our country, the runs on gas masks and canned goods, the fears of anthrax spread through the mail and WMDs spread by crop dusters over our towns and cities. We remember open speculation about rounding up Muslim-Americans and placing them in internment camps just as Japanese-Americans were rounded up after Pearl Harbor. We remember the euphemisms used to paper over our country’s breaking of international law: the “extraordinary rendition” of suspects who were then taken to “black sites” and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We remember other things as well, things closer to home, things less violent but just as hateful, things such as communities of faith being barred from building houses of worship by their neighbors...neighbors who feared them, who therefore persecuted them, and some of whom very likely hated them.
There’s a catch-all term that’s normally given to such actions. It’s “xenophobia.” “Xenophobia” is the word we use to talk about being afraid of people from other places just like “arachnophobia” is the word we use to talk about being afraid of spiders. It comes from two Greek words: phobia—fear—and xenos—pronounced with a ‘z’ but spelled with an ‘x.’ Xenophobia: the fear of foreigners. What’s interesting, though, is that the word for foreigners in Greek isn’t ‘xenos;’ it’s ethnos, which is where we get the word ‘ethnicity.’ ‘Ethnos’ means you’re a foreigner, you’re from somewhere else; xenos means something different, something a little more sinister.
This book is The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament…or part of it at least. This is volume 5 out of 10, and it’s the one where we learn how xenos was used in ancient Greek. Therefore this is the place where we learn what it means when it’s used in the New Testament. The entry for xenos—I kid you not—is 36 pages long. I’m going to read just a little bit of that. “In the first instance the xenos is the stranger. Between the stranger and those around him there is reciprocal tension. He is a man from without, strange, hard to fathom, surprising, unsettling, sinister. But to the stranger his odd and different environment is also disturbing and threatening. Thus there arises mutual fear….This is the first and basic mood associated with xenos, no less in early antiquity than in other cultures….In all peoples the stranger is originally an enemy; this is why many nations have only a single word for both….To kill him seems to be the easiest way to dispose of” him. (pp. 2-3).
Xenos shows up in less than a dozen spots in the New Testament. And only once is it placed on the lips of Jesus. You might recognize the passage. It’s from Matthew 25: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations”—all the ethnos, all the people from somewhere else—“will be gathered before him….Then the king will say ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father…for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was an alien and you made me welcome. I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you an alien and made you welcome, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’”
In the church, Matthew 25 gets quoted and referenced all the time; it’s the cornerstone of the church’s understanding of its mission and ministry to the world. And right there in the middle of it is that word: xenos. “When I was a xenos,” Jesus says, “You made me welcome.” So not really a stranger, like many translations have it, not someone who’s just unknown to you. And not just a foreigner either, not an ethnos. Jesus is talking about welcoming someone that is more than both of these: A xenos: someone whose presence might otherwise make you uncomfortable, someone that conventional wisdom would tell you that you ought to fear. Someone who, in the wider culture, would be made the object of xenophobia. “Seek out the alien,” Jesus says. “Seek out the xenos.” Not because you’re a nice person, not because they might be a nice person, but because that is how you love and serve your Lord.
And that is a hard thing to remember sometimes, you know?
Just about a year ago, I preached a sermon here about the upcoming presidential election, and I titled it “A Sermon at the Start of Silly Season.” It wasn’t a silly sermon, but I made light of the political conversation that would inevitably happen during the party primaries and the general election. I think sometimes that maybe I shouldn’t have preached that sermon, because we are not, right now, in a silly season. We are in a spiteful season. We’re in a season where our neighbors are turning on one another, but more to the point we’re in a season where our neighbors are turning on the strangers, the aliens, the foreigners in our midst. Fifteen years after the 9/11 attacks, it seems like all the wrong lessons that were learned back then are on the rise and all of the right lessons that were learned have been forgotten. To use the word again, xenophobia is on the rise, and it is being stoked by certain politicians and certain pundits. I could tic off examples—unprovoked attacks against Muslims, the demonization of Middle Eastern refugees coming here (half of whom, by the way, are Christians)—but time won’t allow it, and besides I really don’t think I need to. I also don’t think I need to go through the stats of how many more Muslims around the world suffer from terrorist attacks than nonMuslims do, or the stats on how many more Americans are killed each year by domestic terrorists than by ones who have come here from overseas. All of that being the case, the conversation remains what it is. And that makes me sad. And quite frankly it makes me scared, but as scared as it makes me sometimes I can’t imagine how scary it must be for our neighbors who are on the business end of all of this distrust and all of this hatefulness.
Now, I don’t think I need to preach to y’all not to do these things. I don’t think y’all are randomly threatening Muslims you pass on the street or attacking young women who choose to wear traditional Islamic headscarves, and I don’t think you’re firing rifles at or setting fire to mosques around this country. But…what are you doing? What are you doing—what are we doing—in order to counter all of this? In order to assuage the fears of our neighbors? In order to counter the venom that’s crept into our national conversation? What are we doing—in the words of Matthew’s Gospel, in the words of Jesus Christ himself—to make the strangers and the aliens amongst us welcome? That’s the question. That’s the question that you and I and every other Christian in this country has to answer, because what we do for them we do for Jesus, and when we don’t do something for them, when we choose to bite our tongue or turn our head, when we hang them out to dry, we leave Jesus hanging as well. It’s like Martin Luther King wrote in his “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail:” the biggest problem at the end of the day isn’t with the extremists; the biggest problem is with the mass of Americans who know better but sit silently by. And that is a hard thing to remember, and that is a hard lesson to learn, but it is what our God requires of us this day.