The Stranger Among You: Immigration

Today's Scripture

Leviticus 19:33-34 — "When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God."

Matthew 25:35 — "For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me."

A command from Sinai and a sentence from the final judgment — both about the same person: the stranger.

The Big Idea

Immigration may be the most shouted-about issue of our time, but the Bible got there first — quietly and often. God commands his people to love the foreigner as themselves, roots the command in their own story, and identifies Jesus himself with the stranger. He also affirms borders, law, and order. Today is about refusing to read only half of that.

Reflection

Remember Egypt

Start with how strange Leviticus 19 would have sounded when it was given. In the ancient world, the foreigner had no rights, no clan, no safety net — and usually no welcome. Tribes survived by suspicion. Into that world God speaks: Leviticus 19:33-34 — do not wrong the stranger; treat him "as the native among you"; in fact, "love him as yourself."

Love him as yourself. The same wording as "love your neighbor as yourself" just a few verses earlier. And the reason given is not economics or politics but memory: "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." Israel knew the stomach-drop of being foreign, vulnerable, and disposable. God commands them to convert that memory into mercy, not amnesia. Exodus 22:21 repeats it almost word for word — this is not a stray verse; the command to love and not oppress the sojourner appears dozens of times in the Old Testament, more often than commands about almost any other social issue.

The Hebrew word is ger — the sojourner, the immigrant, the person living outside their homeland. And the command climbs all the way up into God's own character: Deuteronomy 10:18-19 — God "executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt." We love the stranger because God already does. To despise the ger is to be out of step with the heart of God.

Before this becomes abstract, make it small. Remember walking into a cafeteria, a new school, a new job — scanning the room, knowing nobody, hoping someone would nod you over? Multiply that by a new language, a different passport, and no way home. That is the person this command has in mind.

The Bible's most famous immigrants

If the command is the skeleton, the Bible's stories are the flesh. Consider Ruth — a Moabite widow who crossed a border with nothing, gleaning leftover grain at the edge of a stranger's field (the very welfare system we read about yesterday in Leviticus 19). When the landowner Boaz treats her with dignity, she is stunned: Ruth 2:10 — "Why have I found favor in your eyes, that you should take notice of me, since I am a foreigner?" She expected invisibility. She received honor — and this immigrant woman became the great-grandmother of King David, and an ancestor of Jesus himself. God did not merely tolerate the foreigner in Israel's story. He wrote her into the royal family tree, where no reader of Matthew's Gospel could miss her.

And then there is Jesus. Before he could walk, his family fled a murderous government by night: Matthew 2:13-14 — "Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt... And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt." The Son of God spent his earliest years as a refugee in a foreign country. When he later said, Matthew 25:35 — "I was a stranger and you welcomed me" — he was not reaching for a random metaphor. He had been one.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison, gave us the lens this requires:

"We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Political debates sort immigrants by what they do — work, cost, contribute, break rules. Bonhoeffer says Christians must first see what people suffer. That does not settle any policy question. It settles the posture question. And Hebrews 13:2 adds a glint of wonder to the open door: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." You never know who is at your table.

Borders, laws, and loves

Now the other half — the half that a different set of readers needs to hear. The same Bible affirms ordered nations. Acts 17:26-27 — God "made from one man every nation of mankind... having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God." Nations and boundaries are not accidents of history; they sit inside God's providence — and notice their purpose: that people should seek God, not that tribes should hate each other. Romans 13:1 — "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God." Governments are God's servants for maintaining order, which means laws, citizenship, and process are not inherently unloving. A country, like a household, can love people through order as well as through openness.

So the Christian holds two truths that the parties have divided between them. Radical, costly welcome for the stranger: biblical. Lawful, ordered communities: also biblical. A believer may honestly debate visa numbers and enforcement — Scripture does not print a policy. What a believer may not do is hate, fear, or dehumanize the foreigner, or shrug while they are wronged. The command "love him as yourself" survives every election.

Watch how each side edits its Bible here. One side quotes Leviticus 19 and goes quiet at Romans 13; the other quotes Romans 13 and goes quiet at Leviticus 19. Both verses came from the same God, and he was not contradicting himself. Order without love hardens into cruelty; love without order collapses into chaos that hurts the vulnerable most. If your position on immigration requires you to skip one of today's passages, your position needs work — whichever party prints your yard signs.

Martin Luther King Jr., accused of being an extremist, replied that the only real question is what we will be extreme about:

"The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?" — Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Some Christians have answered that question with their lives. The ten Boom family in Holland hid hunted Jewish strangers behind a false wall in their home, and paid for it with arrest and a concentration camp. Corrie ten Boom emerged still able to say what her dying sister taught her there:

"There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still." — Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

Whatever your politics, that family is the family the church wants to resemble: a door, opened at cost, to the stranger God loves. And C.S. Lewis reminds us what is actually standing on the doorstep:

"Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Welcomed while we were strangers

Why does God press this so hard? Because the stranger's story is the gospel's story — yours, if you belong to Christ. The New Testament's word for what we were is exactly this word: strangers. Alienated. Far off. Outside the covenant, with no claim and no passport into the people of God.

And then: Ephesians 2:19 — "So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." How? Not by our paperwork. "You who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (Ephesians 2:13). Jesus, the refugee King, was cast outside the city to die so that outsiders could be brought home. Heaven's border opened because he was shut out.

Tim Keller compressed that into a sentence worth memorizing:

"The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

People who know they were welcomed while they were strangers make the best welcomers. That is why the early church baffled the Roman world. An anonymous second-century letter described Christians this way:

"Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers." — Epistle to Diognetus

At home everywhere, fully at home nowhere — because their citizenship was elsewhere. Christians, in other words, are permanent resident aliens. Peter addresses his readers as "sojourners and exiles," and that identity quietly rearranges this whole debate: the foreigner at the border is not "them" to a Christian. He is a picture of us. Augustine saw the same thing: God is assembling, out of every nation on earth, one society no border can contain:

"This heavenly city, then, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages." — Augustine, The City of God

The church is God's preview of that city. So however the policy debates land — and Christians of good faith will keep debating them — the local church should be the one room in town where the foreigner is greeted like Ruth in the field of Boaz: noticed, named, and safe.

Going Deeper

Move one stranger from headline to human this week. Learn the name of someone in your school, workplace, or church who came from somewhere else, and ask one real question about their story — then actually listen. If you do not know anyone, find the people serving immigrants and refugees near you and offer one concrete thing: a meal, a ride, conversation practice, a welcome. Before you go, pray Leviticus 19:34 with one word changed: "Lord, teach me to love the stranger as myself — for I was a stranger, and you welcomed me."