Our Migrant God

Mary wraps the child in cloth and lays him in a manger. When churches tell this story, we focus on the tenderness embodied in this routine act. Swaddling helps babies feel safe and secure while sleeping—mimicking the uterine embrace. So here we find Mary, building an external womb to shelter the one she cherishes. In this strange land, God is not only born in the personhood of Jesus, but also through his parents’ love. Exclusive focus on a mother’s compassion and humanity, however, obscures the inhumanity of an empire that pushed her to this choice. Placing your infant where the animals feed is both an act of care and an act of desperation. Escaping in the dead of night for a foreign land with an infant in tow is both an act of selflessness and an act of despair. At the end of a year when the country’s loudest voices repeatedly demonized migrants, Advent demands empathy—and a reckoning with how we act as Christians in the days to come.

The Christmas story is told as much by verses we gloss over as it is by the ones we dwell upon. How many pageants every year begin with “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus,” but never sit with the implicit violence that a ruler’s words can force a pregnant teenager to uproot her life, leaving everything she has known in order to find safety and security at her most vulnerable moment? The compounding suffering—when Joseph and Mary must flee to Egypt to save their newborn’s life—is saved for another Sunday, safely removed from the carols and tinsel. And yet, the inclusion of such details is part of why Latiné people have deep devotion to the Holy Family: Because this story of migration, of economic precarity, of security and vulnerability is a story we know so well. Too many are familiar with what it means when edicts from the powerful radically change the trajectories of their futures. Mary’s act of love is echoed by the millions of women who clutch children tight against their breast while walking hundreds of miles, in the tenderness of a mother who wraps her kids in foil blankets on a concrete floor. That love is a proclamation of humanity in the middle of systems designed to dehumanize.

The Bible is filled with migration narratives because it is a reality that humans have lived throughout our history, and one that humanity will continue to experience. And while stories like Christmas depict the courage and compassion found in dire circumstances, other narratives reveal devastating choices people make when struggling to survive. Consider the heart-wrenching story of Naomi and Ruth.  When this story is taught or preached, too often we moralize it as an example of Ruth’s commitment, perseverance, and love for her mother-in-law Naomi. At weddings we hear Ruth’s famous words to her mother-in-law: “Do not urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.” 

These words are beautiful and poetic, but they’re spoken in a moment of fear, weakness, and uncertainty not often associated with romantic love. Continue reading for a couple chapters, and the two now-migrant women have returned to Naomi’s homeland. They’re vulnerable in every way. They’re poor and hungry. They’re widowed, without anyone to provide for and protect them. One of them is a foreign migrant looking for work with nowhere to turn, and their desperation has reached a critical point. And this is where the story turns tragic. Feeling trapped and hopeless, Naomi exploits Ruth. She exerts what little power she has and concocts a plan for Ruth to seduce a drunken relative into lying with her so that she might become pregnant and thus have his protection, and by association so would Naomi. This story of faithful friendship, deep commitment, and authentic love quickly turns, and we see that desperate people are often forced to make desperate decisions. As such, Naomi, “commodifies [Ruth’s] body,” Dr. Erica Dunbar writes, “and puts her physical safety and reputation on the line to sexually entrap an inebriated man.” Beset by her own fears and feelings of powerlessness, Ruth complies.

As if this story isn’t scandalous enough, we also learn another critical theological detail by the close of the book: Ruth births a son who will become the grandfather of King David, the most revered and beloved of Israel’s kings, which also makes her a direct ancestor of Jesus. At the heart of the Christian story is the claim that both the mother and the great, great, great…grandmother of Jesus are migrant women on the run, both looking for safety, for security, and a community to take them in so they can simply live.  Why has the Christian God chosen to be made known through these exploited, vulnerable, powerless figures on the run? And, lest we cast these women in a certain light, what is implied that they persevere, overcome, survive, and eventually come to define what virtue and faithfulness look like in our tradition?

I believe there is insight to be gleaned for our national conversations on matters like immigration, on women’s autonomy over their own bodies, on national economic policies, on our care for the most vulnerable among us, our relations with our neighbors and even strangers, and on the role religion and politics play in the public square. And while we want our political processes to address these matters, I think the more pressing questions are, “What is my personal role and responsibility in responding to these crises? What role should my church take in response to the migrants among us?” The Advent story does not allow us to remain detached, objective observers.  It demands response.
In the despair expressed from all sides of political spectrum in lead up and aftermath of our national elections, we seem to have forgotten that electoral politics is but one way to express our aspirations. There are many other ways to determine who we are as a people, the communities we will form and shape into being, and the kind of world we will leave for future generations.

Communities of faith and conscience are essential to determining the values and the contributions we will make to that collective effort. That is, in part, why we need to revitalize these sorts of communities, because we’re seeing what happens when they are no longer vibrant.  In its place, the electoral sphere becomes the only meaningful way to determine who and what we will become, and in that sphere there are winners and losers. In communities like Garrett’s, however, and in your own communities of faith, our future isn’t determined by winning and losing; rather, it is determined by values like love, justice, compassion, mercy, and hope. Thus, the real questions I think we must answer post-elections are: Will we be a community of hope? Will our children, will those in need, will those in power, will those most vulnerable find in us— in our way of life, in our way of thinking, in our methods of constructing a future—a compelling and life-giving vision of what might be?  

Mary, Ruth, and Naomi and their experiences are precisely the sort of people who should be centered in our theological vision and moral universe. Their suffering, their prolonged vulnerability, their subjection to dehumanizing choices are what Gustavo Gutierrez, the recently deceased Latin American theologian, called structural sin: the reality in which majorities of people confront these dilemmas daily while the powerful elite can live their lives mostly inoculated—rarely if ever having to see it, let alone live it. Christian faith, he argued, called Christians into a different relationship with God, one in which their neighbors’ material well-being is as important as the spiritual. To profess Christ without centering that reality in our own faith fundamentally misunderstands Christ and the God he revealed to us. This is why Gutierrez’s central theological claim was that God has a preferential option for the poor. As a result, he claimed that we should too; that if we want to find God, we must follow God to the margins, where the poor and exploited, the rejected of our society, and the forgotten are forced to dwell. Yet, in God’s economy our margins are the true center.  We cannot idolize the manger and not contend with the filth into which Jesus was laid. The lives of people, God’s people, all over the world depend on our willingness to follow the Jesus whose preferential option could not be clearer.

This Christmas, Christians must ask ourselves: What kind of world do we long to see birthed? What values and actions are essential in that world and for its people? How can churches become sanctuaries of justice, compassion, and hope—building a future where displacements and forced migrations no longer define millions of people’s reality? These are questions that our political processes alone cannot and will not answer for us. We must answer them, with our own commitments and actions that advance God’s love and compassion. If there is any hope in our current national malaise, it is that we have agency, we have a critical role and voice in making that love and compassion known and real. That’s the real decision, the true election we face—not only every four years, but every day.

In Luke’s gospel, the first people who hear about Jesus’ birth are migrants, too. The angel appears to nomadic herders, inviting them to bring their sheep and find the holiness born into their midst. Like Mary, these shepherds are people on society’s periphery who are brought into the center of God’s story. The angel’s first words to them are “Do not be afraid,” not because there is nothing to fear but because God is the God who is present with God’s people as they move. From Abraham and Sarah to Jacob, Joseph and their family, the prophets, and Christ himself, exile, migration, and return is the biblical theme from beginning to end. And “Do not be afraid,” is God’s reassuring word to us, as well. Hope is not an ethereal yearning; it is a repeated choice. Like Mary, when we face threat and danger, we can build external wombs for one another—sanctuaries of welcome, where God again is born.

This article was originally published on garrett.edu. To explore more about Garrett Seminary and the wide range of programs available, visit Degrees and Programs.