Welcoming the Stranger

Today is Father’s Day. Should we have made it a Special Sunday here at Chilwell Road, or a Sunday at least as important as Mothering Sunday? There aren’t as many fathers as mothers around these days, because there are so many single mothers in our society. And anyway, a certain man in Devonshire Avenue had four sons and not one of them has remembered him on Father’s Day. So let’s forget Father’s Day, at least for the sermon.

Our OT reading was about three widows: Naomi, Orpah and Ruth. And in recent Sundays the readings have included the stories about the widow of Zaraphath and the widow of Nain. So Widows’ Sunday would be an even more appropriate title for the day. And our text could have been “The LORD protects the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow” from Psalm 146.

But because it’s just been Refugee Week with all sorts of activities nationally and in Nottingham, and because “Welcoming the Stranger”, our Church Charity this year is concerned with helping refugees, the strangers in our midst, we’ll settle for Refugee Sunday. And my text chooses itself from the OT reading from the book of Ruth.

Ruth 1:1 There was a famine in the land and a certain man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the land of Moab with his wife and his two sons.

Biblical refugees

Refugees are not a new phenomenon and we can learn useful lessons from the past. In particular, we can find in the Bible many stories of refugees and how they were treated. Besides that story of Naomi and Elimelech, the OT has plenty more examples: see how many you can recall.

The people of God always remembered that right back at the beginning of time Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden of Eden. [Genesis 3] They never returned home to that primeval paradise and had to toil for food in the wilderness. Only a myth of course, but there is the essence of the predicament facing all refugees: forced from the security and comfort of home to a place where the going is hard.

The next story in the sequence, another myth from pre-historical times, is the plight of Noah and his wife and his three sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth. The family were faced with a terrible flood which seemed to cover the whole earth, but they managed to escape by boat and take their food, fresh, with them. They were the only survivors but Noah’s family formed the seeds of a renewed community.

Catastrophic floods occur today, like the one following hurricane Katrina in 2005 when 90% of the residents of New Orleans were displaced. We can sympathise and offer help. But we can also be re-assured that recovery is possible and that new communities grow up to replace the old. As sea-levels rise across the world, severe flooding will become even more common in countries like Bangladesh and preventive measures will be more important that curative ones. New patterns of life, perhaps on higher ground, will be formed. So: first exile, then flood.

But it is the Exodus that is the event most remembered and celebrated by the people of God in the OT. It all started when Joseph was trafficked from Canaan to Egypt after falling out with his brothers. Fortunately Joseph made good under the Pharaoh, and eventually his whole family migrated and settled there. They prospered and multiplied and became an exceedingly mighty ethnic minority. They were very useful in Egypt because they did all the low-paid jobs like building the pyramids, but the Egyptians came to fear their economic power and oppressed them harshly, setting the men to hard labour in the fields. But under the leadership of Moses, the Jews fled from Egypt and made their long and painful way across wilderness and deserts back to Canaan: six hundred thousand refugees. Exile, flooded out, then fleeing from oppression.

Long after the Exodus, the Jews experienced the suffering of the Exile. The Assyrians carried ten thousand people away captive from Jerusalem, and there by the rivers of Babylon they sat down and wept, sighing “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” First exile, flooded out, then fleeing from oppression, then exile again. But less than a hundred years later, they were back in Jerusalem rebuilding the temple. The people of Israel were refugees from their homeland time and time again. Jesus himself was reported to have been taken as an infant in flight from Jerusalem to Egypt to escape the cruelty of King Herod. More oppression; more refugees.

And so that old story of Naomi, fleeing from famine to a foreign land, enduring first security then tragedy before returning home to Bethlehem when things got better, typifies the whole history of the Jews. Refugees are indeed nothing new.

Refugees today

So what about refugees in our time, and in our country? Some of you will have encountered refugees from Germany and Austria in the thirties, and we all know of Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Anne Frank. I was taught biochemistry by Hans Krebs who came to Oxford from Freiburg in the thirties and went on to win the Nobel Prize.

In the post-war years, this country has provided refuge for three large groups fleeing oppression in their own countries. In 1956 20,000 Hungarian refugees came here after the uprising against Communist oppression. In 1972, 30,000 Ugandan Asian refugees came to the UK after being expelled by Idi Amin. And then in the late seventies, we received an influx of 19,000 Vietnamese boat people fleeing the communist regime after the fall of Saigon. I remember interviewing one of them in an evening service here, and this church community helped the family to set up home in the Rylands.

But what of today? The UNHCR reckons there are ten million refugees around the world. Ten million people forced from their homes by war and drought, flood and famine. Ten million needing help. Ten million desperate to return home and rebuild their lives. The numbers are probably comparable with those of OT times when the world’s population was so much smaller.

Where have they fled from? Just think were the wars and famines are today: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. 60% of all refugees today come from those four countries.

And to where do they go? From all the press rhetoric during the election campaign, you’d think that they all came to Britain. Nothing could be further from the truth! Less than 3% of the world’s refugees are relying on us here for help. Refugees generally travel to their neighbouring countries, just as Elimelech and Naomi fled to Moab, just around the shore of the Dead Sea from Jerusalem. When we arrived to work in Malawi in 1993, that small poor country was already the home to a million refugees fleeing the civil was in next-door Mozambique. Today, Afghans go to Pakistan and Iran. Iraqis go to Syria, Jordan and Iran. Sudanese go to Chad, and so on. And so the burden, and the privilege, of caring for refugees is largely taken by rather poor countries: much poorer than us. And we mustn’t forget there are another 14 million people who are refugees in their own countries: IDPs, internally-displaced persons, but refugees in all but name. 20% of them are fleeing the drug wars in Colombia; another 20% displaced in Iraq and another 10% in DR Congo.

And so the list of misery goes on. Not here in our own back yard, but over there, somewhere else!

Refugees in Britain

The UNHCR and UNRWA are the international bodies set up to provide aid to the world’s 10 million refugees, but they know that they only reach fewer than half of them. Our own government, through DFID and the European Commission, makes one the largest contributions to their funds, about 5%. Our NGOs like OXFAM, Christian Aid and MRDF also make a substantial contribution to the aid given to refugees. So we do play a part, however modest.

What is the experience of refugees in Britain? How would Ruth and Naomi have fared here? Do we have a fair, humane and effective asylum system that provides protection and enables refugees to rebuild their lives in safety? Is the UK a place of sanctuary for those fleeing persecution?

I fear not. Some asylum-seekers are detained with their children in holding camps. Many are housed in poor quality accommodation in ghettos in deprived areas – often in houses previously hard to let. Many are them afraid to go out at night because of abuse and harassment. Many are destitute, having to live off £40 per week. Many are hungry and cannot afford clothes and shoes: they are not allowed other benefits and they are not allowed to work. They are much more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators. Access to legal advice is poor, and so is decision-making by the UK Border agency: many decisions are over-turned on appeal. The political parties now in government both promised to improve the situation for refugees, but nothing has changed yet. What does the Archbishop of Canterbury say about the sort of refuge we provide in Britain?

Rowan Williams defining “Refuge”. Video-clip [first 2 minutes] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1J3aAe5oOQ

There are many organisations helping Refugees in UK. The Women’s Friendship Group is just one example of a simple act that reaches out to a small number of refugees in our own community who desperately need help. Several members here are centrally involved in that work, and our Church Charity is supporting them this year.

This Refugee Week has been supported by a host of UK agencies including Refugee Action and the Refugee Council. It has tried counter fear, ignorance and negative stereotypes of refugees, to celebrate the contribution of refugees to the UK, and to promote understanding about the reasons why people seek sanctuary. I trust we have all learned something from it.

Summary and conclusion

Refugees, just like the poor whom we always have with us, have long been the concern of the people of God, just as they themselves were refugees so many times. They knew what it was like to be displaced, homeless, oppressed and destitute. So they clearly knew they had a duty to support the foreigners and the strangers who fled for their lives into their own territory.

As inheritors of that tradition of concern and hospitality, we Christians can each play our own part at national and inter-national levels, and through local enterprises like Refugee Action and the Women’s Friendship Group.  For then the King will say 'Come, you who are blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was a stranger, and you invited me in.’ Amen