Epiphany
February 8, 2016

Scripture Reading: Deuteronomy 26:1-11

When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’ When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God: ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. –Deuteronomy 26:1-5

Sometimes I think we rather glamorize our ancestors in the faith. Perhaps that is because we have been saturated with movie versions of their acts. I probably would not have considered them as refugees, if our world were not so full of wandering people some of them from the neighbors of the current Armenia. There are not a lot of Armenians left after the Armenian Genocide that occurred during World War I. Our scripture today recognizes that, Moses apparently identified Armenians in his ancestry.

What impact does it have on a people to lose their land and be forced to live among aliens? Joseph did very well in Egypt, but 400 years later when the Israelites had multiplied, they became a threat to the people who had once welcomed them. That same thing is happening to those countries who have accepted in recent years, refugees from the war-weary middle east. How long will it be before they can return to their homes? As people charged by God to love we begin to ask how much and to how many, as resources shrink and the number of refugees increases.

There are no easy answers. It is an opportunity to hone our skills at loving, meeting needs as we can, encouraging systemic answers that are stubbornly not pursued, and leaning heavily on God to open paths of love not yet seen.

Prayer: Lord, show us the better way to welcome the strangers as neighbors. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized 
Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council 
of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights 
reserved.