Because you asked...

I get asked many questions and often the best response comes in written reflection. Here’s the lasted prompted by a question about the difference between refugees and migrants.

A Refuge for the Stranger:

Why Welcome Is Our Calling

When Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ birth, he does not linger long at the manger. Almost at once the Holy Family is on the road again — Joseph waking in the night, gathering the child and his mother, fleeing into Egypt to escape a king who means to kill them (2:13–15). Before Jesus could walk, he was a refugee. The Son of God began his earthly life as a displaced child whose parents carried him across a border in the dark, seeking safety in a foreign land.

This is not a detail the Church has overlooked. In 1938, as families fled Nazi Europe, the Episcopal Church printed a poster depicting that very flight into Egypt and summoned the faithful to welcome those arriving at our shores. From that work grew what became

Episcopal Migration Ministries, which for the better part of a century has helped tens of thousands of refugees begin life again in this country.

We do this because Scripture leaves us little room to do otherwise. God’s instruction to Israel is unambiguous: “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). In the biblical imagination the refugee is not so much a problem to be managed than it is a neighbor to be loved — and even Israel was commanded to remember that it, too, had once been a people in flight. And, in describing his last days, Jesus identifies himself with the stranger directly: “I was a stranger and you

welcomed me” (Matthew 25:35).

The Greek word is xenos — the foreigner, the outsider, the one from somewhere else. To turn the stranger away, Jesus says, is to turn him away. The Letter to the Hebrews names the corresponding duty philoxenia, love of the stranger — the precise opposite of the xenophobia that comes so easily to frightened nations —and reminds us that in welcoming strangers some have entertained angels unawares (Hebrews 13:2).

It matters that we are precise about who the refugee is, for the distinction is not a technicality. Many who come (or want to come) to our borders are migrants in search of a better life — steadier work, a future for their children, an escape from economic hardship. They choose to leave, weighing the home they have against the hope of something more, yet they could, in principle, remain where they are. Their hopes are real

and worthy of our compassion, and perhaps their claim is equal to that of the refugee, but that is for a different article.

Yet, a refugee chooses nothing. A refugee is driven out. To be a refugee is to flee imminent danger — war, persecution, the soldier knocking at the door, the awaiting camp, the famine — with the certainty that to stay is to die or to watch your children die. The migrant leaves home to seek a future; the refugee runs from home because there is no future left in it, and often no food. One is a search for advantage; the other is a flight for survival. My wife’s maternal family fled the Armenian genocide and found refuge in the United States. The law has always recognized this difference, and Scripture, while commanding us to be present to all in need, does some of the same — it is precisely this stranger, the one with nowhere on earth left to turn, whom we are most profoundly commanded to take in.

This calling is not narrowly Episcopalian. The welcome of the refugee is one of the rare places where the whole household of faith stands together. Roman Catholic bishops, evangelical World Relief, Lutheran and ecumenical agencies, Jewish HIAS, and Episcopal Migration Ministries have for decades done this work side by side — conservative and progressive, liturgical and free-church alike. Across a fractured religious landscape, caring for the displaced is still common ground, because it rests not on partisanship but

on the plain command of God.

Here the calling widens beyond the Church to the nation itself. The truth is that if you’re not native to these lands, America is, at its origin, a country of refugees: Pilgrims and dissenters fleeing persecution, the poor of a hundred lands seeking a future. The famous lines at the base of the Statue of Liberty have for generations proclaimed this country a refuge for the world’s weary and persecuted. For decades, under presidents of both parties, welcoming the persecuted was understood not as a threat to the nation but as an

expression of its highest character. A country may rightly attend to order and security; these are real responsibilities, honestly held. But a nation that closes its heart to the persecuted cannot be described as Godly.

When I think of the 250th anniversary of America, when I think of the thousands upon thousands who have died in service to this nation, who gave their all, as-we-say, to reject ideologies grounded in something other than character, I think of the ways myriad of ways that we have welcomed the oppressed.

The refugee at the door is not a statistic. He is, Christ tells us, Christ himself — and how

we receive him is, in the end, how

we receive our Lord.

By Grace,

Scott+

Art Credit: Kelly Latimore, The Sagrada Family