How To Check If You’re A Migrant?
By David Wilson
I think I’m a migrant. Seriously. You might be too. It’s worth checking.
The idea was first put into my head by no less than the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. He was addressing a seminar on ‘New Testament metaphors for the church’. The meeting had already considered metaphors like ‘the body of Christ’ and ‘the bride of Christ’.
The Archbishop then proposed a fresh angle from I Peter chapter one, verse one: ‘to the exiles scattered throughout the provinces’1. He pointed out that the Greek word for ‘exiles’ is special and only used for this purpose. Indeed, when the ‘New English Translation’ was published they chose to express the word as, ‘to those temporarily residing abroad’, which is a very exact translation.
So now we know who was on Peter’s distribution list for this letter – people who weren’t at home. My guess is that Peter was delighted with his role in encouraging these ‘sojourners’. He could well remember the day, just seven weeks after the resurrection, when he had to explain to the thousands of internationals milling around the Jerusalem temple area what was going on. That crowd was by definition international. Their nationalities were listed by Luke: people from what is now Turkey, Central Asia, Libya, Crete, Italy, Egypt, Israel, the Arab countries, Iran and Iraq. These people were all officially Jews but the one thing they didn’t have in common was a native language. Which is why they were bamboozled when they heard Peter and his friends speaking in languages from all over the then-known world.
The job fell to Peter to stand up and explain, presumably in Greek (the only language everybody would know). His main points (a) Nobody’s drunk here (b) You are experiencing, in real time, a supernatural phenomenon predicted over 800 years ago (c) It’s your fault, both you Jews and the Romans, that Jesus got killed (d) It didn’t work anyway because God took him out of his grave again – to describe him as alive and well would be an understatement. My friends and I saw him with our own eyes. (e) He left and went back to heaven last Wednesday week – we saw that too. (f) At this point it’s up to you. If you apply to God for the amnesty for your sin, you’ll get it. Three thousand people applied and all 3000 got it. Numerous of them then started on the long road home to Asia, Africa or Europe. Peter must have wondered if he could ever be in touch with them again.
Long story short, he did – twice at least, in his two letters of which we have copies. By that time, he had long since acquired a new job (which, for once, didn’t involve fish). During that six week period before Jesus left, he had commissioned Peter & Co to be ‘Teachers of all the nations’2 – there was going to be no market share of the Christian faith among the nations. By ‘nations’ he didn’t mean our nation-states, which only crystallised after the Napoleonic wars. The Greek word he used for ‘nations’ was ‘ethne’ – people-groups defined by their language and culture rather than whether or not they had heard of Napoleon. So, from now on the ‘teachers’ would be on the move. They would always be migrants.
This issue came home to roost for my wife and me when we went to live in Germany and started learning German. We needed to work out an answer to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ Eventually we got it: ‘Eigentlich ist Deutschland meine zweite Heimat, meine erste ist im Himmel’ (‘Actually, Germany is my second home, my first is in heaven’).
Those first century migrants were not left without good models to follow. Whenever they consulted their highly-valued record of God’s initial promise to humankind they would run into case after case of men and women who were valued by God as migrants3. The Book of Hebrews lists these pilgrims who were prepared to follow God’s direction even though they did not know what their destination was.
Hebrews even makes the startling statement that ‘God is not ashamed to be called their God’ (!)4. In the text the cases pile up: Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses’ parents, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel. At one point the writer quits listing names because, ‘I do not have time’5. It’s not just that time was not available but the list of migrants was too long. They constituted ‘a cloud’. These model migrants are so multitudinous they ‘surround us’6.
And it’s not like these are museum specimens. Far from it. Hebrews specifically tells us that, ‘God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect’7. So it works both ways. They motivate us and we complete their lives. Your migrant life today will vindicate them in their hanging on to God in spite of everything.
Recently my sister boosted my understanding of this way of life. She and her husband had been living in Copenhagen and attending a church there along with many Farsi-speaking refugees. The protocol was that if an asylum-seeker came to faith in Jesus they would take a year of teaching and support before being baptised. One of them, called Amin, had had his asylum application turned down by the Danish authorities and so was now facing deportment. It was high time to get baptised.
At the baptism the pastor announced, ‘Until this point you have considered yourself to be just a refugee; now you leave here as a pilgrim, going with God to where he is leading you’.