A Wandering Illinoisan was my Ancestor
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
October 6, 2019
Emmanuel Baptist Church, Rev. Kathy Donley
My parents were both raised on farms in rural Illinois. My mother was one of 10 children. There were 5 in my father’s family who lived to adulthood. They met in college and because of my father’s apparent desire to see the world, they have now lived in 5 countries on 3 continents.
When I was 22-months-old, they took me to Ghana, West Africa. We stayed there until I was in the third grade. Life there was decidedly different than what I would have known if my parents had not wandered so far from home. My childhood immunizations included all the ones American kids get, plus a yellow fever vaccine. On an infrequent, random basis, I saw wild elephants or crocodiles or baboons.
Regularly, I played with chameleons or hedgehogs I found in the yard or with Oscar, our pet monkey. The family rules included a stern requirement that we only drink water from the tank where it was boiled and that we always be on the look-out for snakes which were all poisonous. One missionary family’s yard included the grave of their four-year-old who suddenly didn’t feel well one afternoon. He laid down for a nap and never woke up. What my parents told me about that grave taught me that life was precarious and that some families’ sacrifices were much greater than ours.
Air conditioning was unknown in that place near the equator. We had electric fans, but the electricity went off every night and stayed off until morning, unless the generators got turned on for an emergency surgery at the hospital. Another nightly ritual was my mother lighting the mosquito coil in my bedroom because mosquitos carried malaria. In spite of that, everyone in my family got malaria at least once and typhoid too, one Christmas. As a child, I knew people who had lost fingers and toes to leprosy, and I often heard big words like “onchorceriasis” and “schistosomiasis” which are tropical diseases never ever found in Illinois.
My parents’ wandering shaped my life. From third grade on, we lived in the United States, but I carried within me a internal frame of reference which always reminded me that things are not the same all over the world. I struggled to come to terms with some aspects of American life, especially in social studies classes where my class-mates always seemed to be smugly superior about people in places they had never been. For a long time, I thought that I would become a doctor and return to Africa when I grew up. I did apparently grow up to be a wanderer. Our current home is the eleventh place that Jim and have lived in 32 years of marriage.
My parents’ wandering shaped my life. It is why my ear is tuned to the accents of West Africans which I’m delighted to hear often in upstate New York. It is probably part of the reason I live 800 miles from my parents – if they don’t like that, they have only themselves to blame. It might be a factor in my ever-present concern for refugees and immigrants.
I was shaped by my family. You were shaped by yours. So many things go into making us the people we are, living the lives we choose, but the events of the past and the ways we attend to them are definitely important meaning-makers.
The covenant people of Israel were shaped by the wandering of their ancestors. Our reading from Deuteronomy provides instructions to keep alive that memory and to engage it meaningfully on a regular basis. Every time they made the harvest offering, they were to recite the story that begins “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” Interestingly, here the reference is not to Abraham, but to Jacob who journeyed back to Aram, when he fled from his brother Esau. The land of Aram is now called Syria, by the way.
The offering-givers are to identify with their ancestors, so much so that the speaker is to use first person language. The Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, . . . therefore we cried out to God, God heard us and saw our need and delivered us and gave us this land. The people recall the past as if those exact events happened to them and then situate themselves within the covenant with their last words, “and now, behold I bring the first fruits of the ground which you, O LORD, have given me.”
“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.” That word wandering can also mean perishing.[1] Israel’s wandering ancestors were landless, threatened, fearful, victims of other nations and at risk of perishing. The offering-giver remembers the hardship of the past, as if it were his/her own, and gives thanks for life in the present.
A more modern sounding version of this creed might go like this:
“We were at-risk Syrians;
We were exploited as cheap labor;
We were delivered by the wonder of God;
We were brought to a place of abundance;
We enact our gratitude to the God who has saved us.”[2]
There was a possibility that memory would fade, that the harshness of slavery and the lessons learned in the wilderness would be forgotten. There was a danger that the wanderers would settle for something less than the vision of liberation and justice that sent them forth in the first place. [3] And to be sure, that did happen from time to time. But the memory was kept alive in Holy Scripture and in the enactment of gratitude.
With gratitude, they were to bring the offering and tell the story. But that was not all. Verse 11 reads, “Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household.” Acting out gratitude was more than something done with ritual words and offering. The next part was to celebrate with two specific groups of people. They were to celebrate with the Levites, the priests who depended on the offering gifts because they had no land of their own, and with the foreigners, the immigrants, those who lived among them and might not have the means to make their own offerings or celebrations. It says “Together with the Levites and the foreigners you shall rejoice”. Celebrate and be grateful, together.
The Bible repeatedly warns the Israelites not to oppress the stranger because they were once strangers who were oppressed. This story has continued to shape Jewish identity for millennia.
When the US government separated children from their families at the border, one of the first places they kept the children was in Tornillo Texas. Joshua Rubin, left his home in Brooklyn and went to Tornillo and lived there for 3 months to protest that oppressive treatment of foreigners. When Tornillo closed down, the child prison at Homestead, Florida opened. Martin Levine began his own protest and public witness outside that facility. Martin did not know Joshua at the time. Martin and Joshua are both Jewish.
When the Gethesemane Karen Baptist Church wanted to buy their own building, I called Bill. Bill is my realtor friend. He is a member of Congregation Beth Emeth. The first time we all went to look at a possible site, Bill and I stood to one side talking while the Karen church leaders wandered around, inspecting the building. Bill said, “Who are these people? What’s their story? How do you know them?”
I said “They have escaped attempted genocide in their homeland. I know them because they came to my church. They’ve been coming to the United States for about a decade, and because most of them are Baptist, they are re-invigorating Baptist churches across the country. “
When I said that part about escaping genocide, Bill said “These are my people.”
This narrative summarized in Deuteronomy shaped the covenant people of Israel thousands of years ago and continues to shape us. And, unfortunately, more recent history does too. The evil and suffering of the Holocaust is never far from mind.
It was the focus of one of the most significant moments of the Emmy Awards Ceremony two weeks ago. Alex Borstein won for her role in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It’s a show about a woman in the 1950’s who breaks with social custom when she pursues a career as a stand-up comic. Alex Borstein accepted the award with thanks to her mother and her grandmother, who are immigrants and Holocaust survivors. She said, “My grandmother turned to a guard… she was in line to be shot into a pit and . . . she said, ‘what happens if I step out of line?” and the guard said, ‘I don’t have the heart to shoot you, but somebody will,’” Alex said, “and she stepped out of line, and for that I am here, and my children are here, so step out of line, ladies. Step out of line.”
Alex knows the story of her ancestors. It shapes her identity. She recites to her children with gratitude. She tells it to strangers to inspire us to courage.
I’m telling all these Jewish stories and you might be wondering where the rest of us fit in. We who identify as Christian also follow a wandering Aramean. You might remember that Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic. He was descended from Jacob, that earlier wanderer. He wandered all over Galilee, which was the area of ancient Israel full of foreigners and the landless poor. For three years, he wandered, healing, and teaching, reminding his people about the God who loved them. He spoke of mercy and inclusion. He demanded justice, welcomed the outcast, and embodied love for his enemies.
We follow Jesus who knew the story of his people. He was one who identified with those who had been oppressed and also with the God who delivered them from oppression. He lay down his life to liberate us from the bondage of sin. And he left us a way to remember, bread and wine shared together, received in memory and gratitude.
[1] John Holbert at https://www.patheos.com/resources/additional-resources/2010/11/sacred-thanksgiving
[2] Walter Brueggemann, “Remembering Who We Are” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 2, (Louisivlle: Westminster John Knox Press, 2015) p 44.
[3] Heidi Neumark, “Aliens Welcome: Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Luke 4:1-13” The Christian Century, February 6, 2007