Church of Sanctuary

Imagine arriving in the dark in Ghana, at Kotoka Airport, Accra, alone, for the first time in sub-Saharan Africa. Expected hosts not there, mix-up of dates. What to do?

There’s a clergyperson meeting others. Speak to him. A driver kindly found to go to his church, Calvary Methodist. Then another to the Anglican Dean’s house. Not there. His wife is a hospital doctor and they’re out of town at her hospital flat. Driven there by his brother, dark night, street stalls lit with lamps. All so new. Arrive. She opens the door to an unexpected stranger.

Instant welcome. I just wept.

Food was prepared. I stayed with them that night.

I was not a Refugee, not an Asylum Seeker.

These blogs are presuming to write about why Christians, as a matter of faith, should, indeed must, welcome Refugees and Asylum Seekers. That is the lived experience of people we are blessed to have in our congregation and our wider church community, people whose story it is, unlike most who will be reading this. But in that moment in Accra, I knew what it meant, to me, to find welcome, safety and hospitality.

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” says the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews (13.2), “for doing so you may entertain angels unaware”. My angels were actually the people who showed it to me. For reflection?

‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. These words are familiar to us from Jesus, who is quoting the Hebrew Scriptures (Leviticus 19.18). The former Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, points out that these words come only that once. The command to ‘love the stranger’, he says, comes 37 times, and is the most repeated commandment. The rationale: ‘love [him] as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’. It is key to the story which Israel repeats about God and themselves as a people.

But this still seems to me to be quite binary, about ‘them’, the stranger, and ‘us’. At this point, might we think of the story of Ruth, the subject at St James’s of sermons through August? A story which is so illuminating about a woman, a Moabite stranger, about her agency in all this, on the way to being the great-grandma of great King David, no less. A question for me is ‘how did it get to be included in the books gathered eventually as ‘Bible’?’ Like many other texts in the Hebrew Scriptures, this witnesses to a deep grain of challenge, as it were ‘built in’, as first the writers and later the compilers transmit what they believe they must about God.

Remember that line: ‘to love the stranger as yourself’, and figure where that leads. Is that ‘binary’? Or does it lead to no distinction as to the worth, dignity and contribution of whoever?

Should we have to say it? We will recognise that countless people of whichever faith, and none, will share the positive values: welcome, safety, protection, honouring the worth and dignity of all, empowerment. These are simply humane, aren’t they? There are those who’ll say we don’t need inherited scriptures to teach us, and it hardly behoves churches which have failed historically with safeguarding to tell us.

But we do have to say it. Because wherever people may find the wellspring, for Christians (drawing too on our Jewish heritage), it begins with what we receive about God: both what faith holds before us, and what this same faith reveals of our own shortfall.

We have to say it now, because there is so much that is stoking division, ‘othering’ people, not just those perceived as strangers, but directed so much that way.

We need to know where we come from, and so what together we must hold to.

There’s more to say about that; to be continued over the next two weeks.