The Christmas story is an immigrant’s story

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San Francisco’s Chinatown was designed to look older than the oldest parts of China.

Why?

Fear of immigrants.

We are always immigrants. All of us. Forever. Share on X

More than a century ago, blatant, nefarious racism against the Chinese was normal. But disaster made the racism even worse. A huge earthquake caused massive destruction. But it was the resultant fires which caused the real danger. Fear, combined with racist altruism led to truly remarkable, lasting changes.

The sorts of changes we would be ashamed of if we ever entertained the thought that we were responsible for them.

You need to hear this. “Pagodas and Dragon Gates” is a fantastic episode of my favorite radio show 99% Invisible:

And check out their page at 99pi.org for pictures and more.

When you play the episode, just listen to it. Listen for what it reveals: a narrative so specific, yet so present, general, always with us.

Listen for the politics, for the racism, for the way people respond to fear. Listen for the short-term thinking and the long-term effects. Listen for how real people treated real people. And how real people are treated by real people. Not just as individuals by individuals, but as families and communities by the wider community and the government.

Listen to a particular story of life as an immigrant people and think of all the other immigrant people.

And when you do, think of the Christmas story. Think of how this story we celebrate each year is a story of a people who migrate, from one country to another. And in that other country, they give birth to a blessed child.

And that child is visited by GOD’s messengers and by society’s outcasts.

Visited a little later by astrologers from a foreign land, traveling through many countries.

A child who so frightens the illegitimate king that he has babies slaughtered for fear that one of them would steal the throne from him.

The child’s parents flee to Egypt, the land to which the people must never go, to live as refugees. Leaving only after they hear that the king who hunts them is dead.

This is our Christmas story. We tell it every year. Another reminder, like the reminder GOD gave the people from the beginning:

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

Love the immigrant, the alien, the refugee because you were immigrants, aliens, refugees we are reminded.

But to GOD, we are immigrants.

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. (Leviticus 25:23)

We are always immigrants. All of us. Forever.

This soil isn’t ours to protect. It’s GOD’s. And we are told again and again to share it. With the people who frighten us.

We are specifically reminded throughout scripture to care for the refugee, the migrant, the visitor, the stranger, the outcast, the one who comes to us, wounded or weary, hunted or hungry, for that is how we were and to GOD, this is how we are.

We live, as Jesus says to his disciples in John 13, with one commandment: to love one another.

The story of San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1906 is also a story about us right now. In our fears over people from the Middle East, people from a different religion, and people with a different complexion. Their story is our story. Because they are we. And this story is our Christmas story.

 

[There are more than a few references to immigrants and refugees in scripture. Here is a pretty good collection.]