The Sojourners

[Adriana Gowen]

Thisissue needs studied in much more depth than I can do below. A book like Christians at the Border by Daniel Carroll or Generous Justice by Tim Keller is a good place to start. What I seek to do below is summarize a few over-arching categories for wrestling with the issue and then list some of the related biblical references.

God roots his commands for how Israel is to treat the sojourner in the fact that Israel was herself a sojourner. Because they were sojourners welcomed and loved by God, they should empathetically feel for the sojourner, welcoming and loving them. Just as God graciously cared for Israel in her wandering, so Israel is to reflect God in how they care for and love the sojourner.

God tells Israel to remember they were sojourners as motivation to love sojourners. God even calls them stewards of his land, and as stewards they are to reflect the priorities of the owner, in this case, hospitality to sojourners (Lev. 25:23).

Seems to me no matter the national/political policies, the People of God have an obligation to open the door to the strangers the poor and welcome them in to eat, to food/clothing/shelter/nursing/and love.

Early Christians spoke about themselves as resident aliens, strangers, and sojourners, asserting that otherness is a fundamental part of being Christian. But why did they do so and to what ends? How did Christians' claims to foreign status situate them with respect to each other and to the larger Roman world as the new movement grew and struggled to make sense of its own boundaries?

Aliens and Sojourners argues that the claim to alien status is not a transparent one. Instead, Benjamin Dunning contends, it shaped a rich, pervasive, variegated discourse of identity in early Christianity. Resident aliens and foreigners had long occupied a conflicted space of both repulsion and desire in ancient thinking. Dunning demonstrates how Christians and others in antiquity capitalized on this tension, refiguring the resident alien as being of a compelling doubleness, simultaneously marginal and potent. Early Christians, he argues, used this refiguration to render Christian identity legible, distinct, and even desirable among the vast range of social and religious identities and practices that proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean.

Through close readings of ancient Christian texts such as Hebrews, 1 Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistle to Diognetus, Dunning examines the markedly different ways that Christians used the language of their own marginality, articulating a range of options for what it means to be Christian in relation to the Roman social order. His conclusions have implications not only for the study of late antiquity but also for understanding the rhetorics of religious alienation more broadly, both in the ancient world and today.

When checking into a hotel room, the first thing some people do is to unpack their suitcase and put all their clothes in the dresser drawers and closet. They take their toiletry bag and lay out their many bottles and tubes near the sink. Others simply find a table top for their suitcase and peer out the window, ready to explore the new place outside. The former are more like settlers and the latter more like sojourners.

Settlers like to stay for a while, claim a space, and perhaps send down some roots. Sojourners, on the other hand, consider the hotel room merely a clean space to rest and sleep to launch them to continue to move about.

Our world needs all types of people, including both settlers and sojourners, to function. Settlers are important to establish a viable and sustainable world in which people can thrive. Sojourners reflect the adventurous spirit to explore and turn over every rock they might encounter. But both also have their downsides.

On our southern border, people become immigrants because of the awful and unsafe conditions found in their native countries. Some are refugees literally fleeing for their lives because of political persecution. So many people decide to become sojourners with the dream of becoming settlers in the US as their promised land. If not for immigrants like my father and grandfather who worked in jobs that nobody really wanted, our country would not be as strong and viable as it is today. If it were not for the many newly arrived immigrants and refugees coming to the US, there would not be enough workers for unfilled jobs that we all rely on.

In the end, if we are brutally honest with ourselves, we are merely a small blip of people on the move in the course of human history. We settled for a time to feel that we have arrived always knowing that our time here is simply temporary. We flee to find refuge solely to survive the day. We sojourn on with the faith that the final place is glorious.

Rev. Donald Ng was president, American Baptist Churches, USA, 2014-15, the first Asian American to serve in this elected position. For 17 years, he was senior pastor of the historic First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco. He retired from full-time ministry in 2015.

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Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations for sermons preached on or afterNovember 6, 2011 are taken from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version),copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission.All rights reserved.

Truth For Life is the teaching ministry of Alistair Begg and is committed to teaching the Bible with clarity and relevance so that unbelievers will be converted, believers will be established, and local churches will be strengthened.

Sojourners for Justice Press is a micro press founded by Mariame Kaba and Neta Bomani that opens its platform to people working experimentally with print-based media. We publish short-form and ephemeral zines, pamphlets, and booklets that engage do-it-yourself, black feminist, and abolitionist philosophies or visions.

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International mobility is a prevalent life event that particularly affects university students. The aim of this longitudinal study was twofold: First, we examined the impact of international mobility on personality (Big Five) change, separating self-selection effects from socialization processes. Second, we extended prior analyses on the association between life events and personality development by investigating the mechanisms that account for socialization processes. In particular, we assessed whether individual differences in the fluctuation of support relationships serve as an explanatory link. We used a prospective control group design with 3 measurement occasions. A sample of university students, containing both short-term (i.e., 1 semester) and long-term (i.e., 1 academic year) sojourners (N = 527) along with control students (N = 607), was tracked over the course of an academic year. Multivariate latent models revealed 3 main findings: First, initial (pre-departure) levels of Extraversion and Conscientiousness predicted short-term sojourning, and Extraversion and Openness predicted long-term sojourning. Second, both forms of sojourning were associated with increases in Openness and Agreeableness and a decrease in Neuroticism above and beyond the observed self-selection. Third, the acquisition of new international support relationships largely accounted for the sojourn effects on personality change. These findings help to fill the missing link between life events and personality development by establishing social relationship fluctuation as an important mediating mechanism.

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