Welcoming The Stranger

When was the last time you were a stranger? For me, it wasn’t so long ago. This past June, my family sold our home, packed up all our earthly belongings, and moved for my wife’s job. Dorry and I had lived in the North Wales area for most of our married life. Our kids, now 18 and 20, had never called any other town home. It’s tough to move. There’s a lot of work involved, disruptions left and right, inevitable frustrations; but perhaps the hardest part is becoming a stranger in a new and unfamiliar community.

My dad once observed in a sermon that “[i]t can be a terrible experience to be a stranger [because] we are meant to live in community, in fellowship with one another.” Dad went on: “Forever etched in my memory are the few trips I took with a committee from my church in summer of 1975 to Fort Indiantown Gap, where thousands of strangers to our shores from Vietnam waited for someone to come and sponsor them so that they could leave the camp and begin their lives over again. I will never forget the longing eyes following us as we walked to the interview center, hundreds of people watching, hoping that we would be the ones to make them strangers no more. And then later, as the family assigned to us came into the crowded room, I watched their fearful, searching eyes as they came to greet us, eyes that said, ‘I am a stranger, stripped of all I need to survive. Will you welcome me and help me to live again?’”

I have childhood memories of that refugee family, and the great work that Grace United Methodist Church did to welcome them to their new home in Millersville, Pennsylvania. That family’s experience as strangers makes my recent move seem tame by comparison. I didn’t come here from a war-torn country on the other side of the globe. I’m just a Newcomer in Newtown. But what the Newcomer family has in common with that refugee family is that we both were welcomed into a church – the Body of Christ – with open arms on our arrival.

As a pastor, my father moved our family a number of times. Speaking of his own experience as a stranger, Dad observed that “the warmth and love and support of the Christian fellowship that I’ve so enjoyed, none of them are mine because I deserve them; and so, I cannot ever take them for granted. God gives them to me daily just because God loves me and for no other reason. When I remember that once I was a stranger to him and to his Body, and then, through others, he took me and taught me and forgave me and enfolded me, then I know that I must always have a special place in my heart for the stranger. For, in the spiritual sense, I once was a stranger in the strange land of Egypt." 

In the Parable of the Last Judgment, we learn that "when we welcome the stranger, we welcome Christ." "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:40 (NIV)).  "Welcoming the stranger … is a blessed service given to every Christian that springs out of the very nature of our experience with Jesus Christ. ... Only as we give daily water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, visit the sick, and welcome the stranger do we know what it means to live in fellowship with him. Jesus numbers himself among the strangers to this world. He is one of them. That is where he has placed himself, and if we want to be one with Jesus, we must join him there.”

As I write this post, I am in Duck, North Carolina on a retreat with some new friends – men of the Newtown United Methodist Church:

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Joe, David, Dave, Rich & Bob 

These men, and so many others at our new church home, have welcomed me and my family into their community of faith with open arms. Thanks to them, and the Lord they serve, we may be Newcomers, but we are strangers no more.

From: “I Was A Stranger”

Scripture: Matthew 25:31-46