The Shadow of Our Wings

“Hide me in the shadow of your wings.” — Psalm 17:8

Far below the headlines of incredible World Cup results and inept coup plotters in Germany, this week has seen a meeting of ambassadors and NGO representatives in Geneva, gathered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to discuss the growing challenge of providing adequate protections for the world’s “displaced persons.” That’s an anodyne, suitably diplomatic phrase for summarizing the misery and vulnerability of people forced out of their homes by war, famine, climate change, failed states, and the myriad other ways in which hope and safety collapse.

This year’s gathering has centered on the relationship between economic development and the protection of refugees and displaced people. That isn’t a small matter; as you read this, there are more than 103 million displaced persons on the planet, the highest number ever recorded. Forty-five percent of them are children.

You might think that linking together “economic development” and “refugees” has something to do with slowing the flow of refugees to Europe and the U.S. by improving living standards in poor countries. And you would be partially right—but only partially.

Because quite apart from all the heated rhetoric about “refugee invasions” by some voices in our brittle political discourse, the reality is most people fleeing poor countries end up in other poor countries. Burundian refugees end up in Uganda; refugees from the troubled Democratic Republic of the Congo flee to Zambia; Ukrainians have fled Russian missiles by heading to Moldova; people fleeing Venezuela move seek safety in Colombia; and so on.

We (where “we” is the wealthy, white West) tend to think that we are uniquely burdened by the inflows of humanity that are collectively known as the “refugee crisis.” That, to put it mildly, is a misapprehension. Far more of the world’s refugees end up in countries already on the edge of poverty. How best to protect them?

“The best form of protection is inclusion,” Filippo Grandi, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said in his opening address to the gathering. That seems like a simple statement. It is not. The task of accepting and including the stranger in one’s own community and life is a basic human challenge. Nature adapted us to have strong lines of demarcation between in-group and out-group people. Scripture, going as far back as Exodus, teaches welcoming the stranger as a virtue of faith—not least because doing so is contrary to instinct.

As I’ve heard that theme repeated in different ways these past two days, I couldn’t help reflecting on our own oft-repeated claim to be an “inclusive church.” We have said this in various ways about a variety of people historically marginalized and excluded by the church, or placed in subservient roles; women, people of color, LGBTQ people, refugees.

We have done this because we realized, slowly but certainly, the disconnect between Saint Paul’s vision of a beloved community without divisions and outcasts—“neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free”—and our own practices.

But at a deeper level, there is something else at work when we engage in practices of inclusion. When we weave people into our faith communities, when the distinction between “outsider” and “insider” is dissolved by approaching inclusion as a spiritual discipline, what we are really doing is extending protection to people who are usually exposed—exposed to discrimination, hate, and violence. We are bringing them under the shadow of our wings, in the words of the Psalmist.

And that is why the spiritual practice of inclusion is, inevitably, political—and inevitably controversial.

If we were taking nominations for the Most Miserable Trend of the Year, a strong contender would surely be the growing evil of all forms of distinction-drawing – hate crimes, nationalistic wars, anti-immigrant rhetoric in the public square. Those of us who see the rise of intolerance through the lens of Christian faith see this as yet more objective evidence of the idea of our fallenness—our explanation for the spiritual meaning of the evolutionary reality that we’re hard-wired to treat those who differ from us with suspicion, mistrust, or worse.

There are other phrases to describe the same idea through different lenses—implicit bias, for example; but the result comes down to the same thing, viz., the considerable capacity of humans to misunderstand and mistreat each other.

For us, at least, countering that tendency within ourselves is a spiritual challenge, something we commit to do in the covenant we make at baptism. And the way we do it—to be blunt—is to give up the idea that being spiritual is enough without the discipline of being in community, which is another phrase for what “religion” is, and is about.

Protecting the vulnerable is an abstract idea, until you bring them into your home, or your community. Then it becomes an act of faith and a work of witness, setting the best that is in us against the worst we are capable of.

We can’t extend the protection of inclusion without in some way increasing our own vulnerability—which may be why the real reason that innkeeper turned away a poor, bedraggled family. As the days draw near to Christmas we will be reminded again of that cautionary tale, and challenged once more to make sure it is never said of us.

See you in church,