Deuteronomy 26:1-11

“When you have come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess and you possess it and settle in it, you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘Today I declare to the Lord your God that I have come into the land that the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’ When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the Lord your God, you shall make this response before the Lord your God:

‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’

You shall set it down before the Lord your God and bow down before the Lord your God. Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you and to your house.

Sermon Text

Where do we come from? It’s a question that some of us can answer with complete certainty, others of us are less likely to know what history brought our ancestors to the places that their children would be from. Unless you have a dedicated genealogist, and, on top of that, existing documents to trace your family back, there is bound to be ambiguity. In some ways, I think the slow movement away from obsession with descent is good – it lets us be our own person, not just who we happen to be related to. However, I think that a lack of understanding about how we got here will also open us up to misunderstanding how this world really works.

My family history is muddled. My dad was adopted as an infant. His parents were friends of the family who adopted him and so when he was an adult and started seeking answers he began to find them. Still, in terms of biological descent we are not entirely sure what our lineage looks like. My mother’s family is also full of question marks. We do not have a good idea about who my grandmother’s family were, and it is very likely we will never know anything about my grandfather’s. Genetic testing tells us we’re almost exclusively descended from people in the British Isles, but that still only tells us so much. Our past, in this way, is a mystery.

Yet, perhaps more importantly for my dad’s side of things, we do know how his adopted family came to be in the Hagerstown area. A few decades ahead of World War I, a family left Saxony-Anhalt, leaving behind their home village of Langenstein for the United States. We are not exactly sure what motivated the move. Maybe they saw the writing on the wall in terms of unrest, maybe their industry had dried up, but this little group made their way across the ocean and eventually settled in Maryland. From that line, my dad’s adoptive family came. From them come all the lessons and raising my father took into his life and passed on to me.

The scripture we read today is a favorite of mine. It is simple in its intent, just a prayer meant to be prayed when the first fruit offerings were given at the temple. Yet, they allowed the Israelites to participate in something they would not be able to otherwise – it let them remember where they came from. Every year as the grain and other produce was given to the Temple, the people would recite this story of how they came to live in the land and would be made to give thanks for their current life and to acknowledge that history that allowed for it to be.

The prayer begins by recalling the journey of Abraham out of Chaldea and into Canaan. “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor,” refers both to Abraham and his descendants. The people of God moved into Egypt to escape a famine, and there they lived for many years. After their oppression under Pharoah was too great, they fled with God’s help back into Canaan, the area they had once wandered in generations past. It was here that they were finally able to settle, here that they were able to give thanks, here that God asked them to give from their excess back to God. The final part of this ritual was to celebrate with the priests and with any foreigners who were wandering as they had once done. To bring all people together to celebrate God’s goodness.

That final step was tied to the first. In order to truly celebrate with their foreign guests, the people of God had to remember that they were foreigners for generations. Abraham’s family had left Ur, and settled for a time in Charan. However, Abraham went down to Canaan, then to Egypt, then back to Canaan. He never really stopped moving, even after he took possession of land. His children were likewise always on the move. They were always guests, or intruders, or strangers in the lands that they lived in. In remembering this, God’s people were given a direct reason to relate to the strangers in their midst. These foreign folk, trying to find a home, are not our enemies, they are not different from us, they are just like we were a few generations ago.

Of course, the story they recounted before the altar skips some important parts of the story. When the Israelites return from Egypt, they did not peacefully settle in the land. They ran a program of extermination that wiped out entire cities. The return to the land was not a bloodless migration. The Israelites displaced the native Canaanites and then claimed the land as their possession into antiquity. They claimed to have a divine right, and few survived who could argue with them. The settling of Canaan, the memory of their ancestors as strangers in strange lands, all were a more complicated story than people would be willing to tell.

In our own pasts, we will likewise find complicated narrative. Some of us have genealogy going back to the foundations of this country. The story of colonization in America is messy. People fleeing persecution or seeking a new chance at life came to the Americas in droves. However, to make room for themselves they displaced the native people. As time went on, government programs sought to actively eradicate indigenous populations. We said, “The buffalo must be hunted to extinction, the savages brought into boarding schools to be shown how to be “civilized,” their language must be cut off, and their lands must be claimed for our own uses.”

Likewise, if you know anyone who is black, chances are their ancestors did not come here seeking a new lease on life. They were brought in chains, they were forced to work and to bear children and to be sold off again and again. Chattel, no longer regarded as human, to fuel the industrial landscape of a country that desired the competitive edge that free labor could afford them. If our families are old enough, like my wife’s family is, then digging into our past might just reveal folks who oppressed and who fought for liberation, in the tangled mess of American slavery.

The reason I think that genealogy is important, why we should tell our stories to our children about how our family came to be, is that there is often a context for how we got here, that can color our understanding of how we treat folks in our modern day. My mother-in-law, a minister in Parkersburg, wrote a whole study on the Book of Ruth that asks the reader to do research into their own family. To understand how our ancestors came to settle in the land we now call home, is to understand why people are still moving and migrating around the world today.

As we stand here today, one in every sixty-seven people in the world have been forcibly displaced from their homes. 73.5 million are displaced domestically within their home country and 42.7 million are living as refugees forced into other countries by conflict. Of all these people, only 8.4 million are actively living in asylum. Still more, 4.4 million people are citizens of countries that no longer exist.[1] If you are out of your country when its government collapses, you no longer belong anywhere or to anyone. You are a non-person, existing only in the paperwork you happen to have.

This week, as we gather around our tables to celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope you will think of your ancestors. Did they come to the U.S. to escape persecution? To avoid a war? Was their home destroyed in disaster? Or were their farms destroyed by drought or blight? Think on these things, and let them color the thanks you give. God has led your family through hardship that they might be able to sit, and give thanks for the meal you now share with your loved ones.

Also think, though, of the darker parts of history. Perhaps we have blemishes in our family history. Perhaps there are folks who actively made life worse for others. Who claimed to own other humans or who worked in exterminating others. These too are memories we should not neglect, for they color our world as well, and give us pause.

Most importantly, pray for displaced people. For those who have been forced from their homelands, who seek shelter in other nations or in overcrowded camps. Think of the refugees that have been saved through hard working people who have come alongside them to help, and those who have been forced into prison cells and thrown back into countries they may die in. Migrants, asylum seekers, immigrants, and wanderers are all our kith and kin, whether we want to admit it or not, for we were once wanderers too.

As I sit with my wife’s family this Thursday, as we sing our grace over the meal and we hear stories of her mother’s long dead ancestors, I will sit and recount the little history I know of my people. Christian Gottlieb fleeing Germany ahead of a World War, taking his life only a few years later due to his own struggles. His widow raising up her children, who would raise up my great-grandfather, Pap. Pap who would work the railroad and serve in the Army Corps of Engineers. Pap, who sewed diapers and cooked and cleaned for all his babies. Who raised my grandfather, who raised my father, who raised me, who now raises my son. I exist because someone long ago sojourned in this land, and I count myself as an eternal wanderer for that reason. Let us see in our neighbors, in the strangers we meet only briefly, and in the foreigners who live among us for a season or a lifetime, a family that we are called to care for. – Amen.

---

[1]The United Nations Refugee Agency. Refugee Data Finder. Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics