Immigration, Hospitality, and the God Who Arrives as the Other
Primary Scripture: Matthew 25:31–46
Supporting Scriptures: Leviticus 19:33–34; Deuteronomy 10:17–19; Ruth 1:15–18; Matthew 2:13–15; Luke 10:25–37; Hebrews 13:1–3
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” — Matthew 25:35
Introduction: What If God Arrives Without Papers?
There is something wonderfully inconvenient about the Bible.
Just when religion becomes comfortable, Scripture introduces a stranger.
Abraham entertains strangers.
Israel becomes a nation of former migrants.
Ruth crosses a border.
The prophets defend foreigners.
Jesus tells stories in which outsiders become heroes.
The Holy Family flees political violence.
Paul announces boundaries breaking down.
Hebrews says:
“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.”
And Jesus gives us perhaps the most dangerous sentence of all:
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
Notice what Jesus does not say.
“I was a stranger after you verified my usefulness.”
“I was a stranger after I spoke your language.”
“I was a stranger after I adopted your religion.”
“I was a stranger after I proved that I deserved compassion.”
He simply says:
I was a stranger.
And somehow, mysteriously, the stranger becomes the place where Christ is encountered.
So today I want to ask:
What happens when God knocks on the door and we do not recognize the face?
I. Israel Was Commanded to Remember
Leviticus says:
“When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien.”
Then:
“The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you.”
And finally:
“You shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.”
That last sentence is everything.
Remember Egypt.
Israel’s ethics grow from memory.
You know what vulnerability feels like.
You know what empire feels like.
You know what it means to live somewhere without power.
Therefore:
Do not become Pharaoh when you finally acquire power.
Biblical memory is political.
II. The Hebrew Bible Keeps Returning to the Stranger
Again and again the Hebrew Scriptures mention a social triad:
The widow.
The orphan.
The stranger.
Why?
Because these groups frequently lacked the ordinary structures of economic and political protection.
The Bible’s concern is therefore not sentimental.
It concerns power.
Who can protect themselves?
Who has property?
Who has family networks?
Who can obtain justice?
Who gets ignored?
The prophets repeatedly judge societies according to what happens to people without power.
That remains a useful theological test.
III. Ruth Is an Immigrant
Christians sometimes read Ruth as a sweet romance.
It is.
But it is also an immigration story.
Ruth is a Moabite woman entering Judah.
She is foreign.
Economically vulnerable.
A widow.
She survives partly by gleaning—the ancient practice that required landowners to leave portions of harvest for poor people and foreigners.
That means Ruth survives because Israel had something resembling a social safety net.
And then something deliciously subversive happens.
The foreign woman enters Israel’s sacred story.
According to Matthew’s genealogy, she becomes an ancestor of Jesus.
The stranger becomes family.
IV. Jesus Himself Becomes a Refugee in Matthew’s Story
Matthew tells us that Herod seeks the child Jesus.
Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and flees to Egypt.
Historically, we cannot independently verify every detail of Matthew’s infancy narrative, and historical-critical scholarship recognizes that Matthew is also constructing theological parallels between Jesus and Moses.
But the story Matthew chooses to tell matters.
Christian imagination begins with a child fleeing political violence.
Jesus enters the Gospel as someone whose family crosses a border seeking safety.
Whatever our immigration policies, Christians should feel the weight of that image.
V. Jesus Makes the Outsider the Hero
Someone asks Jesus:
“Who is my neighbor?”
Jesus responds with the parable we call the Good Samaritan.
We have domesticated the word Samaritan.
Hospitals use it.
Charities use it.
But Jesus deliberately chooses someone his audience could regard as religiously and ethnically suspect.
The outsider becomes the moral center.
The priest passes.
The Levite passes.
The Samaritan stops.
Orthodoxy walks past suffering.
The outsider practices mercy.
Jesus asks:
“Which of these three was a neighbor?”
The answer is not:
The person with the correct theology.
It is:
The one who showed mercy.
VI. Religious Pluralism Begins on the Road
That parable should humble Christianity.
Perhaps God is happening outside Christianity all the time.
A Muslim feeding hungry people.
A Buddhist caring for refugees.
A Jewish congregation sheltering strangers.
A Pagan protecting the Earth.
A Hindu doctor treating people who cannot pay.
An atheist defending someone else’s religious freedom.
Do I need to tell them:
“You were secretly Christian”?
No.
Let the other remain other.
God does not require religious plagiarism.
Where love happens—
where mercy happens—
where justice happens—
something sacred is happening.
VII. Derrida: Hospitality Is Dangerous
Jacques Derrida wrote profoundly about hospitality.
Hospitality contains a tension.
If I welcome only people I already know, is that really hospitality?
The stranger, by definition, brings uncertainty.
Hospitality involves risk.
This does not mean communities need no laws or borders.
Every society makes practical decisions about migration, citizenship, asylum, employment, security and public resources.
But Derrida keeps asking a deeper question:
What happens to hospitality when we control the guest so completely that the stranger can never truly arrive?
VIII. Caputo: God Arrives as the Call of the Stranger
John D. Caputo gives us a beautiful way to hear Matthew 25.
God does not descend as supernatural border patrol.
God insists.
The stranger appears.
And suddenly there is a demand:
Will you welcome me?
The demand has no army.
The stranger may possess no political power whatsoever.
That is the weakness of the call.
God does not force hospitality.
Hospitality must happen through us.
God insists.
The stranger exists.
We decide what happens next.
IX. Levinas: The Face Interrupts Me
Emmanuel Levinas placed enormous philosophical importance on encountering the face of another person.
The other person interrupts my self-centered world.
Suddenly there is someone whose existence places a demand upon me.
Before ideology.
Before economic calculation.
Before political category.
A face.
This matters because political language can make human beings disappear.
“Migrants.”
“Illegals.”
“Foreigners.”
“Refugees.”
“Aliens.”
“Cases.”
“Numbers.”
Categories can be administratively necessary.
But theology must keep putting faces back onto categories.
Someone has a mother.
Someone misses home.
Someone is afraid.
Someone wants work.
Someone is fleeing something.
Someone loves someone.
The face returns.
X. Francis Meets the Stranger
Francis of Assisi built his spirituality around crossing boundaries.
Rich and poor.
Healthy and sick.
Christian and Muslim.
Human and animal.
Francis repeatedly moved toward those his society taught him to avoid.
His encounter with the leper becomes especially important.
Francis discovered that the person he feared could become the site of transformation.
The stranger changed Francis.
That is another secret of hospitality:
We imagine ourselves helping the stranger.
Then the stranger changes us.
XI. Clare Creates Belonging
Clare of Assisi created a community built around shared life rather than status.
That matters because hospitality is more than letting someone temporarily enter your space.
Real hospitality eventually asks:
Can the guest belong?
There is a difference between:
“You may stand here.”
and:
“You are one of us.”
Christian hospitality moves toward belonging.
XII. Julia Serano and the Politics of Othering
Julia Serano has written extensively about how social assumptions shape the ways gendered people are interpreted and treated.
Her work helps illuminate a broader mechanism.
Societies construct categories of people who become the other.
Different.
Suspicious.
Abnormal.
Dangerous.
Inferior.
Once someone has been successfully othered, mistreatment becomes easier to justify.
Queer people know this mechanism.
Trans people know it.
Racial minorities know it.
Religious minorities know it.
Immigrants know it.
Different histories should never be collapsed into one another.
But the mechanism of othering deserves attention.
The Gospel continually disrupts it.
XIII. Jesus Says the Stranger Is Christ
Matthew 25 goes further than ordinary charity.
Jesus says:
“I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
The disciples ask:
When?
Jesus answers:
“Just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”
This is extraordinary Christology.
Where is Christ?
Not merely in heaven.
Not merely in church.
Not merely in Eucharistic bread.
Christ is encountered in vulnerable bodies.
Hungry.
Thirsty.
Naked.
Sick.
Imprisoned.
Strange.
Perhaps Christianity has spent too much time asking whether Jesus is in the communion wafer and not enough asking whether Jesus is outside the church door.
XIV. From the News: Immigration Is About Actual Human Beings
Current U.S. immigration debates make these theological questions concrete.
Reuters reported in June that the number of people held in U.S. immigration detention had risen to about 60,000, citing U.N. figures based on official data. The U.N. human-rights chief called for independent investigations into deaths in custody; the Department of Homeland Security responded that its death rate remained low relative to the detained population and said it maintains high standards of care. Reuters’ own analysis found that the detention death rate had more than doubled since 2025.
The human complexity is visible in individual stories. In August, Reuters reported that the Nicaraguan-born father of a U.S. Navy sailor serving aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln was taken into immigration detention after a vehicle stop in Florida.
There are genuine political disagreements here.
Governments have responsibilities concerning borders, immigration law, asylum systems, public safety and orderly administration.
People reasonably disagree about enforcement priorities, legal immigration levels, detention, deportation, asylum standards and paths to citizenship.
Christian theology does not magically resolve those policy questions.
But it should establish one moral floor beneath the debate:
No immigration status erases human dignity.
A person does not stop being human when paperwork changes.
XV. A Democratic-Socialist Perspective: Do Not Make Workers Fight Each Other
Economic anxiety often enters immigration debates.
People worry about wages.
Jobs.
Housing.
Schools.
Healthcare.
Those concerns deserve serious discussion rather than dismissal.
But a democratic-socialist analysis asks us to look upward as well as sideways.
When wages are low, is the fundamental problem the worker born somewhere else—or the structures determining wages?
When housing is unaffordable, should renters fight one another for scraps, or should society examine housing supply, speculation, zoning, public investment, wages and landlord power?
When healthcare is scarce, should sick people compete over who deserves treatment—or should we ask why healthcare is scarce?
Workers can be divided remarkably effectively when they are encouraged to fear one another.
Solidarity asks another question:
What if workers organized together regardless of birthplace?
XVI. The Politics of Scarcity
Politicians across ideological traditions frequently tell people some version of:
There isn’t enough.
Not enough housing.
Not enough healthcare.
Not enough jobs.
Not enough money.
Therefore decide who deserves exclusion.
But sometimes scarcity is real.
And sometimes scarcity is politically produced.
A democratic society must distinguish between the two.
If housing is insufficient, build.
If schools are overcrowded, invest.
If healthcare systems are strained, expand capacity.
If employers exploit undocumented workers because those workers fear reporting abuse, strengthen labor protections and enforcement.
The answer to vulnerable workers should not automatically be making another group of vulnerable workers more vulnerable.
XVII. Dorothy Day: Hospitality Without a Résumé
Dorothy Day practiced a radically inconvenient hospitality.
The Catholic Worker tradition did not begin by asking whether hungry people had optimized their lives sufficiently to deserve soup.
Feed them.
Shelter them.
Know their names.
This does not solve every structural problem.
Charity alone is insufficient.
But Dorothy Day understood that political analysis becomes dangerous when it loses actual people.
The revolution begins at the table.
XVIII. Howard Thurman: Christianity From the Underside
Howard Thurman asked what Christianity means for people whose backs are against the wall.
That is exactly the perspective immigration theology needs.
Policy looks different from the border checkpoint than from the detention cell.
It looks different from the migrant shelter.
It looks different from the employer’s office.
It looks different from the neighborhood experiencing rapid demographic change.
Christian ethics should listen across these experiences while paying particular attention to people with the least power.
XIX. Christian Atheism: Welcome Without Metaphysical Guarantees
Suppose you do not believe Jesus is literally hiding inside every stranger.
Fine.
The ethical challenge remains.
Another human being stands before you.
They experience pain.
Hope.
Fear.
Love.
They possess only one life that we know with certainty they have.
Perhaps that makes hospitality more urgent.
A Christian atheist can hear Matthew 25 without imagining supernatural surveillance.
Jesus’ words become an ethical event:
The stranger matters.
God may be the name we give to that impossible insistence.
Or perhaps you prefer not to use the word God at all.
Welcome the stranger anyway.
XX. Process Theology: The Stranger Changes the Future
Process theology understands every encounter as creative.
Nobody enters a relationship and leaves reality exactly unchanged.
The stranger brings possibility.
New food.
New language.
New music.
New ideas.
New relationships.
New conflicts too.
Real pluralism is messy.
Hospitality does not mean pretending difference never creates tension.
It means believing tension can generate something other than domination.
Communities change.
Cultures change.
Religions change.
People change.
The future emerges through encounter.
Conclusion: God Has a Strange Accent
Maybe God does not always sound like us.
Maybe God speaks Spanish.
Arabic.
Hebrew.
Swahili.
Tagalog.
Mandarin.
Creole.
Maybe God uses sign language.
Maybe God speaks through someone who believes in another religion.
Maybe God speaks through someone who believes in no religion.
Maybe God uses the wrong pronouns according to somebody’s theology.
Maybe God has no passport.
Maybe God crosses our carefully constructed boundaries and says:
Hello.
And we ask:
Who are you?
Where did you come from?
Why are you here?
Do you belong?
And Matthew 25 whispers:
Pay attention.
You may be asking God for identification.
Because Christ keeps appearing where respectable religion least expects him.
Hungry.
Poor.
Imprisoned.
Foreign.
Excluded.
Strange.
The stranger knocks.
God does not break the door down.
That is Caputo’s weakness of God.
God insists.
Hospitality calls.
The door remains ours to open.
And perhaps the Kingdom begins with something unbelievably ordinary:
A chair.
A meal.
A safe room.
A lawyer.
A job with a fair wage.
A congregation that says:
You can sit here.
A neighbor learning someone’s name.
A society capable of debating immigration law without forgetting immigrants.
Francis discovered Christ in the person he feared.
Ruth crossed the border and became family.
The Samaritan crossed the road and became neighbor.
Jesus crossed every boundary religion built around holiness.
And the Gospel asks us one question:
Will you cross too?
Not because borders are meaningless.
Not because laws do not matter.
Not because every policy question has an easy answer.
But because beneath every policy is a person.
And Christianity begins losing its soul whenever the category becomes more important than the human being.
So welcome the stranger.
Listen to the stranger.
Protect the dignity of the stranger.
Let the stranger challenge you.
And sometimes allow the stranger to become friend.
Because perhaps the stranger is not interrupting the sacred.
Perhaps the interruption is the sacred.
God insists.
The stranger knocks.
Love waits at the threshold.
Open the door.
Amen.
The current-events section reflects reporting available through September 19, 2026.
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