But what I really want you to know about is the third thing--refugee sponsorship--and how God is changing my heart, and the hearts of others in my community, to be more like His.
I have told the story of the situation in Syria a lot of times, and honestly there are a lot more sources that can do it better than I can. And I hope you already know. Syria is not the only place in the world where people flee because of violence, but it is in an emergency situation right now, making international action inevitable. This video concisely explains the whole mess.
One of my favourite classes I took at university was an Old Testament class. And one of the best parts of that class was the discussion of the prophets. When we think of prophets today, we think of people who know how to tell the future or say "The end is near" or something like that. But in the Old Testament, prophets were the ones who spoke to God's people, speaking what God had to say to them at that moment. And these prophets did not always have good things to say. God didn't really speak to them and say "You are doing a terrific job. Keep up the good work." Mostly they didn't do a terrific job. I can relate to this. Being the people of God is tough.
When God spoke through prophets, it was usually reminding them of the people they were called to be. They reminded the people who God was, and who they were. They reminded them what being the people of God looks like in the everyday, flesh-and-blood, dirt-under-the-fingernails life.
Excuse me while I act as prophet.
This is what I know about God: I know that he is more loving than any of us could ever be. I know that he cares about people on the outside of society. When I was speaking to kids at camp this summer, I explained to them that Jesus is God, and that means that when you read about everything Jesus did when he was on earth, that tells us about who God is. And what did Jesus do while he was on earth? Well, for one thing, he welcomed the very people the ruling class of the day saw as outsiders. Jesus chose to spend time with and to heal the very people who the insiders said would never be the people of God.
Which is good news for all of us in the church, because deep down I think we all know that we are outsiders. We are all broken beyond repair, born separated from God. We all know that if it weren't for Jesus, we would still be there on the outside of God's kingdom. Also we all know that we aren't really broken beyond repair, that in fact Jesus has healed us and is healing us. Once we were not a people, but now we are the people of God. Once we received no mercy, but now we have received mercy.
One of the best-- if not the best--gifts that God gives to believers is the Holy Spirit. Church, we are carrying around God's Spirit. When we have the Spirit, we get to know more about God's heart. He speaks to us. He transforms us, making us more like Him.
In the light of the Syrian refugee crisis, let's listen to God's heart within us. God's heart is different than our heart because while we are attracted to beautiful things, God's heart is attracted to ugly things. I don't mean that God loves the ugliness. I mean that he loves the things that are difficult to love, and he is in the situations that we naturally tend to avoid.
I have no doubt that God's heart right now is in the Middle East. There are four million refugees coming out of Syria and millions more within the country who have lost their homes. The government of Canada has committed to receive 10,000 Syrians by September 2016. Make no mistake. This is barely anything. Canada has not raised the quota of refugees to welcome; our government is simply putting Syrian refugees ahead of others. I think some people in our country are scared of refugees because they may be Muslim, and Muslim is different. And they may not speak English, and English is the best. And they may take away our jobs, because we expect the government to provide jobs for us.
Please pardon the sass. But there is a lot of fear around this issue, even from those who do truly want to help. But fear and love are polar opposites. We cannot love well when we are afraid of the people we are loving, or afraid of not having enough, or afraid of our lifestyle changing.
Because welcoming people who have no homes is scary. It is very scary. It may change the way our everyday lives look. But God's call is to make love the priority in our lives. I cannot stress how unlikely this is, but there is an extremely slim possibility that we may welcome a terrorist. But Jesus calls us to love our enemies. Jesus did a lot of scary things in order to love his enemies. He died an ugly, painful death out of love for us.
There is really no getting around it. Loving people, especially people different than us, is hard. But it is very, very necessary.
So that is why a group of outsiders who have been welcomed in--aka Christians-- have gathered together in a living room and prayed and talked and dreamed and decided. We have decided to take on the challenge of welcoming a family to our little town. We have decided that no matter what happens, God has called us to love. This involves us giving up a lot of time, money, energy, and resources. It involves emotional ups-and-downs. It requires us to put aside our differences for the purpose of showing God's love. We are outsiders who have been invited in to God's kingdom. We know that all we have is from God, and we don't deserve one bit of it. And so we say: "Welcome. Come inside."
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