“If I go back, they will kill me.” During the last months of 2015, variations of these words were repeated over and over to me at the Idomeni border camp for refugees. Idomeni, located on the Greek side of the border between northern Greece and Macedonia, had begun receiving an influx of refugees late in the summer. Working with a Pentecostal organization, my coworkers and I made our first trip to the border from Thessaloniki in August, at which point we already saw hundreds of individuals camped out on and around a set of train tracks. Groups of asylum seekers were allowed to cross the border into Macedonia at intervals, after which they could make their way further north or west across Europe. Greece’s poor economic situation at that time was well known, so most were hoping to eventually settle in other places, such as Germany or Scandinavia.

When we first arrived at the border, there was almost no infrastructure, but in the following weeks a number of organizations collaborated to change this, erecting large tents and installing plumbing to accommodate the growing transient population. We came to the border with one of these organizations, an anti-trafficking NGO called the A21 campaign, and we soon met others working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Doctors Without Borders, and more. Though the Syrian refugee crisis had largely precipitated this inflow, Syrians were not the only ones at the border. Refugees from Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and several other nations had also made their way to Greece. The journey was generally treacherous, often involving boat rides from Turkey on flimsy rafts or barges. I heard directly from people who had feared that they would drown when their boat stalled or their raft deflated, who had been forced to swim for their lives, or had experienced the traumatic deaths of family members and friends on the trip. Among my most vivid memories of that time is of speaking to two young men from Syria whose father had drowned on the journey over. They were far from alone in this sort of grief. Coworkers of mine were shown photos by grieving parents of toddlers who had drowned on the voyage or told stories of loved ones who’d lost their lives well before they began to travel to Greece, back in home countries that were no longer safe.

Why did so many brave this journey? In addition to Syrians who fled bombings or conscription, others were displaced by violence, corruption, or religious persecution. Many told of dangerous escapes from death or imprisonment. One woman, sitting in a field surrounded by her few possessions, told me, “I have a master’s degree and young children. This is the last place I want to be and not where I expected to find myself.” I met people with new scars or disabilities incurred shortly before or during their flight from home. Had any other option been open to them, it was clear, they would not have subjected their families to such conditions. I spoke to others who were still in states of light-headed relief that they had not drowned on the journey over. I was sometimes shown selfies, taken moments after having landed on firm ground – the subjects of the photo smiling in gratitude and joy. Then, to my shock, I would see similar selfies circulated on social media as proof that those involved couldn’t really have been that desperate.

A refugee carries his child inside the Idomeni refugee camp in norhern Greece. Giannis Papanikos / Alamy Stock Photo.

The Idomeni camp quickly began receiving an influx of thousands of individuals each day. During September and October of 2015, before the UNHCR hired more personnel for the border, my friends and I worked evening shifts in which we essentially took over for the UNHCR after its workers’ day shifts. We coordinated with the border guards to schedule and prepare the groups who would cross the border. My role was usually to approach each group of travelers as they were placed in a tent, find people in the group who could speak English and translate for me to the others, and then communicate details about when it was time for them to cross the border and how to do so, in addition to discovering if anyone was in need of any special accommodations. I wrote the following on October 23, 2015:

Last night was one of the most intense I’ve experienced at the border; it was pouring rain, with multiple buses of fifty refugees each lined up waiting to enter the camp, and over fifty groups of fifty (over twenty-five hundred people) waiting to cross during the night. I was doing [coworker’s] and my usual evening job filling in for the UNHCR. We organize groups of fifty into tents and work with police to help them cross the border. Some groups are there for hours waiting to cross, along with small children, elderly, and disabled people traveling in many of them. At the beginning of the night when the rain was coming down heavily, the police wanted a group to cross every five minutes, which involved me or [other coworker] charging into the required tent, yelling the group number, trying to find the group leader and gather the scattered fifty people, then quickly get them up to the border so that they could cross, all while another one of us looked for the next group and [more coworkers] met the current group coming in and took them to their tent.

During those moments, I looked into the eyes of dads and moms carrying their babies and young children, trying to shelter them from the cold and rain, people with inadequate shoes and clothes who were trying to make it until they could get replacements at the next camp, and people who really should not have been traveling at all [but were forced to]. One dad stopped to give me a big smile as he tried to cover his baby with his coat.

What surprised me most in those days was the sacrificial love and hospitality that I encountered from people who were in the most difficult of situations. On a night similar to the one I detailed above, my informal translator within one of the groups, a young man from Syria, was clearly exhausted from his narrow escape and days of travel. Yet each time I came to his group’s tent to give them additional information or to find details of what they needed, he’d promptly leap to his feet from where he’d been resting and very kindly ask me, “What can I do to help you, Sarah?” On another night in December, a group of Iranians had been stuck at the increasingly cold border for nearly two weeks after the Macedonian government had stopped allowing people from several of the countries represented at the border to enter. This particular group had fled religious persecution. Each night that my coworkers and I saw them, they invited us to sit with them around their fire, and on this night, one of the men insisted that we join their “potato party.” He cooked several potatoes in the fire, insisted that we share them, and we sat chatting and singing songs for each other. The love, hospitality, patience, and care of those I met far exceeded my own, and yet it was they and not I who were enduring so much oppression and suffering.

As I drove back to Thessaloniki most nights, it was hard to fight off an overwhelming despair. There were more than 13,000 people in the camp at its peak. Our personnel and resources were limited. And how could the problems that had perpetuated this crisis ever be fully eliminated? I certainly was powerless to do so. How could we halt the wars and oppression and greed that had sent so many here? My resistance or acts of compassion could barely make a dent.

When I moved back to the United States in 2016 and began to work with a local group involved in refugee resettlement in my home state of Nevada, these questions kept occurring to me. I still found myself experiencing a despair that at times veered into cynicism. My cynicism did not take the form that I see online in our current debates about refugees: that of disbelief at the narratives of those who leave their homes or of insistence that we should prioritize our own land, loved ones, and problems to the exclusion of those seeking refuge. I had seen too much, up close, to believe that. Rather I came to doubt the value of my contributions in the face of so much suffering.

The answer that sustained me – albeit very imperfectly – then is much the same as the one that sustains me now, as I experience frustration with the current state of events. As I read Habakkuk, I asked his question: “God, why won’t you bring justice?” The answer that God gave Habakkuk, as I interpret it, was along the lines of, “I will, but it won’t be in the way or in the timing that you’ve envisioned.” And Habakkuk’s response, that he would wait patiently for God’s judgment, pleading that both God’s justice and his mercy would be made known in his time, became mine. After praying this, Habakkuk adds, “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights” (Hab. 3:17–19). In my tendency toward despair at injustice, I too could hope in the Lord. A friend of mine used the phrase, “Jesus, the hope of humanity,” while preaching a sermon. I repeated those words over and over to myself. If Jesus was the hope of humanity and the source of my own joy, I could keep working, believing that my work for the Lord was not in vain. I could keep working, knowing that God’s Spirit sustained me. I could keep working, knowing that Christ and not I or my meager and insufficient work was the hope of humanity.

Back in Nevada, I drove newly settled refugee families to government appointments and agencies to apply for work, helped them to practice English, and sat with them in their tiny living rooms, meeting their children and drinking their inevitably generously offered refreshments. As I had at the border in Greece, I heard about the circumstances that had forced them to leave their homelands. I learned about the difficult and months- or years-long ordeals they endured in order to finally be permitted to settle in the United States. I watched them apply for jobs for which they were overqualified and learn how to navigate a large and strange new city without vehicles or connections of their own. I sat with a new friend from Syria and her young daughters as she confided to me her fears for her family members who were still back home, and her worries for herself due to rhetoric about immigrants that she heard in the news and saw online.

If anything surprised me in those days, it was not what I learned about the experiences of the refugees I met, but rather the comments of some of my fellow Christians. If I talked about refugees online or even sometimes in person, I was sure to be met with mentions of outlier cases of terrorism or crime committed by immigrants, and shrugs when I pointed out that statistically, US-born citizens were far more likely to engage in such crimes. I was met with skepticism or with concern for my own safety when I related what I’d encountered both abroad and in the United States.

As a child of a minister in a missionary family, I grew up learning the biographies of saints and martyrs throughout history. My parents had read me the story of Corrie Ten Boom, whose family hid Jewish people from the Nazis in their home in the Netherlands during World War II. When Corrie, her sister, and father were caught and arrested, the Gestapo noted her father’s old age and infirmity and in an uncharacteristic act of leniency offered to let him go, if he would promise to stop housing Jews. “If I go home today,” Casper Ten Boom replied, “tomorrow I will open my door again to any person in need who knocks.”footnote He died in prison.

Few of us have faced risks at the level of the Ten Boom family in our everyday decisions. Yet I fear that many American Christians would fail to welcome strangers as the Ten Boom family did: with wholehearted faith in a God who loves and welcomes strangers and calls us to do the same. While the Ten Boom principle was to unequivocally welcome those in need, even at enormous personal cost, the common theme underlying comments expressed by many in the United States was and still seems to be “welcome and hospitality, but only if what I perceive to be my safety and comfort is assured.” I say, “what I perceive to be,” because crime and danger is repeatedly brought up as a reason why Christians should prioritize their own and treat those seeking asylum with an overabundance of caution, never mind the actual facts about crime by immigrants and refugees. I was taught to admire the virtues of saints who, like Corrie and her family, were willing to endure martyrdom, impoverishment, danger, or sacrifice for others. Yet now, in some of the same communities that nourished my faith, I witness Christians refusing to apply this principle to our current situation – and indeed, have instead seen advocates for immigrants and refugees attacked by fellow Christians.

Christian theologians have historically held that we ought to show special care to outsiders, the poor, and those who are in need. Basil the Great, the fourth century bishop from Cappadocia, famously wrote to those who would hoard what they’ve received that “the bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you keep buried in the earth is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.”footnote

Over a thousand years later, the Protestant reformer John Calvin, a religious refugee and a pastor to refugees, said the following of the injunction given to the Israelites in Leviticus 19:33 not to harm or oppress the foreigners among them:

The people [of Israel] are commanded to cultivate equity towards all without exception. For if no mention had been made of strangers, the Israelites would have thought that, provided they had not injured any one of their own nation, they had fully discharged their duty; but, when God recommends guests and sojourners to them, just as if they had been their own kindred, they thence understand that equity is to be cultivated constantly and towards all men….

All those who are destitute and deprived of earthly succor, are under the guardianship and protection of God, and preserved by his hand; and thus the audacity of those is restrained, who trust that they may commit any wickedness with impunity, provided no earthly being resists them. No iniquity, indeed, will be left unavenged by God, but there is a special reason why he declares that strangers, widows, and orphans are taken under his care; inasmuch as the more flagrant the evil is, the greater need there is of an effectual remedy. He recommends strangers to them on this ground, that the people, who had themselves been sojourners in Egypt, being mindful of their ancient condition, ought to deal more kindly to strangers; for although they were at last oppressed by cruel tyranny, still they were bound to consider their entrance there, viz., that poverty and hunger had driven their forefathers thither, and that they had been received hospitably, when they were in need of aid from others.footnote

Neither of these men can be written off as anti-religious wolves in sheep’s clothing, or as confusing the values of liberalism with Christian duty.

It is not my intention here to advocate for a particular policy or political action, but rather to suggest that we consider the words of Basil, Calvin, and Casper Ten Boom, and how they might relate to the situation before us. I find myself called to re-apply them to my own life and confront my own unwillingness to give up my own comfort to extend generosity.  It seems to me that Christian theology, beginning as it does with the knowledge of what God has done freely and generously for us, ought to move us to respond to God’s grace given to us by showing abundant, even risky generosity to others. Security is good, but our security should not be our only or even our first concern. Our resources are not just for us or for our loved ones. Our duty, as Calvin says, is not “fully discharged” if we only attend to our own people. As Jesus taught us, the category of neighbor is far more expansive than we assume. The call to love one’s neighbor requires us to move beyond our class, race, and national categories and care for those in need. It is my hope that Christians today will reject the false teaching that permits them to ignore the needs of the wanderer and sojourner in the name of security and safety, and instead follow the example of Christ and his disciples throughout the ages who sought to be neighbors to those in need.

Footnotes

1. Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place (Bantam Books, 1971), 138.
2. Basil, On Social Justice, trans. C. Paul Schroeder (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009), 70.
3. John Calvin, Commentary on Leviticus 19:33, trans. Charles Bingham, in Calvin, The Harmony of the Law, Calvin Translation Society edition, trans. Henry Beveridge et. al. (Edinburgh: 1844–56).