Visitors

This weekend, for American Thanksgiving, I had Philip, his girlfriend Cailey, and four of her college girlfriends in my home. All of the girls are majoring in something to do with gaming: programming games, designing games, creating art for the games, writing scripts for games. Then there’s Philip playing them in his free moments. The rest of us stick to card games and board games. We played Hand-and-Foot and Scum. Philip introduced us to Dominion. As the group played, I remembered how easily kids laugh at the smallest things, infecting one another until the whole group is laughing at hilarity. I also remembered how much I like having friends comfortable around my table, laughing, eating, talking, and how I don’t need to be in the center of it, just around, enjoying it like a good dessert.

When the topic of Thanksgiving celebrations came up, two of the girls said their families don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. It’s just a holiday for them. They’re American born, but from Asian immigrant families. I think they said something like, “We don’t really get Thanksgiving.” It was an Oz moment. If you don’t grow up being taught about Pilgrims and turkeys and dinners with Indians, the holiday doesn’t feel as important. When I’m in Mexico, I celebrate Thanksgiving, but it’s hard to celebrate with Mexican friends, because the idea of a sit down meal at a specified time in the middle of the day doesn’t make as much sense to some of them—and where’s the salsa? On the other hand, I don’t celebrate Day of the Dead, but this holiday weighs on the hearts of my Mexican friends, especially if they have lost a loved one. They ache to celebrate it, and if their church forbids that, they feel the tension.

Culture clash is like that. We ache for different things, and these aches don’t make sense to people who didn’t grow up with you. And eventually they affect your culture, and things change from how you remember them. So many people in our world know this. It’s hard to give up your Thanksgivings, Days of the Dead, Tet, or whatever traditions you’ve held dear, to see them eroded by the great migrations of our day.

And in Old Testament times, God protected his people from these changes. “Force all the Canaanites from your lands,” he said. “Don’t intermarry,” he said. “Keep the feasts,” he said… “in Jerusalem.” If you’ve read Ralph Winter’s article in Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, you know that in Old Testament times, God meant to draw all the people of the world to his presence at His Temple. In Jerusalem. The Jews were meant to have this incredible culture that would draw people to God, an inexorable, centripetal force. The world would come to Him there.

But today, we are not in Old Testament times. We are not expected to keep the feasts. We are no longer set apart and different. No. Now we are in New Testament times, Centrifugal times, sent into the world, to its very last corners, to live among people just like Jesus lived among us. And this might mean living next to people who have immigrated into our country and are very different from us. Having different customs, even different faiths. They might not get Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or a myriad of other things, including Jesus himself. And so we might we might see our traditions worn away by people different from us, and it might hurt, but it’s our calling as Christians to go, to leave behind what is beautiful to us, and go. To knock on our neighbor’s door (our literal neighbor now) and welcome her without fear, knowing that her presence in our neighborhood will change things, and that’s ok, because God has sent her.

And it’s no coincidence that the tale of the Good Samaritan is set on a road, where people of different races and religions are traveling, maybe migrating, maybe forced by economics or politics to cross paths, and in this story, Jesus makes the Muslim the good guy, stopping to help a Christian left bleeding. Who is our neighbor?

Our church is deliberating whether to sponsor a Syrian refugee family here in Niagara that the Canadian government has approved. Rightfully, there are concerns, but this is my take on it.