Thanksgiving and the Longing for Special Providence

When I was a little boy my mother taught us a bed-time prayer which my sister and I said every night:

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

The Lord go with me through the night,

And keep me safe till morning light.

In the more common, older and much scarier version of that prayer, the last two lines are:

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I’m glad Mom gave us the revised version. I can’t imagine teaching a child to say the original.

The scarier version dates from a time when little children did sometimes die in the night from a host of deadly childhood diseases which have mostly been eliminated over the last century. Today our children are safe from those deadly diseases because scientists have discovered vaccinations and medicines that are truly miraculous. Our medical and scientific progress is (I believe) part of what God is doing in the world. It is part of God’s continuing creation

Today we have come to expect that for our children, safety is the norm. And death and disease are rare. At least they are rare among the developed nations of the world. It is easy for us to forget that in other parts of the world children continue to die of disease and malnutrition at an alarming rate.

We expect our children to be safe, and there is nothing wrong with that. All children ought to be safe. And safety is what every parent wants for his or her child.

But the biblical promise is not safety. The promise is that God will not leave us. Or to put it differently, in the context of my bed-time prayer, “safe” meant “safe in God’s care.”

One of the most cherished misunderstandings of biblical faith is the doctrine of “Special Providence.” We want to believe that God loves us more and protects us more than others. Special Providence promises that God cares for me, and for my family and loved ones, in a special and unique way. Of course, that is true in the sense that each of us has a unique experience of God’s care. But as Jesus said, the sun shines and the rain falls, on the just and the unjust, and God’s love is there for everyone.

In a radio sermon preached in 1952, Reinhold Niebuhr said that for many people, believing in God means “that that we have found a way to the ultimate source and end of life that gives us, against all the chances and changes of life, some special security and some special favor.” As an example, he speaks of the prayers “that many a mother with a boy in Korea must pray, ‘A thousand at thy side and 10,000 at thy right hand, let no evil come to my boy.’”

For the mother or father with a child in danger, that is the most natural prayer in the world and it is the deepest desire of our hearts. Yet in the end it is impossible. As Niebuhr explains, “The Christian faith believes that beyond, within and beyond, the tragedies and the contradictions of history we have laid hold upon a loving heart, and the proof of whose love, on the one hand, is the impartiality toward all of his children and, secondly, a mercy which transcends good and evil.”

On Thanksgiving we give thanks for the Providence of God and the blessings that sustain our life on this fragile planet. The promise of Christian faith is not that God will grant us a special exemption from life’s hardships, or give us a special reward for our virtue, but that at the center of life there is a loving heart, which will be with us now and forever.

Once We Were Strangers

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Deuteronomy 10:17-19

If you listen to the politicians’ talk about the threat of Syrian refugees flooding into our cities and towns, you would think that they would be arriving by the boatload or planeload. That is not the case. They would arrive in the same way that refugees have been arriving for decades: family by family. One at a time. And then each family would be adopted by a community group (often churches) to be settled into their new home.

Under the current process, Syrian refugees, like all other refugees, must pass through an extensive process of multiple interviews and security checks before they can be admitted to the United States. The process may take more than two years and families are not typically admitted until the final stages.

In a New York Times article published last week, Haeyoun Park and Larry Buchanan outlined the present practice. This is a summary of the current protocol:

1. Registration with the United Nations.
2. Interview with the United Nations.
3. Refugee status granted by the United Nations.
4. Referral for resettlement in the United States.
5. Interview with State Department contract employees.
6. First background check.
7. Second background check for some refugees.
8. A third background check for those deemed at risk for criminal or terrorist actions.
9. Fingerprint screening with photo.
10. Second fingerprint screening.
11. Third fingerprint screening.
12. Case reviewed at United States immigration headquarters.
13. Some cases referred for additional review.
14. Extensive in-person interview with Homeland Security Officer.
15. Homeland Security approval is required.
16. Screening for contagious diseases.
17. Cultural orientation classes.
18. Match with an American resettlement agency (like Church World Service).
19. Multi-agency security check before leaving for the United States.
20. Final security check at an American airport.

The process is redundant, and it is intentionally redundant to make certain that those finally accepted for resettlement qualify as refugees, can be effectively integrated into a community, and do not pose a security threat. Security checks performed at the beginning of the process are repeated near the end to make sure that new information or concerns have not surfaced during the intervening months and years.

If the House bill passed last week were to become law, then the certification process in step fifteen would be expanded to require that the Director of the FBI, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence would each have to confirm that each individual applicant did not pose a threat. In other words, each of those Directors would have to personally review each application and personally guarantee the determination. Since that is a virtual impossibility, the net effect of the House bill would be to make it impossible to resettle any Syrian refugees in the United States.

At a time when we are confronting a world-wide refugee problem greater than anything we have faced since the Second World War, Christians in the United States should be advocating for a more extensive resettlement program. We should be doing more, not less. We should not ignore possible security risks, but we should remember that we were once refugees and that we are called to welcome the stranger.