Our Aramean Ancestry

From 20 Feb: A devotion written for recent travelers to Tanzania.

The Red Roads of Pommern - July 2008

Read Deuteronomy 26:

‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labour on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O Lord, have given me.’

Consider This:  Migration is woven into our theological and spiritual DNA. Ours is a wandering God - one who walks in the garden with those he created, who leads his people by a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, who turned his face toward Jerusalem accompanied by fishermen and outcasts, who moves among us like a wind and dances above our heads like a tongue of fire. We are, all of us, a people on the move - a people scattered at Babel, Israelites wandering the desert, exiles in Babylon, and resident aliens in the lands of princes and of powers.

“Migration [is] often a theologizing experience.” It causes one to think about God, about identity, and about one’s ultimate concerns. According to historian Timothy Smith the experience of neither being in one’s ‘homeland’ nor fully accepted in one’s new location caused early European immigrants to the Americas to have deep crises of the spirit that affected their religious practices and helped to shape the American religious landscape we know today. 

Migration is all around you. In Tanzania, under President Nyerere and the philosophy of Ujamaa (or ‘familyhood’), the social and physical landscape was changed as the process of villagization swept the country. In the 1970s, in one of the largest acts of forced migration in human history, 10 million peasants were forcibly evicted from smaller settlements and relocated in larger villages across the country. As you travel the dusty roads of Iringa and pass through village after village, be mindful that not all of them have been there forever. Migration brought German missionaries and Lutheranism from southern districts to the hill town of Pommern and migration brings nomadic peoples like the Maasai into the lands of settled people like the Hehe. Migration, in the short-term, brings Minnesotans to East Africa and, in the long-term, Somalis to the Upper Midwest.

For those who are settled (for the moment at least) and those who are currently on the move, migration continues to be a ‘theologizing experience.’ It causes -or should cause- us to ask questions about identity, God, and the transcendent. How have our own histories and beliefs, as well as those of others, been shaped by acts of migration? How are we to treat our neighbors - wherever in the world they may be from? What happens to when we look beyond the identities forged by Passports, Borders, and Flags? 

Pray: God of all Nations, We confess that our Ancestor, too, was a wandering Aramean and that we, likewise, are a people on the move. As we walk alongside our brothers and sisters in Tanzania help us to do so with eyes wide open - ever aware of the movement of your peoples around this planet and the stirring of your Holy Spirit among us all. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, who crossed over from Heaven to Earth so that we might return to you, we pray. Amen.