Ruth the Magnanimous Moabite and Mothers and Children from Central America

I wonder if all these well-meaning people so fearful of mothers and children fleeing precarious situations in their native lands...I wonder if all these well-meaning people have ever read the book of Ruth.  What if Ruth the foreigner (hated Moabite) had not persisted in her pledge of covenantal loyalty and steadfast love to the Jew Naomi?  What if Ruth the foreigner had been told to leave Judah and return to her native land of Moab?  There would never have been this most subversive account of another time where the covenanted people are taught, educated by the Other, the outsider, the one from the margins.  And this foreigner, outsider, alien, stranger, undocumented one was the conduit and instrument by which the Lord God challenged and invited his people to an even greater magnanimity.  What if she had been cut off, refused entry, told to leave?  Then the Old Testament would never have been able to tell such a story of covenantal loyalty and steadfast love that is nearly unparalleled until the gospels themselves.  What a tragedy that would have been...

One never knows how Almighty God is going to cross one's path.  Many times it is through the one that the world would just as soon not notice, give no heed to, ignore, or tell to go back where they came from.  The mysterious letter to the Hebrews has that chilling verse which should give everyone who is serious about following the way of the Lord pause: "Do not neglect love of strangers [philoxenia], for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels" (Hebrews 13:2).  God himself may just be trying to seek hospitality and refuge right here and right now in some mother from Guatemala or some child from Honduras.  And instead of welcoming them with arms wide open (magnanimously), some of us would just as soon push them away (pusillanimously).

I think I will stay with Ruth and say as she said: "Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge.  Your people are my people and your God is my God.  Wherever you die, I will die, and there I will be buried.  And may God do thus and so to me and even more if even death separates me from you" (Ruth 1:16-17).