How can a mother live without her childen?
Where is hospitality? Too often we don’t welcome the strangers among us. In the United States today, there is a backlash against immigrants — a fear of foreigners — that we often see in our own congregations. It may be, as in the time of the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah who blamed Israel’s problems on foreign-born wives, we are living in an era where it is easier to attribute our problems to foreigners than to our own societies. Uprooted people are often seen as a threat to our way of life. But the threat of the uprooted is that they have the potential to shake our complacency. In South Florida, many English-speaking European-Americans have moved out of Miami because schools and communities are now largely Spanish-speaking. Many European-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in South Florida live completely separate lives. They shop in different areas, send their children to different schools, worship in separate churches. But it is in shaking this complacency that we open ourselves to the
