It’s a simple question: where are you from? How many conversations between strangers might begin with this common question, implying as it does that one’s national or regional origin might reveal something about the individual, an original self saturated in the ambience of a particular location. Think of the difference you imagine between somebody from Sioux City and somebody from New York City, the immense shift the imagination makes between South America and the American South. People from California are laid back, Midwesterners earnest. Southerners are debonair, devil-may-care while northerners are industrious, thrifty and preppie. The cartography of our imaginations ascribes certain characteristics to various locales around the world and accompanying traits to their inhabitants. Certain cities, countries, and regions have a particular mystique, an aura of historic or cultural significance that hangs above it as palpable as the climatic conditions we are certain are constant there. And when encountering another, we are sure to know something about their essential self by knowing where they are from.

When I’m asked where I’m from I usually say something about it being complicated, or to simplify matters, say that I’m from Montreal. In fact, I was born in Jerusalem in the wake of the 1967 war to an Arab Palestinian father and an Anglo Saxon American mother. (How they met and married is a whole other story!). I was born a US citizen overseas of mixed Arabic and Anglo Saxon parentage. We came to the United States within a year of my birth, settling in Hartford, CT, where my father landed a job teaching Arabic at the Hartford Seminary in their Muslim studies department, while he finished his PhD in modern Arabic literature.

Ours was the typical immigrant family, typical mixed culture family, negotiating that space between the different cultures and places we inhabited simultaneously. We were American and yet not; Arabs and yet not. My childhood, and that of my siblings, was typically Arab-American; we were proud of our identity, and also a little embarrassed. US culture had (and continues to have) a limited set of stock images of what an Arab is, making us outsiders in a culture that didn’t reflect us. We knew we weren’t oil barons and we weren’t terrorists and we weren’t veiled dancing harem girls, but that was pretty much all our non-Arab friends seemed to know about Arabs. We were considered strange, unknown, our ethnicity vaguely unsettling.

Things got even more interesting when we moved to Montreal in 1975 and became English-speaking Arab-American immigrants to French Canada. What’s more, the nationalist movement in Quebec was at its height, with a separatist political party sweeping into power in 1976 and soon putting into place legislation that severely restricted the use of the English language before engaging the province in a referendum on Quebec sovereignty. While some French Canadians were sympathetic to us as a displaced Palestinian family (“The English took away your country, too!”) most suffered the xenophobia typical of nationalisms everywhere. Immigrants, foreigners, ethnic and linguistic outsiders were not welcome and those of us who were not “vielle souches” as they say, died-in-the-wool French Canadian, felt that lack of welcome in many ways.

I say I’m from Montreal, because I lived there the longest and grew up there. The problem with saying this, however, is that everybody assumes I’m French Canadian. The ironic thing to me is that when I left Quebec, having lived there as an outsider for twenty-one years, to go to seminary in Toronto, English Canadians there assumed I was French Canadian. “Oh, you have a weird name and you’re from Quebec.” I also discovered, having crossed the border between English and French Canada, the affinity I actually had with the cultural atmosphere of Quebec. I also came to appreciate the keenly felt loyalty to one’s language; Arab-Americans, like Latinos and francophones, are defined by our language and culture, rather than by race or color.

I had lived almost all of my life in Canada when it came time for me to choose a site at which to do a ministerial internship. In all that time, I had never become Canadian, and hadn’t really thought of myself as Canadian. I had always been an American in Canada, or fashioned myself as a citizen of the world. When I realized that it was likely that I’d be a ministerial intern in the United States, I had to face the possibility of losing my status in Canada. So, since the US State Department had changed the rules about dual citizenship, I became a Canadian citizen. And then promptly left the country.

I came here to be your ministerial intern in 2000, and stayed in the Boston area after that was done to complete some pastoral care requirements before leaving for Michigan three years later. What I found curious living in the United States during that time, was that anytime I said or did anything that people found unfamiliar, it was taken as some kind of national or ethnic difference. Like, taking my own reusable grocery bag to the supermarket. “That must be a Canadian thing.” Being back in Canada these past two years, the same thing happened there.

Born in one place I have never returned to, belonging to another continent entirely. A dual citizen, straddling two national identities. Of mixed cultural heritage, combining ethnicities. This is the place I am in, one adept at translating, crossing borders, and migrating between worlds.

One of the things I learned, crossing national and cultural borders, is that people whose ethnic or national background is different from yours are only as strange as you make them. Strangers can be more familiar than we allow, seeing as we often do only the border that separates them from us, and not the similarities we share. A stranger is simply a friend you haven’t yet made.

I’ve learned that the divisions drawn on maps are only as real as you make them. I have come to believe that all loyalties are local. To love the world, to be at home in the world, you need to love your particular part of it, to know its seasons and cycles. At the same time recognizing that our piece of the world is interconnected and interdependent with the entire world and our loyalty to our place does not diminish other places and other peoples and their love of their part of the world. “This is my home, the country where my heart is, and other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.” I am loyal to a certain bioregion through which international and other borders are drawn and which contains people from around the world.

I have come to enjoy and profoundly accept my own hybridity, the hodgepodge of identities that make up who I am without being all of who I am, and I have come to enjoy and profoundly accept that we are all made up of many different and sometimes contradictory parts.

I have learned to reject the kitsch, the nostalgia, the purist doctrines of nationalism—all nationalism. I have learned that they are false and inhuman, with tendencies toward ethnic cleansing and segregation and war making. National identity is not only the boundary drawn around those of shared belonging to a place, of common heritage and language and culture and customs. Because there are two sides to the boundary, it includes and excludes at the same time: those who belong here and those who don’t. Borders create insiders and outsiders. I’ve learned that the socially constructed categories of nation and ethnicity and race and gender hold up only in particular circumstances and in particular ways and are not, in fact, essentially and universally true for individuals. Individuals are far more complex and interesting than the stereotypes created about them as people.

I have come to see the interconnection of peoples, that objectifying or demonizing people on the other side is not possible for me, as I have been there. I’ve learned that those of us who cross borders can be the best links between alienated and warring peoples.

In fact, the practice of traversing those divisions in order to create mutual understanding is what I believe followers of Jesus are called to do. Jesus was a person who reached out across the dividing lines of ethnicity, religion, gender, and class to say nothing of the taboo-breaking habit he had of bringing together respectable and rejected, clean and contaminated, worthy and worthless.

Today’s gospel reading is a case in point. Jesus leaves the Jewish homeland, crossing the border into Phoenicia, which is to say, pagan country, a foreign and Gentile land. The Jewish nation, in the time of Jesus, saw themselves as distinct from the surrounding peoples. The word “gentile,” in fact, simply means “the peoples” or “the nations” and is used to mean “non-Jews.” There’s us—and then there’s everybody else. In other words, that distinction was a sharp one.

And yet, this woman approaches Jesus, surely knowing that both as a woman and as a Canaanite, she was taking a risk that he would be hard pressed to find a reason to help her, to bring healing to her household. Ethnic and gender boundaries divide them. Indeed, Jesus ignores her. His disciples then come to him and say, “Tell her to get lost! Now she’s bugging us!” We then hear this exchange between Jesus and the woman: “It’s not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” Yes, friends, that’s Jesus talking. His mission, as he says, is to the lost sheep of Israel, not the surrounding nations. “Sure it is,” she retorts, “Don’t the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table?” Jesus is clearly impressed by her audacity and wit, and the woman’s daughter is healed that very hour.

The gospels, you remember, are not eyewitness accounts written as the events they portray were unfolding, but rather are theological works written in the generation after Jesus’ death. Those communities of Jesus followers were contending with a number of things, not the least of which was the attraction to the Jesus movement of non-Jews. Gentiles were joining the nascent Christian community. Jesus had been a Jewish teacher in the Jewish homeland and had sparked a religious movement that was essentially Jewish. Would these non-Jewish followers of Jesus have to be circumcised? Should they keep kosher? Those earliest communities were Jewish, and yet not; Gentile and yet not. A good portion of the New Testament is devoted to these questions, particularly the letters of the apostle Paul. We heard from Paul this morning, quoting Hebrew Scripture to show that God can and will be known and loved by “the peoples,” by those outside the Hebrew nation.

The theological reflection of the meaning of Jesus’ life and work that are the gospel accounts of him consider these questions as well, as the remembered events of Jesus’ life are interpreted through and by the communities struggling with these questions of inclusion. And so we get this remarkable story of Jesus changing his mind. In his encounter with the foreigner, the alien woman, Jesus’ own understanding of his mission shifts to include those outside his own nation’s borders. The other nations, other peoples, cannot be viewed as objects, demonized and stereotyped as inferior. In crossing that border, both literally and figuratively, Jesus becomes the bridge between his nation and the rest of the world. Jesus brought healing to the nations, not just the nation of insiders. The communities gathered in his spirit and memory, themselves increasingly divided between Jew and non-Jew, between insiders and outsiders, remember and reenact Jesus’ border crossing in their own practices. The stranger, the foreigner, in the Christian community, is embraced and befriended, made familiar. Among Jesus followers, there are only insiders. Among Jesus’ followers, there are only insiders.

We are considering this month the theme of hospitality. The New Testament word for hospitality is philoxenia. This Greek word literally means, love of the stranger, love of the foreigner. Our word “xenophobia,” which denotes the dislike of foreigners, means just the opposite: fear of the stranger. Fear, because one whose language, customs, and religion are different from ours is a challenge to the fixed nature of our norms. Suddenly, we see that there are other ways of doing things, other foods, other gods. And so to embrace the Other, to receive the stranger, is to accept the challenge of viewing our own cherished customs as relative. To extend our boundaries to include the one who stands at our threshold brings with it a risk. It is the risk of being transformed, of learning something new, of becoming something different.

The practice of hospitality is the alchemical process by which the strange becomes familiar, the stranger is transformed into a friend. The boundaries that divide us are crossed and borders of division become bridges of mutual relation. The practice of hospitality does not allow us to interact with others on the basis of stereotypes, does not allow us to think we know somebody just because we know where they are from. True hospitality requires a listening heart, an openness to the real person in front of us, divorced from our preconceptions and prejudices. The practice of hospitality demands of us a mind that does not divide the world into us and them, subject and object, self and other but rather that sees we are all us, we are all subjects, none of us objects, none of us “Other.”

The Greek word xenos denotes “stranger.” Yet, this word also means guest and host. This one word signifies the mutuality at the core of the practice of hospitality. In the encounter of strangers, of insider and outsider, alien and citizen, we find the encounter of subject with subject, each knowing themselves as host and each knowing themselves as guest.

“When foreigners reside among you in your land,” we read in the book of Leviticus, “do not mistreat them. The foreigners residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (19:33-34) The biblical witness declares: You were a foreigner once, too, remember that; you can be a foreigner yourself when you go across the border, remember that. You are as much an alien as a citizen, a guest as much as a host. People are only as strange as you make them.

Who is the stranger among us in need of the welcoming embrace that we offer? From whom, in your workplace or extended family, are you estranged and how can you turn that stranger into a friend? From whom are you alienated, and how can you turn that alien into a fellow citizen? You don’t always have to cross an international border to take the risk of befriending another; sometimes you have only to cross the room. The borders we cross in our daily lives are not the kind that are defended by armies, they are the defensive habits of the ego. What are we afraid might happen if we speak a kind word to somebody we don’t know, if we reach out to somebody who needs our forgiveness or who we need to forgive? Can we risk being transformed; can we risk being changed, changing our minds? Can we risk venturing into the unknown, the unfamiliar? The practice of traversing those divisions in order to create mutual understanding is our calling.

Church communities like this one, gathered in the spirit and memory of Jesus, are at our best when we practice hospitality. For what is a congregation but a collection of strangers endlessly befriending one another? We are at our best as people of faith when we remain open, risking the trust that our relational way of doing religion requires of us, always inviting the one who stands at the threshold to enter and take their place at the table. In our world of individuals and nations closed off against each other, our value of openness to new truth matters a great deal.

We are called to be an inviting people, a hospitable community, called to create an atmosphere of hospitality, befriending the one strange to us or estranged from us. There are strangers among us who need our welcome: newcomers and new members and visitors. There are people unfamiliar to us, even those whose name we know and who we see all the time and whose inner struggles and life stories and personal beliefs are all unknown to us. Each and every interpersonal encounter is an opportunity for the unfolding of God’s presence. For each time we encounter another, we may be encountering God incognito. The stranger we take in as guest may in fact be the host embracing us. Let us seek the face of God in offering welcome to another. May we do so with courage and grace, and in so doing earth might be fair, and all her people one.