Worship - 12 October 2025

Summary of this week's theme

One of the great challenges of our time is the rise of hostility towards migration. Yet the Bible speaks far more about welcoming the stranger than about other topics that so often dominate church debates. Perhaps it is easier to judge those unlike us than to be confronted by verses that call us to compassion. Sometimes the bitterness of our culture makes it easy to feel as though we are living in exile.

Exile and migration run through Scripture: the Exodus, the Babylonian exile, and God’s command to remember what it means to be strangers in a strange land. When Jerusalem fell in the sixth century BCE, the prophet Jeremiah urged the exiles not to despair but to live faithfully where they were: build, plant, marry, live. His rival, Hananiah, promised a swift return home, but Jeremiah’s words proved true. Optimism says, “This will soon be over.” Hope says, “God’s peace can be sought even here.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks put it well: “Optimism is passive, hope is active. It takes courage to hope.”

Jeremiah’s hope was practical: seek the welfare of others, and you will find your own. It echoes the African idea of ubuntu: “I am because you are.” Even when life feels overwhelming, hope calls us to act with faith and compassion, trusting that God remains at work.

Six centuries later, Jesus also stood in a place of exile - between Samaria and Galilee. There he met ten people with leprosy, pushed to the margins and crying, “Jesus, have mercy on us.” In sending them back to the community that had rejected them, he not only healed their bodies but restored their belonging. Healing, in Jesus’ hands, is always communal.

The borderland between Jew and Samaritan was a place of hostility, yet it was there that reconciliation began. God’s new world breaks in where difference meets grace. The Church is called to live in that same space today - between faiths, denominations, and social divides - listening for cries of mercy and becoming agents of restoration.

Desmond Tutu reminded us through ubuntu that our healing is bound together. Jeremiah and Jesus both call us to live as people of shalom in our own in-between times: seeking peace, rebuilding community, and loving the migrant, the stranger, and the excluded. For the God of shalom is still here - and still full of love.