Daily Immigration and Welcome

Lord of the Exodus and the Underground Railroad, You who parted the Red Sea for refugees fleeing Pharaoh's cruelty and lit the North Star for those following Harriet Tubman's footsteps through swamp water and midnight forests — we come before You today with Amos ringing in our ears: "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream."

We confess, O God, that we have sometimes locked the door that You left open. We have forgotten that Abraham was a wanderer, that Ruth was a foreigner gleaning in strange fields, that Your own Son fled to Egypt as an infant refugee with nothing but His mother's arms and Joseph's weary faith.

Teach us the holy welcome our grandmothers practiced — the ones who stretched a pot of greens to feed whoever knocked, because they remembered what it meant to arrive somewhere with empty hands and a pounding heart. Stir in us the courage of those freedom churches that hid the desperate in root cellars and sang loud enough to cover the sound of footsteps.

Today, when we pass someone whose accent is unfamiliar or whose documents are uncertain, let us see not a stranger but the very face of Christ in disguise, testing whether we meant what we sang on Sunday.

Make our tables longer, our doors wider, and our hearts brave enough to say what You have always said to the displaced and the desperate: Welcome home. In the name of Jesus, who had nowhere to lay His head, Amen.