Trinity and Humanity

From the Hebrew text for Thanksgiving Day: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien.” ~ Deuteronomy 26:5

I hope you are at home for Thanksgiving this year – whatever and whomever home may be for you. It is a hard thing to be wayfaring, wandering, and on the road as a stranger in a strange land. Through the law of Moses, God constantly reminded Israel that they had been aliens until they found a home and that they ought to therefore welcome strangers, aliens, and foreigners into their midst.

I hope that, if you are at home for Thanksgiving this year, you have found a way to open your home, your table, and your life – however briefly – to someone with nowhere else to be. To do so is to live out the very substance of God’s own life: in Jesus, the home of the Triune God opened up and received all of us – strangers and aliens to the Divine – into himself.

I hope that in your home this Thanksgiving there is thanks given for the home that is and is yet to be. As the old spiritual says, “I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger / While traveling in this world of woe / Yet there’s no sickness, toil nor danger / In that bright land to which I go.”

May your Thanksgiving table this year be a foretaste of the Thanksgiving table of the world to come: a place where you are at home and others have found a home with you.

~ Jonathan Stepp