God Loves all People by Loving a Particular People
When my older son, Quincy, was a baby, and he would fuss and refuse to cooperate as infants and toddlers are known to do, his babysitter would shake her head and declare, “Lord, he has his ways.” Lord, he has his ways. Yes, well, I agree, the Lord certainly has his ways, as evidenced by our lectionary readings from Second Kings and the Gospel of Luke.
The healing of Naaman the Aramean by Elisha the prophet of Israel and the gospel story of Jesus healing the 10 lepers are stories of border-crossings—border crossings by despised foreigners and political enemies. They remind us that the Bible is full of subversive surprises—stories that reverse the roles of smug insiders and excluded outsiders. We read how the Lord works in mysterious ways — unwelcomed by those anyone, ancient or modern, who want God to observe humanity’s boundaries, and welcomed by those at the margins of society or on the outside desperately seeking God’s grace and mercy.
Who and what is a foreigner? Who and what is a native? Who is an outsider and who is an insider? Theologians have a term for the way those who are chosen are distinguished from those who are not throughout scripture: these questions are addressed in book The Faith of the Outsider by the Old Testament scholar Frank Spina who acknowledges the truth of what theologians call the “Scandal of Particularity.”1 The Scandal of Particularity is an attempt to come to terms with the unlikelihood—some would say absurdity—of God having chosen to enter humanity as a particular person at a particular time, and in a particular country and culture. Why that place and time? Why that country and culture?
In the Hebrew scriptures, the Scandal of Particularity is that Israel alone contains God’s elect people. “Israel is not only God’s special insider community, it is the only insider community,” Spina writes. Likewise, in the New Testament the early Christians proclaimed that “no one comes to the Father except through Jesus” (John 14:6). That the Second Person of the Trinity came to earth as a Jewish male in first century Palestine and was born to working class parents from a backwater town. The incarnation is scandalous because its implication, that some are chosen while others are not, insults our modern sensibilities.
Spina argues though that the Scandal of Particularity obscures the radically unconditional nature of the grace of God. God’s grace negates the notion of “chosenness”—and thereby the notion of exclusion. Spina uses the stories of Esau and Jacob, Tamar and Judah, Rahab and Achan, Naaman and Gehazi, Jonah, Ruth, and the woman at the well all to illustrate how the unchosen—whether a son, a woman, or a Gentile—acts in ways more consistent with God’s grace than the chosen son, the firstborn Jew, the prophet’s servant, or the disciple of Christ.
It is important to understand that in the arc of the biblical narrative, God’s salvation works from the particular to the whole. Christianity only exists because a gracious God has included us inside of Israel’s story. Those same early Christians who proclaimed Jesus as the only way also imagined heaven populated with, and I quote from the book of Revelation, “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language” (7:9).
So…we must ask, what do our lessons this morning teach us about how we determine who is chosen and who is not? Who is worthy to receive God’s merciful grace and who is not? And who gets to plant themselves on our side of the fence. It is obvious that the Lord, in his unimaginable ways, disrespects the boundaries that we humans erect and rejects the dehumanizing labels we put on people to keep them on their side of the fence. When will we learn that the boundaries we place around God’s love and God’s grace cannot be contained?
From the beginning of Naaman’s story, we know he is a powerful man, commanding the army of Israel’s enemy, Aram (Aram is modern day Syria, the region around Aleppo). The narrator praises Naaman in glowing terms: “He was a valiant soldier, a great man in the sight of his master and highly regarded.” Then he adds a shocking detail: “Through Naaman the Lord had given victory to Aram.” That’s right: God gave victory to Israel’s enemy through a pagan officer!
Naaman is also desperate to be healed of his leprosy. His wife’s Hebrew slave knows this and, daring to break the silence expected of her, directs Naaman to the healing power of her Lord, the God of Israel. After a lot of politicking on both sides, in Aram and in Israel, much gnashing of teeth fretting and rending of clothes by Israel’s king who thinks he’s being set-up, and the gnashing of teeth and posturing by Naaman, Naaman relents to Elisha’s instructions, dunks himself seven times in the Jordan river, and is miraculously healed.
We see the same phenomenon time and again throughout the Gospels. Jesus bucks the expectations of the “insiders” all around him, including his disciples, to embrace those who are outside of the covenant: the Roman centurion; the Canaanite woman and her demon-possessed daughter; the woman at the well; the good Samaritan; and of course the one leper among the ten Jesus heals who turns back and prostrates himself in thanksgiving before the Son of God. Talk about scandal! In Jesus’ time, observant Jews didn’t go anywhere near Samaria or Samaritans. They were a despised people, culturally inferior, unholy, outcasts from the people of God. Even Jesus couldn’t refrain from referring to one of them as “this foreigner.”
Friends, these passages warrant the question: Who do we label in this particular time and place as modern-day lepers? Is it a trans person? Is it an immigrant with brown skin? Is it a radical liberal or one who dons a red MAGA hat? There are too many verses to count in the Bible in which Yahweh, the prophets, the Wisdom writers, Jesus, the gospel and epistle writers implore us to respect, care for, and even love—the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant, the alien, the refugee, the neighbor. We cannot get around it.
Even that most mirthless of books, Leviticus, with all that its forbids and excludes and says “no” to, tells us that “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt” (Lev 19:33–34).
I find it distressing that even our Christian brethren face a culture in their own denominations that is increasingly indifferent to this mandate. This is a shame, because the message of full salvation for all people—the message of radical, free, transformative grace—is beautiful and liberating and biblical. But for it to touch all people, however, we need to pay particular attention to some people.
The particular people in our midst are those branded “illegal.” It’s a scurrilous label, because it conflates their lack of citizenship with criminality. Please know that the act of being present in the United States in violation of our immigration laws is not, in every case, a crime. It’s also worth noting that one’s immigration or refugee status can be fluid and take years to adjudicate. To label one an “illegal” is akin to calling a criminal defendant “guilty” before a verdict is rendered.
Even as the political debate rages over immigration, we must not lose sight that it is our moral imperative as Christians to advocate for their safety and well-being, for their value simply as human beings created in the image of God. We cannot be complicit in scapegoating them for the systemic failures of our immigration policies that have plagued our nation since its founding. Our government has long deported those who have not immigrated legally. What’s new is the cruelty, the capriciousness with which it is being orchestrated, often as political theater, and sometimes deadly. It is undemocratic and used to divide us, more important, it is a sin.
Charles M. Blow wrote a piece for The Bitter Southerner last week, arguing that this anti-immigration sentiment is triggered by xenophobic hysteria. He writes, “We have, in many ways, conscious and not, assigned the undocumented to the lowest caste in this country: they are America’s Dalits, in the shadows, performing labor many citizens wouldn’t deign to do. And, in that light, a monstrous unwritten truth emerges — they’re not afforded the same, basic human dignity as others; they are locked out of access to our full empathy.”2 In short, “Reducing illegal immigration is a legitimate policy goal; forfeiting our humanity — and robbing others of theirs — to achieve it is not.”3
The Episcopal Church has a curriculum entitled Sacred Ground which addresses the church’s own complicity in the African slave trade, but it also teaches the inconvenient truths of prejudice and bigotry embedded in the DNA of our immigration policies. Over the years, our laws have championed mandatory literacy tests, as well as widespread notions of eugenics, nationalism and xenophobia, leading to the racial and ethnic exclusions of the poor, Catholics, Jews, Asians, and Africans, not to mention the spits and starts of legal migration for low-skilled workers from Mexico and Central America.
Tomorrow is a national holiday—Indigenous People’s Day. It is worth remembering that Mexicans were indigenous until “Manifest Destiny” justified the ideology of white superiority and legitimized the government’s westward expansion, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land even while their feet were still rooted in it. Before the Mexican-American War of 1846, almost half of the western United States was part of Mexico. Our history is complicated. To be an American means it’s always possible to both understand and reject, to love and to detest, to be loyal and question.
How do we move forward? We must reclaim and repair our numbed and broken and alienated humanity. We must reacquaint ourselves with our loving and merciful God, who knows no borders and boundaries. Who, when all seems lost can and will work miracles in the lives of all God’s people. As cease-fire negotiations were underway last week between Hamas and Israel, the mother of a slain 23-year-old Israeli hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, shared a universal truth that struck me to my core. Rachel Goldberg-Polin, in an interview with CBS news said, “If you only cry when one side’s babies die, it means your moral compass is broken, and therefore your humanity is broken.”4
God loves all people by loving a particular people. They have names, families, stories, histories. God loves all people by loving a particular people. They are not statistics. They are not anonymous. Someone calls them beloved. Love—God incarnate—always begins with particulars: this woman, this Abraham, this leper, this immigrant, this Jew, this Palestinian, this Democrat, this Republican, this Virgin Mary, this Samaritan, this Jesus of Nazareth, into infinity. God loves all people by loving a particular people. Let that love begin with you. With me. Amen.
1 Frank Anthony Spina, The Faith of the Outsider; Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 206pp.
2 https://bittersoutherner.com/issue-no-12/the-heritage-of-american-terror, Charles M. Blow, October 8, 2025.
3 Ibid.
4 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hersh-goldberg-polin-mother-rachel-october-7-war-gaza-israel/