What If No One Had to Leave?
Migration With Dignity Reflection, Exodus 17:1–17
I begin with a question we do not ask often enough:
Why would anyone leave home?
Why would someone leave the land where their grandparents are buried, the streets where they learned to walk, the language in which their mother first whispered their name?
Why leave familiar food, familiar music, familiar celebrations, familiar seasons?
Why leave neighbors, cousins, grandparents, friends, worship communities, schools, memories?
Human beings are deeply attached to place.
We belong somewhere.
And so perhaps most migration does not begin with a border.
It begins with something happening to home.
A job disappears. A crop fails. Water becomes scarce. Violence comes closer. A government becomes dangerous. A gang threatens a child. A family cannot make enough money to eat. The climate changes and land that sustained generations can no longer sustain another. Someone becomes unsafe because of who they are. Political balance is threatening.
Anthropology reminds us that migration itself is not the problem. Human beings have always moved—following water and food, responding to changing climates, seeking opportunity, forming relationships, trading, exploring, and imagining new possibilities. For most of human history, we moved across landscapes without anything resembling our modern system of national borders. The tragedy, then, is not migration. The tragedy is when people are denied a meaningful choice about whether to move or remain.
Migration With Dignity honors both realities: our ancient human freedom to move and our equally human longing to belong somewhere. Dignity means the freedom to leave, the freedom to move, the freedom to return—and the freedom to stay.
And eventually a terrible calculation must be made:
Is staying more dangerous than leaving?
That is where we meet Israel in Exodus.
They have escaped Egypt, but freedom has not yet become security. They are in the wilderness, and there is no water.
They turn on Moses: “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”
It is easy to criticize their lack of faith.
But thirst changes theology.
So does hunger. So does fear. So does listening to your child cry because you cannot provide what they need.
The wilderness strips away abstraction.
The Israelites are free—but freedom without water will not keep them alive.
And that may be an important word for how we think about Migration With Dignity.
Dignity requires more than the freedom to move.
It requires the possibility of remaining.
The possibility of finding meaningful work. The possibility of raising children safely. The possibility of drinking clean water. The possibility of cultivating land that will still produce food. The possibility of worshiping, loving, speaking, and living without fear.
The possibility of calling somewhere home.
Perhaps one of the deepest goals of Migration With Dignity should therefore be a world in which fewer people are forced to migrate at all.
Not because movement is wrong. Human beings have always moved. Scripture itself is filled with migration—Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and his family, Ruth, Israel in exile, the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt, the apostles crossing boundaries with the Gospel.
Movement is part of the human story.
But there is a profound difference between choosing to move and being forced to flee.
There is a difference between pilgrimage and escape. Between opportunity and desperation. Between packing because another place is calling you and packing because remaining may cost you your life.
And that distinction raises an uncomfortable theological question about borders.
What if we began not by asking how high the wall should be, how many agents should patrol it, or which people should be permitted to cross?
What if we began further upstream?
Why are people coming to the border in the first place?
What would happen if communities everywhere had access to safety, meaningful work, food, water, education, health care, political stability, and a sustainable environment?
What if people were free to stay?
The border might become something very different.
Perhaps even something far less important.
Because the deeper theological question is not simply how nations control territory.
It is how human beings learn to share the earth.
We are reminded in the psalms of God splitting rocks in the wilderness and giving the people water “as from the great deep.”
Water cannot show a passport. Rain does not recognize national boundaries. Rivers cross borders without requesting permission. Birds migrate. Seeds travel. Wind moves across continents.
Creation itself seems remarkably indifferent to the lines human beings draw on maps.
Those lines may serve legitimate human purposes. Communities organize themselves. Governments have responsibilities. Laws matter.
As Christians and people of faith, we must never confuse those lines with the boundaries of God’s compassion.
The reign of heaven has no borders.
Philippians takes us deeper: Paul tells the community: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”
And then comes one of the cornerstones of the Christian tradition.
Christ does not grasp power.
Christ empties himself.
Christ crosses the distance between divine privilege and human vulnerability.
Christ comes among us as servant.
This is kenosis—self-emptying love.
And it presents a radically different vision of power.
Pharaoh’s power asks: How do I protect what is mine?
Christ’s power asks: What can I give so that another may live?
Those are very different ways of organizing a world.
One builds walls of fear. The other builds tables. One protects privilege. The other creates relationship. One asks whether the stranger belongs. The other washes the stranger’s feet.
Matthew gives us another question:
“By what authority are you doing these things?”
It is the question the religious authorities ask Jesus.
But perhaps Jesus turns that question back toward every human institution.
By what authority do we decide whose life is worth protecting?
By what authority do we determine who deserves food, shelter, safety, work, or belonging?
By what authority do we decide that being born on one side of an imaginary line gives one person possibilities denied to someone born a few miles away?
These are not easy questions.
Nor do they produce simple immigration policies.
But they should disturb any theology that begins with the protection of borders rather than the dignity of human beings.
Ezekiel gives us God’s desire with remarkable clarity:
“Turn, then, and live.”
That may be the word connecting all these readings.
Water from the rock: Live.
Turn from injustice: Live.
Christ empties himself: Live.
Jesus challenges authority: Live.
Migration With Dignity begins there.
Every human being deserves the possibility of life.
Not merely survival.
And perhaps that changes the question we ask about migration.
Instead of asking only, How do we stop people from coming?
we might ask, What would make it possible for people to stay?
What would it take for a farmer to remain on ancestral land? For a mother to know her children will be safe? For a young person to find meaningful work without leaving family behind? For someone threatened by violence to sleep without fear? For communities facing environmental devastation to flourish again?
And when remaining is impossible, what would it mean for the rest of us to receive those who move not first as threats, statistics, cases, or categories—but as neighbors searching for life?
Perhaps then borders would cease to be primarily walls of exclusion and become places of encounter.
Perhaps migration policy would begin not with fear but with human flourishing.
Perhaps nations would spend less energy keeping desperate people away and more energy helping create a world in which desperation does not force people from home.
And perhaps we would discover something even more unsettling:
The stranger at our border is not simply asking us for something.
The stranger is asking us a theological question:
What kind of world are we building together? A world where some must flee so others can remain comfortable? Or a world where every person has the possibility of water, work, safety, community, dignity, and home?
The Israelites strike the rock.
Water comes.
The wilderness does not disappear.
But life becomes possible there.
Maybe that is our work as well.
Not simply helping people survive the wilderness.
Not simply helping them cross another border.
But striking the rocks of systems that tell us scarcity is inevitable, fear is necessary, and exclusion is the price of security.
Making room for water.
Making room for dignity.
Making room for home.
And perhaps imagining a world where migration is neither crime nor desperation, but what it ought to be:
a human freedom—the freedom to leave, the freedom to move, the freedom to return, and, perhaps most importantly, the freedom to stay.
The Reverend Rex McKee is a Deacon in The Episcopal Church in Minnesota, serving at Saint John the Baptist. He is a co-leader of ECMN Immigration Caucus, MWD Task Force, Caucus and Episcopal Migration Response Network. Rex describes himself as an aging radical hippie beat poet theologian philosopher peacemaker; “If I start from a place of love, more times than not I will find what is "right," but if I start from a position of "right" I will rarely find love.” You can find more of his writings on Substack: https://rexmckee.substack.com/