Isaiah 25:1-9, Matthew 22:1-14
There is Room at the Table: A Migration with Dignity Reflection
There is a story we have been taught to believe.
There is not enough.
Not enough food.
Not enough housing.
Not enough work.
Not enough money.
Not enough security.
Not enough room.
And when there is not enough, someone must be left outside.
Much of our conversation about migration begins here. We speak about limits, capacity, resources, borders, and who can be admitted. We ask how many people we can afford to welcome before we ask why some have so much while others have so little. We learn to imagine the migrant as one more person competing for what is already scarce.
The Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines.
For all peoples.
Not simply Israel. Not those who arrived first. Not those with the proper documents. Not those who can prove their usefulness.
All peoples.
Isaiah imagines the reign of God as a table.
And there is room.
The Theology of Scarcity
Scarcity is more than an economic (food, water, shelter) condition. It can become a spiritual formation.
If we are repeatedly told there is not enough, we begin organizing our lives around fear. We protect what belongs to us. We become suspicious of anyone who might need what we possess.
Eventually, scarcity creates boundaries between us and them.
We have homes; they need housing.
We have jobs; they are taking jobs.
We belong here; they are newcomers.
We are citizens; they are migrants.
And soon the question becomes not, “What does our neighbor need?” but “How much will our neighbor cost us?”
The biblical imagination repeatedly interrupts this logic.
Psalm 23 does not describe a barely sufficient world.
You spread a table before me.
My cup is running over.
The shepherd does not ration grace.
The table is prepared. The cup overflows.
And in Matthew's parable of the wedding banquet, when those originally invited refuse to come, the servants are sent into the streets.
Go out.
Find people.
Bring them in.
Fill the hall.
The movement of the kingdom is outward.
Who Owns the Table?
Perhaps this is one of the questions Migration with Dignity asks of the Church:
Whose table do we think this is?
If it is our table, we can decide who deserves a chair.
If it is our country, we can decide whose presence makes us uncomfortable.
If these are our resources, we can determine who has earned access to them.
But Isaiah insists that the feast belongs to God.
The earth belongs to God.
The harvest belongs to God.
And ultimately, we belong to God.
That changes the question.
The migrant arriving at the table is not asking for a portion of something that belongs exclusively to us.
We are both guests.
We arrived before them, perhaps.
But we are guests nevertheless.
Why People Leave
In these reflections on Migration with Dignity, I have kept returning to a simple truth: human beings have always migrated.
Sometimes we move because we are curious.
Sometimes because we fall in love.
Sometimes because we seek opportunity.
But humans more often leave because staying has become impossible.
War.
Political violence.
Religious persecution.
Hunger.
Economic collapse.
Sexual Orientation. Sexual Slavery.
Climate disruption.
The inability to find work sufficient to feed one's children.
And sometimes the decision is even more elemental: Which direction gives my child the better chance to live?
The Somali British poet Warsan Shire gives haunting language to that choice in her poem Home:
“no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark”
And later:
“no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land”
Those lines change the way we hear the word migrant.
Migration is too easily discussed as though people simply wake up one morning and decide they would prefer to live somewhere else. Shire asks us to imagine something very different: the moment when the danger of leaving becomes less frightening than the danger of remaining.
Behind the word migrant there is a human story.
A mother.
A father.
A child.
Someone standing in a doorway looking back at a home they may never see again.
Someone carrying memories, language, food, prayers, photographs, stories—and perhaps, as Shire writes elsewhere in the poem, an anthem still carried under their breath.
This is why Migration with Dignity must defend two freedoms that belong together:
the right to move and the right to remain.
People should be able to seek safety across borders. But justice also requires creating a world in which people are not forced from their homes because violence, economic exploitation, political oppression, or environmental destruction have made remaining impossible.
The question cannot only be:
How do we receive migrants?
We must also ask:
What kind of world are we creating in which the water can become safer than the land?
And perhaps an even deeper question:
What would justice require so that fewer people are ever forced to make that choice?
Scarcity Is Often Manufactured
There is another uncomfortable truth.
Sometimes there really are shortages.
There are communities without enough affordable housing. Schools can be underfunded. Food shelves can run low. Health systems can be overwhelmed. Families can struggle to find work.
We should not romanticize abundance by pretending these realities do not exist.
But the theological question goes deeper:
Why is there not enough?
Is there truly not enough—or have we organized our common life so that abundance accumulates in some places while scarcity is concentrated in others?
Global economic systems move capital across borders with remarkable freedom.
Corporations move resources across borders.
Goods cross borders.
Investment crosses borders.
Wealth crosses borders.
Yet human beings fleeing the consequences of those same economic systems often encounter walls.
Migration with Dignity therefore cannot simply be a ministry of hospitality after people arrive.
It must also become a practice of justice.
Hospitality asks:
How can we welcome the stranger?
Justice asks:
Why was the stranger forced from home in the first place?
We need both questions.
The Banquet Hall
Jesus tells a troubling parable in Matthew 22.
A king prepares a wedding banquet.
The invited guests refuse to come.
So the servants are sent into the streets:
Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.
And they do.
The hall fills with people who never expected to be invited.
People from the roads.
People from the margins.
People who were not on the original guest list.
There is something wonderfully disruptive about this image.
God keeps expanding the invitation.
Go farther.
Invite more.
Bring them in.
Until the hall is filled.
Perhaps the Church's vocation is not to guard the door of the banquet.
Perhaps our vocation is to keep carrying invitations into the streets.
There Is Room
Imagine if this became part of our Christian response to migration.
When someone says,
There isn't enough room.
We remember Isaiah.
There is a feast for all peoples.
When someone says,
There isn't enough.
We remember the psalmist.
My cup is running over.
When someone says,
They don't belong here.
We remember Jesus.
Go into the streets and invite everyone you find.
This does not give us a detailed immigration policy.
Scripture rarely gives us policy manuals.
It gives us something more fundamental.
An imagination.
A way of seeing the world.
And before policies change, imagination must change.
We must learn to imagine our neighbors not as competitors for scarce resources but as fellow guests at God's table.
Practicing the Feast
The feast Isaiah imagines has not yet fully arrived.
People still hunger.
People still flee violence.
Children still cross borders.
Families are still separated.
People still wait in detention centers.
Others remain trapped in places they desperately wish to leave.
The table Isaiah sees remains unfinished among us.
Which means our calling is not simply to admire the vision.
Our calling is to practice it.
Every meal shared with a newcomer practices the feast.
Every congregation accompanying a migrant family practices the feast.
Every effort to secure housing, legal assistance, education, health care, or meaningful work practices the feast.
Every challenge to economic systems that force people from their homes practices the feast.
Every act that refuses to reduce a human being to an immigration status practices the feast.
Perhaps that is what Migration with Dignity can become:
a practice of God's abundance in a world formed by scarcity.
Not naïve optimism.
Not pretending resources are unlimited.
Not ignoring the difficult questions communities face.
But refusing to accept fear as the organizing principle of human community.
Because Christians have been given another story.
There is a mountain.
There is a table.
There is a feast.
And somehow, against everything the world tells us about who belongs and who does not,
there is room.
Room for the migrant.
Room for the refugee.
Room for the neighbor.
Room for us.
And perhaps our work is simply—and courageously—to keep pulling up chairs until the world begins to resemble the table God has already prepared.
That is not merely hospitality.
That is not merely immigration reform.
That is practicing the reign of God.
And the invitation still stands:
Come. The table is ready.
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/