Caring for the Stranger
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
July 20, 2025

I’ve been watching, this spring and summer, as efforts to capture and detain undocumented immigrants have filled our news and our social media. There have been some dramatic scenes of protestors converging on raids to disrupt and to protest the presence of agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known generally as ICE. We’ve seen people trying to block ICE agents’ vehicles, and in some cases, appearing to drive them away from attempted raids. During one memorable incident during a restaurant raid in San Diego, protestors grouped together to walk toward the agents, causing them to fall back. They chanted, “Shame. Shame.” It’s been fascinating to watch, because the agents appear to be trying to look and act as intimidating as possible; wearing face masks and body armor, but not uniforms, and with no identification. There’s nothing to differentiate them from kidnappers. Yet people are refusing to be intimidated; they are being trained to approach parked SUV’s with tinted windows, and knock to ask for identification. And as we’ve seen, in many cases when a raid is in progress, bystanders actively attempt to prevent the agents from nabbing people.

I saw this first back in May when a raid was disrupted in Worcester. Family members tried everything to keep their mother from being detained, including at one point standing in front of a car holding a baby. Police were videoed knocking people to the ground.

I was amazed at the courage, and also at the risks taken. And I asked myself, would I have been willing to actively confront these very thuggy-looking agents with their weapons and their body armor making them appear much larger than everyone else?

What would I be willing to do?

Witnessing these attempts to confront authoritarianism reminded me of the efforts of ordinary people during World War 2, both to take huge risks to resist the progress of the German invasion across Europe, but also to do all they could to rescue Jewish people who were being rounded up and loaded onto trains bound for concentration camps.

In the 1980’s, psychologist Eva Folgerman began to search for non-Jewish rescuers from the World War 2 era in order to document their stories before they could be lost, and also to try to understand what motivates people to try to save the lives of strangers, putting themselves at risk. She documented these stories in her book, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust.

The stories are frankly mind-boggling. No one was prepared for this emergency. Often, people were first drawn in by being asked suddenly to take in a neighbor’s child, or to hide a friend or a work colleague. And because the need was so overwhelming, the rescues seldom stopped with that one seemingly low-risk, innocuous decision to help one person, but snowballed over the years of the war as more and more knocks on the door came from desperate people fleeing in the night.

Rescuers would suddenly find themselves with 10 or more people crammed into their houses, sometimes behind quickly-built false walls, in basements and in attics. Perhaps the people hiding could emerge during the day but had to be ready at a second’s notice to hide if the Gestapo pulled up to the house. Some might have moved on quickly, but more would arrive right away to replace them. The homeowner would have to hang out laundry, and provide food, and remove trash and waste, all without creating any suspicion among the neighbors. It’s impossible to imagine the stress of years of acting this way, during wartime and occupation, with ration cards and food shortages part of daily life. And add to that the normal strains of family life – raising children, keeping them healthy, but also training them to keep secrets, to never allow their friends to drop in after school.

I wonder what I would have been able to do. I think about the parable we read earlier – the story of the Good Samaritan. This story has been handed down through the ages as a model for human care and compassion: to be willing to care for a complete stranger who had been left suffering by the side of the road. But the Samaritan never seemed to put his own life on the line, just some time spent binding up wounds, and offering some money for care at a nearby inn.

At a Hands Off rally this spring I saw a sign that has stayed with me ever since. It read, “Ever wonder what you would have done in 1930’s Germany? You’re doing it RIGHT NOW.” It’s shocking to be at this juncture. How often have we heard that what happened in Germany could never happen here?

But here we are, too close for comfort, knowing that we need to summon our courage and resolve and begin to ask ourselves some hard questions. What will we do? And at this time in our country’s history, we need to look more carefully at altruism: the selfless care of another person, the willingness to put the needs of others before our own.

There are times in most lives when we are called to put others first: when raising children, or caring for elderly parents or relatives. That is a given. But how much risk are we willing to take to defy authority through protests and demonstrations? What if those are outlawed? How far can we go – how far should we go – toward rescuing complete strangers?

Eva Fogelman noted in her book that most people did not help rescue others. We know this, of course, because of the horrific number of people killed in the Holocaust. Thousands were saved, but millions were not.

There was a wide spectrum of responses to the humanitarian crisis of the Holocaust, beginning with those who reported their suspicions to the authorities, or those who looked the other way or allowed denial to prevent them from noticing what was happening to others around them. Then there were those who noticed but didn’t report the suspicious activity, and finally the small number actually willing to take life-threatening actions to save others. Eva Fogelman devoted her research, her interviews with as many rescuers as she could locate, to discovering the roots of their altruism.

On the surface, Fogelman wrote, rescuers seemed to have nothing in common. She commented, “When one looks at (a group of) them from the audience, the group seated on the podium always seems to be as random a gathering of people as a group of subway riders seated in the same car.” (Fogelman, Eva, Conscience and Courage, p. 253.)

But in her conversations, Eva Fogelman was able to begin to establish some common threads, some common core values. For starters, rescuers tended to have been raised in nurturing, loving families. Often, they had an altruistic role model to set an example for them, and to make clear what behavior was expected and why. Very often, they were raised to accept people who were different from them, or perhaps lived in neighborhoods where by religion or ethnicity they themselves were in the minority. These environments helped to foster compassion and understanding, and an ability to see other groups as equally deserving of good treatment. Finally, Fogelman noted that often rescuers were raised to be independent thinkers by authoritative parents, not authoritarian. Rather than being taught to never question authority, to toe the line and to not think for themselves, rescuers were typically the product of families that reasoned with them, who explained the type of behavior that was expected, rather than doling out harsh punishment. The result was often independent thinkers who had the self-confidence to confront and solve huge challenges.

I see a strong parallel between the type of culture that Fogelman describes, and the values of Unitarian Universalism. We encourage people to think for themselves and explore their own beliefs. Think of our core values, including compassion, equity, and pluralism, with Love at the center. And of course we hold strongly to our first principle, that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.
When I think of all this, I feel that I have been given the tools to actively participate in fighting an authoritarian regime. Where this might lead, I do not know. I’m not a big risk-taker. But I know I am privileged, and I should find ways to use that privilege. I find myself asking, in the words of the Jewish scholar Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”
These are such hard questions.
Once I became a parent, I believed, and still do, that I should work to maintain my children’s safety, but also my own. For in my safety, my continued presence, lay their protection. I can get very judgmental when I hear a story about a mountain climber dying on Mount Everest and leaving behind a pregnant wife and a couple of preschoolers. And so, of all of Fogelman’s research, what I found the most fascinating was the willingness of parents, who are remembered as having created loving and nurturing homes, to involve their young children in the rescue of strangers. In one story, a family who was sheltering refugees heard that they might have been reported. They were taking inventory of all the forged papers they were creating for the refugees when suddenly there was a knock at the door. It was the Gestapo. In an instant, the mother scooped up all the incriminating papers and stuffed them into the sweater worn by her young son standing nearby, and told him to run out the back door and go somewhere to play. It has been hard for me to make sense of this seeming great paradox – that loving and caring families could place their beloved children at such great risk. Here’s a spoiler alert: in this story, everyone survived. Could I have done this? Maybe, in the heat of the moment, where one little slip could have meant the death of everyone. Can I imagine doing this here in this moment? No. I cannot.
And yet. We are all being called in this moment.
“What is the law?” asked Jesus. The lawyer replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
We Unitarian Universalists love asking big questions. Not all these questions have ready answers, and in the case of what we do to care for our neighbors, and for strangers, each of us has to search our own heart to find what feels right. And so I don’t have a nice neat conclusion for you this morning.
But I will leave you with the words of a Danish resister and rescuer, a man named Svend Holm-Sorenson, who was captured and sent to a concentration camp. He was asked if it had been worth it. Here’s part of his reply: “Above all, I want my sons – and young people… – to know that despite everything in the (camps) what I did during the German occupation of Denmark, I would do it again.
I do not say this lightly. I’ve asked myself many times whether my work in the resistance was worth losing my health, my marriage, and ten years of my life, which is what it took before I could get hold of my nerves, get my energy back, and give myself completely to my work…Was everything I did in the resistance really worth everything I went through…and would I do it again?
My answer is still the same: yes. Because without freedom, life is nothing. Never, never, do I want to live – or have those I love live – in hate, fear, and suppression. And yes, yes, I would do it again. And again. And again.” (Ibid., p. 296.)
Amen.