(RNS) — In the middle of a recent 3 a.m. doomscroll — yes, we clergy are as susceptible as anyone — I ran across clips of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, invoking the New Testament to defend U.S. border policy against Pope Leo XIV’s comments about the moral obligations Christians bear toward migrants.

Johnson’s argument was a familiar one, citing Paul’s Letter to the Romans to suggest that Christians are called to submit to governing authorities, whose responsibility it is to preserve order through law. That Scripture, Johnson claimed, means migrants are to be welcomed, yes, but only on the condition that they assimilate.

Unable to fall back asleep, I did what Anglican clergy do when the night runs out: I turned to Morning Prayer. As if by providence — or perhaps irony — the Old Testament reading appointed for the Daily Office that morning was the Book of Genesis, chapter 23, in which Abraham negotiates for a burial plot for his wife, Sarah, in a foreign land.

Reading it with Johnson’s appeal to Romans fresh in my mind, the story landed with particular force. Abraham, after all, is a refugee by any reasonable definition. He has left his homeland in Ur of the Chaldeans in response to a divine call, journeying into territory that is not his own. When he approaches his new Hittite neighbors in Canaan to request a tomb, he identifies himself plainly: “I am a stranger and an alien residing among you.”

Abraham is welcomed, albeit cautiously, and permitted to purchase land in order to bury his dead according to his own customs. He negotiates publicly, honors local legal norms and yet remains recognizably other. His presence is tolerated, even respected, without being absorbed.

In light of Johnson’s call for immigrant assimilation, this detail matters. The patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is not a settled landowner defending borders, but a migrant negotiating space for grief in a land not his own.

In the long line of descendants of Abraham, his story is hardly an exception. Moses flees Egypt. Israel becomes a nation in exile. Jesus begins life as a displaced child, fleeing political violence. The Prophet Muhammad’s defining journey — the Hijra — is an act of migration. Across the Abrahamic traditions, religious identity is forged through displacement, not secured against it.

This does not mean Scripture has nothing to say about law, order or political authority. The Letter to the Romans does describe governing authorities as instruments through which God restrains chaos in a broken world. Yet the context in which this letter is read matters greatly. Paul is writing to fragile house churches living under imperial surveillance, not to Christians wielding state power, and his concern is pastoral and pragmatic: how believers survive under empire without inviting unnecessary repression. It is not a blueprint for Christian governance, nor a timeless endorsement of every policy enacted in the name of law and order.

To lift Romans wholesale into a contemporary political theology — particularly one that treats the state as the primary moral agent — is to ask the text to bear more weight than it can sustain. Romans (along with the rest of Christian Scripture) must be read alongside Israel’s long experience of exile, Jesus’ execution by the state and the New Testament’s recurring suspicion of imperial power. The Bible offers no simple equation between God’s purposes and the interests of any given government, even one that claims Christian privilege.

This is where, for me, a concept from 20th-century ecumenical theology proves helpful: missio Dei, the mission of God. Emerging in Protestant and Catholic conversations after World War II, the term names a simple but profound conviction: God’s work of reconciling the world does not belong to the church. It belongs to God.

The church participates in that mission but does not control it, define it exhaustively or contain it. God’s purposes precede ecclesial institutions and, at times, exceed them.

Seen through this lens, the relationship between church and state becomes more complex, and more honest. The state can, at times, participate imperfectly in God’s reconciling work. Modern welfare systems that provide health care, education and shelter may well reflect, however partially, Christ’s command to care for the least among us. That such work is carried out by governments rather than (or in addition to) churches need not be interpreted simply as the failure of Christianity. It may also be evidence that God’s mission extends beyond the walls of the church.

But the reverse is also true. If both church and state can participate in God’s mission, then both can also act against it.

Policies that treat migrants primarily as threats rather than neighbors, that reduce human beings to problems to be managed or that invoke Scripture to sanctify exclusion should trouble Christians deeply. Not because borders are inherently unbiblical, but because the Bible resists being pressed into service of any political project that confuses control with faithfulness.

The question before Christians, then, is not whether states may enforce laws or maintain borders. It is whether our reading of Scripture serves God’s reconciling work in the world, or whether we are interpreting it merely to allay our anxiety about losing power, identity or security.

Abraham’s story suggests that God’s covenant people are, more often than not, strangers negotiating space rather than rulers enforcing boundaries. Paul’s letters remind believers to live wisely under imperfect authorities, not to confuse those authorities with the reign of God.

When Scripture is invoked in debates over immigration, it matters not only that the Bible is quoted, but how it is read, and to what end.