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Good morning. I love watching ‘who do you think you are?’ It demonstrates over and over that if we go back only four generations, who knows where we come from!

I was in my mid 40’s, when I discovered that I am part Irish – a matter about which I am justly proud. Apparently my great grandmother left her native County Cork, and like many other migrants sought work, finishing up in Bradford in the mills. There she met the person who became her husband, and the rest - including my own arrival into the world some decades later – is as they say history.

My great grandmother’s generation was not the first to migrate to these shores, nor the last: and later generations of immigrants, from Asia, the Caribbean, and more recently from parts of Africa and Europe shape our currently plural population.

Immigration is never far from the top of a list of political hot potatoes, and evokes many emotions. The basic issues remain as they ever were. What is the proper balance between integration and separation, between sameness and distinction? What is fair and what isn’t, and to whom? What sort of society do we want to be?

‘Who we think we are’ is a key question. We are an increasingly variegated  population of those who by various routes have come to live in these Islands, and will continue to come, who at our best strive for tolerance, fairness, justice and equality of opportunities for us all.

God of all, your holy word presents clear – and sometimes conflicting - challenges to us in these days. ‘Welcome the stranger’, ‘feed the hungry’, ‘provide hospitality’, ‘do justice and love kindness’. Help us to live as those who embody your word today, and who continue to wrestle with it. Amen.