2022.03.27 | God's Re-creation
“God’s Re-Creation”
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
Fourth Sunday in Lent
My first observation of racism was rather memorable, which is remarkable because I was only four or five at the time and completely confused by what was said to me.
My maternal grandmother, the daughter of Norwegian-German immigrants, was watching me play in a wading pool in a public park when she called me over to her and whispered in my ear not to play with the “colored” children. Not having heard the term before, I thought of crayons and rainbows and Easter egg dyes and swung my head around, fully expecting to see children whose skin was as multicolored as Jacob’s coat in the Bible. I was disappointed — all I could see was kids in bathing suits and towels, doing the things kids do at the pool.
I’m not sure when my confusion cleared but I know by first grade, which I started at age 6 ½ in 1968, I knew that kids with brown skins were no longer to be called colored but Negro. I also knew by the end of that year, which was the height of the Civil Rights Movement, that even the most innocent reference to another child as being Negro elicited a rather sharp question from the teacher: “Now, why would you call her that?!”
So, like many children of many races who want to please their teachers, I decided that perhaps the best thing to do was to never mention someone’s race at all. And that was a strategy that worked pretty well for several years, especially since in an elementary school of several hundred students, we had maybe three or four non-white kids.
The first major failure of that strategy was in sixth grade. I was riding my bike past a tennis court when I saw my teacher playing tennis and stopped to say hi. He asked me about an Asian classmate and I said innocently, “Oh, you mean…” Here I paused, trying to decide if she was Japanese or Chinese and whether I was actually allowed to say either out loud, when my teacher interrupted my thoughts and exclaimed emphatically, “Can’t you just say Asian!”
II
Fast forward to my late 20’s and I’m living in Boston in 1987, feeling fairly cosmopolitan and racially aware. I had, afterall, dated a Korean man in college. My new boyfriend’s best friend, a Filipino-American, came to town and told us he had been racially taunted at Logan Airport while waiting for an airport shuttle. I was surprised; he wasn’t.
It wasn’t until I adopted my daughter Lia, who is Chinese-American, in 2003 and began to travel with Athena Malloy, who is Filipina-Chinese-American, that I became aware of how shockingly regular anti-Asian behaviors and remarks were, even here on the West Coast, which I always regarded as a bastion of liberalism. I can’t repeat the worst, but I will say that each one, whether it was intentional bad service or childish taunts or angry outbursts from grown-ups, caught me off guard.
The most recent happened in Ranch 99 in Dublin. If you don’t know, Ranch 99 is an Asian grocery store chain with aisle after aisle of Asian produce, ingredients, fresh and frozen seafood, and imported foods, from spices to cookies. It’s a good place to go for mussels and mooncakes and all the sauces you need for stir fries. It’s also completely staffed by Asian people. I stopped by to pick up pea sprouts and overheard an elderly white man berating a produce worker for not understanding him and what he wanted. He actually said: “If you aren’t going to learn English, why don’t you go back to your own country!”
Just to be clear: He said that to an Asian man in an Asian market in a city that is 48.5 percent Asian.
III
In 2021, anti-Asian hate crimes rose over 330 percent (1). Almost nightly, we see video of one or more on the news, some of which are so horrific that I have to leave the room and say a prayer that my daughter will be safe as she and her friends go out in downtown Toronto. And I know my fear is nothing compared to hers and the over 9 million Asian women who live in the US, a thousand of whom recently lined up around the block in New York City to pick up free pepper spray for their own protection.
I’ve been so focused on anti-Asian crime that I missed one news story that is as appalling as violence but worse because the racist perpetrator is the US government itself using its power to arrest, investigate, and prosecute Asian-Americans.
The China Initiative, created by the Attorney General Jeff Sessions during the Trump administration, was intended to root out Chinese theft of American trade secrets and technology. But quite quickly after its creation, it began to focus not on Chinese corporate or governmental agents but on Asian-American academics doing cutting edge scientific research at American universities.
Dozens of arrests of academics, including Professor Gang Chen of MIT and Professor Franklin Tao of the University of Kansas, were deeply humiliating to those arrested and to their families. They were plunged into legal limbo for years. And in some cases, the charges leveled against them focused on grant fraud, rather than trade theft or espionage and in many cases proved to be baseless and ended in dismissal of the charges.
According to Ann Chih Lin, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, “The casualty is Chinese American faculty in general because it's creating a climate of fear. I think the prospect of having your life destroyed in that way is terrifying to faculty. . . even if they know they have done nothing wrong.”
A survey she conducted across five U.S. universities found that nearly a quarter of Chinese American researchers don't feel safe in America or feel uncertain about whether they'll be safe here in the future, many because of these government investigations.(2)
Recently the Biden Administration announced that they would no longer use the name China Initiative in response to concerns that targeting Chinese-American academics was harmful, and it would instead broaden their anti-trade theft investigation to include other countries suspected of trade theft such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea.(3)
But like racism at every level, the damage is done: Professor Franklin Tao went on trial this week for grant fraud. Suspended from teaching while awaiting this trial, his wife Hong Peng has worked three jobs to pay the bills. She is deeply disappointed in her adopted country, “We came here 20 years ago for the American dream, to pursue our passions, to contribute to this country, to make a better life for ourselves and our children. We don't want to give up.”
IV
In today’s scripture reading, the Apostle Paul offers us an image of salvation that is radically different from what many of us were taught and it has a direct bearing on racism in our country.
He says that love compelled Christ to die for us and because of that love we should no longer live for ourselves but for him. And acceptance of that love, belief in that love, has transformed us and our world. In response, Paul says, we should regard no one from a human point of view.
The underlying Greek phrase for a human point of view is “kata sarka” which literally means “according to the flesh.” As Bible scholar Paul Sampley says, “Believers must look to what is not seen; they must look to the inner person and not take primary clues from the outer person; they must consider the heart and not the face.” (4)
And conversely, Paul says that to continue to view people “kata sarka,” according to the flesh, is to live a life that denies the transformation that Christ’s death brought about. In other words, Christ's death gives us the capacity to change, to look at people differently, and to actually be God’s new creation.
Paul ends the passage with a plea —”Be reconciled to God.” It’s the only time Paul places the work of reconciliation in our hands. We are to seek forgiveness for our past ways of viewing others and embrace our new capacity for seeing people for who they are rather than who we suppose them to be.
I’ll end today by stating the obvious: racism is deeply embedded in our personal histories and in the history of our country. But it doesn’t have to be our future.
Imagine for a moment how much clearer and calmer a child would be about race if the adults in his or her world could take a moment to explain what grandma said and why. Or if teachers would try harder not to overcorrect a well-intentioned child’s remarks. Or if friends would share personal experiences of racism and name the emotions that coursed through one’s body. Or if parents would provide children with toys and books that offer anti-racist role models.
One such book got national attention this week when it was waved around by Senator Ted Cruz at Judge Ketanji Brown’s Confirmation Hearing as an example of how children are being indoctrinated with critical race theory. The Anti-Racist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi and illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky includes this “controversial” language: Anti-Racist Baby celebrates all our differences, uses words to talk about racism, and understand that people aren’t the problem —policies are.
I ordered a copy of Anti-Racist Baby for our Church Nursery and I like to think we will always have Senator Ted Cruz to thank for it.
My friends, through Christ, we have the capacity to change; through Christ, we are God’s re-creation of the human condition. May God help us and our children regard no one from that old human point of view. Amen.
Kimmy Yam, “Anti-Asian hate crimes increased 339 percent nationwide last year, report says,” nbcnews.com, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-crimes-increased-339-percent-nationwide-last-year-repo-rcna14282, accessed Mar 25, 2022.
John Ruwitch, “Arrested under a Trump-era China initiative, Franklin Tao heads to trial,” npr.com,https://www.npr.org/2022/03/21/1087806556/arrested-under-a-trump-era-china-initiative-franklin-tao-heads-to-trial, accessed Mar 25, 2022
Ryan Lucas, “The Justice Department is ending its controversial China Initiative,” npr.com, https://www.npr.org/2022/02/23/1082593735/justice-department-china-initiative, accessed Mar 25, 2022
J. Paul Sampley,. “2 Corinthians” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. XI, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001,92.