April 19, 2006
Easter
It must surely be one of the greater of sins to rob a people of their culture — their language, their symbols, their generations, even their families. And heaven only knows what else.
We did that with the Native Americans and wondered why they turned on us, the “illegal aliens” on their eastern shores. We tried it with the Japanese during the Great Middle War (aka WW II). And of course, there are the Mexicans we sorely need to build the very fences to keep them out. Let alone how we continually marginalize the poor and exclusively drive wedges into a class system that borders on social chaos.
Now, with the remembering of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, stories are returning about how, when it obliterated Chinatown, we tried to keep things that way when the rebuilding of the city began. Only a hundred years later, who can miss the irony of how today without the Chinese bankrolling us we could hardly keep an SUV on the road, let alone fuel our pretensions to empire?
And all the while, we call ourselves a Christian nation. In the doing, we’re either blind to our own history and the intentions of our founders or we’re altogether biblically illiterate or both. Before this season once again fades away, might we listen up to Paul who got it so right when he wrote that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3.28). What an elegantly faithful way to keep Easter on our minds, seek and serve Christ in ourselves and others, and enable peace and justice in our land.