Ephesians 2:13-22
September 17, 2001
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the CCU Candlelight Service for Peace held at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The earliest memories that I can remember growing up are that I was surround by Toishan people. My cousin and her husband with five children lived on the first floor. My uncle and aunt and their three children lived on the second floor. And my three brothers, my parents, and I lived on the third floor. It was the 166 Quincy Street Toishan village transplanted in Boston’s Roxbury.
We spoke “say yup.” And there was a time that if you didn’t know how to speak “say yup” in Boston’s Chinatown, you would not get any service. In our three-story flat, our family has set up a chained link fence to keep everyone else out. You see there was a dividing wall—hostility between the Toishan people on 166 Quincy Street and the rest of the world.
Next door to our house was another three-story flat. In this house lived Italian families. They were the Andrettis. When we used to play stick ball, our ball would go over to the Andretti’s yard. We would climb over the chained-link fence when Mama Andretti was not looking. She was very mean to us. There were two grown daughters who would go to work and come home from work. One was friendlier than the other. Over their garage, we would see grapevines growing all over the roof. Some of us kids would make fun of how we can imagine them in their bare feet crushing grapes to make wine.
I had few positive memories of the Andrettis because we were Toishan people and they were Italians. We both maintained the chained-link fence—a dividing wall that kept our families apart.
After I started going to elementary school that was just across the street from our house and the Andretti’s house, I noticed that right at the corner where I would cross the street to go to school was a memorial street sign with the Andretti name. During national holidays I would see little American flags stuck to it. I came to learn that the Andrettis lost a son, a brother in World War II.
Perhaps my memory of the Andrettis unfriendliness was due to their tremendous grief of losing a son, a brother. The dividing wall that they may have set up was a wall of protection from further pain and suffering. Their dividing wall prevented us from being what neighbors should be.
Make no mistake. Our Toishan wall was also formidable and high. Our families only spent time with other Toishan families that came over on the same boat that we did. They spoke Chinese without realizing that perhaps other listeners might have felt left out. We stuck together for convenience, safety, and maybe even ethnocentric pride. One may say
that we were preserving our cultural heritage. But we were also calling people “white ghosts” and “black ghosts.” The dividing wall of being Toishanese created suspicion, mistrust, and hostility with our neighbors.
When Roxbury became a Black neighborhood in the 1960s, our walls got stronger and built higher. White families including the Andrettis fled the neighborhood living the only remnant of their presence, the memorial sign of their son’s name on the street corner in front of my elementary school. In the late 60s, after our neighborhood became a battleground of whites fighting blacks, blacks fighting whites, the police fighting everybody, and the Chinese too afraid to take a stand, we too fled our Toishan village at 166 Quincy Street.
What was once a chained-link fence—a dividing wall that separated the Andrettis and us has now become a wall of hostility of huge proportion. Roxbury has become a walled in neighborhood where nobody wanted to live or drive in.
One in Christ
The Apostle Paul was troubled with the Ephesians when he saw disagreements and hostility among them. They were arguing about who was more acceptable and welcomed. Paul had to remind them that they were once the outsiders but in Christ, they are now no longer strangers. They were once without any hope but now they have God in the world. The Ephesians were trying to put up walls around them. They thought because they have something that is good and rich and valuable, they want to keep it for themselves. They want to put up these high walls and say you are not welcome here.
Now listen to the Apostle Paul,
“Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the
blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one
and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us.”
We are living in a time of national and perhaps global crisis. As we sit here tonight, our national and world leaders are in their closed-door war rooms making plans for war. We have closed our border walls as a defensive maneuver. We have placed all US military bases and battleships on high alert and put up high security walls around them. We still have chained-link fences on the Golden Gate Bridge to wall people from walking across the bridge.
Walls are going up everywhere. We have set up walls of suspicion toward our Arab-American brothers and sisters. Even at the most devastating terrorist attack sites on American soil, there are barricades, police lines, roadblocks, cut communication lines, closed subway stations, and many other ways to impede us from going and coming. These are all dividing walls that separate us from each other as neighbors.
For the thousands of families stretched across many countries who have lost loved ones in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania, perhaps the most haunting and most difficult wall they are needing to take down is the daunting task of digging through the rubble.
We must not let these terrorists use the dividing wall of hostility in the rubbles of New York City, in the scarred building at the Pentagon, and the big hole in Pennsylvania keep us from being neighbors. We will eventually dig through the rubble. We will eventually clear the twisted steel and broken concrete. We will eventually fill in the hole. If we allow these horrible acts against us cause us to build up walls of hostility between us, with Americans of Middle East ancestry, or engage in senseless war games, then the terrorists have truly succeeded.
But listen to what the Apostle Paul says,
“Jesus has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that
he might create in himself one new humanity in place of two, thus making peace,
and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus
putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you
who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us
have access in one Spirit to the Father.”
We find ourselves after almost a week has passed since September 11th feeling angry and filled with rage. We want to end our pain by getting revenge. We want to feel good about ourselves again and get back to what it was like before. We may secretly desire some kind of military response to comfort our sadness, to reduce our anger, to save face from last week’s tragedies. And as human beings, we are tempted to want some kind of revenge. We want dividing walls of hostility so that we would not see the faces we will be killing.
But God’s ultimate act of love in Jesus Christ on the cross puts to death all hostilities. He brought Jews and Gentiles together. He brought the religious leaders and sinners together. He torn down the temple that was the dividing wall that kept people from coming to God. In Jesus, one new humanity is created, thus making peace among us.
There should be no more walls that keep groups separated. There should be no more walls that allow us to persecute and do violence against Arab Americans. There should be no more walls that cause so few people in the world to have so many of the world’s resources and so many of the world’s people having so little that they can’t survive. There should be no more Berlin Walls, DMZ zones, the Great Wall, and police barricades that keep people of the world from being neighbors. There should be no more walls that will be created if we begin to work for peace and reconciliation instead of starting a war.
And Lord God, I wish that I did not maintain the chained-link fence wall that divided the play yard between the Andrettis and our Toishan family at 166 Quincy Street.
No Longer Strangers and Aliens
Paul said that in Christ,
“You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints
and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the
apostles and the prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him
the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord,
in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.”
When I arrived in San Francisco a few years ago, many of you told me how you never crossed over certain streets that were borders of Chinatown. If you did, you probably would have gotten beaten up. These walls that we built surrounding our neighborhoods create mistrust, suspicion, scapegoating, and hostility. These become the same kinds of walls that we imagine exist between continents, nations, and countries.
In Christ, we are truly no longer strangers and aliens but all citizens and members of God’s world. God wants us to take down these walls that we are building as we speak.
The CCU didn’t know what kind of response we might get tonight. And I know that all of our churches have had a number of prayer times and worship services in the past week to mourn and remember the victims. But there was still something that was missing in each of our efforts. We may have cried and prayed with our particular denominational tradition but we have not come together to bear the love of God together as brothers and sisters of the CCU until tonight.
You see, we have dividing walls among our individual churches. Out of busyness and full plates, we often time forget that we have the CCU and that we have a witness to bear in our Chinatown community. It’s not enough to only pray with our own congregations. It’s not sufficient to say that we have done our part. We must say that as Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians, Disciples, Salvation Army, Methodists, Nazarenes, Lutherans, Evangelicals, and yes, especially Baptists that we come together tonight and say, “We are no longer strangers and aliens but citizens with the saints and members of God’s world.”
By you and I being here tonight, we are living out our resolve to tear down the dividing walls of hostility that separate neighbors from each other. We are joined together and growing as God’s holy temple here in Chinatown and around the world. As we gather together tonight, we are saying “No more walls. The dividing walls in the world must come down!”
Let us pray. Almighty God of us all, we seek for your forgiveness when we put up dividing walls of hostility. Lead us to take down these walls that keep us from being in fellowship with each other and with the rest of the world. And when we are truly untied in Jesus Christ, we receive your peace. Amen.