by Jennifer Youngsun Ryu, Summer Minister

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

We celebrate Independence Day, and yet we are not free.

Not until every heart knows liberty,

not until every hand is joined together,

not until everyone lives in dignity,

Let us write a story of Freedom –

a story that includes everyone.

Come, let us worship together

Like Sam Reynolds, I also remember a blustery autumn day from my childhood.    I was 12 years old, my hair in two tightly braided ropes.  My father held my hand with his strong grip and we crossed the busy downtown street toward the Federal Building in Toledo, Ohio.

I remember this day so vividly because this was the day I became a United States citizen. This was the day I finally felt like I belonged here and knew who I was. I was an American.

I was an American, and the Melting Pot was my story. The Melting Pot, originally a play written in 1908 by a Jewish immigrant, had become the overarching narrative for this young country.  It was a symbol of America’s promise to people of every color and background: the promise of one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

As an immigrant, I wanted to live this story. It told me that I belong here and that peace among different peoples of the world is possible. In Korea, my family’s life had been entirely upended by the war. So for us, this story held an amazing promise.

But it was just that—a promise, yet to be fulfilled.

During my teenage years, I tried to purge every bit of Korean-ness from my identity. I set aside my native language. I stopped associating with other Asians. And I picked up American teen habits that infuriated my parents.

But no matter how hard I tried to live my life out of the Melting Pot Story, I could not do it. I could not fully assimilate. The shape of my eyes, the color of my hair and skin would not let me “melt.”

My parents and our small Korean community in Toledo taught me to let go of the Melting Pot Story, just as they had done. 

They guided me to another story, told from their mouths, but really a story sold to them by the dominant culture.  This was the “well-behaved immigrant” story, otherwise known as the “model minority” Story.

This story casts Asians in America as well-educated and hard-working.   On its face, this seems harmless—even complementary. It’s certainly better than the Yellow Peril stereotypes of the turn of the century. And it was a story that I could actually live out of. Work long hours, follow the rules, do predictable things, like play the piano and violin, excel at math and science. Don’t disturb the status quo, stay among your own kind, and don’t get involved in political action.

The Model Minority story confines the people it talks about.  It confines their self-expression to a few set roles.

Although harder to see, the Model Minority story also confines the tellers of the story to a certain mind-set. In telling this story again and again, mostly unconsciously, people reinforce habits of separation, discrimination, “otherization.”  We may feel that people tell these stories out of meanness or ill-will. But actually, these kinds of stories usually come from fear.

Fear of the other,

Fear of the unknown,

Fear of the stranger.

And a life lived out of fear is a small and fractured life. 

The Model Minority Story functions in another way.  It uses one group of outsiders (in this case, Asian-Americans) to justify the oppression of another outsider group—African Americans.

The phrase “model minority” was coined during the 1965 riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles.  It was taken up by White America as an attempt to explain away White complicity in these riots. White America could hold up the relative success of “hard-working” immigrants as proof that racial barriers do not exist in the United States. 

The model minority story was all around me, and as close as the air in my lungs. But I had no idea it was there.

And that’s how stories are.

We all need compelling collective stories that we can fold our individual lives into.  And the only stories powerful enough to be worth living out of are religious stories—stories that reflect the moral values that we hold most sacred. Of course, not all religious stories reflect moral values that promote love. Some promote fear.

Are we aware of those collective stories we live and act out of? Do we choose them mindfully? And do those stories move our community toward love or fear?

Well, I didn’t notice that the story I was living out of was leading me to make choices in my life.

It led me to study business, when my heart really wanted to study urban planning. 

It led me to a job in marketing, when my heart really wanted to create public spaces where strangers could meet.

It led me to relationships in which I could not let my whole self shine because I was trying to show only the parts of me that I thought were acceptable.

There was something, though, that kept calling me out of that life.  Those were the years when I was working in Baltimore for Planned Parenthood. My walking route to work took me past the Unitarian Church’s Wayside Pulpit, just like you here.  These were not the messages I expected from a church. They were irreverent, quirky, provocative. What kind of church was this?

One of the first things I noticed about the people in the church was that so many of them knew what it was like to feel out of place. 

A recent report by the UUA (the Unitarian Universalist Association) tells us that, “UUs often see themselves as outsiders or misfits.” 

No wonder I felt right at home there!

It wasn’t that I had found the fulfillment of my earlier dreams of diverse people living in community.  The Baltimore Church, despite its urban location, was 98% white, as is true for Unitarian Universalist congregations nationwide.  

The lack of real movement toward an anti-racist and deeply inclusive church was frustrating. It still is.

And yet, I found people who were willing to ask the hard questions and do the work. 

And our shared experience as outsiders, though different, was sufficient for the beginning of valuable relationships.

I started to wake up to the stories I had been living out of. I began to see that the place in between Korea and America was not an empty place void of meaning or identity. 

The place in between is full of life, full of my life and full of the lives of millions of others.

And I started to notice the stories I myself had been telling about the “other.”

Stories I repeated unthinkingly about Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, and people living without homes. 

And I heard stories I had never heard before. It was in the UU church where I first heard about the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the start of the Gay Rights movement.

It was the first place I heard about Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat by laid-off auto workers who mistook him for Japanese at a time when U.S. manufacturing jobs were being lost to Japan.

In America, we have inherited stories that tell us who we are and how we are to live with each other. 

They are religious stories for they reflect the values we hold sacred.  They are stories compelling enough to devote our lives to.

We are now the stewards of those stories.  We are co-creators and co-authors—all of us.

As we hand them down to the next generation, the power of these stories will either move them toward love or weigh them down with fear and wound and insecurity.

What a grand and solemn responsibility!

I believe our UU community longs to write collective stories that will move us to deeper love,

-stories flexible enough for everyone’s personal truth and strong enough to bind us together.

-stories that affirm the worth and dignity of every person,

-stories that say, if one of us is hurting, then all of us are hurting.

And yet,

Creating these stories will require us to let go of some old habits.

We will have to change

We will have to move

We will have to let our stories be changed by new people, instead of making them be changed by us and our stories.

We will have to be less attached to our individualism.

We will have to move beyond mere tolerance

We will have to do more than invite people to sit with us in church.

This summer, more than 174,000 migrant farm workers and their families have come to Oregon.  Though the work is plentiful, housing is not.  Neither is healthcare.

Is there a place in the collective story we are writing that allows for their stories?  Or are they such strangers to us that we either make up stories about them, or say nothing at all, thus perpetuating existing stories.

What are the stories we hear in our communities about seasonal farm workers? 

That they are illegal aliens from Mexico,

they don’t speak English,

they are uneducated.

That they come here knowing the risks and dangers.

That this is their chosen life.

It’s clear how these stories damage the migrant farm workers, but what about how it damages the soul of the communities that tell the stories? What about how these stories try to make distinctions between who is worthy and who is not, between who is legitimate and who is not.  Separating people into these categories is a habit of the heart and mind that reinforces fear.  And a life lived out of fear is a small and empty life.

What if, instead of telling stories about the other, we invited the other to tell their own stories.  What if we went to Mount Angel to set up a public witness forum where these workers could walk up to a microphone and tell their stories to us. What if we listened deeply to them. What if we could be the trusted witnesses to self-revelation? 

Even when those stories break our hearts and challenge the way we see ourselves and our world.

Maybe, if we listened deeply enough, they would feel like they were holding that cup watching it fill up with cold, fresh water. Maybe, if we listened deeply enough, the water would overflow and touch their skin and they would feel loved.

Maybe, but I don’t think that’s the most important reason to go to Mount Angel. 

What is most important is that we need their story. For the sake of our soul, we need their stories because without them, our collective story is too diluted; it does not have enough power to move us to deeper love. 

Without them, and others who have been historically silenced, the collective story will become one that supports the worldview of the people with the most money and the most power. And we know what that kind of world looks like.

Our spiritual lives depend on them being a part of our story because we hold inclusiveness to be a sacred moral value, and if we leave others out of that story, we live incomplete, fractured lives.

I still believe as I did when I was 12 years old, that America can be one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We can build a land where we bind up the broken and give garlands to the afflicted, but we must remember that we too are broken and afflicted. 

This is the work we are meant to do. 

And the work itself is part of the stories we are creating together—stories that don’t separate us from them, stories that include all voices. 

May It Be So.

(Psalm 122, adapted)

Great Spirit of Love,

We pray with the words of the Psalmist:

Help us now to pray for peace in the cities

and harmony among the races.

May peace come to live on our streets

and may justice flow over our walls.

With our most open hearts we pray

that peace comes to live among us.

For the sake of all the earth’s people,

may we do our utmost for peace.

AMEN