My Seattle Sermon about China from 08/30/09

God’s Transformative Work

Rev. Debbie Blane

Woodland Park Presbyterian Church

August 30, 2009

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

Psalm 45:1-2, 6-9

James 1:17-27

In the Book of James we hear today:

“Every good gift and every perfect present comes from heaven; it comes down from God, the Creator of the heavenly lights, who does not change or cause darkness by turning. By his own will he brought us into being through the word of truth, so that we should have first place among all his creatures.”

In the Songbook of the Bible, the Psalm we heard today tells us that the kingdom of God is ruled with justice and we are to love what is right and hate what is evil.

And in the Song of Songs, the love book of the Bible, we encounter the language of love between a man and a woman. We “hear” that love is to be beautiful, caring, and life changing.

It is God’s work to transform us into the things that our Scriptures speak to us of today; good gifts, perfect presents, loving what is right and hating what is evil, beautiful, caring and living changed lives. Martin Luther, the patriarch of the Reformation that created Protestantism, disliked the Book of James. He believed that this book advocated a theology of works. He believed that the book told us we had to earn our salvation. I believe that this book tells us about the work that God will do in us, not the work that we will do. And I believe that the portion of the Psalm today and the portion of the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, shares with us some of the beauty that has been experienced by people who have known God and have been changed by God’s transforming work.

Many of you know that I have returned this summer from two years of teaching English in China. And some of you may know that in another month or so I will be leaving to teach Theology at the Nile Theological College in Khartoum, Sudan.

In the sermon this morning I will be sharing with you one of my experiences of China. I need to state clearly that this is MY experience of China, other people have had different experiences and would share different things with you. This is known as a caveat: I take responsibility for what I am sharing with you, this is my perspective and may not be shared by other people.

I have framed that sharing by talking of God’s transforming work in us. This is work that we cannot do; it is the work that is done in us by the Holy Spirit, work that is a gift from God.

I am going to talk about my experiences through the picture of a Chinese friend of mine in Nanjing. I will share with you about the life of my friend who I will call M. M is our picture, our snapshot, framed in the Scriptures you have heard this morning. I will speak to you of my friend M as I experience her through the frame of God’s transforming work in us.

My good friend M is a twenty-something woman. She is beautiful, talented and blessed with an amazing ability to understand herself and others. She is a Christian. And she is trapped. She is trapped in a job that does not use her many talents and gifts. Because of the economic system in China she is trapped living with a father who takes advantage of her and blocks her every attempt to change her situation in order to be able to grow into the woman who God created her to be.

M. Is fluent in Chinese, French and English. She has the equivalent of an AA degree in Environmental Sciences. Her dream is to become a psychologist. M does not make enough money in her dead-end job to move out on her own, thus she lives with her father. There are no shelters in China. There is no place for a verbally, spiritually, mentally or physically abused woman to flee. There is no place of transition where a woman can stay for long enough to get her life on track and moving in a new direction.

In China College is paid for by either savings of the family, or by loans from family or friends. M’s father refuses to help her financially in order for her to be able to return to school to earn a Bachelor’s degree. A Bachelor’s degree would give her a much better chance of being able to leave China in order to earn a Master’s degree in her field of dreams. Psychology appears to be an undeveloped field at this point in China’s history.

M has made some very deliberate decisions in her life. She has chosen not to marry a Chinese man because she knows that in doing so she would be further, and irrevocably, backed into the corner in which she finds herself. She is intelligent and it is unlikely that she will find any husband, Chinese or foreigner, in China who will appreciate her intelligence.

I had female students in China who knew that they would have to choose between a Ph.D. and marriage because men in China do not want to marry highly educated women. I heard of only one case in which a married woman went back to school after having her one child and earned a doctorate. She had a husband who supported her financially and emotionally and who was very proud of her. This is very much an exception to the rule.

In spite of how difficult M’s situation is in China she is even more fearful of the idea of leaving China. She believes that she has no way to earn an income outside of China, despite her fluency in three languages. M grew up being told that she was ugly and dumb. She told me that this is the Chinese way.

My students told me that they were never encouraged to think about, talk about, or develop their gifts and interests. What they were good at had nothing to do with the ability to pass the tests that would decide if they would or would not receive education. Education was critical because it made the difference between doing hard labor for a living, or not.

I don’t mean to paint a totally bleak picture of China. Many of my students, and certainly my friend M, were wonderful, loving, and talented young people. I did discover though that China is not a land of opportunity. The gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow and I was told that someday it might lead to social unrest. The government is trying to shrink that gap but is not succeeding. I realized that my students, as M, had very limited opportunities and futures. By the end of my time I had discerned that China is a land of dead ends and I could no longer tolerate encouraging my students and seeing so much potential and intelligence in many of them knowing that there was absolutely no hope for them to live into their potential.

At the same time I could literally feel the lack of faith in anything beyond the Communist party and the capitalist system that is now exploding in China. China is a country that is a combination of capitalism and authoritarianism. The Communist party rules with an iron glove and anything or anyone that threatens its power and privilege is subject to re-education in labor camps (two elderly women who appealed the decision to remove their homes for the Beijing Olympics) to disappearance, jail or death. Parents who demanded an investigation into the substandard school buildings that collapsed last year in the huge Sichuan Province earthquake were silenced.

Looking back at my time in China I think that I can feel/hear/experience Jesus’ tears for Jerusalem and know that those tears are also for China. Just as with Palestine, China is, in many ways, an open-air prison for many people. Surely this is not what God intended for God’s creation.

M. was baptized while I was in Nanjing. She “gets” Jesus, which is an exciting thing! Sometimes I got confused between what was my North American perspective and what is the Bible speaking to us? But what I told M, and what I will tell all of you today, is this:

When we become Christians then God begins to do a work in us. While God is already at work everywhere in the world and with everyone, for Christians the work of the Holy Spirit is something that we cooperate with as we slowly begin to let go of the tight, tight control of our own lives. The technical term for this process is sanctification.

Every good gift and perfect present comes from heaven. WE are the good gifts and perfect presents! As God shapes us into Christ’s image, we become the bride and bridegroom in the Song of Songs. As we come to see ourselves through God’s eyes we become the beautiful and beloved of the Psalm.

God’s love helps us to see our worth and also what we have to offer in the world. As we are loved we become beautiful. This is a beauty that nothing can take away – not old age and not death. Not concentration camps and not communism. Not abusive, narrow and limited parents.

I pray for the beauty of China. I pray for the beauty of my friend M. There were Buddhists and Muslims in China. They too were beautiful, along with the Christians. How God works in religion is a mystery, but I did see with my own two eyes that those who had something beyond themselves to believe in had something that everyone else did not. Those who had faith had morality. They were not out only for themselves; they cared about the welfare of others as well as for their own.

My particular concern was for my friend M. My prayer is that M. will come to know the love of God so thoroughly within herself that God’s love will wipe away the sin of other people that has hurt her so deeply. I pray that God’s love will wipe away the sin of other people that has robbed her of her knowledge of herself as blessed, important, a beloved daughter of God and sister of Christ.

M is not the only Chinese woman who desperately needs God’s transforming work in her life. And friends, it isn’t just the women. The men are robbed of their personhoods too.

Our frame is God’s transforming work. Our picture is M, or every man and every woman. We can’t do the work. God’s love for us is not based on what we do or how we do it. God’s love for us is expressed through what God does for us. Redemption is an answer for the cry for help!

While all people and all countries need God’s presence, light, good gifts and perfect presents – I am especially aware now in my own life of the need that China has for God. How much does each of in this room today also have that need for God’s love?

All of creation is need of God’s redemptive love. ALL of creation is in need of God’s transforming work. Thank God that love IS work based. God’s work means that we are not left to our own devices!

Alleluia!

Amen!

August 29, 2009

What follows is the response to a request that was made to me to share about my time in China.

China is a vast land, according to the National Geographic Magazine; it is geographically nearly the size of the continental United States. Just as the US has different cultures and ethnic groups, so too does China. There is the majority ethnic group called the Han, and then many minority groups many of whom are followers of the Buddhist or Muslim faiths.

As China moves rapidly into modernity some of her traditions and customs have been kept – and at the same time, much of the underpinnings of what made China China have been lost or swept away. I had students tell me that someday traditions would be found again because a country and a people cannot survive without their roots.

Many of my students were kind and intelligent. Many of them had the desire to help their foreign teachers adapt to their country and many of them had a deep longing to learn. In contrast, I had students who did not want to learn and who did not want to be in the English Program at the university where I taught.

I taught at a Pharmaceutical University. Most of the English Majors had desired to be in the Pharmaceutical Program but when their grades were not high enough they were put into the English Major Program. This affected the motivational levels of many of the students. Some students realized how lucky they were to be in college because in a country of 1.3 billion people, China does not have the ability to provide a university education for each person that desires one. Students told me that if they were not in college their choice for work would have been hard labor such as farming.

My favorite way to spend time in China, besides reading, was to have students over to my apartment. I lived an hour away from their campus by school bus and two hours by public bus so it took some sacrifice for them to get to me. I did not live where I taught. Some students wanted to spend time talking. Some wanted to go shopping with me. I would often take the student(s) out to lunch. When I had meals with my students I reflected on how different Chinese and American meals are. In China there are common dishes and in America we typically have our own individual plates and do not share with one another.

I took three Chinese friends with me to Shanghai the weekend that I flew home this June. We had dinner together at a Japanese restaurant (I thought that was quite an irony!). The three of them had a meal that they were able to share and I ordered myself a self-contained dish that sat alone on my plate.

I realized that this is how China is to me. I was able to get close but not to merge. I was able to observe but not necessarily to understand. I valued but did not adopt. For me the cultural differences remained unbridgeable, and yet there was room for love and respect. Perhaps in the end the greatest bridge of all IS love.

further ponderings

There are times when people just need to die. With death will come their healing. Sometimes in life people just continue to be in hell and to inflict pain on other people from their own personal hell -- they make it communal hell. They inflict pain and trauma on those around them.

China has gone from feudalism to communism. The common denominator is authoritarianism. Christian love, hope, and faith fly in the face of Chinese culture. Chinese culture understands duty and not love. China is structured hierarchically and the government controls the church. Seeing that there is even a birth control policy one might think that the government controls all of life.

Guanxi means "who one knows." It is the intricate system of relationships that exist in the Chinese manner of negotiating life. Guanxi controls a person's life. If someone knows someone, then that someone will get a position even if there are better qualified people applying for it. The Imperial system has a new name and a new court, but it is alive and well in China.

Catching up and Finishing Up

In the next day or so I will be finishing up my Chinese blog and moving on to a Sudanese blog. Stay tuned! :)

March 14, 2009

Sometimes there is a deep nostalgia, even just a momentary one, for the life that one has left behind to come to China, or anywhere that isn't home. I had one of those just now. I was looking at an on-line catalog, a familiar thing for me to do, and suddenly I was remembering Trader Joe at home in Issaquah, Washington. I was remembering spring and newly warm sunny days and taking my car on a carefully planned out shopping trip to Costco/PCC/TJ. I was remembering all of the things that I can't get here in China -- but not only that, just the familiar. I was remembering the familiar. It has been almost two years since I have pumped gas into a car. I do still have a driver's license though.

March 6, 2009

Today I learned in a very real sense a very real difference between Western and Chinese culture. In the classroom I was utterly freezing, my feet hurt they were so cold. At one point I moved to the back of the room to look out the window and I found (drum roll) THAT THE WINDOWS WERE OPEN!!!!! I got them closed and closed the drapes so that no one could see they'd been closed. And then I was even colder at the thought of how cold the open windows had made the room! The hour and a half bus ride back from the branch campus to the main campus where I live was not heated. I was miserable.

It appears to me after reading in the English edition of the China Daily and CNN.com on the internet that China and the US also have opposite issues in terms of our economies. The Chinese need to learn to spend money while in the US we need to learn to save money.

We discussed the Global Economic Crisis today in my classes. I was told about a school cafeteria which could no longer afford to employ all its workers. The older ones were let go at maybe 50 years of age with three months severance pay -- and no pension. Retirement age for women in China is 55 and for men is 60. The student told me that China's social welfare system is not a good one. I did not disagree.

By the way -- in continuance of the entry where I talked about the open windows of the Philippines, something else I learned there was the concept of courtyards being used to circulate the air in buildings. I think this may also have to do with the utility of the hutong in China. The hutong is a family home, or a set of rooms that are built around a courtyard. The courtyard would provide shade and if it is in a building it would serve that function of circulating air. When I visited Beijing last summer I saw some of the remaining hutongs and noticed this architectural practicality, beauty with function. In the Philippines the Silliman University has a courtyard on the bottom floor of the library. It is no longer being used because the building is now air conditioned to preserve the books. Courtyards are not as effective as preservation perhaps as air conditioning in specific forums.

Open Windows -- March 5, 2009

An equalizer of wealth and position that I saw in the Philippines were the windows. Most of the buildings had windows that were constructed in order to allow air flow -- thus taking the place of artificial air conditioning. My friends told me that while air conditioning is not necessarily a threat to the environment, its use is an issue of consumption. Who can afford it? The well to do. By using natural breezes as a cooling mechanism, the ground is leveled. A drawback to air conditioning is that there are frequent brown outs on the islands and when one is without electricity the air conditioning doesn't work, and a person is stuck in a closed room or building with no way to ventilate.

Why is it that the West, and white people, have "conquered" the world? The Chinese, for instance, have a rich history of technology and Egypt, I believe, invented the first forms of writing. Why then Western civilization?

Christianity began in the Middle East, in the heart of the world. And yet with Constantine it became the Christian Empire of the West. Nazareth -- Bethlehem -- Galilee -- Jerusalem, became the margins and not the center. Rome acquired and required Christianity and Romanized her. The lens of the West became the normal perception -- the normative lens through which everything else was evaluated.

This perception spread with colonization. A white Jesus can be found in every culture in which I have been.

I find it fascinating that even as Christianity is diminishing now in the West it is growing in the very places that were colonized. Latin America, Africa and Asia -- and there is a growing movement to strip away white man's religion and make it indigenous. There is such a power struggle with the ancient institutionalized white church wanting to control and the new centers of Christianity growing/coming into their own.

I would say at this moment that religion and language are two major tools of colonization and oppression. Language becomes split in two -- the native language which is often forbidden and the colonizing language which is often the language of the elite -- and that of access.

Access to education -- which takes money. So those who use the native, marketplace language may not have access to that which would open doors and change lives.

The tools of oppression are also the tools for change. A double edged sword.