Each spring, Harvard Divinity School's Office of Ministry Studies organizes the Billings Preaching Prize Competition, an annual preaching competition open to second- and third-year MDiv students. The finalists delivered their sermons at the Wednesday Noon Service on April 12, 2017.
Below are the remarks of runner-up Jiaying Ding, MDiv ’18.
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In the Book of Job, after Job’s “friends” argue that he must have done something to deserve his suffering—after all, deeds beget consequences in God’s just world—Job counters:
“Look, my eye has seen all this,
my ear has heard and understood it.
What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you.
But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God.
As for you, you whitewash with lies; all of you are worthless physicians.
If you would only keep silent, that would be your wisdom!” (Job 13:1-5)
Job sets in motion an argument and counterargument. He and his friends get sophisticated in their claims. Their reasoning trades back and forth, winding tighter and tighter, but none of it gives resolution to Job’s problem.
For all of their perfection, both Job and his friends’ arguments disintegrate in the force of God’s appearance.
I foreground my delivery today in the story of Job because the information I will give is vital, but it is easily segmented to bolster arguments in which differences are sharpened, in which difference is what is valued.
Like Job, I feel I am operating in a kind of ever heightening, ever tightening dialectic, where I am equally blind—as Job and his Job’s friends are—to something essential. What do any of the arguments do to help Job endure? Job reminds me that pursuing a line of argument, of proclaiming what one thinks one knows, is woefully inadequate. And yet there seems to be no way around that.
This spring, I learned of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its foundation for today’s immigration policies.
Many in our community are affected by immigration, but I’m not sure how many know about the Chinese Exclusion. In two courses this term, I learned about abolition as the era of great intellectual ferment, a fertile soil out of which grew biblical studies on the prophets. I learned that the author who penned, “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound/That saved a wretch like me…” had been a slaver before his conversion.
Yet abolition also caused Chinese immigration to start abroad. The sudden labor shortage prompted Britain, France, and the U.S. to import Chinese laborers from the China southern region. Chinese workers, called “coolies,” replaced slaves in mines, cotton, and sugar plantations. Chinamen were contracted to blast through solid rock to build the California railroad.
In some places, the Chinese were indentured. In other places, it was para-slavery. The ship Lord Elgin left Amoy with 154 Chinese and arrived in British Guiana 170 days later. Locked in the reeking, airless hold, only 85 people were left alive.
This start to Chinese migration eventually resulted in the Chinese Exclusion in the United States. As “coolies” began to settle into urban and rural towns after the railroads were built, as they began take up trade and farming, a depression in 1870 galvanized citizens to expel the Chinese.
“The Chinaman can live where stronger than he would starve. Give him fair play and…the youngest home of the nations [the U.S.] must in its early manhood…meet the doom of Babylon, Nineveh, and Rome.”1
Abolition rhetoric ironically bolstered reasoning for ejecting the Chinese.
“I oppose Chinese immigration, not because the Chinaman sells his labor cheaply, but because his civilization is such as to enable him to sell his labor cheaply…they belong to a non-assimilative race…a people who come not to escape oppression and to seek a free government, [where they can have liberty of thought and freedom of action,] but solely for the purpose of making money…they are thus, in every sense of the word, aliens. I want no accessions from any race or people who bring with them nothing except muscle—who do not aspire at least, to be American citizens—who degrade labor by their…servile habits…mere machines driven by their employers…Such a system of labor is semi-slavery…”2
Enforcing the Act laid the foundation for today’s immigration. Government staff conducted raids and checks, interviewed, and held people for indefinite periods. The rationale for identification, for documentation, the green card—the Exclusion started this.
Yet, what is my information today worth? When I read these abolition era accounts, I am struck by how these writers thought they were making sound arguments on justice and on human rights.
Their righteous indignation heats the page. How come people don’t know about this? Shouldn’t people take abolition seriously? I’m haunted by whether echoes theirs. How come people don’t know about this? Shouldn’t people take the Exclusion seriously?
Am I like Job’s friend, who bolsters himself by saying:
“See, I open my mouth; the tongue in my mouth speaks.
My words declare the uprightness of my heart,
and what my lips know they speak sincerely.
The spirit of God has made me,
and the breath of the Almighty gives me life.” (Job 33:1-4)
Although this friend sounds great. Sounds good. He is in fact ineffectual to helping Job endure, and in fact, completely wrong about the cause of Job’s suffering.
The immigration ban adversely affected people in our community. It dialed up feelings of tension, fear, and imminent danger. Do I contribute to this cacophony, this maelstrom? How long does this feeling last, and how does it burn?
Do I exhaust those who act? Do I help understanding Chinese immigrants? Does my speech paint an image to you of Chinese immigrants? What do you see? Are we disenfranchised? Are we coolies? Are we a kind of sharp and sweet savor [to be relished] in the dish of protest? What does it do for the people I care about, when I speak publicly? What does it do for the long dead Chinamen?
Does my speech validate me as a worthwhile member of this community? In talks that differentiate black from white, am I yellow? Does today’s speech me a place to belong?
Do I speak because there’s a value attached to speaking? Is my wisdom to keep silent? I tell you vital information today, but at the same time I am blind to the effects of my speech and suspicious of these prescribed choices into which I have placed Chinese immigrants—coolie, the oppressed, a minority.
In thinking of you, my audience, I am woefully short on what knowledge does for understanding you. In the end, Job repents when God appears. He says:
“I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” (Job 42:3)
I argue that Job is able to break free of suffering’s hold because of his face to face encounter. The argument about his suffering isn’t resolved. God never does tell Job that he was part of an experiment with the Satan. But the tenderness of Job’s speech:
“Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:4-6)
To me, this tenderness captures the essence of reciprocity, of compassion in relationship to another, an intimacy, a reorganization of priorities in light of what one realizes is beyond understanding.
Isn’t this what happens between people? I’ve got a bone to pick with you! But, now that my eye sees you, I despise myself. What was so rational, so elegant, just one moment before, disintegrates.
HDS Professor Michael Jackson writes, urging us “to perpetually make and remake ourselves in relation to others as if nothing were certain.”
Job remade himself. In relation to God, he laid aside certainty to the cause of his suffering. His relationship with God allowed him to put to rest arguments and knowledge that were all limited in some way.
Similarly, Theodor Adorno in post-war Germany wrote: “freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.”
Therefore, I too put forth this argument, this information on the Exclusion, in hopes that it will lead to understanding, beyond what I know. I have never preached before today. Today I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
I hope that doing this speech, I participate in the remaking of my relationship with you, with people I don’t know, customs I am not familiar with, in order for something to emerge as I go forward.
- 1. Madeline Yuan-yin Hsu, “Slipping Through the Golden Gate,” in Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China 1882 - 1943 (Stanford: Stan- ford University Press, 2000), 62.
- 2. Ibid...63.