For years, I’ve used my professional website to share church resources, workshop materials, and tools for ministry. Today, on this Good Friday, I’m sharing something more personal.
This reflection,“For You Were Once…” tells a piece of my family’s story as Chinese Americans during the Exclusion Era. It is a story about silence, memory, and what it means to carry fear across generations. It’s also a story about faith.
At a time when immigration continues to stir deep conflict in our nation, I believe the Christian call to welcome the stranger must be remembered, not just in our public witness, but in our own histories and identities. This isn’t a post about partisan politics. It’s a pastoral letter about discipleship. And it’s written with hope that faithful people will listen again to the stories that too often go untold.
Grace and peace,
Rev. Blake
Blake as a preschooler and my grandmother, Verna Lee Landers
“For you were once…”
Rev. Blake Bradford,
Good Friday, April 18, 2025
Just days after waving palms and crying out “Hosanna,” the same voices shouted “Crucify him.” Our own congregation walked that liturgical journey on Palm-Passion Sunday. We began in palms and praise, and ended in betrayal and the ritual stripping of the altar. That story is not only about Jesus. It is about what fear can do to a people. How easily cruelty can overpower compassion. How quickly our hearts can become hardened. Stories like that don’t only live in Scripture. They live in the rhythms of history, and sometimes in the quiet patterns of our own lives.
I grew up knowing what it meant to be quiet about where your family came from.
In our family, there were stories we told and stories we kept silent. I am the descendant of Chinese men who came to the United States during the Exclusion Era, men like Jim Lee, Kung Sing, and Wa Haing, who made their way to a country that had already decided it did not want them.
In 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the first federal immigration law to single out a specific race and class of people, barring Chinese laborers from entering and declaring them unfit for citizenship. The earlier Page Act had already outlawed the entry of most Chinese women. Chinese skin was functionally criminalized in both law and policy, and an entire national immigration enforcement industry was devised in the early 1900s to keep Chinese immigrants out of America and under surveillance inside America. Angel Island in San Francisco was not the same as Ellis Island. One was a site of cruel, dehumanizing detention and scrutiny. The other, a portal of welcome. As historian Erika Lee has so insightfully framed it, America’s gates were closed to non-Europeans. The discriminatory laws about immigration, property ownership, and citizenship stayed in place for more than sixty years, finally ending in 1943, but their legacy lingered far longer. The racist and cruel immigration enforcement tools created for Chinese Exclusion in the late 1800s and early 1900s were later repurposed for other communities, other populations. Anti-miscegination state marriage laws stayed in place until 1967, and the spirit of the Exclusion Act also continued in policy, in public sentiment, and in the kinds of things children learn without being taught.
My ancestors learned to navigate the fine line between being present and being seen. Survival meant learning when to speak, and when not to, and assimilation was their urgent goal. My grandmother stayed connected to the Chinese American community in Little Rock in quiet ways, especially in her professional business life as the accountant for most of Central Arkansas’ Chinese-owned businesses, after immigration reforms in the 1960s opened the door to more immigrants from non-European countries. My mother, who was in junior high during the Central High Integration Crisis in Little Rock, focused on never mentioning her background. She was focused on fitting in.
As a child in the 1970s and early 1980s, my facial features distinctively showed my Asian heritage. The teasing came early and easily. Children tugged the corners of their eyes and chanted in mock-Asian tones, I was taunted with ethnic slurs, and I was once asked if I ate dogs. Strangers asked if I was adopted when I stood beside my white father. Some assumed I was one of the Vietnamese refugees who came through Fort Chaffee after the fall of Saigon. The message was clear: I was somehow foreign - the “other.” It was confusing and hurtful.
After one of those first hurtful days, my grandmother sat me down for a talk. I was in kindergarten or first grade. She told me about our heritage. She told me we were Chinese American. And then she told me not to talk about it outside the house. She wasn’t ashamed. She was afraid. Born in 1924, my grandmother vividly remembered what happened during World War II, when Japanese American families (many US citizens) were rounded up and sent to internment camps. While my grandfather was a tanker in the European Theater, she was home, and she had seen how fast a government could turn against people who were perceived as different or foreign or “other.” She understood that human dignity could be easily cast aside as inconvenient. Her fear was my early inheritance.
As I got older, my features changed, and I began to pass as white. In a nod to the politics of hair, my mother had my bowl cut transformed into curls. The ethnic teasing faded. I continue to get the occasional question, but it has become rare. I stayed quiet. Not out of denial, but because the silence had simply become second nature, and I certainly did not want to take space from those who were experiencing deep and abiding racism every day. That quiet came at a cost by producing an internal dissonance in the form of a widening space between how others saw me and my heritage.
That space has become harder to maintain. In recent years, I have watched the rise of white nationalism as it moved from the fringes into daily life, along with anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. I have seen the uptick of anti-Asian hate since COVID. I have seen public compassion overridden by fear. And I have seen how quickly neighbors can be turned into suspects.
Some of those affected have been here for decades. Others are new arrivals. They are workers, caregivers, students, and parents. Some came through lawful channels. Others came fleeing war, persecution, or economic collapse, seeking a better life, just as my ancestors did. But time and again, their stories are flattened. Their human dignity is treated as negotiable or simply erased..
And all too often, we act as if immigrants are not our neighbors and they are not fellow children of God.
As a United Methodist pastor, I remember well our baptismal ritual, which includes the question: “Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves?” This vow is about how we care about people, and exists deeper than politics or economics. There is a reason I seek to be concerned about who is being left out, pushed out, kicked out, or forgotten. This baptismal vow reminds us of those who suffer when fear shapes policy. It also reminds us that resisting injustice is part of the life of grace. The vow reminds us who is forgotten when convenience overrides compassion.
Scripture is filled with stories of people who are displaced, exiled, fleeing, or migrating. Abraham sets out without knowing where he is going. Ruth crosses borders to find refuge. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus flee to Egypt to escape violence. These are not side stories. They are central to our sacred narrative.
Deuteronomy 10 reminds us of who God is and what God asks:
“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:17–19)
This command doesn’t say, “Love the legal immigrant.” It doesn’t say, “Love the foreigner if they have documentation.” It says love the foreigner. In Matthew 25:35, Jesus tells us clearly:
“I was a stranger and you invited me in.” And when his followers ask when they saw him, Jesus answers, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these… you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)
Hospitality, in scripture, is not a sentiment. It is an ethic. A moral imperative. A theological conviction. A way of recognizing that every person carries the image of God.
The United Methodist Church affirms this truth. We oppose immigration policies that dehumanize or scapegoat. We support reform that respects human dignity and keeps families together. We believe that welcoming the stranger is central to Christian discipleship.
I follow a Lord who died on a cross at the hands of an inhumane authoritarian empire that used professionalized cruelty to maintain control. As I read my news feed, my civic heart is burdened by the lack of due process and the disregard for court orders. My soul is further burdened by the cruelty, abuse, and dehumanization of God’s children. I am no expert in law or immigration, but I know in my soul that our immigration policies should be rooted in dignity and justice, not cruelty or suspicion.
This is not just a matter of political ideology for me. It is theology. It is woven into my family’s story. It is something I’ve carried in my body and soul. And it is something I carry still as a Christ follower and pastor, called to witness and walk alongside those who are too often pushed aside.
We have closed the gates before. We have never really owned up to the moral consequences. But we do not have to keep our gates and our hearts closed. We can listen again to the stories that have been hidden. We can remember that all of us have been strangers at some point. And we can make space, again, for the kind of welcome that transforms both guest and host.