“And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:29)

“There was once an ordinary woman who lived in a small town near Modesto, California. She was not famous, powerful or influential. I do not know her name. I was told this true story about her. She was the kind of person we’d call a good neighbor. She was friendly, liked by her neighbors, and was good to her family. When the United States entered the Second World War, she supported our government — until California Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren signed an order requiring all U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry to be interned in relocation camps.

Many of this woman’s neighbors were Japanese Americans. She knew them and loved them as her friends. She went to Sacramento and lobbied the legislators. She wrote to the president to try to stop the camps and the government confiscation of Japanese property. She could not move the powerful and famous. She was a lone nobody. Few others protested. The Disciples of Christ was the only official Church body to protest the order to intern Japanese American citizens. So this lone woman did what she could. She bought all the Japanese farms and homes in her town for a dollar each and watched her friends be taken away. When the camps were closed, when the Japanese who survived had no homes left, when their lands were stolen by our government, this woman’s neighbors were lucky. She gave her friends and neighbors back their homes and land so that they might live.”

⊕ from a sermon “The Courage to Choose/The Commitment to Being Chosen” by Rita Nakashima Brock in And Blessed Is She: Sermons By Women, Ed. by David Albert Farmer and Edwina Hunter.

Photo: Dorothea Lange