Pastor Kevin Doi reimagines the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25 and makes it unfamiliar for us again. Both the victim and the protagonist in the story are Asian American. The victim is an Asian American elderly woman, perhaps, who is beaten, ignored, left for dead, with no one to intervene, as often as we have seen this horrific scenario of AAPI hate crimes during the pandemic. Then comes the Samaritan, a “perpetual foreigner” who comes to the man’s aid and cares for him. The assumption from Jesus’ story is that God cares for the victimized man (obvious to the reader), but also the Samaritan (not so obvious) who made himself a neighbor by his act of compassion.

For the non-Asians among us, it is a call to stand with our AAPI brothers and sisters in their pain.

For Asian Americans, God sees you, and even when we still feel like outsiders, God places us in the center of his story. In Jesus, we all belong to each other, and “home” is not defined by borders, or ethnic, or even religious distinctions, but wherever there is the presence of love, wherever we choose to care for one another.