Sermon: One, whole and Blossoming
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving day. A lot of Canadians can’t even imagine Thanksgiving day without a roasted turkey; many Koreans cannot imagine it without a trip outside to see the Harvest Moon, with everyone in the family holding hands. These following two pictures show the archetype in the mind of every Korean, of how we imagine our Thanksgiving night. Koreans have their own term for the day: Han-gawi. If I literally translate the word, it means “The great center.” Han means “great”. Gawi means “the center or the middle.” So, in this season, every Korean seeks the center, the great middle of their hearts, which could be their home, their family, their mother.
So, Hae-in, a Catholic nun/poet, whose work is beloved in Korea, writes “Han-gawi; when everyone’s heart becomes a full moon/ for evermore longing for each one’s home.”
My six-year-old son Peace doesn’t know this poem yet, but I think that there is a kind of cultural gene in him which makes him develop a particularly sentimental longing for the home and the moon. Last year, Peace had a great time during the summer vacation when he and I visited Korea. Everyday, he played among a bunch of kids in our small town, from morning to dusk, or even late into the summer night with them. He was loved by his friends, grandparents and cousins enormously. So when he had to come back to our four-member, small, lonely family life in a foreign land, he missed his friends and grandparents greatly.
One day when our family was out taking a walk at night, Peace saw the full moon, a pale and ghostly one. And he asked, “Mom, when it’s night here, is Korea in daylight?” I said, “Yes.”
Then he said firmly, “Mom, that’s not the Moon. It’s Korea. Morning has broken in Korea. Do you see it’s bright over there? I see the white cloud flowing in the moon. I even see my friends at the playground. Mom, do you see, too, the busy morning, people opening their shops, crossing the streets, the messy traffic flow?” From that day on, Peace really believed it is Korea- he calls it Korea, not the Moon. (He's serious. He wouldn't change his mind; if it's Korea, then it's Korea.) We even wave our hands to the moon to say hello to the people there in Korea, sending our prayers that they are well.
It’s an unbreakable truth that it is not Korea but the moon, up there in the sky. But I don’t want to change my son. I don’t want to change the way he deals with his own deep-rooted longing for home far away and the people he misses. It is how children use their imagination. I don’t think children’s imaginations are simply a product of their youth. Imagination is what blossoms when they feel a deep affection for what they hold dear.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus said about children, “The kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” They use their imagination, and make the improbable be probable. Using the imagination, they make the invisible be visible. Children like to touch and grasp. They turn what they imagine to a concrete small reality so that they can hold it in their palms and see and own it. They wouldn’t let it just remain as a sheer ‘possibility’, floating as a concept, in a land of abstract, where their arms cannot reach. If they can’t see the people they love and miss so much, little children would make them live in the Moon. If we really want to enter God’s Kingdom and fully appreciate the unfathomable blessings God alone can place in our lives, we might need to desire it first as little children do. And we might want to consider using an important function we human beings have - imagination - in the same way we season food with a pinch of salt.
When we open the Gospel of Matthew, a special reading suggestion for this Thanksgiving Sunday, (which we didn't read), we hear another favourite among Jesus’ words; “Do not worry. Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”
It’s interesting that what Jesus gave to disciples as perfect examples of God caring, feeding, and clothing were the birds in the air and the lilies in the field. Jesus didn’t give human beings as the examples. The people in Palestine in Jesus' time worked very hard to earn their daily wages; they lived hand-to-mouth. They weren’t clothed by some miracle - they carded and spindled and and span the wool to make what they wore. Jesus didn't suggest some of the names among these people as the good examples of those who trust God's care. Like "look at Simon, consider John." The majority of those who gathered on the mountain to listen to Jesus’ sermon were peasants, fishermen, tenants … In other words, those who had to care for themselves, by themselves. They were not Solomon or Caesar, either. And think about who gathered around Jesus and sought to see him; sick people, depressed people, isolated people, a few who had power but secretly yearned for change and difference. Their fields had been stolen by Roman colonizers. Their highway was trodden by the invading army. Their hard-earned savings, even down to the two coins of an old widow, were taken as a tax either by Rome or by the temple. Women who were caught in adultery were thrown into the streets for stoning. Dove sellers and money changers set up tables in God’s temple, turning it into a marketplace. John the Baptist who called so many to turn to God was beheaded in prison. In all of this messy ridiculous suffering and injustice, who would say God has provided, who would dare to say He cares?
Maybe the only things that Jesus and the crowd could find as examples of "God cares" were, sadly and disturbingly, the birds in the air and the lilies of the field. Maybe they could find the fullness of God which was intact and untouched, one and whole, only in the ignored small things like the birds and the lilies.
And maybe that’s the same in our lives. Truly I can say that many of us are really blessed; we know that we have been cared for by God all through our lives with such great blessings. But when we carefully look at even our happy lives, we see wounds, cracks, loss, a few petals fallen off to show that even the happiest life is not a perfect life.
For Thanksgiving day this year, I’d like to invite you to find ‘a bird’ or ‘a lily’ in your life which has been not scratched or dented, a blessing that has been preserved intact; those parts in your life where you have undeniably been truly cared-for, fed and clothed.... by God, in God's fullness. What are the birds and lilies in your life and in your family which are whole, free and blossoming?
We might be stuck, only finding one or two, just a few things which 'seem' to be blessed, intact, preserved, blossoming. But they are the first door we open to encounter the fullness of God, and where we learn to hold the "wonder which is this world," as little children do.
I hope, I hope, eventually, with imagination and faith, we can say “There was God's care" in every moment, even in the moments we thought we had been left alone to struggle. God's providence is both hidden and revealing.
So, not tomorrow night, but the next full moon, I think my family will go out at night and have our own cross-cultural Thanksgiving; sending prayers and giving thanks for the people we miss to the moon, the full moon, oh no, to the Morning Korea, .... and the Great Center, God our Creator. Would you like to send yours, too?
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