Prayers: Be Innocent like Wildflowers/To Be a Rainbow in Somebody's Clouds (July 28, 2013)

Call to Worship

Be Innocent like Wildflowers

Leader:

Make your days fragrant,

by embracing small loves

Every day

Open wide the window of your heart

So that small joys like wildflowers come in

And make you lighter and more fragrant.  

People:

Let us worship together this morning, O God,  

And praise Your breath blowing over the earth  

As if we stand on the sacred territory

Of an innocent, small wildflower.

Prayer of the Day _ To Be a Rainbow in Somebody’s Clouds

(Inspired by one of the Maya Angelou’s keynote speeches)

Leader:

O God,

Let me be a rainbow in somebody’s clouds.

When it looks like the sun won’t shine anymore,

When rain persists and the clouds do not disperse,

May my neighbour find a beam of hope

In the colours of my rainbow.

People:

Those who are downtrodden, we will help lift up.

Those who are stumbling, we will hold.

Those who are hurting us, we will forgive.

Those who need one word of kindness, we will speak the word.

God of hope,

Let us walk together,

Singing the Gospel’s path,

To be the colours of the rainbow in our neighbour’s clouds.

Sermon: To The Ends of the Earth (July 28, 2013)

Luke 11:1-13

Sermon: To the Ends of the Earth

This past week has been a difficult one; I've been worried, I’ve been distracted, but I did not lose my focus entirely. Through the week, I was holding a book wherever I went, wherever I was, carrying it with me in the car, reading it on the bed and in the waiting room of a physiotherapist’s office, just reading it, hoping that it could help untangle the message that we need to hear from this week’s scripture readings. The Tower of Babel and Wanderers, written by an excellent Korean theologian, Rev. Dong Hwan Moon, kept my spirit alive and enlightened through the week. Rev. Ik Hwan Moon, who wrote the hymn "With the Wings of Our Mind"(VU 698) that we sang last Sunday, the protagonist, prophet and poet of the Korean democratic movement, is his older brother. I met the younger Rev. Moon, the author of The Tower of Babel and Wanderers, for the first time at the celebration service for the 60^th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea. Min Goo and I attended the service during our holiday in Korea last month.

I saw this old man walking up to the pulpit, relying on his cane and also being helped by a youth - this 90 year old, shrunken and frail person - then he preached like thunder! The title of his sermon was “The Escape to the Garden of Eden”. He lashed out against the evils being done in the name of the neo-liberalism that unleashes the tyranny of free trade and free markets. He said it is our Tower of Babel. This Tower of Babel tells us that ‘possessing more’ equals more happiness, so “produce more and consume more.” Rev. Dong Hwan Moon lived through severe trials of his own while he worked to free Korea from autocratic military rule, including two times of imprisonment. His sermon said that he now realizes that the point of his life’s work was not only Korea’s urgent need of democratization but also to fight the evils of the industrial culture of our world. It opens the way for military dictatorships of many countries to rob the power of their own people in order to make their countries join the ranks of advanced nations. It opens the way for advanced nations to ignore valid concerns about water and air pollution in order to create more tax revenue and make the wealthy even wealthier.

Here in Canada, more and more of us realize that it doesn’t make sense to pump bituminous crude oil from tar sands, transport it through elevated pipelines, and then ship it overseas, risking disastrous spills. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternative reports, “71 percent of all tar sands production is owned by non-Canadian shareholders, and over half of all oil and gas operating revenue in Canada goes to foreign entities. The industry provides jobs for a mere 0.8 percent of the Canadian workforce.” I believe that we need to take time out to ask what all of this may mean. We’re told that the Tar Sands make this country wealthy, but the truth is that much of the wealth goes elsewhere, while the environmental degradation stays with us.

Individual human greed has limits; transnational corporate greed, the need to generate ‘capital’ at all costs, has no boundaries. One third of the people on earth live on three dollars a day or less. It’s hard to imagine this poverty - its existence - in depth. (...) Extreme poverty lies far behind us; it exists and manifests its ugly shape only in the sepia-tone pictures of old-time Europe or North America, or in the Third World. But as a ‘resident alien’, if I borrow the term from the biblical account, or as a ‘wanderer’ if I use the term with which the Rev. Moon identifies many like himself, or (I think I may correctly say) as an ‘outsider’ living in this country, I have begun to see and feel and experience the poverty in spirit existing in Canada. This realization runs deep, especially when my family finds we don't have anywhere to go for any meaningful relationship – which is, I find, a basic necessity for human life and happiness and well-being - especially in the evening or on holidays. Then almost the only option left for us is "shopping." We often say jokingly that almost the only welcoming place for us is, regretfully, Wal-Mart; Yes! Wal-Mart! Wal-Mart welcomes us! 

I go, seeking diversion, and I am horrified by its oppressive, cold reality which does not show any nationality, any human face, any of life's heat and uniqueness. There, we consume what we have not produced from our land. We consume products made by unknown masses whose paltry wages insure that they will never be able to buy the shiny things they have made. As an outsider, I am identified and identify myself as a mere consumer waiting in line with other consumers, to pay. It is a cold, lonely feeling like being cooled by industrial-sized air conditioners, in the temperature-controlled Wal-Mart building. This is poverty in spirit which causes people to feel smaller, undersized and powerless before the power of money.

Rev. Dong Hwan Moon says only when we experience and realize evil as an evil would we dream to escape from the evil. Only when we realize that we are lost, will we seek and knock and open a new way of being, a new way of hoping, a new way to create and to be re-created by the Creator God whose wish for us, the original place God intends for us to be in all the world, is the garden, Eden. In Judaic/Christian faith, the first community God intended for us was the escape community; God called out to Moses and his small group of "wanderers", those resident aliens in the empire of Egypt, the transnational labourers of that time, the Hebrews - and released them from the forced labour and the oppressive system of Egypt.

The prophets in the Bible repeatedly cry out in lamentation as they retell and remind the people of God that God intends for us to live in a world where justice and fairness rule and peace blossoms. Any Tower of Babel which exists for the sake of its own benefit, profit and power is against God’s will.

If a church stands only for its own, if its interest is only in growth, if it is silent about the wrongdoings of society, it is in itself a tower of Babel, no matter its size. I hope, I believe that we don’t want to be a small Babel. A church needs to speak and act. It needs to go and walk the Gospel’s path to the ends of the earth; not to convert people, but to be converted, to experience a true conversion in our hearts from the people who are at the edges and ends of the earth, struggling with the evils they experiences in their lives, now, and there, and also here – around us, near us, and even among us. I hope we can remember and embrace all those who experience poverty materially, in spirit,or in any aspect of our life. I can't forget the determined voice and the anxious face of Rev. Dong Hwan Moon when he said in his sermon, "God aches. What's important is that God aches. If we are not aching, we are not the disciples of Jesus."

May we "ask, seek, and knock"(Luke 11) to open the garden of God's aching soul and to embrace it in our hearts. 

Sermon: Be Revolutionary Like Jesus (July 21, 2013)

Sermon: Be Revolutionary Like Jesus

Luke 10:38-42

The pain of one person is not limited to that person alone. That individual, that person lives in society, and their pain ripples out to everyone around them. Pain arises and lives within the one person; it twists the direction of their thoughts and actions - it can destroy the life of an individual and then spread outward and cripple a community. 

Loneliness, one of the pains which is pervasive throughout our society, is not just one person's feelings of being lonely. Extreme individualization, one-by-one recasting of individuals as simple consumers in the vast global market economy. We have called these 'alienation'. We are past the time of the Industrial Revolution, where, under the banner of ‘mass production and mass consumption’ men, women and children alike shaped long workdays around the machines that drove the new era. In this era of global free trade markets, the era of money as superpower, people become capital; their movements become the flow of currency. People feel lonely because the environment where they live and which surrounds them is no longer shaped for humans; it is shaped for economic gain. In the cities in Korea and in Vancouver, the only large city I have ever known in Canada, I have seen many transnational labourers, their families and children sometimes with them but often far away,  individuals who surf the waves of a grand network of anonymity, and I have seen their loneliness.

Recently I found one phrase while reading Korean poetry, and immediately loved it: “The cold mercury measuring a life’s hotness.” In today’s Gospel, we meet two individuals who are expressing pain, and you can’t help but notice the heatedness, the passion of their pain. I read today’s story of Martha and Mary as if I were a cold mercury thermometer measuring the heat of their lives. They both were struggling with pain but each one’s pain was expressed differently. Martha was pained because she did all the housework, cooking, cleaning, serving the family and assisting male visitors all by herself and no one cared about how she felt about doing these tasks all the time, alone. Mary was pained because the vocation she chose as a ‘better part’ for her was not understood, not only by men but also by women, including her own sister, Martha. Her better part, her better career, her vocation was always being threatened to be taken away from her. Both Mary and Martha were in thrall to the patriarchy - each of them struggled to have control over their lives.

Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part for her, which will not be taken away from her”, Jesus’ words are revolutionary for that time – and it still is even now in many parts of the world. One scholar suggests that it is a mistranslation to translate Jesus’ words as “It will not be taken away from her.”, because it was translated as prediction, but in truth, in the 2000-year-long history of Christianity, the possibility of women’s ordination, of women being recognized as ministers with the same God-given authority as men, has been denied by men who claim the entirety of the vocation for their own sex. The scholar continues to insist that the correct translation is in the imperative voice; it should be “Mary has chosen the better vocation. Do not take it away from her.” This revolutionary story still resonates to this day. We see the same struggle and pain of Martha and Mary in many Catholic women who hope to be ordained in the church which they are deemed fit to serve, but have been forbidden to lead.

I chose to marry young and build my career later, unlike my friends in Korea. In the summer of 2006 I was holding my newborn baby, Peace, in my arms while I felt a crisis in my heart. I was very happy to be a new mother, to see my baby growing day by day, but I was also feeling a terrible sense of doom. Life in Korea at the dawn of this new millennium demands people run at super-speed,  like you are speeding down one straight highway, eyes straight ahead. If you lose your focus, get distracted by possibilities beyond the straight track you will be crushed. The rate of unemployment reaches ever-higher; the most lauded goal of the nation’s youth is to secure a highly-paid, stable job. Only a few of my generation will get what all of us have been pushed to achieve. In a society where economic growth is the primary agenda, slowing down and pursuing other values and virtues means a permanent ejection from the high-speed, one way highway. My marriage, my baby meant that I would not be able to get back up to the speed demanded on the road to success. I knew that my major fields of study in university – religious studies, social studies, philosophy- would not lead to a splashy career in finance or politics. And I am a woman – which, in Korea means either elbows out to clear my own path or, ‘Stay at home and be a good mother.’

During those difficult days, I found my long-time hidden vocation – to be ordained – and moved to Canada to explore a new pathway for my family and for myself, enrolled myself in the Vancouver School of Theology, and studied very hard. But few of my Korean Christian brethren understood my dreams and ambitions. One day, a man I knew showed interest in my studies. He was very encouraging as I told him about my classes and my teachers, but ended the conversation by asking, “By the way, what are you going to do after graduation?” He knew that I was studying for my Master’s of Divinity, but failed to imagine that I would become an ordained minister. In Korean churches, the wife of a minister has a special role; she is expected to assist her husband, stay at home and be a smiling presence on Sunday mornings.

So I apply my past experience and pain to understand Mary and Martha, and Jesus. I am imagining how revolutionary Jesus was and how we who follow Jesus should be – revolutionary! Life-giving! In the places where oppressive rules and systems cover up people’s dreams with the thickness and the weight of black asphalt.

When you hear the word ‘revolution’, or picture revolution in your imagination, what images do you see? You may be reminded of scenes of fights, struggles, opposition, protest, violence. However, from the perspective of the Gospel, from the perspective of the good news, from the perspective of the Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed, revolution is the hotness of life. The heat of life. The heat which tells us that we do have pain inside us. When we get a pain in our body, we often know it by its heat. You can’t explain what causes it immediately, but you feel that it exists in you and in others – in our neighbours. And I would like to encourage us to try to measure it by ‘cold mercury’ – our intellect, our reflection, our reason, our study – to understand how the world creates the source of pain in us and in our neighbours. Believing Christ goes with understanding Christ – understanding the real Christ who walked on the real path on this earth. Why did He say the things He said? What makes Him erupt in fiery anger? Why did He weep for His friend’s death?

The Love preached in the Gospel is about loving the real people in our lives who are hurt, in pain, robbed, stripped bare, and left alone. Love is revolutionary. Love is liberating. And this love makes us who we are as Christians. We are individuals, but we are never alone. The world may tell us that we have to take the fast road, to focus on success, to become the capital that feeds the engines of a nation’s economy, but we choose differently. Be revolutionary like Jesus.

Prayers: A Window That Joy Opens/ Water is Like Blood/ Prayers of the People (July 21, 2013) - With Evaluation

Call to Worship

A Window That Joy Opens

Leader:

My room has a window that is

brightened by the morning sun

I pray to have a window

that joy opens in my heart.  

People:

May the windows of our heart

open into the four directions of love,

like the cross opens to the four edges

of grief and hope.

Leader:

Don’t cry.

Don’t feel lonely.

Let us open the window

and communicate

with others, with the sacred.

People:

May there be revelations for the eyes –

my eyes, my neighbour’s eyes

and Christ's eyes –

through the window

of our worship today, we pray. Amen.

Prayer of the Day

Water is like Blood

(Adapted from the words of August Brown in The Sacred Headwaters)

Leader:

Water is like blood.

It goes everywhere and anywhere; we can’t stop it.

People:

Water does not stay still.

It always finds new paths for its flow.

And once it does, the river changes forever.

Leader:

God of Living Water,

we are concerned that the acid from mines

can coat the bottom of the river, the stream, the creek,

where the fish lay their eggs, 

and then the eggs won’t hatch.

People:

God of Life,

let us not coat the bottom of our hearts

With greed and indifference.

Leader:

We have a message.

We have a prayer.

We cannot eat gold.

We can eat our fish.

All:

Give us wisdom to live in harmony

with all living beings and our neighbours.

We pray this in Jesus’ name

who has witnessed life by the cross. Amen.

Peace of Christ

Jesus has borne witness to justice, peace, and life.

As followers of Jesus, we should do the same;

To be more just with our neighbours, to be more peaceful with ourselves,

To be more in harmony with the living, whole creation.

May the peace and life-giving Spirit of Jesus be with us and transform us all.

Prayers of the People

God of justice and healing,

We pray for the suffering black community and people of African descent in North America from the shock of the murder done to Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old boy. Many are in shock, outraged, grieving at this terrible echo of all the injustices that have been forced upon their ancestors and themselves. The verdict may have been lawful, but it represents the triumph of fear over sensibility, injustice over equality.

There is human law and there is higher law, O God, we and we have conviction in a higher justice. God’s law says “Thou shall not murder.” And Jesus says “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”

Lord, hear our prayer.

We pray for the Neighbourhood House here in Chemainus, its staff, its youth and their projects. We pray that the community of Chemainus and we as a church can be supportive of their need to find a new place to protect and nurture their dreams and hopes. May our hearts and minds be attentive to their concerns and hopes, and carry them on the wings of our ideas and actions. We pray that youths in risk in Chemainus and their families can be fully supported by the society and community and feel security and confidence as they grow.

We pray for the youths’ mental health, well-being and achievements in pursuit of their dreams.

Now we bring up those names in our hearts and prayers: we especially remember N and his family and friends. While N and I sat together, in his living room, commanding a beautiful, panoramic view of the sea and the sky, through the wide widows, he said to me, “I know it is a beautiful view. I love the other side of the view that you can see through the other room’s window, by standing on your feet. Go and appreciate it.”

O God, we believe that we see you when we look at the other side of the view. When we open the window, may you also open it, and look us in the eyes, and brighten us like the morning Sun.

We also pray for N’s good friends, J and T. N said, “I have old, good friends, J and T. It is heartbreaking that I have not seen him for a long time.” God, in your love, take care of J and T and all his good friends in our church, especially N’s well-being in his mind and body.

Finally, we pray for those in our church who miss their lost partners. We also ask that You bless those who find life companionship in mutual trust, care, true affection and love. Watch over with love our members and their families whose lives are touched by cancer. Give them your saving health.

Evaluation
https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/13ff3146137c2203

Children’s Time: Jesus Blesses Children

…

In the world, there are many sad things happening to children.

Some children are hungry. Some children are ashamed or bullied just because their skin colour is different from those around them. Some suffer because they live where wars are happening. Some have to leave their homes because there are no jobs for their parents where they live, or because their country has become a dangerous place.

When children are hurt, God is also hurt.

When children cry, God cries. When children laugh for happiness, God laughs for happiness.

You can imagine and feel God’s heart and draw God’s face – smiling face, a weeping face – because you have the eyes of child. And the way you see, the way you hope, the way you draw God’s face are truly gifts you can share with us all. So my answer to the original question is that God cries because God loves us all.

Sermon: Seeing Underwater (July 14, 2013) - neo-liberalism, etc

Sermon: Seeing Underwater

Amos 7:7-17, Luke 10:25-37

Traveling from one country to another is like diving into a huge container where the water is a completely different colour from what you’re used to. What would you see if you dove in and opened your eyes in red water, or water dyed turquoise, or water that was clear up close, but was all a whitish haze if you tried to look any distance?

What shocked me first when my family landed in Korea was that the summer sky was

not how I remembered it; it was an unfamiliar hazy white, not the blue I remembered from my youth: the well-loved clear, hot, steamy blue sky with beautiful towering cumulus clouds.

I remember walking home after school, looking up and enjoying the blue sky

and the fluffy white clouds, licking an ice cream cone that melted too quickly in the blaze of sun. In my memory, summers were hot, sweaty, blue and refreshing. But now the Korean summer sky looks as if it were painted with white watercolours; the sky is white all over, the same colour as the polluted air between me and the sky. My oldest son and I played at counting the days until we could see any patches of blue above us or even see the sun emerge from the haze of the white-blurry sky, but we gave up doing that after a while. The blue returned to the sky the day after a rain shower - not for long, but enough to assure us that blue skies still existed in the world.

I think the description of Korea as a huge water container is quite right. When I visited

Korea, it was the rainy season, but it rarely rained. The water seemed to be contained

up in the sky, trapped in the humid air. And people seem to live or swim there - in their

own life container without actual water. They live in a system, a custom, and a feeling of crisis which stems from their need to survive in this container, in this air, in this water. And I realized that I am also one of them, no matter whether I live in Canada or in Korea. I have been swimming to survive.   

If I sum up what I see consists of the system, the container, is first of all neoliberalism - politics that focus on a nation’s economic growth. Possession or lack of money determines people’s lives - whether they possess real estate, and how much they have in the bank literally determines people’s happiness. Korea was called ‘a nation of savings’ before its economy bottomed out in the financial crisis of 1997. Since then, borrowing seem to have become the basis of many families’ finances. Many people gladly incur credit card debt to show off how they live. The rich live in skyscraper apartments in Seoul or in fancy suburbs, literally separating themselves from less fortunate citizens, while  the others drive past these new towns on their long commute into the city, looking up at the skyscrapers, wondering who lives there. ‘Mass production and mass consumption’ have been the principles that prop up unquestioned Capitalism. But we have a smaller and smaller population which can afford ‘mass consumption’ as fewer and fewer people have stable jobs. In the global ‘market economy’, wealth ignores borders, politics; transnational capital controls everything – even people’s movements.

An influx of labourers from nearby Asian countries is flowing in to Korea, which means the world’s pains and their desperate struggles are also coming in. But Korea does not seem to be ready to embrace them.

What are the churches doing? Just as in the era of Christendom in Europe, and like many mega- churches in North America are doing now, almost all the churches in Korea, mega-churches, smaller churches, all together, follow Mammon.

In these money-seeking, power-seeking churches, it is hard to find the Jesus who, in the wilderness, resisted Satan’s tests three times: the tests of power, money and using God’s name for one’s own interest and security. Why have so many churches in the world fallen into seeking wealth and worldly influence over seeking Christ? I believe it is because we’ve been taught the world and nature exist for our exploitation and financial gain and that following Mammon is a logical, even virtuous pursuit. The challenge for us Christians is that we are born into this world, we live in this world, and we have not yet experienced the alternative to life on this flawed planet. If we don’t give ourselves to be led by the Spirit so that we can be the embodiment of God’s works, we can’t resist the world’s tests of power, money, and using God’s name for our own advancement. If we are not baptised with the tests Jesus was tested by, if we are not baptised with the Spirit Jesus was led by, if we are not baptized by Jesus’ death on the cross, if we don’t carry our own cross, we can’t poke our head from the water we swim in and see the new earth and new heaven.

Canada has a brilliantly blessed blue and green nature - we have the blue summer skies to prove it. But Korea can be a relevant lesson for Canadians to see who we are, because we live in the same world where global Mammonism silently covers up countless people’s cries of pain, suffering and struggle as if they didn’t exist. This is the power of what we call ‘the system’. Jesus entered Jerusalem – the center of the Jewish world at the time, to choose the cross, as the only and right option for him, when he wanted to turn the wheel of human history back to the original point when God first created the world. It’s important to remember that when God created the world, the world meant the simplicity of Eden, the garden, not the ambition of the tower of Babel.  But Adam and Eve made a choice, and its consequence was that they left Eden. Then, outside of the Eden, they gave birth to Cain and Abel, and Cain killed his brother Abel. Their troubled offspring constructed the tower of Babel.

In today’s reading in Amos, God asks the prophet Amos, “Amos, what do you see?” Amos replies, “A plumb line.” The Bible says, Amos saw God was “standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.”

A plumb line is a string with a weight on the end. When you hold the string at the top, the weight makes the line hang down straight, so you can determine the straightness of the walls you build.

God says to Amos, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by.”

What does it mean in Amos’ vision that God is standing beside a wall with a plumb line?

We can consider this question and reflect on it in many ways, but one of the understandings may be this: the present tower of Babel, our world, in which the richest 20 percent of nations take 76.6 percent of the world’s total wealth and the poorest 20 percent hold just 1.5 percent of it is not sustainable. It also means that the world tower which is built upon the poor people, the exploited, the powerless, the countless people who fall into being transnational labourers, wanderers, this bulky structure that puts the wealthy upon the backs of the poor... can’t stand up vertical.

What saddened me when I travelled to Korea was that very few hoped, very few desired,

very few imagined the ‘new earth and new heaven’ God promises in the Gospel. Very few

knew that what God originally wished for the world was a garden. To God, the idea of ‘world’

originally meant a place where justice and fairness rule, life and peace blossom,

love is the language, and a person speaks to the next person, and they hear from one

another, ‘you are the flesh from my flesh, the bone from my bones.’

For the first few weeks back in Korea, I asked my family and friends, “Why is the summer sky blurry and white? How did the colours of the air and the sky come to be same? The sky

used to be blue, with beautiful cumulus clouds! But I haven’t seen the sun for almost 10 days!” Then, they would invariably reply, “Ha Na, the summer sky has been always like this!” People don’t seem to realize the weather has been changed; the dust of pollution takes from them the memories of the clean and clear, blue summer sky. May we always remember, may we always honour that God created the garden first, intending for us to live there, in tune, not at odds, with all living beings in the world.