Sermon: If Easter Had A Face - My last sermon at CUC (April 27, 2014)

Sermon: If Easter Had A Face

Text: John 20:19-31

If Easter were a human person, like any other regular human being that I could meet face to face, I would like to ask, “Hey, Easter! We meet again this year, one more time. Yet, it is not just ‘another time’. Since I have known you, every year you come to me with a different face, with a different look. Hey, what’s up?”

I imagine Easter as a human person and it makes sense to me only if she has a face, just as Jesus, the Jewish healer, wisdom teacher, Kingdom of God movement initiator, who breathed his last breath on the cross, had a human face. Easter has a human face. The communal resurrection of Christ has a human face – people. People. People who resurrect with Jesus. The communal resurrection of Christ comes after, only comes after the communal crucifixion of Jesus. Only after we communally experience and respond to and share the sufferings of another, only after we give our ears to the cries of the people in bewilderment, in pain and even in anger over the injustices that impact their lives, only after we choose to stand at the foot of the cross and go through Good Friday to cry with and for those who have no more tears left to shed, can we see the face of the communal Christ amongst our human faces. We see the face of Easter in people, ordinary, common people like us.  

It is the second Sunday of Easter, yet I still desire to meet Easter face-to-face, looking Easter right in the eyes. I am longing to hear the beat of Easter’s heart. I imagine what it feels like calling Easter and being with Easter, as if it were a friend, a neighbour, or a stranger, who has a face. A real human face:

Easter in a dying friend’s face. Easter in the tears the people of Calgary shed for the victims of last week’s stabbings and their families. Easter in the faces of the Korean people in their collective grief over the hundreds of deaths in last week’s ferry catastrophe, and in their sharing of the families’ sorrow, grief, shock, bewilderment, and even their outrage.

 

Korean people are, again, rising to ask what has gone wrong with themselves as a nation, as a society, to allow this tragedy to collapse upon these young people, and kill those who should shine like jewels, blossom like flowers. Their destiny should not end like this; entombed in the cold, cold sea when at their age, the idea of their own death should be so distant as to be unimaginable. The Korean people are outraged, believing personally and deeply that, more than ever, they must truly protest the fascist societal system that allows economics and wealth-creation to take priority over people’s safety and lives, the government which runs roughshod over the people’s rights to know the truth, and the mass media acts as a puppet delivering government’s propaganda. Easter must seem so distant to the grieving and devastated Koreans, yet I discern the dimmed light of Easter Hope getting brighter in their eager desire to see another human being’s face in the light of truth and to understand another’s pain as their own.

Through the past two years of serving Chemainus United Church, I have been so privileged to look you in the face, and witness the Face of Easter in you. We have journeyed together in a communal faith walk that has led us through the depths and peaks of life, personally and spiritually. I thank you for your openness and willingness to look me in the face, so we could see each other as we truly are.

Emmanuel Levinas says, “The idea of infinity, the infinitely ‘more’ contained in the less, is concretely produced in the form of a relation with the face.” The infinite variety of humankind, the unlimited number of ways that we relate to the world, to each other and to God, can be seen and appreciated when you look at another person’s face, and to know that there is another person there a singular being who may not be completely knowable but who is always worthy of love and respect. In the encounter of the Other, in the face-to-face encounter with another human being, the human face ordains us in the sacred relationship between I and “Thou”, not I and “it”.

These past two years has been a time for me to witness the infinitely ‘more’ that is concretely produced in the form of a relation with the face. You hugged me. You gently squeezed my hand as you encouraged me. You showed your teary eyes and said ‘Thank you.’ You expressed your concerns, sharing with me your ideas of how I can become a better minister for you and others – and here I am. I am proving that you are right! (* grin *) You let me hold your hands beside the hospital bed to pray. You asked me to say the words for your families in their loss. As we see each other face-to- face, looking each other in the eyes, as we hold one another’s hands, and share our hearts, you let me witness the infinitely ‘more’ that is your community, your lives. So I thank you.    

The infinitely ‘more’ is what we Christians call God. And in God, the duality of the beginning and the end as the two opposite poles in a linear order of time - dissolves. Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, bursting with promise. Even now. Even amidst this ending, this last Sunday service we are now having together.

Here is a piece of a poem that I like, Song of Myself, written by Walt Whitman.

“I have heard what the talkers were talking,

The talk of the beginning and the end;

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now.”

One of the Christian doctrines that has engaged our Christian imaginations for a long time is Creatio ex nihilo, meaning ‘Creation out of nothing’. God has created the whole universe – the Sun, the Moon, the stars, animals, birds, bugs, water, earth, flowers, human beings, the complicated and delicate, organic life system, every entity in it and its beauty – ‘out of nothing’ at once, in a singular event. Yet the God of Creation, God of Easter, exclaims to us that “You are created from everything!” Not out of the void, not out of  emptiness, not out of the vacuum, you are created from everything! From light as well as darkness – from the tidal waves of human experiences of loss and grief, anger and disappointment. You are created from everything - from the squalling of infants, from supernovas on the far side of the universe! You are created from everything! Your beginning is already full, flooded in the water of everything; God’s breath is hovering upon the face of your beginning, vibrating upon the face of the deep.

Beginning is still going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, bursting with promise. Even now. The two polarities of the chronological order of time – the beginning and the end - dissolves.

I am standing on the promise, neither the end nor the beginning, but where the duality of the end and the beginning dissolves - and so are you. You are standing on the promise; it is our Easter hope. In today’s Gospel, Jesus says to doubtful Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand, put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.”

Some days ago, a church member knocked on my office door, and uttered an incredible comment that cheered me up. He said that he went to the Men’s Breakfast that morning. Most of them were from the other churches in the Chemainus area, yet they had known that I had been a minister at Chemainus United Church, and also knew that my term with CUC would end soon. He said, that morning, my next step was the "subject" of their discussion. I exclaimed, “Was I discussed?!” with surprise and some excitement.

“Yeah, you’ve made a good reputation around here.”

I became even a bit more playful. “Am I popular?” “Yeah, Min Goo and you, both of you. Min Goo was the first. And you were the second. You came to us. You were opening up the culture and acceptance.”

The last sentence – Min Goo and I were opening up the culture toward acceptance – was so affirming. So right. It cheered me up. Opening up is a great description to explain what the ‘beginning’ is about. “To begin” means, in Hebrew, ‘To cut open, to open up’. The beginning does not lie back, does not lie in the past, like an origin, but rather it opens out.

Thank you, everyone, for the last two years. Together we, communally and collectively, have opened up the culture and practiced acceptance, learned it and embodied it to truly see the face of another – not the colour of our skin, not the differences in how we look, what languages we speak, but to look each other in the face – the human face.   

 

 

We are  standing on the eternal now, the infinitely more. We are standing on the promise that is concretely fulfilled in our endeavour and journey to make right and authentic relationships with one another through the Risen Christ. The beginning is still going on, and is everywhere.

Chemainus United Church, I love you. You were my first congregation. My Lay Supervision Team members: Ken Graham, Gloria Cope, Lana Palmer, David Thomas. I love you. You have been a lighthouse for my journey through the past two years. My earnest prayer is that you may continue to be a warm and remarkable community that thrives with the vision and practice of acceptance, hospitality, and the love and warmth of Jesus Christ as you have shown them to me. God bless. Amen.

Children's Time: Birds On the Wires (April 27, 2014) - My last message for the children at CUC

Children’s Time: Birds on the Wires

Happy Easter!

Today is a very special day for me; this is my last Sunday to worship with you and everyone here at Chemainus United Church. I have been so blessed to be your minister and friend for the past two years. Knowing you personally, calling your names, blessing the water with you each Sunday morning, and this part of worship – this time with you with stories and wonders – have been a joyous part of my life. Hmm, so, … how do I feel about this? How do I feel about this ending – that I need to say goodbye to you, today? I am sad, I am very sad.

Here is a video clip that I have been hoping to share with you.

One morning, a man called Jarbas Agnelli was reading a newspaper, and he saw a photograph of birds sitting on some wires: This picture! (on the power point screen.) He was so inspired by how these birds – I think they’re crows – were sitting on the wires –. What do you think he decided to do? (Receive the answers.)

He was inspired to make a song! He noticed that there were five wires, like the five lines in a stave of music, and he wondered what melody the birds would create, if he used the exact location of the birds as musical notes! He was so curious that he went ahead and did it! So, here we go- (play the clip.)

I think it sounds beautiful, and I love the idea that all the birds were in the right place to make beautiful notes together.

This is my message for you today: wherever we are, wherever we go, we will find our own individual right place. And wherever we are, wherever we go, we will each continue to be God’s musical note at our own right place. Yet, we are together. We are not alone. Even though we may have to say goodbye to our friends someday, as we grow up, as we change schools, even if we move away we will continue to sing in harmony, in our own right place, an open-ended song for the whole world to hear.

Easter Sunday Sermon: The Communal Resurrection of Jesus (inspired by John Dominic Crossan's The Communal Resurrection of Jesus and The Communal Crucifixion of Jesus) April 20, 2014

Sermon: The Communal Resurrection of Jesus 

2014 Easter Message from Kairos:

Resurrection is indeed a daunting invitation, isn’t it? It is all the more true when we think that the Resurrection is not confined to the event that happened one time, at a single point in human history, 2014 years ago, to Jesus himself, alone. Resurrection is a communal experience made available through Christ that works through the Holy Spirit. Jesus rises up, not for his glory, to be praised and extolled like a celebrity, like a superstar (Well, I have to admit that one of my favourite musicals in my high school years was and still is Jesus Christ SuperStar.). But that has been how Western Christianity has envisioned resurrection so often throughout history: Jesus arising in splendid triumph from an open tomb, Jesus emerging in muscular majesty, alone, alone, alone…

Look at this icon from the Eastern Christian tradition. It is a banner hanging in the small shrine-chapel in Jerusalem that commemorates the Resurrection of Jesus.

Can you see Jesus bending forward – gently, tenderly, graciously - , stretching out his right hand to grasp and pull on the wrist of Adam, and his left hand likewise to grasp and pull on the wrist of Eve, which means me and you, and you … Adam meaning ‘earth’ and Eve meaning ‘life.’ The whole of creation, the whole population - the risen Christ is reaching out to take us all up with Him.

Personally, following many other scholars in Christianity, I wondered whether Jesus saw his life’s purpose as dying for the sins of the world. This interpretation that ‘Jesus died for our sins’, …. like the others in the New Testament, is “Post-Easter” and thus retrospective. “Jesus died for our sins” … It is how we embrace his death, after Easter, so it is our Post-Easter affirmation of faith. Looking back on the execution of Jesus, the horrendous event, the early Christian movement sought to see a providential purpose, the depth of God’s love shown through Jesus. “God so much loved the world that God gave His only begotten son to us.” However, it makes me wonder when I ponder upon “God gave His only begotten son to us,” O.K. but … even to let his own son die, abandoned, on the cross?

I wonder whether the historical Jesus really thought that the purpose of his life, his vocation, was his death. His purpose was what he was doing as a healer, teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator – initiator and innovator to create, on earth and for the earth, a great grass-roots community of sharing. He called it the “Kingdom of God.”  He asked, wondered, imagined and envisioned “What life would be like on earth if God were king and the rulers of this world were not.”

Jesus was the “Kingdom of God” movement initiator who envisioned a remarkably inclusive community that actively subverted the sharp social boundaries of his day. Jesus’ most visible public activity was his community’s inclusive meal practice that we, the post-Easter followers of Jesus, call Communion or Eucharist. However, 2000 years ago, it was a high-risk activity that was often targeted by Jesus’ critics. He ate with the marginalized, outcasts, women, (*children*), the disabled, the sick, the poor, most of the same people we would find marginalized or judged today. They came to Jesus’ community to ease their hunger and slake their thirst for inclusion, to find a spiritual path for a new life. In Jesus’s community they all ate together and it was indeed a simultaneously religious, spiritual and political act done in the name of the “Kingdom of God.”

Going back to the icon that I was talking about, the reason why I am so touched by Jesus in this icon is that this image of Jesus shows us his communal character. One thing we need to remember is that he didn’t die alone. I don’t mean that there were two other people being crucified along with him - the two criminals on his right and left. What I hope to remind us is that Jesus was not the first faithful Jew to die on a Roman cross at Golgotha – nor would he be the last. In 4 B.C.E. Varus crucified two thousand Jews there, and in 70 C.E. Titus crucified five hundred a day. The first followers of Jesus were Christian Jews who believed that Jesus was their awaited Messiah, their expected Christ. They did not think that Jesus was just another Roman execution, but neither did they think that he died alone.

The reason why the Jesus in this icon touches me deeply is because it depicts the power and the beauty of the communal resurrection of Jesus, or our communal resurrection with Jesus that comes after the communal crucifixion of Jesus. He didn’t die alone, neither did he rise up alone; Jesus bends forward toward the whole of humanity and toward us, as he did in ages past and will he do in ages to come – stretching his right hand to grasp and pull on the wrist of Adam, and his left hand likewise to grasp and pull on the wrist of Eve. In this icon, next to Adam and Eve are the first martyr in Hebrew Bible, Abel, and the first martyr in the Gospels, John the Baptist. What this symbolically means is that the Risen Christ carries all of us; he reaches out his hands to me, and you, as earth, as life, 

women and men and children in Indigenous communities, (the missing and murdered indigenous women), all those who suffer from human greed, poverty, oppression, violence (both domestic and in the world), … and even the hundreds of Korean high school students who were trapped in the sinking ferry, unable to survive the cold, cold sea, … and their indescribably devastated parents and families to whom grieving meant giving up so they couldn't grieve, not while there was still even the faintest of hope to cling to, even as the certainty of their loss was sinking deeper into their bones. And now is the Easter. No, in Korea, the Easter Sunday has one day passed.  You know, like in any other place, in my home country, high school grade 2s are jewels, shine like jewels...

Can you believe? Can you imagine that Risen Jesus is reaching out his hands to grasp, gently grasp .. and yet also powerfully grasp their wrists – the students’ and the families’ - to pull them out and to carry their sufferings and to weep with them and us now?

On Easter, we learn that this vision of the ‘Communal resurrection of Christ’ only comes after the ‘communal crucifixion of Jesus’, … which means resurrection only comes after communally experiencing and sharing the sufferings. We look up to Jesus’ cross, yet what we see is not only his but the thousands and millions of crosses over the universe, over the earth. You see? Can we believe? Our vision of Jesus who resurrects with all those who suffer invites us to resurrect communally. Can we believe? Can we go beyond the mind that we have today, to gently grasp and pull on the wrist of another to raise them up and experience Easter hope together?. … To sing Hallelujah courageously and unbelievably? Can we do that? 

Resurrection is a daunting invitation - do we have the courage to accept? 

John Dominic Crossan's The Communal Resurrection of Jesus
       http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-dominic-crossan/the-communal-resurrection-jesus_b_847507.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=1443053b=facebook
John Dominic Crossan's The Communal Crucifixion of Jesus
       http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-dominic-crossan/the-communal-crucifixion-jesus_b_847504.html?utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#sb=1443053b=facebook

Good Friday Service 2014 (April 18, 2014)

Declaration of What Ails Us

I imagine what it would be like if someone came to this church for the first time in their life and wondered what this specific time, traditionally entitled as the Prayer of Confession and Assurance, is for. How do you think you could explain it to them if they didn’t understand the meaning of words we use commonly during this time? What is sin? How do we understand it?

This quote is from Ludwig Bemelman’s classic story, Madeline;

In the middle of the night, Miss Clavell turned on her light and said, “Something is not right!”

Something is not right.

Something has gone wrong.

There is something “wrong” with us.

There is something “wrong” with us and also with how we, as a community, as a society, as a world deal with situations that affect others’ lives seriously – human suffering through injustices that our own complacencies may perpetuate - something wrong with our own brokenness, indifference, apathy, or wrong choices.

Something is not right. Something has gone wrong. We are lost.

– This sense of disconnection, this sense of being lost, is what leads us into reflection and confession, for today, on the foot of the cross.

We are invited to see the ‘stuff’ of our lives through faith, meaning ‘a way of seeing the whole.’

In this part of the service, we are invited to see our personal and communal predicaments through faith, from a perspective of the whole.    

This perspective is what leads us into wonder and longing – longing to make things right, longing to return home from the place where we are lost, exiled, cut off.

This morning, we gather at the foot of the cross not to praise and give our eulogy for Christ. (He’s already risen and has risen!). Rather we gather together one more time to ask God, who is the wholeness of love, to be with us, as we address our concerns about our lives, our human conditions – our deepest concerns about the things that ail us so much.  

I invite us to a time to name what ails us most and to ask God to be present with us as we seek God’s understanding of our predicament, accepting us as we are, and empowering us to transform even as we are transformed.

  

God’s Promises to Us

Singing Hallelujah takes a journey. Singing Hallelujah takes courage. It is our personal and communal way to find our home, a journey of return, a courage to “Go beyond the mind that we have now.”

May the Risen Christ who is ever-present provide us with wholeness, forgiveness, renewal, and freedom. May Christ, who was faithful unto death on the cross carry us to see beyond the edges, and go before us and lead us to live the fullness of life, the fullest potential of our lives. Amen.

Readings

Silent Reflection & Closing Prayer

As a post-Easter community of Christ, we know that this is not the end of the story; yet we hear from Jesus, “it is finished.”

Our God is God of new beginnings, new tomorrows, yet is also God of Endings, God of Darkness, God of the Tomb, God of dark days and loss, carrying the grief of the lost, the heartbroken, the bereft.  

Let us open our hearts as we pray together;

Jesus, you have come to us in many stories that point to the way of salvation – wholeness and our healing. You are;

Light in our darkness,

Sight to our blindness,

Liberation (for captives.)

Return (from exile.)

The healing (of our infirmities.)

Food and Drink.

Our vine: the source of life.

This service is not a eulogy for you or just another chance to praise you - who you are and what you have sacrificed for us; we also gather to remind ourselves who we can be and how we should live in order to help your saving love flow and touch the face of the earth and humanity along with it – our lives and the lives of others.

We pray for all those on earth who suffer from the dominions of power, violence, and oppression. Especially we continue to pray for people in Ukraine. And we ask you to remember the students and their families who suffer from the human tragedy that happened this week on the sea, at the edge of Korean peninsula.

God thank you for being with us in this wondering moment

where we stand poised between life and death,

filled to the brim with sorrow,

filled with thoughts of what has been

and what lies before us.

Comfort us even as we are shaken by the horror of these last hours.

God of Endings, God of Darkness,

God of the tomb, God of dark days and great loss

Be with us now as we wait with Jesus, carrying the grief of the lost, the heartbroken, the bereft.

Benediction

May God bless you and keep you,

May the very face of God shine upon you, and be gracious to you,

May God’s presence embrace you and give you eternal peace.

Amen.

Unsaid words

Sin and forgiveness, these correlative images, … correlated “realities” – sin as a human problem and forgiveness as God’s solution, however, is one way to understand our Christian vision of life.

It is one way we talk about our problem and understand how God’s grace works through us to transform our lives.

Marcus Borg, the well-known author of Meeting Jesus Again For the First Time and Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, says that for example, we may pray “Forgive us our blindness” but if we are blind, we don’t need forgiveness as much as we need to see. If we are lost, what we need is a way of return. If we are in bondage, slavery, captivity – as realities as well as metaphors that point to our own individual and collective experiences, what we need is liberation, more than forgiveness.  

Sermon: Our Universe Has A Bias Toward Justice (April 13, 2014)

Sermon: Matthew 21:1-11

Last week, one of my friends shared some sad yet also inspiring news via Facebook.  

The headlines read as follows; “Jesuit Murdered in Syria: Ignatian Family mourns.” “The Ignatian family mourns the loss of Dutch Jesuit Father Frans van der Lugt, who lived in the war-torn Syrian city of Homs, and was killed on Monday, April 7, 2014.”

You may well ask how I can introduce this ‘murder’ story as inspiring news. Abduction and murder hardly seem like cause for inspiration - but then we would be forgetting that how anyone dies should never be as important as how they lived.

Until I saw this Facebook post, I didn’t know that this great man of faith even existed. Yet his words that are now shown on your power-point screen caught my eyes and heart. “I don’t see Muslims or Christians. I see, above all, human beings.”

To give you some brief information about who he was, this man of faith, a Dutch Jesuit priest, has worked in Syria since 1966. I believe that there would be no better description of him than his own words about what he believed. So here we go;

In his own words: “Christians and Muslims are going through a difficult and painful time and we are faced with many problems. The greatest of these is hunger. People have nothing to eat. There is nothing more painful than watching mothers searching for food for children in the streets. … I will not accept that we die of hunger. I do not accept that we drown in a sea of hunger, letting the waves of death drag us under. We love life, we want to live. And we do not want to sink in a sea of pain and suffering.”

It is very interesting and at the same time very painful to ask why certain human conditions often end up with murdering a person of faith, silencing a human being’s action of faith, even when the faith is not about keeping the dead doctrines or dogmas or what oppresses us alive, but a humanistic faith that keeps us for life - for keeping our brothers and sisters, who are created all equally in God’s image, for life. However, throughout human history, we have seen countless times when individuals and societies choose to murder or silence a person of faith for their acts of radical love and trust and their expressions of deep concern for our divided and hurting human condition.  

According to the news coverage about his ministry and death, Fr. Frans had been influential in the county on many levels such as youth programmes, spirituality, inter-religious dialogue and politics. During the lasting turmoil in Syria, he was trapped with many others by the government’s siege of Homs. He was given the chance to leave Homs but he refused to do so. He played a crucial role in helping others who were also trapped there survive months without a dependable food supply.

Two thousand years ago, Jesus entered the oppressed, torn and turbulent city, Jerusalem, that suffered from the oppressive and violent occupation or “programme” (John Dominic Crossan) by the Roman Empire and the schemes of its own native religious/political authorities that only added the burdens of the common people. Jesus’ approach to building a community of faith was non-violence oriented, as is well-represented in today’s story – Jesus entering the gates of Jerusalem, sitting on a donkey. Jesus’ community was a non-violent, yet resistant community that refused to accept the agenda of Rome which focused on political dominion. On the contrary the agenda of Jesus was founded on an ethic ‘sharing’ in everything we do. The banner of Jesus’ community might read like this: “When you are in Jesus’ community, you never go hungry” physically, emotionally, spiritually.

Today’s sacred story tells us that “A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road.” The story continues on,saying that the crowds “Went ahead of him” and shouted, “Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna,” meaning “Save us, Rescue us!” As Jesus and his crowds entered Jerusalem, the city (probably not the whole city, maybe enough of a group that the Roman’s always alert to rebellious or resistance types would wonder about this new threat…) was in turmoil, asking “Who is this man?”, unsure of how much information they could glean about this man and the big waves of crowds arising with anticipation and hopefulness.

When dominant groups oppress others, what they are most afraid of is that the oppressed regain their sense of hope - hope can lead to desire for real change.

In this great story of marching and parading with palms waving and with shouting and whispering to one another, ‘Who is this man? Who is this man?” a good reader of stories can get  the hint immediately about how this story will unfold. A dark and shadowed human condition will reveal its violent nature and so subsequently a tragedy – kidnapping, exile or murder as an attempt to remove the truth-teller, peace builder and hope-finder. After this moment of glory, praise and palm waving, it is no wonder that we descend into the Holy Week – the week of passion, suffering and death on Good Friday. The Cross of our Jesus is the manifestation of human darkness which refuses to hear the truth, to share another’s pain, to build the bridges of peace with LIGHT.  However, we also learn that the Cross is not the end of the story. So here is the good news. This is where the heart of the Gospel lies. The Crucifixion is not the end of the story. Beneath the cross is not a place where failure is placed. It is a place where we are reminded of what our life’s purpose and meaning actually should be and can be, which is “Overcoming our fears in order to struggle to choose life, save life, heal life.” Quoting Fr. Frans’ words, “We love life, we want to live.” Don’t we?

We watched the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission) held in Edmonton last month, and learned that the cross must not be a symbol of power or superiority that the church has traditionally enjoyed and claimed for itself - it must be a painful reminder for us that we are here to save lives and heal lives, not to destroy them.  

Beneath the cross, we don’t see Muslims or Christians, however we or however the world name the divide between children of the same God. We don’t see ourselves and others by names, races, or faith traditions. Beneath the cross, “We see, above all, human beings.”: human beings imbued with both darkness and light, and with pains and the courage to “be” and live AND live out hope.

Then and there, beneath the cross, we bear witness that our Universe is biased toward justice. ( …our universe, in the words of Bishop Tutu, “has a bias toward justice.”) We learn from the cross that our Universe is not a vacuum of meaning, like when a life dies, every meaning that has belonged to the life suddenly dissolves into the vacuum of nothing. No. Beneath the Cross, we believe, and dare to believe that our Universe is carried by Divine grace/ Divine providence that has a bias toward justice and that we are called to be a meaning-maker – the meaning that is not severed by a death event but marches in our evolving journey toward justice and peace beyond death.

In our endeavor to believe and to live fully with God, the most important thing is to know which path we have chosen to walk – glory and darkness, with shadows hiding our faults? Or the cross for hope, with its searching, all-revealing light? Whatever spiritual and/or religious path we have chosen, what is most critical in our endeavour is to actually walk the path we have chosen through the love of Christ and/or through the wisdom of the One Divine grace that leads us all.

May the path toward peace be our strength and the pillar of our journeys beginning at the foot of the cross. May we be seekers of the truth, and keepers of our kin – brothers and sisters of God’s family. Amen.

Children's Time: "Jesus, Cheese! (or Kimchi!)" (April 13 2014, Palm Sunday)

Children’s Time

Good morning, friends.

Isn’t it wonderful that we sometimes do very special things together at worship, like parading and waving palm leaves and branches?

When I was young, I remember I wondered why we had to use palm branches? In Korea, palm trees don’t grow naturally. I have never seen real palm trees in my neighbourhood, or in any place I have visited in Korea.

Why wouldn’t we wave, for example, forsythia branches, cherry blossoms, things like that, to welcome Jesus?

 

Forsythias are everywhere in Korea at this time of the year.

Here in Vancouver Island, it is also not common to see palm trees grow, but we do have one, don’t we?

Can you guess where?

We have one at our church - a wonderful one.

But have you wondered why we began our worship with waving palm branches today?

Our Bible story tells us that when Jesus entered Jerusalem, the largest and most important city in Israel, many people living there, young and old, rushed to see Him.  

They had heard that a man with a great message – that God is love and God loves all – would come to the city.

Many people in Jerusalem liked Jesus and wanted to welcome Jesus with enthusiasm and hearty cheers, shouting -  Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna! – and they chose to wave palm branches because the palm trees were everywhere in their city… so common, yet its green leaves symbolize that new life will begin with the person Jesus.

So, though we waved palm branches today, to celebrate today’s sacred story, imagine with me if Jesus came to us today, to the town of Chemainus, what do you think you would find around you to wave to show your most hearty welcome to Jesus? (Receive answers.)

Those are all great answers!

I wonder if some of us,(myself, for sure) would hurry to bring cameras, smart phones, or iPads, to take a picture of him, and shout to Jesus, ““Cheese!” or “Kimchi!” Jesus! It’s so great to see you today! Take courage and teach us how to live out the way of God, the love of God, in every aspect of our lives!” Amen.