Sermon: The Reality +
Text: Luke 15:1-10
(Pokemon Go – music – from my phone app)
Some of us have heard this background music a lot this summer. I know I have -have you? Can you tell me what this music is? It’s from the Pokemon Go game for smartphones. Your Pokemon go adventure or walk starts with this music playing as soon as you open the free app. Do you have Pokemon Go fans in your family? It’s not just a kid thing - kids, teenagers, adults all enjoy playing it. My family – Min Goo, Peace and me – were counting the days to the Canadian launch date in July and got so excited when we downloaded it and had our first try. Unfortunately, I soon realized that we only had two phones, so when my family walked outside to catch the little monsters – Min Goo got his phone, and Peace held mine (like this – the signature pose). Jah-bi and I had no choice but to just be their sidekicks. An interesting thing is that my grade 5 son normally doesn’t like the idea of taking a walk outside with his parents, at all, “already”, if there’s no promise of seeing his friends or there’s nothing interesting for kids… He would say he would be fine being alone at home… But last summer, Pokemon Go excited Peace’s vision about “going out in to the world.” We drove around and had many family walks to Assiniboine Park or St Vital Park - we saw an incredible crowd of Pokemon-crazed players who gathered around the parks’ lakes. (flamingo pic in Tumbler) Mostly, we all enjoyed the fun of the game; Pokemon Go is a great motivator to go out and join the gang, meet with neighbours and ask nerdy questions - even say hello to strangers.
Of course, everyone responds to this new craze differently. As almost all churches are Poke Stops (Poke Stops are where you can get more poke balls to catch more Pokemon) youth ministry experts advise that proximity to players can be youth ministry gold or a great venue to welcome the players. Through the summer, I’ve seen four families and some individuals stop by and hang around our church to get Poke Balls… Just last week a mom and her two kids sat on our stone bench, and when I said hello, the daughter proudly said they are on level 20! (It’s huge! My family’s just at level 14.)) And, yes, … I have also read some critiques and warnings, too, like “Pokemon Go is everything that is wrong with late capitalism” or “Cops warn the players: please don’t trespass to catch’em all” , jumping in over somebody’s fence. They also warn kids to not cross the road with their eyes only on their phone.
There are pros and cons, attractions and dangers in the Pokemon craze, but there are a few good parallels that highlights interesting features of the game and … Christian ministry and mission.
First, like Pokemon Go, the goal of ministry and mission is about creating ‘reality plus’.
Pokemon Go works in a frame of “augmented reality”. Augmented Reality is a live view of a physical, real world environment whose elements are augmented (supplemented, or added-to) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, etc. Likewise, faith and mission also encourage us to generate an augmented reality of God’s view - the view of a Kingdom built in the love of God- to reimagine, reframe, reshape our reality, and make it become a reality that’s positive and transforming. We are invited to see our world as more than the material world. I remember I had a moment of awe with my son when he was 3 years old. We were in Korea, staying at my parents’ apartment, on a busy city street. He was looking down from the balcony of their apartment, on the 7th floor. It was night and the neon signs and traffic lights were flickering in front of his gaze, full of love and wonder… He was looking down at the busy street scene which was, to me, just a messy human world –young men and women loitering purposelessly, or shopping or drinking. Tired, ordinary people like us seeking a night’s fun. It seemed that my little boy had ‘reality plus’ eyes or had a “God’s mind”, (I thought), when he said, “세상, 참 멋지다” (“How awesome it is, my world”)
Another feature of Pokemon Go that parallels with the goal of Christian mission is the idea of “de-territorization.” It basically means we see our world as a kind of map – but we are tasked to reorder, or remake, or even remove the sense of the map. When you play Pokemon Go, you have to walk. That’s the point. You’ve got to walk to find characters. To hatch an egg, you need to walk 5 kilometers (3.2 miles). You cross over borders and railroad tracks, from one block to the next. You welcome that sense of exploration, to put your footprints in places where you’ve never been before, never been curious about, never expected to find anything interesting or positive. It removes our conception of where MY community ends and where the other’s community starts. The “software” of purpose, motivation and value replace the “hardware” of geographic borders and locations. This game is able to help us rewrite or remake our sense of spaces and boundaries. People are moving through spaces where they never did before.
Christian mission is just like that. To find a soul, to engage with our neighbour, to make ourselves healthy with a spiritual walk, we remove, reorder, rewrite the maps of geographic locations: For example, we can deconstruct the invisible lines between St Vital North and St Vital South; we venture into social locations of immigrants, refugee, visible minorities, indigenous community members, LGBTQ +, and listen to voices not heard, stories previously unheard. We mirror the way of God, who gathers all from all geographical and social locations to create COMMUNITY. In this community children are experts in love and teaching fairness; all gather to find understanding and celebrate each others’ accomplishments. This is the community I dream of, God dreams of, we all dream of as Jesus’ disciples bearing the witness of God’s Kingdom of Love. I admit that there’s a leaping interpretation to draw a parallel between Pokemon Go and Christian mission, but it’s all true.
Pokemon characters (picture) – are defined by their health, type, weight, height, power (like 100, or 50) to attack or to defend. When we go out into the world and walk a Christian mission – 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers – we meet and engage with our neighbours with the mind of a disciple – not to evangelize but to build relationships, first. We are hard-wired to define or categorize people and things: Categorizing what is familiar and what is foreign is almost automatic brain work we evolved to survive in an ever-changing world. We define people, our neighbours - friend or enemy, insider or outsider? I do, you do. We see the color of skin. Age. Ethnicity. The type of food that people buy to make their dinner. Language.
In the Kingdom of God Go, we all are the little monsters. We are all characters with different traits. Yet in the God community, these traits no longer function to separate us from one another or to isolate us from others. In the Christian community, modelling God’s Kingdom, these distinctive traits of ours are each one’s Strength. Gift. Power. Do you cook Pakistani food? Strength. Do you speak Chinese? Power. Do you have refugee experience to tell us about what you believe is a just world? Gift. Are you LGBTQ+ community members? Teach us the courage of how to take wings and escape from our boxes! We need a new lens to look at our neighbours and our neighbourhood in REALITY PLUS - a reality augmented, modified, and supplemented by a new lens of God’s love and Christian mission.
Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel story how God would act when God seeks to find one valuable soul that is lost. Please note that no soul has ever been lost in God’s heart; it is only lost from us. When God searches, like a shepherd for his or her sheep, like a woman sweeping all over her house to find that one last coin, the search is not bound by locations. No one says, “That’s the most dangerous place or the most unlikely place to find a soul - better not look there.” The single goal is to find one and restore one, because God loves the one. Christian mission takes a walk – a spiritual walk; physical/metaphorical walk, 5 kilometers, 10 kilometers, to hatch LOVE. We cross borders. We rewrite maps to hatch new relationships, renew self-understanding, and rebuild the meaning of discipleship. We believe in the passion it takes to create God’s Reality Plus.
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