Abiding in Unconditional Love: A Reflection on UNDRIP (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) (Apr 29, 2018)

Abiding in Unconditional Love: 

a reflection on UNDRIP 

(United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)

Click UNDRIP handbook

John 15:1-8

My family’s first home in Canada was in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. We had just arrived, and we had no car, just a stroller for our 8-month-old, Peace. At that time, I don’t remember my family ever walking on Burnaby Mountain. We lived in Burnaby for the first year, then we lived in Vancouver for the next three years. We moved again to Vancouver Island for the next four years, until we finally settled in Winnipeg. We’ve moved from place to place, yet still, the name, ‘Burnaby’ sounds like home. Whenever we hear the news about what’s happening in Burnaby, my memories move me into listening with more affection, more concern, more interest, because it was our first home here.

Newcomers and new immigrants develop their sense of home in their new country: their affection for the places, their sense of belonging to the community. 

Back then, I didn’t have the awareness that this place where we lived and grew our family was on Tsleil-Waututh territory, on which the coastal First Nations have raised a totem pole, a “warrior”, overlooking Burrard Inlet toward Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Terminal in Burnaby. The totem pole enshrines a commandment to the community to “warrior up” against Kinder Morgan. 

When I had a personal meeting with Stan McKay, I asked the question I had carried with me for a long time about what, as a newcomer, my responsibility and participation could be in solidarity with Indigenous communities and individual relatives. I appreciated Stan’s answers. “Are the settlers all the same? No. The indigenous are all the same? No.” We need to recognize diversity in the settlers as well as diversity in the indigenous community. Both settlers and indigenous, the diverse people in both communities see that the land is a gift. Immigrants and new Canadians are a gift too, yet we should know that a gift comes with a responsibility. Success continues to be measured by societal norms, still deeply imbedded in the doctrine of discovery, which is aggressive survival on the land. Intercultural communities of faith need to learn that we have this piece of the same struggle, understanding diversity as gift. Collaboration is possible. Stan continued, “In this part of the city, when new Canadians come, we, the indigenous community wish education: how the newcomers are prepared to encounter indigenous people and our issues." 

The arrival of new Canadians is not itself problematic. The lack of education on racism is a problem. The lack of it complicates all of our intercultural relations. At the entry into Canada or at the citizenship ceremony, the final recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 94, calls for acknowledging Treaty. 

94. We call upon the Government of Canada to replace the Oath of Citizenship with the following: 

I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second, Queen of Canada. Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada, including Treaties with Indigenous peoples, and fulfill my duties as a Canadian citizen.

“It’s a request. We are not there yet”, Stan concluded.

A few months ago, the Prime Minister visited Winnipeg and met with whoever wanted to participate in a Town Hall-style meeting with him at the University of Manitoba. I was impressed with his compassion, keen sense of justice, and the way he applied his listening skills to a lot of people anxious to talk to him, until a moment when a man behind him began to shout to get the Prime Minister’s attention. It was understandable that otherwise he might not get a hearing. Before him, many did the same to talk to the Prime Minister. The issue this man wanted urgent attention for was about the Kinder Morgan Pipeline, but the Prime Minister (in contrast to the warmth and compassion he showed to the other justice issues) brushed him off quickly and coldly and said “No.” “We need to think of all in Canada.” which made me question, immediately, “Who are all?” Obviously and at the same time implicitly, the Prime Minister conveyed the clear message or impression to me (There were a lot of new Canadians in the meeting room. He looked at them and said, “all”.) that the ‘all’ include new Canadians and are the new Canadians who have come to this land seeking hope and success, AS IF our hope is a single goal - economic and political stability and success. As if we are unable to dream bigger than just the economic prosperity of this country. As if we are potentially unwilling to join in the historical task of our work towards reconciliation, just because we are new Canadians. (Remember, many newcomers know what it means to have their land and identity taken away through their own country’s painful history of being colonized and politically oppressed.)

Reconciliation is our call and task as a church. Immanuel started our response to this calling years ago. As I shared last week, this is a way for us to live the Christian call to be a “boundary-dweller” because we will continue to open ourselves to deeper learning and stronger relationship with the indigenous community and their members until no one is the Other and no place is the margin.  

TRC Call to Action 48

“We call upon the church parties to the Settlement Agreement, and all other faith groups and interfaith social justice groups in Canada who have not already done so to formally adopt and comply with the principles, norms, and standards of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” as a framework for reconciliation. One of the examples is ensuring that their institutions, policies, programs, and practices comply with the UNDRIP. 

What is the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples? There are some misunderstandings and negativity surrounding this affirmation. The BC provincial government warns that "It could put jobs and the economy at risk, because the declaration requires states to obtain from indigenous people 'their free, prior and informed consent before adopting and implementing legislative or administrative measures that may affect them.'” The B.C. Premier said there are, “Really problematic… clauses that would seem to suggest that First Nations could have an absolute veto over resource development on any of their territories.” These are misunderstandings. They are not true (for example, there is no mention of “veto” in the document.)

UNDRIP is a document which affirms six key principles: 

the right to self-determination, 

the right to participate in decision-making

the right to cultural and spiritual identity

the right to lands and resources

the right to free, prior, and informed consent

the right to be free from discrimination. 

When we claim that we are “neutral” and say that we wish to see the situation from a bias-free point of view — then we’ve already started casting aspersions on UNDRIP. Our former government characterized it as an “aspirational document” (2010, Canada), before then, opposed it. (2007.)

Recently, we’ve received a large-size poster of the document to display in our sanctuary. We also have many copies of it in the form of a small booklet. You are very welcome and encouraged to pick one up and take it home. I hope that the inclusion of this work in our daily life and our church’s community life will help us to make better solidarity with the indigenous members in our church, our neighbourhood and community, and with the Coast Salish people who urgently call for our support and solidarity. 

Burnaby is my home. Vancouver is my home. Chemainus is my home. Winnipeg is my home. Reconciliation is our “home” work, the home work of all of us.

In today’s reading, we are reminded of God’s unconditional love. We are called to “Abide in love” (John 15), and this love is unconditional love. What the church offers should be unconditional love. In reality, what the church offers is (sadly, very often) conditional love to minority people. “Conditions.” What are the conditions? To fit in, to conform, to not be different. “Do not rock the boat.” When we welcome people to us, what churches, (We, United Churches too, the traditional, mainline Canadian church!) often ask, in many small details, of those we welcome is… “proximity” to whiteness or white middle-class styles and views. Without keeping this awareness in mind, we tend to do it — the asking —, even though our best intention is to genuinely welcome them and love them in Christ. It is truly sad, if we give these conditions to those whom we welcome — not to be different. To be like us.

I hope that our small action of displaying UNDRIP in our view, in our sanctuary, may encourage us to study and to remember that Jesus’ love is unconditional love; we must strive to become an intercultural church inspired by these affirmations on the rights of indigenous peoples. We may not be able to be perfect in unconditional love all the time. In fact, we will always fall short of being perfect. Yet, I hope, with our Council elders at Immanuel, that we will always try hard to get closer to what we are called to do and be — abiding in love. Abiding in God’s unconditional love. 

Amen. 

Being a Boundary Dweller (John 10:11-18), Apr 22, 2018

Being a Boundary Dweller 

John 10:11-18

Today, I am moved to talk about happiness as a continuation of last week’s boundary talk.  Are we happy or are we not happy? If we are happy, why are we happy? If we are not, why not? What’s the definition of happiness, and what may be another layer of understanding happiness if we see it from the viewpoint of Christian spirituality?  

“Anna: But explain Mary Lou Winters. Rich and popular then, even more so now. I sweat my way through law school — she marries the doctor and gets to lounge around Forest Heights for the rest of her life. Where’s the justice? 

Wesley: She’s miserable?  

Anna: Naw! She’s happy as a clam!  
          She was standing in the middle of the main hall and you could barely squeeze around her, the fur coat was that bulky. And a very handsome doctor was attached to the mink.” 

(from Midnight Madness, performed at Dessert Theatre, Immanuel UC, last weekend)

To explore happiness better, we need to establish a context. Otherwise I might betray some of your expectations about what I may be going to say about centering happiness. For any matter, there’s never just one true story. There are many true stories. If we present a single story and believe it is the only one, we are in trouble. 

I suggest that we begin with this theological statement: 

Being a Christian is being a boundary dweller. 

This statement uses the metaphor of “borderland” not as a wall like Berlin, Israel, … but as places to help us see differently. 

Marianne Sawicki says, in Crossing Galilee, “The frontiers of Jesus’ land project into his soul; indigenous Galilean, transplanted Judean, dancing with Herodians and Romans. He is mestizo, culturally mixed, out-caste, transgressive of borders. This is why he can see things in new ways.” 

There’s another concept that is very useful for our exploration of boundaries and happiness, and to understand the fact that we are, we all of us are, boundary dwellers. This useful concept is “wild space.” 

Compare the diagram of Personal Boundary I introduced last Sunday and this one. These two exist not as opposite and incompatible but as something compatible and something we can live in both/and. These two different diagrams are ‘oblique’ to each other. 

Your Space          

Personal Boundary             

Their Space

Conventional World         

Your world             

Wild Space

Wild Space is the part of each of us that doesn’t quite fit into our conventional language or the lifestyles and values which are more generously accepted or praised in our culture and society. (those life styles which are more widely considered to draw success and happiness.) What is your wild space within you? What elicits yearnings and desires from within you that do not correspond to the consumer and market-oriented, individualistic, greedy world? (A quote from Sally McFague: Life Abundant) Wild space is the source of our being that makes us encounter the world in a certain way and change you in a certain way. 

I invite you to take time to ponder with me how we explore these spaces: Your Space, Their Space, Conventional World as the Space which influences the conventional wisdom about what it means to be happy and how you can be happy, and Wild Space: the authentic voices within and what you learn from relationship with others and with Mother Earth. We call the earth Mother because we believe our interaction with the environment to be a primary relationship that sustains life. How do you make your world? How do you live in those Spaces and on the boundaries and borderlands? As you explore these spaces, places, relationships, you are changing, discovering new and old ways of how you understand the world, what is good and what it is to be happy. You never stop changing. And you shouldn’t ever stop. Our life of border dwelling is never easy. At the corners of our life, we are stressed, we are burnt-out, angry, frustrated. Yet, our call is not to intentionally stop dwelling along the borders and boundaries, but to continue to learn about the vital work that can happen in these unsettling places. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me… For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.” In the same chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus also says “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Jesus calls us to be a borderland or boundary dweller, to lay down our life for others and for the community. It is not a calling to live a sacrificed, unjoyful life – giving up our freedom and our right to choose to live on our own and in our own way. It is a call for us to live abundantly – life abundant. But how does that happen? How does the shared life bring bounty? 

We build justice, because one more person pushes the limits and borders and then takes the consequences of pushing the limits and borders in order to effect change. Perseverance combined with being in the hard space; if more people joined, we would see a more perfect world more quickly. Healing occurs between people because somebody cares enough to reach out their hand to another. 

Care or pastoral care (I admire our pastoral care team, Joan and Muriel – very much) is a very courageous act because it requires you to take one more step beyond, that leads you out of your comfort zone or boundary. Each Christian is called to be a boundary dweller; being one who does not dwell inside the boundary walls, but on the uninhibited, bothersome, tricky borderlands of human encounter. ‘Care’ is a beautiful calling.

Caregiving is a hard job - for example, in Korea, we have the ethic of filial piety. This ethic is based on interdependence: Our mother has raised us up, feeding us, changing our clothes, sheltering us with love. So we pay our aging mother back with the same love and we care for her well-being because our own life was given from her from the beginning. But caring for somebody is hard. (More so, in Korean patriarchy, as the daughter-in-law is responsible for the primary care-giving of her mother-in-law. Think about it. We are interdependent, (tainted with patriarchy, but) so we do it, but care-giving is an immensely hard job. Love, joy, and commitment are there, yet more than just occasionally, worries, stress, frustration are there too. 

If the care for the vulnerable or the ailing, and the pursuit of social justice are border and boundary dwelling, being a boundary dweller is not well-attuned to the happiness formula our global capitalist and individualistic world promotes. Boundary dwelling as a Christian calling requires different and new ways of seeing what constitutes a good life, what promotes happiness. I imagine that no one among the first Jewish Christians ever said “Jesus lived a happy life.” Or “Jesus didn’t live a happy life.” And I bet none among them has ever thought that happiness is the crown we would inherit as Christians, but life abundance, living abundantly. Abundantly has nothing to do with being happy or not happy. Abundance is related to the “more”, the God: the ‘more’ than what appears to be happy.

The root of the word oppression is ‘being pressed’. It comes from press. “The press of the crowd; to press a pair of pants; press the button.” Presses are used to mold things or flatten them or reduce them, sometimes to reduce them by squeezing out the gases or liquids in them. Something pressed is something caught between or among barriers. To be oppressed we don’t have to be a racialized person, woman, gay or lesbian. If you feel you are pressed, caught between barriers in your life or in your present life stage, you are oppressed by what presses you. The expectation of happiness – what the happy and good life should look like; the well-trodden, crowded road towards success – can be oppression. I believe Jesus’ wisdom on border and boundary dwelling is this: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” He’s not removed the yoke or burden, but they are easy and light. Jesus, “The indigenous Galilean, dancing with Herodians and Romans, transgressive of borders”, moved between multiple places, agonizing and dancing with wild heart, to live the “more” and to live with the “more” – God, the Wisdom, in all things. 

Therefore, I ask you, in the hard places of oppression – whatever presses you – dare to live the more, live abundantly. Happiness and freedom from care may be the conventional wisdom of our time. But do not let the expectation of what happiness is supposed to be – independence, or you name it in your context - make you unhappy. Our calling is to live with courage in the face of oppression and what presses us. Our world is the complex world of convention and wild spaces. Navigate through them. Do not lose hope. Do not lose joy. Seek happiness, yet also know our truest call is to seek what is more than happy: Jesus, the good shepherd who knows the way, and the way itself is life abundant. 

Flesh and Bones: A Reflection on Boundaries, Luke 24:36-48 (Apr 15, 2018)

Sermon: Flesh and bones

Luke 24:36-48

One recent morning, Min-Goo and I were discussing “boundaries.” Min-Goo said, “You remember the priest who came from Myanmar. He invited us to his home for dinner a few times, when we lived in residence on the UBC Campus.” It was almost ten years ago now; Back then, we lived in the residence next to to the Iona ‘castle’ building at Vancouver School of Theology for about three years. Among the students, there were just a few of us who came from different countries. “One time he said to me,” Min-Goo continued, "'Canadians are cold and their heart is like a machine.' I wonder if the boundary you are talking about is what he tried to say at that time.”

When you come to this country as a newcomer, the first thing you learn (or not just learn; you learn that you must learn and understand this and work around it) is “boundaries,” or “personal boundaries.”

If you come from a collectivist culture, (not individualistic) the concept of personal boundaries is new and confusing. According to Wikipedia, personal boundaries are guidelines, rules or limits that a person creates to identify reasonable, safe and permissible ways for other people to behave towards them and how they will respond when someone passes those limits. 

To speak of my own experience, my first impression of Canadians was that most people were kind and compassionate, as long as we knew the boundaries and adopted the rules. To me, personal boundaries are still something foreign and hard to completely follow and be happy about. Building mutual relationships is very hard for many newcomers because they often do not know when and how mutuality start to bloom in the relationship. It often seems that the possibility is dependent upon another person’s willingness to open their heart and let us come into their life. A typical personal boundary may be illustrated like this: Stretch one arm out straight in front of you and turn around to make a full circle. 

The circle that is drawn at the edge of your finger is a typical, North-American-style personal boundary. In its positive function, it is helpful. It helps you to know your rights, who you are and what you need. Its main function is related to protection and containment, regulating the incoming and outgoing in the interactions between people. It exists to protect a healthy divide between oneself and the world, oneself and the other. Yet, it is in its nature based on hierarchical understanding, distance, neutrality, and power.

According to my Google search, there are several areas where boundaries apply: 

Material boundaries determine whether you give or lend things, such as money, your car, clothes, books, food, or toothbrushes. 

Physical boundaries pertain to your personal space, privacy, and body. Do you give a handshake or a hug - to whom and when?

Mental boundaries apply to your thoughts, values, and opinions. Are you easily suggestible? Do you know what you believe, and can you hold onto your opinions? 

Emotional boundaries distinguish separating your emotions and responsibility for them from someone else’s. It’s like an imaginary line or force-field that separates you and others. There are sexual boundaries and spiritual boundaries as well.

Many popular self-care and self-help books available in North America, generously use and favour the concept of personal boundaries. 

They would tell us that love can’t exist without boundaries. 

It is very true, but I wish to invite you to ponder with me why and how we may have become so accustomed to and feel so comfortable with using (or overusing) the concept of boundaries to articulate the model for right relations between people and communities.

I have theological and spiritual concerns regarding our generous use of the concept of boundaries.  For example, translate all the descriptions attached to personal boundaries to white privilege or male privilege. A personal boundary makes more sense when you have a privileged status and are a privileged individual, or when the individuals in the relationship are equal. The flip side of the personal boundary is that you have the right to separate yourself from the thoughts and feelings of others and not to engage with them because you have no responsibility for the other’s well-being if you don’t choose to. You have the right to protect yourself from being violated by others, but what happens when your idea of ‘violation’ is being asked to consider any idea that challenges your sense of supremacy?

Boundaries don’t work so well and makes less sense when the oppressed want solidarity, seek mutuality, and ask you to stay with them in their pain and hurt, but your own boundaries exclude acknowledging the pain and hurt you may have caused or benefited from. 

Our reference, our ultimate reference is Jesus. Jesus’ Gospel doesn’t have a single chapter that teaches us boundaries. 

In its root and foundation, ‘boundaries’ are an ethic that emphasize distance, neutrality, separation, and individualism, an inheritance from white, male, patriarchy. 

Keeping healthy boundaries is important for right relations, yet it is not equivalent to a right relationship. For being in right relations or relationship, we need more than healthy boundaries. What is the ‘more’? I believe these are the questions the Gospel teaches us to ask.

In today’s Gospel story, the risen Jesus stands among the disciples, coming from and out of nowhere. The disciples are startled and terrified, thinking that the other is a ghost. Not real. There’s a sense of “This is something wrong.” This presence is unexpected!

The first word that Jesus uses every time he appears to his disciples after Easter is, “Peace”. The disciples are terrified, in fear, looking at this unidentified other who has intruded and is standing in their space, in their boundary, without warning. (That’s Jesus’ first violation of their personal boundary.) 

Jesus says to them, “Why are you frightened?” “Look at my hands and my feet; Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones.” He shows them his hands and his feet. (Jesus has rather a loose physical boundary). 

Then, here’s my favourite part: This is the revealing moment in which we can sense who Jesus is and what he teaches. Jesus is the authority, the master, the teacher, the God, the divine. We are quite familiar with the stories in which Jesus’ actions accord perfectly with his divine status: He breaks the bread and gives it to people to eat. In the post-Easter story in the Gospel of John, the risen Jesus meets the disciples at the lakeshore, cooks the fish on the pit fire, calls them, and gives them food to eat. In the previous story in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus also reveals himself to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus by breaking the bread and handing it to them. He is the High Priest who performs the sacrament. No story reports how Jesus ate. In today’s Gospel story, Jesus is a hungry person, with real flesh and real bones, real peace and real humor, asking the disciples, “Have you anything here to eat?” (challenging the material boundary).

One commentary says this story reveals “The most unashamed, materialistic nature of Easter”. 

Jesus of such power shows without shame his materialistic, physical need and vulnerability, and makes the disciples relate to him by giving him what they have: a piece of broiled fish. The story tells us that Jesus takes it and eats it in the presence of his students, in front of the eyes of his students, watching him until he finishes. I imagine that Jesus eats with care, with respect, slowly, taking his time, unhurried. 

Our theology and spirituality are more concerned about person-to-person-touching; The gospel teaches us that we should always be more concerned about one-more-person-to-be-accepted than about our-boundary-to-be-protected. We are, in Christ, willing to stay in the ambiguity and sisterly and brotherly love and solidarity, looking toward mutual relationships - our ears, eyes, minds, hearts open to incoming and outgoing stories -  boundaries opening two ways. 

Our culture seems to be so addicted to spreading the self-care, self-help lessons of boundary-keeping and maintenance. However, we are also reminded that for Christians, spirituality is more like

• opting to be vulnerable. 
• Letting ourselves be taken advantage of 
• absorbing pain and suffering
• receiving the gift of inconvenience 
• taking risks and being overwhelmed 
• growing in relationships of interdependence. 

Our ultimate reference of such spirituality is Jesus. Touch and see the Jesus of warm flesh and strong bones, here, lovingly within your boundaries.

Sermon: Easter is here... (John 20:19-31), Apr 8, 2018

Easter is here… 

John 20:19-31

I began church ministry in 2012 on Vancouver Island, and then served at Meadowood in Winnipeg. Since my first Sunday worship experience with you last September, I have been continuing this spiritual journey called ministry, fortunately and gratefully, at Immanuel. Right after the Good Friday service, when I joined the church’s informal, unofficial, annual tradition of post-Good Friday service lunch at the Pancake House on Pembina — you may well wonder why pancakes come after the Good Friday service, and not on Shrove Tuesday. Some churches have a pancake dinner the night before Ash Wednesday, which is the starting day of the season of Lent. Since Lent is traditionally a liturgical time of fasting, people have made a tradition of eating pancakes and sausages on Shrove Tuesday – pancakes on Good Friday falls outside of that tradition. Don’t think about it too hard - it‘s just one more fun, quirky Immanuel “behaviour” which has no theological problem, but reveals a just slightly “unorthodox” bending, which I love. During the lunch, a member who sat across from me kindly commented, “So, Ha Na - now, you have experienced with us the full cycle of the church year.” I responded, “not until Easter. After Easter, I will have.” So, really, now, WOW, I have arrived at Easter, having travelled safely and joyfully with you through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Holy Week. Time flies fast.

For the past 6 years, as I have grown in ministry, my understanding of Easter has grown too. I am sure that your understanding and how you embody the Easter experience as your own has also grown. As each of us is a unique creation of God and our life stories evolve in overlapping yet different paths, we can understand each other’s Easter experience as they truly are, with compassion, and at the same time we deepen our understanding of Easter, each year, with new insights from our changing lived experience. 

What has personally stood out for me and therefore has shaped my theology of Easter is the following definition: Easter is and should be a bodily and physical resurrection experience, as much as it is the spiritual experience of hope and new life. If we cling to the understanding that redemption or salvation is about the immortality of our soul — that kind of thinking is misdirected; it doesn’t seem to me to be the right reason to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. Instead, I believe in the significance of the meaning and power of the bodily resurrection of Jesus and therefore ourselves as well. Every year, Nature reveals the great analogy and the image of the risen Jesus through the miracle of the spring which comes back at the right time, in the right way. 

In the Christian tradition, we have this liturgical time of three days. On Friday, Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. On Sunday, (or on the Third Day), he rose again. In between these two days, on Holy Saturday, which is the day of the Sabbath, (the shadow, the middle space, the void), the Apostle’s Creed mentions that Jesus “descended into Hell.” “Hell” is not the Christian place of eternal punishment, but the Jewish Sheol or the Greek Hades, an afterlife place of nonexistence. This is where the bodies of the righteous rested, those who died from injustice, who awaited God’s transformation of this world and the imminence of God’s justice.  It was those who lived in a time of violent injustice with the hope of rising again at the end of the world (eschaton— meaning not just the end in a chronological sense. My son’s worst fear is a meteor or Planet X hitting the earth, forcing us to face the end of the earth in fire too soon, but I assured him if it happens, it might happen millions and millions of years from now. Our faith in Christ and resurrection is not about the far future of millions of years later.) Holy Saturday represents the ultimate time of Uncertainty - on that day, Jesus descended into hell, or Hades, below the earth, to liberate all the righteous ones along with himself. He was not alone on the first Easter. He was with the thousands and thousands of the righteous when he rose again. That’s our belief in communal resurrection.

In this sense, if resurrection is our Christian hope and is in the centre of our believing, (and yes it is) it is because we believe we will rise with the whole of humanity and we will transform to be the new earth of nonviolent justice and love - even if imperfect, now, perfectly in eschaton (the end). 

It is Utopia — the perfect, unimaginable, beautiful cosmic transfiguration. Utopia comes from the Greek for “no place” or “not this place” or “not here, not now”. Why does it happen? Is it automatic or just because God planned it? No, Resurrection is both an event of the future and the hope of now, because the creation below this earth and upon this earth demand it! We cry out to God for restorative justice, warless peace, and cleaning up the mess humanity has spread across this planet through love! 

I see the prominent images of the bodily Risen Jesus in the gifts of Spring. We sometimes think that the declaration of “Easter is here” almost means the same as “Spring is here.”

Fran Darling, who was the minister at Chemainus United Church, was diagnosed with cancer in early 2012, and was advised to take medical leave. I was a student and was looking for a congregation where I could start my internship. I was interviewed and given a chance to temporarily work for them as their student minister. Fran really wanted to come back - she wanted to be part of the life of the church as much as she could, while I was there. I tried to accommodate her wish and the congregation was strongly supportive in general. Her fight with cancer was very inspiring, yet her health rapidly deteriorated. By early 2013, Fran knew she was going to die, and so she prepared for her last sermon on Easter. Her death was impending, and the vigil for her passing began during Holy Week. Many gathered around the Maundy Thursday table, thinking of Fran, who was at home. On Easter Saturday, 6 a.m., Fran passed away. She wrote in her Easter sermon “A West Coast spring unfolds very, very slowly… We cannot understand Easter’s joy without beginning with grief.”

I witnessed that Fran’s spiritual journey did not end with her physical death. Together with those who grieve her death, her ending was not yet entered into fullness or completion until we, together, experienced Easter in the day's morning as fellow members of the earth. We only slowly realize the truth, everyone and every being taking our own time.  

On that Easter morning, the day after Fran’s death, 9 am, I got out of my car and stood in the church parking lot. I looked around and then looked up. I was standing on the quiet, warm earth which constantly moved with energy - creative and new. What I remember of that Easter Sunday is that the sunshine was pervasive. No clouds. I met the bright, brilliant blue sky with my eyes wide open to see through the sky. I tried to bid farewell to Fran. Instead, what I received was blessing, endless and unconditional blessing in the splendid light and warmth of the Spring. (And the pink cherry blossoms were in full bloom, everywhere!) It was the bodily, physical, temporary experience of resurrection, reconciliation and forgiveness for me.

Sometimes it is quite hard to explain what we know intuitively and translate it to a more reasoned logic. How can I explain better my physical, bodily experience of the resurrection of Christ in theology, other than just trying to ask you to pause, recollect and remember the moments when you were in a certain place and Nature’s beauty or Mother Earth’s material transformation touched your spirit and body and granted you hope. A beautiful moment of Spring which embodies the astounding, fresh, material, constant change is an example of The Utopian event called Easter.

I celebrate that I had my first Easter with you this year. I wonder what our journey together will be like after sharing more Easters and experiences at Immanuel. What Easter might we be able to dream together, live together, and act together, like Spring, as the Utopian event, ‘warm and flowery’, ‘snow melting, green shooting’? Will we emerge from our tomb: our body opening up like a flower, our voice becoming stronger, our flesh becoming warmer? May we witness resurrection, our physical and bodily participation in Easter’s dance, in our own and shared life together.