Remembrance Sunday sermon: Building a Cathedral, (Mark 12:38-44), Nov 11, 2018

Sermon: Building a Cathedral  

Text: Mark 12:38-44

Remembrance Day is a very special time for me.

I remember H, the worship committee chair at my first congregation, came to me and gently asked me to include God Save the Queen during the service on the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day - which we simply called Remembrance Sunday. This was 2013, so I had been in Canada for seven years. I responded, “No.” I didn’t understand why Helen would even ask for a pro-monarchy anthem that week. In those early years of my ministry and living in Canada, I wasn’t able to empathise with H’s respect and love of British Monarchy, or her loyalty to a distant ruler. Since 2013, I have been privileged to preach on war and peace, sacrifice and loss, and hope, on a number of “Remembrance Sundays.” I admit that I’ve had a huge learning curve through the years! My time in Canada has taught me a lot – about a lot of things. Time builds understanding. Time really plays an invisible, yet powerful role in helping us understand the hidden meaning in things, in the same way it helps us become a good friend to somebody. “Time” - how much we have known a person - does its magic. Time matters. 

What I’ve learned over the years, every November, is that I need to spiritually and pastorally engage with my people, and to do so, I must “lay down” my perspective and beliefs, and being “disarmed” from those belief systems, listen and share my humanity and emotions with my church members, equally. Of course, when I first started my congregational ministry, in 2013, I was not very well aware of this need to engage on an equal footing. 

In those early years, there was one pertinent belief statement that really puzzled me and made me wonder. It was a major conflict which I really had to wrestle with and fight to find clarity of thought, before I produced my sermons on Remembrance Sunday. I remember what I said in 2015. Here it is. “I wonder what it really means when we say, ‘For they have sacrificed their lives that we may live in this country peacefully or that we may be free.’ This belief seems to originate from our Christian confession that Christ has bled and died on the cross so that God forgives our sins and saves us.’ (Atonement theology) 

My puzzlement lands on the word, ‘freedom’. When we say, ‘we’, who do we refer to? Who is free, when, even with our best intentions, the real face of war never allows anyone to be free. Who is free, when others suffer?” This statement seems to me to assume that military conflicts occur overseas, outside of our national borders, and the sacrifices outside keep us inside, safe and free. I struggle with this statement: first as a Christian who believes in Jesus’ choice of non-violence and proclamation of the reign of peace, and secondly as a Korean, who, even though I didn’t personally experience the Korean War, indirectly witnessed and lived with the old, destructive and divisive remnants from the war itself and from the Cold War. These have been huge obstacles to the advancement of democracy, harmony and peace in the land of Korea. They are powers that still oppress those who fight for the rights and dignity of poor people or even the ordinary people who are forced to sacrifice their rights for their land and their country’s peace to their own Korean government and to the militarized agenda of the US, which still has about 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea.

The following is part of the reflection I shared in 2013, describing the Korean War. “When killing has occurred, when wounding has occurred, we have not killed the unknown, the ‘other’; we have killed and wounded one another, our brothers and sisters. Koreans call the Korean War “Our Great Tragedy of Mutual Killings of One’s Own Brothers and Sisters.” (the literal translation.) The North and the South still point guns at each other on the 38th parallel; Russia and the US and their allies used Korea for their proxy war, and the US, Russia, Japan and China would never really want to see in their eyes Korea (I do not like saying two Koreas, and am still not used to saying Two Koreas.) succeeding in Reunification, as what they want is not peace, but the Korean peninsula’s geo-political advantages. The US continues to build military bases in South Korea despite the people’s desperate, decades-long grassroots protests. The phrase of their sacrifice overseas and our freedom in our land does not translate comfortably into Korean, or into the languages of many other vulnerable countries. All are wounded. All are hurt. There is no hero. The others were not unknown – they were our own brothers and sisters, with our shared blood. We try to love but it is so hard to reach out while we hold a weapon in our hand.”   

That was my truth. It still is, but “time” has slowly brought me to a more generous space where my own defensive walls break down, I become more understanding and take time before I speak, with my eyes fixed on revolutionary patience… which is, “laying down” my own defence system and rigidity. Instead of using the primary lens of my life experiences, I began to look at the young people and their families in our past (in Canadian history) who were just like us, ordinary folk who loved their life and had dreams to pursue with passion and commitment. These ordinary heroes gave up their education and interrupted their careers and families, to act upon their belief in freedom, faith in God, and for justice and goodness for all people. On this day, we truly unite in silence to remember them, their sacrifice and courage.

Now I am in the third chapter of understanding Remembrance…, whose title may be, “Yet I Still Believe in Peace…” On this day, we remember that, as we prayed in the Call to Worship this morning, in the 11th hour, on the 11th day, in the 11th month, 100 years ago, in 1918, we “lay down our weapons.” This is what we are called to remember.

Because I believe in peace, and we should, in this world, still globally militarized, believe in true peace even when the true meaning of and search for peace are confused with ‘security’. “The peace negotiators who travel to Geneva or Stockholm are men who act like business agents.” Dorothy Solle says, in “The Window of Vulnerability.” “For the negotiators, peace is a business — good when it is successful and promises satisfaction to both sides”, the worldly powers. 

Many of us say, “Of course, we want peace.” However, if we truly examine what we say, honestly and with compassion, peace in our terms may actually be the hope of the middle class, of the Group of Eight highly-industrialized nations (called the G-8), which can send out their troops to other parts of the world — mostly, the places which can gain us geo-political advantages. Does our reference of peace in Canada also mean insuring the security of our nation, our class?

Maybe Remembrance Day is when we go deeper than a national ideology to the Christian spiritual root of non-violence. Understanding violence and non-violence is my next goal - my fourth chapter - to truly enhance the right and dignity of my life. It will be a conversion. It is a passion for the impossible. Some may think that embracing non-violence is too foolish or naive. But maybe we haven’t really sufficiently explored spirituality, trained ourselves and studied the mechanics of non-violence. It may sound unrealistic and irrelevant — “OK. For civil disobedience, to fight for equality and democracy at home, for such causes of a relatively minor scale, non-violence makes sense. What about world peace?” In response to this imagined question, my response would be, the near-impossibility of the task shouldn’t convince us to forsake searching and studying the politics and spirituality of non-violence and our conversion to peace… If “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way (Mahatma Gandhi)” is true to our emotional and spiritual realm, if civil disobedience can bring a change to our social paradigm, in principle, it should be true in relation to building world peace as well. 

Peace through peace is truly a giant work, and most human beings, like me, haven’t really trained ourselves or been encouraged by our public system to really think about it, not to mention, embrace it. Society wouldn’t encourage it. But Jesus would, in the Gospels. Maybe, the starting point of thinking about all of this - peace through peace - is realizing how it seems an impossibly gigantic work to do, but believing that it is never too late to start, it is never useless and fruitless to do the work of peace. In my past few sermons, I introduced Dorothee Solle a few times, and the concept of Revolutionary Patience, and here, I would like to leave you with a luminous excerpt from Solle: “Once, when I was particularly depressed, a friend and pacifist from Holland told me something very beautiful: ‘The people who worked to build the cathedrals in the Middle Ages never saw them completed. It took two hundred years and more to build them. Some stone-cutter somewhere sculpted a beautiful rose (the image on the screen); it was his life’s work, and it was all he ever saw. But he never entered into the cathedral. But one day, the cathedral was really there. You must imagine peace in the same way.” For building a Cathedral-sized peace, time matters. To sculpt a beautiful rose, just one, like the “two coins” of the widow in our Gospel story, is the starter.