Sermon: Grace is Everywhere (March 30, 2014)

Sermon: Grace is Everywhere.

Ephesians 5: 8-14

Today we have heard such a beautiful passage from Ephesians: “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” Nothing to add or subtract – it is a complete description of where we are and what journey we have walked through in recent years, together and as friends. Every journey has a call to transformation - spiritual and personal metamorphosis through the changes of light and shadows. It is interesting that light becomes most plainly evident when contrasted with the deepest darkness. We appreciate the ray of light when it is most needed, and we learn by experience that the deepest darkness does not necessarily indicate ‘emptiness’ - it simply means that there is ‘absence’ of the light. We will see everything we treasured and loved again, just as it is, when the light of God graces us.

As we age, and as life around us changes every day, we may feel that too many things are leaving us; we are losing them so fast and sometimes so brutally.  But the reality in God is that nothing has changed. Nothing has changed since the very beginning of the universe and human life on this earth through this very moment, now. When its appointed time comes, a form of life dies, yet the energy and vitality that has made the life brilliant and miraculous and so precious, the creative and ‘creational’ energy of construction and deconstruction, the energy of love that is born of divine blessing, never goes away, never falls extinct. It metamorphosizes … like forsythia. We see forsythia blossoming this month on Vancouver Island – and it is a perennial Korean favourite in the spring. It ‘diffuses’ itself into the vibrating, warm air of spring!, (... even as its flowers fall to the ground below.)

Like forsythia or wisteria, blossoming and releasing its burdens and blessings, a life releases and spreads itself everywhere – into the endlessly deepening and widening web of life -  into the whole universe. So, life itself is never non-existent even if it dies because it metamorphoses everywhere, blessing every creation of our God and vibrating like the energy of Springtime. Like spring, when the dull soil fractures open and reveals tiny sprouts of green rising like a million tiny miracles, life metamorphoses into a phenomenon of everything growing, everything new.

In contemporary theology, Christ is not only thought of as an individual, Jewish man who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago. We also have begun to appreciate the theological meaning of the Cosmic Christ. In this theology, we don’t demarcate between the natural and the spiritual (or supernatural). Christ is ever-present, through the web of relations of all sentient living beings and through the history of all human interactions and connections and relationships, and also through a spiritual realm we cannot ever fathom completely as long as we live here on earth. Christ is with us and through us and connects us with all living beings, as well as the natural and spiritual realms.

When I attended a workshop at the Duncan Hospice Society, the workshop leader addressed the time when people experience their loved one’s death. For many people, losing a loved one makes them feel a great existential anxiety. They ask, “Who will I become?” or “Where I will be?”, or “Where has my loved one gone, and where is he or she now?” Many of those who ask this question don’t claim any belief in a spiritual life or in religion. Yet the sharp realization of their loved one’s absence, the irrevocable fact that their loved one does not exist with them anymore makes them question their assumptions about the structure of the Universe as they ask, “Where is my loved one now?”

We Christians believe that our loved ones are with Christ in life, in death, and in life beyond death because Christ is everywhere, Christ is ever-present, Christ is ever-metamorphosing, Christ is the bridge between our physical life and our spiritual life; He is the link between nature and the supernatural, changing the face of life and the face of the earth forever. Christ is the name for every phenomenon of life, bearing witness of life, death, and resurrection.

This week, when I read through Fran’s on-line blog journal, I understood that Fran knew this truth of Cosmic Christ, as, in her writing, it was so obvious that her faith and belief is that everywhere God is grace and God’s amazing grace is everywhere. Honestly, her use of this particular geophysical concept of ‘everywhere’ touched me very deeply.

Here are two quotes from her journal that I would like to share:

The first one was written on Aug 22, 2012, at 9 am. “I remain grateful to God for the life I have led, for the many surprising gifts in the life I continue to live, for the company of the Holy Spirit, and the company of all of you on this mysterious journey. When I dare to face the enormity of love that exists in this world, I am overwhelmed. No wonder we are all hesitant to accept this Amazing Grace! (Yet) it is everywhere.”

The following quote also shows her exquisite, deep and beautiful spirituality. When she was writing this entry on Mar 10, 2013, she was struggling with shallow breathing and discomfort.

“Spiritually this is a tough place to be, especially when I stand in the place of preaching the Good news! So once again I look the cross, and this is really new in my life. I have always focused on joy and resurrection and Life. But for me right now, it is comforting and encouraging to think of Jesus in that place of horror, taking on the whole of the world’s pain to experience it, out of that iron-clad covenant steadfast love. He was and remains one of us.

I really do believe the whole of the universe is born out of Love, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, and how we name that creative power does not really matter. If there is only one Divine Source, God doesn’t particularly care how we name it.”

As we remember our friend and minister, mother and grandmother and wife, Fran, I picked a hymn with the text of Psalm 42 – As the Deer Pants for the Water  - as our response. My hope is that when we sing this song, we can participate not just with our voices and hearts, but with the deepest part of our souls, offering up our spirits to worship our God. Fran had the heartfelt desire to worship our God in community, and with the family of God forever - and so do we. The tune is very familiar but the words are new and so beautiful. Please sing from your heart, loving and tasting the words for your own soul. As today’s reading tells us, may Christ shine upon Fran and every one of us here and upon everyone we remember. Amen.

Children's Time: Jelly Bean Prayers (Lenten Prayer for Children), March 23, 2014

Children’s Time: Jelly Bean Prayers as Lenten Prayer for Children 

Today, I would like to share with you an interesting prayer you can pray during Lent. We have heard Veronica read the message for us when we gathered around the table,

“Pray like no one is watching you. Fast like no one is watching you. Do good like no one is

watching you. God knows.”

Can anyone share with us how you understand the message?

Wonderful. 

Have you seen the bag I brought?? It’s somewhere around here! Here it is. 

I wonder what we’ve got in the bag – and how can it help us to learn a prayer.

(Open the bag – a bunch of jelly beans…)

Do any of you like jelly beans?

What kind of things can you do with jelly beans?

(We can eat them. We can decorate a Gingerbread house. We can try different flavour combinations. We can make pictures! What’s great about jelly beans for me

personally is that they have different colours!)

Could you sort out the jelly beans in front of you by colours?

Red

Green

Yellow

Orange

Purple

Pink

Okay - well done!

Now, can you choose one jelly bean of your favourite colour?

Could you tell us which colour you have chosen?

Great.

Now, when we use these jelly beans for a Lenten Prayer, each colour is given a special

meaning.

Red is for Christ… a sacrifice.

       Sacrifice is quite a big word – Can anyone explain to us what ‘sacrifice’ means? (receive answers.) Giving up for others. Showing how we love Christ and the people we love by our actions.

Green is for the shade of the palm tree… Doing a good deed.

Yellow is for God’s light … Kindness to others.

Orange is for prayers at twilight … bed-time prayers.

Purple is for days of sorrow …. Saying sorry to someone, saying goodbye to someone you love.

Pink is for each new tomorrow … Forgiving others, forgiving yourself.

I made small copies for you to keep… (give them to the children.)

When we do these things, making a sacrifice, doing a good deed, being kind to others, bed-time prayers, saying sorry to someone, forgiving others, they can be our prayers and will strengthen us and bring us closer to God and to one another.

Feel free to eat the jelly bean on your palm or not to, it’s your choice, but remember to do the good deed you have chosen as often as you can as your Lenten prayer. God bless you.

Sermon: The Reason We Reach Out (Mar 9, 2014)

Title: The Reason We Reach Out
Text: Matthew 4:1-11

I felt so good when I got back home from the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper last week! I was fully refreshed and recharged - as you can see from the picture on the screen, I was fully satisfied with the delicious food and contented by the friendship and happy chats that I experienced that night. You can see all the pictures that so perfectly capture the happiness on the faces of people that night if you visit our church’s Facebook or mine. You see, Facebook can be a great resource – it is a great way to link us and connect us all if we use it wisely. Thanks to every volunteer who gave their talents and time that night and to those who came and supported the event with their gifts of money – each individual gift may be small, but when it is all gathered, it is not only a large sum of money, but a wonderful way to gift ‘grace’ to a family in Kenya. Thanks to the outreach team, again, for organizing this event in such a loving way.

As you know, our church has, for some years, sponsored a family in Kenya to help send the girls – Lucy and Sonia – to school. Recently, the girls’ father sent a few letters asking us to support not only the girls’ education, but to send some extra money to help the family’s struggle through recent hardships, including some problems with the family’s business. It made some of us feel uncomfortable. Just before the election in 2013, which the people in Kenya and the world were so fearful about, remembering the bloody eruption of violence after the election in 2007, our sponsored family moved to the border country next to Busia, Kenya, for their own safety. They were safe, and we were happy for them, but their recent requests for more money concern us because we are not sure what our best response should be.  

I understand that our sponsored family’s kinship, family, community-oriented culture may be essentially different from our Western culture where individualism and individual rights are of the foremost primary value. From some of my first-hand and personal experiences with people from Africa, including Kenya, I know their culture has some drastically different underpinnings, especially how they understand and value kinship and relationship and how they perceive and evaluate what makes a true friendship.  Here are a few of my first-hand experiences – when they call another a friend, they don’t spend years building up trust and mutual obligations - they immediately expect that the other person must provide care for them, and the extent and the intimacy of care they expect has no correspondence in Western culture. For example, if one person needs to go, let’s say, 1 km to find a washroom, the other person, if they call each other a friend, is expected to and must go with the person to find that far away washroom, when, in our culture,  there is no need of accompaniment for such a basic and personal task. Another interesting experience I had is that as soon as I was called a friend, my African friend immediately asked me to comb her hair that was braided in an African way, applying a special salve. My African friend’s understanding of friendship and care wasn’t comparable to any measure or expectation of friendship that I experienced either in Korea or in Canada. Very intimate. Very immediate. Too intense. Too close. It seems that they have no concept of the personal boundaries that we in the West keep between people. My point, as I say these things, is that it tells me that they still keep the kind of culture that used to sustain the culture of my home country a long time ago –this kind of deep kinship and care-based culture does not work in the now highly-individualized and Westernized culture of Korea.

Assuming that the Korea of my great-great-grandmother’s generation or earlier may be quite close to the African’s, I guess that, to the family in Kenya, the survival and sustenance of the family as a whole comes before the girls’ individual educations, no matter how deeply the family is committed to the girls’ education. I assume that if the girls are educated with the help of our financial aid, while the family struggles with other, more basic financial needs, it wouldn’t make sense to many Kenyans. The reason why I make and share these unexamined assumptions here is not to say that my guess is right, but to say that when we support somebody or a family, whoever it is, the principle must be that we open ourselves to curiosity, learning, understanding and engagement.

The first consideration, even before our financial capacity to support them, is to know that we are engaging into a ‘relationship’ with them. Aiding the family and the girls with our financial resources is the easiest part of reaching out to them. Our commitment is not composed only of our money, time, and fundraising, although those things are both appreciated and precious. What we must take seriously and engage with our hearts is friendship. To put it in a different way, what comes before our financial commitment is the why question – WHY do we reach out to them with financial resources? If we say that we do what we do because we want to help the family with gifts of money, it is not the response to the question ‘why’ at all - we just simply repeated what we do to answer to the question of why we do it. Last Sunday I introduced the concept of the Golden Circle. 

The point of the Golden Circle is that people know what they do, but seldom ask why they do what they do. Why do we support the family and Lucy and Sonia in Kenya? Because we believe that we are called to make friendships and extend friendships at the margins, at the boundaries of our lives, in difficult places. Forging a friendship in a difficult place calls us to step beyond our comfort zones, take a risk - because we care about trust and value faithfulness. The amazing thing about friendship is that we are invited to give our very self – and this is exactly what we do when we enter into a relationship with someone else in the name of Christ. Since we decided to support this family, we have been invited to the call that is for all Christians – to make friendship at the margins, at the boundaries, in difficult and odd places. Last Tuesday those who were part of the pancake supper enjoyed the great feeling of refreshment that good friendship brings – and I believe that the deep secret behind that great happiness we shared is that there was another friendship present – our friendship with the family in Kenya.

Friendship is a fundamental human interaction that’s based on sincere feelings and trust. True friendship is based on equal relationships even though one friend may be given aid by the other. Outreach is great not because it adds one more tangible item on the list of what we do as a church, but because it reminds us that we must extend our friendships beyond our comfort zone and beyond this community. When we make friends with one another we learn how to be faithful to another even in the hardest, the most difficult places and times - we learn that faithfulness is much more valuable under those circumstances.  When we are called to follow Jesus, we are called to the deep hospitality, the radical hospitality that Jesus exemplified. This hospitality is not the practice we extend to invited dinner guests or visiting family; we exercise and extend radical hospitality when we open ourselves and engage our hearts “To the strange and to the stranger.”

When we welcomed people with hospitality at the pancake supper, we also invited the family in Kenya to be present with us as friends, guests, and strangers. We need to learn how to be faithful to the “unusual” friendship.

As we begin our Lenten Season of this year, I hope that we may remember this year’s Lenten theme: “We live in a Web of Love.” I hope that today’s Children’s message may also remind us that we are called to live out our life as a church as a Sharing Community. Jesus says, in today’s Gospel, “We can’t live by bread alone.” Turning a stone into bread is like sending money to our Kenyan family for their sustenance. However, Jesus didn’t tell us to give bread in today’s story. What he said, exactly, is that we don’t live by bread alone. We give the gift of friendship that is a holy currency, holy money that moves and circles around and nourishes and replenishes ourselves as well as those we befriend. Making friendships at the oddest places and learning to be faithful with unlikely response, unlikely care and unlikely friendship is a distinctive call to all Christians, and must be a principle as we reach out to the family in Kenya, every person we meet and everything we do to advance humanity among us in the name of Christ.