For John W

Funeral Sermon for John W

Text: 1 Corinthians 13:1-13

We’ve just heard 1 Corinthians chapter 13: the apostle Paul’s beautiful description of the love that never ends. As for prophecies, as for tongues, as for knowledge, they will come to an end; however, there is no end for the true, faithful love. We do know that some loves come to an end; we do hear about loves that do not last. Under the heavens, all things seem to have their end - and most things do. What love is this that Paul wants us to know? What is this love which is greater than any words that the angels could speak, this love which is superior to any human boast of  power, knowledge or wealth? At the end of our life’s journey, what is left undestroyed?

What is left is not our body, our bank account, our success or failure, but the love we have received and the love we have given and the countless ripples we made on the life water of the people we loved, the communities we cared for, and our world. This love that lasts in the hearts of the world and the people bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. This love is remembered, and echoes on like the ripples in an endless ocean.

Today, we remember John Wiens and celebrate the life he lived. He was a life-long musician, talented and dedicated – I hear that there were not many instruments he didn’t play. He liked to play old time fiddles and others. He served his community of faith with the same affection and dedication he gave to his music. Most importantly, he loved his family. Barbara remembers that after days of travel, when John walked in, he would say, “I’m home. I love you.”

Last week, I had the honour to be asked to meet John at Victoria General Hospital; I was told that day would be John’s last day here with us. It was a beautiful late-Spring day. All things in nature were fully welcoming the arrival of the fresh-born summer. Everything looked ready to bloom into its full potential, at any time. The green energy of God was all around, breathing in and out. While driving over the bridge to get to the hospital, I quickly glanced at the river. It was glowing with thousands of small wavelets, flowing like silky wrinkles, from the south to the north. Driving on the bridge, looking down on this river, ancient but ever-new, I prayed for John. I prayed that John’s life, granted to him and to us, would return to God as the rain returns to the river. This river, whether it is deeply unmoving in the frozen winter, or beginning to yield to Spring’s warmth, is the same river. Through all the changes, there is something that remains: an essence that is vitally pulsing, ever-changing on the surface but always a part of the whole, sustaining all around it with Divine purpose, active and alive, now and in the future.

River or love, I believe that there is something that doesn’t change. Our beings, like a river, like love, like music, manifest splendid diversity and beauty in different stories and forms of life. We change along with the changes that life brings. In fact, following the flow and the changing rhythm of life is how we accept life and live it fully, and discover its mystery and gift. Yet, in faith, we also see that when we fully realize the essential character of life that is change, we even more clearly see below the changes, inside the changes, there is something that never changes, never has its end. We, who participate in God’s being and becoming, are inherently capable of seeing and meeting God, who gives meaning, grace, gifts, sustenance. God, whether we call God River or Love, never hides God’s prevailing existence! May God bless this whole earth of ours as we continue to live life with praise, and may the spirit of John joins God’s and become one and reside with God - forever. Amen.

Sermon for Pentecost/I.D.A.H.O. service (International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Oppression), May 15, 2016

Sermon: The Love That Casts Out Fear

Text: Acts 2: 1-21

Last Saturday, I chose to attend a whole-day Affirm event at Churchill Park United Church, called Spirit and Soul: not Determined by Anatomy. The theme of the event was understanding and embracing the transgender community. We had four theme speakers and used the sanctuary as our gathering place, sitting at the tables cafeteria-style. The day’s work turned out to be one of the most life-transforming events I have ever experienced; it not only educated me but it solved a very personal question I never shared with anyone else, that had gone un answered for the past 20 years.

When my family and I arrived at Churchill Park, I was relieved to see that there were two other small children as well as my two boys. As the church provided child-minding in their nursery, I said hello to the other parents, introducing my kids to them and asking their kids’ names. They looked like a typical gay family composed of two young dads and their beautiful kids. I sat down; the first theme speaker came from the Rainbow Resource Centre. He taught us what sex and what gender means, who are cisgenders and who are transgenders. Cisgender refers to a person who has a gender identity that is the same as the gender they were assigned at birth. Transgender refers to a person who has a gender identity that is different from the gender they were assigned at birth or from societal expectations.

The next speaker was Trevor MacDonald and I was very surprised! My eyes were opened! Really! He was one of the dads I had briefly met that morning; he came up to the stage, and introduced himself to the gathered people as a transgender male. He transitioned from female to male before his marriage, and was married to his partner. They wanted to have children so much that they researched and started proceedings to adopt children, only to find that it would be a pretty challenging process for them in their particular situation. At the time, Trevor had had his ‘top’ surgery done and was taking testosterone. However, Trevor, whose spirit, soul, mind being all male, chose to not to do the bottom surgery as it might cause some serious health risks, and it is “terribly” expensive. That meant he was able to be pregnant.  To have a child, he stopped taking hormones and as soon as his cycle came back, he took the very natural process of having a baby and now he is a dad of his own beautiful, healthy children, 5 years and 18 months old. Trevor shared many more fascinating stories that day, but I’ll stop here - if you want to know more; you can visit Trevor’s blog www.milkjunkies.net to read his amazing stories. Earlier I said the event was one of the most life-changing experiences for me, and it’s mostly due to my encountering Trevor and his husband and meeting with their family. Until I met them, my understanding was so deeply ingrained with heterosexual normativity I couldn't even think of this possibility: that a transgender man can love the same sex (male). In other words, I hadn't examined my own heterosexualism until I met Trevor, and presumed that a transgender man would love or develop a committed loving relationship with their opposite sex, which would be a woman. I was wrong. I was mistaken. I realized that I was so entrenched in a heterosexual-centered world view. Later, Trevor taught me that a person’s sexual orientation is separate and independent from the person’s gender identity, and that is true for a transgender man - and all of us, really.

It was not the end of the day’s awakening for me. I had a question that I personally had held on to me since I was a high school student in Korea. I remember that when everyone in my family was sleeping in the night, I asked my question on an online site, wishing that somebody would answer my question; there was no return answer, though. My own gender identity and sexual orientation have never been a really big life challenging issue for me. I was quite adaptive and could easily blend in. However, the way I am is never gone. (The way you are IS never gone) It comes back, in different situations and in different life phases. The question would never really change my life. However, I have known that it would not be deleted either, until it was answered. (I hope and believe that you know what I mean. Gender identity and sexual orientation is essentially part of you. Whether you are in questioning or certain about them, the process is the journey toward having the whole map of your beautiful make up.) But all I can say for now is that seeing and meeting real people in real relationships, navigating their way through life like Trevor and his partner and his children made my puzzles – my own wondering and questioning - come together. His gay relationship immediately gave me a shock of understanding and made my heart pound to know more about it. At the lunch table, I asked Trevor the question I could never solve, ALONE, – because my mind was so entrapped in my deeply internalized heterosexualism - and his answer and our very quick conversation were just enough to allow me a liberating experience to the point of understanding and embracing (for the first time) the 'otherness' in me and others for the first time in my whole life. That conversation was the string that would enable me to connect myself to the whole of myself and to what might have been considered as just a phase or passing fancy. (You can't change the otherness within you and in others.)

These experiences and my own research gave me a profound understanding of why the affirming journey of individuals and of communities like us at UCiM matter and why we need to continue to engage with our question – how to become a safe, spiritual and welcoming place for all who enter and seek God. First, there is a diverse group of people striving for self-definition. There are souls and spirits and bodies and minds who work so hard to escape from the traps and restrictions of society’s heteronormative presumptions and strictly binary gender prescriptions in order to stand in a space of freedom and affirmation of who they really are. These souls, who might call themselves non-binary gender people, teach us that genders are not two opposites, male and female! It is a PHENOMENON in Spectrum; these souls are a brilliant constellation, images of a God who is unrestricted, unreserved, non-binary. Exploring identity is an amazing thing; exploring identity becomes the way we encounter the unrestricted God of beauty, power and integrity, face to face. Seeking understanding of the whole map of oneself and learning to love oneself and others as they are is also how we strip away each layer of fear we have wrapped around ourselves to protect us from hurt. It takes a very courageous journey; the whole, integrated Identity, (in Christian terms, God’s image within us) must not be edited, nullified, judged, criticized, rejected. Affirming is the act of pulling up the anchor that keeps us moored in safe waters, to sail on the endless surface of the unknown ocean. We must become friends on this boat, in togetherness - it is the process in which we connect ourselves to what is whole and holy, God as the power, the inner movement, and the divine spark within, outside of the confines of traditional ideas of gender and societal customs. It is the sacred activity of integration of all positive elements and dimensions of our condition, (it’s important: including gender and sexuality) to create the personal identity the individual can trust. 

Erich Fromm says that creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. Everyone deserves to live in a world where they feel safe to explore, understand and claim their own true and whole identity as their true calling and the way of creation of life in a way that is the most comfortable to them and makes them happy. If we don’t challenge the world we live in, which tells people to believe that there are only two poles of gender, male and female, and there is no such a thing as non-binary gender, we are denying the truth about God – God of splendid diversity - and about God’s real people who seek love, safety and acceptance.

Joan Chittister notes in her book, Between the Night and Daylight, “Certainty dies in the midst of these new questions. New data, demanded by the new questions, turn the world upside down, like the Kinsey Report, the atomic bomb, feminism, desegregation, transgenderism. … Confusion becomes the dream state of the awakened mind.”

On this Pentecost Sunday, the day of the colour Red, we commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Oppression. What is Pentecost? I would like to define it as this: It is the day when a constellation of stars across the blackness of the midnight sky becomes flames; as a matter of fact, all stars are flames, burning across the darkness. These flames, in the form of a tongue, a flare flower, descend on us, invade us, demand our acceptance and promote understanding. Receiving God in me and us, God as a myriad of flare flowers, the Others and the Otherness within us, allowing room for the strange to become our beloved IS the descent of the Holy Spirit: The Holy Spirit of Love that casts out fear.

Credit: the art work of Kotama Bouabane 

Sermon: Petals of the gospel-flower (What makes a radically welcoming church?)

Sermon: Petals of the gospel-flower

Text: Acts 11:1-18

In today’s story, Peter baptizes a Gentile and his whole household and accepts them to the Christian Jewish faith community. Now he has to face all those in the community who take issue with his actions - but can he persuade them to accept Gentiles into their midst?

The Gentile was a man named Cornelius, a Roman officer, in the Italian Cohort. He was a generous, religious man, dwelling on the fringes of Palestine and at the margins of Judaism, fearing God. His conversion will probably cost him his position and entail many social difficulties; at the time the Jews and the Jewish Christians, including Peter, shared a cultural presumption that all Jews are forbidden to visit, eat, or associate with anyone of another race.  In today’s story, the real issue that the objectors have is not so much with the baptism of Gentiles but with Peter’s willingness to physically, face-to-face, sit and eat with the Gentiles, in the community’s “Table Fellowship”, a communal meal with mandatory attendance. The newly-baptized ones are now free to join the table which had previously been limited to the righteous few.

In response to this confrontation, Peter, describing the visions he had when he was in a trance three days before, shares the instruction he received by Heavenly voice: God commands the Gospel-following community to “Not call profane what God counts clean.” We must not stand in God’s way; the gift of the Holy Spirit should be poured out on all peoples, “Without terms.” Quoting from 2 Timothy, “We must not be overcome by the spirit of fear, because we would be given the spirit of power to do the work of God.”

One thing I would like us to note is that this morning, we’ve only heard Acts Chapter 11, yet the whole story begins at chapter 10 when Cornelius, the Gentile hero of today’s story, receives instructions from an angel who tells him to travel to meet Peter. With God, this Gentile-outsider initiates and creates something which transforms Peter’s mind and heart and the practice of Jewish Christians at the time. They are moved to accept all races (the circumcised and the uncircumcised) into the kingdom life through baptism. I wonder what this story of conversion and the spirit of transformation can teach us about answering our call to live the kingdom life.

Stephanie Spellers distinguishes three different stages of becoming a church that embraces God, the Other and the Spirit of Transformation this way: Invitation, Inclusion, Radical Welcome.

First, being an Inviting Congregation, which is just as important as the other stages. (We need inviting practices!!! We must truly be inviting with all that we can strive to do: warm Sunday morning coffee, friendly greetings, intentional evangelism, to draw new people, to help new people come inside, etc. We can’t exaggerate the importance of this amazing job), Stephanie says, yet it has its own limit: assimilation. The tricky thing about this part is, by using the logic of invitation, we quickly find ourselves locked into a pattern of reaching out to people who will appreciate our institutions and practices as they are, or who, at least, seem willing to subscribe to them. In this approach, we may grow, and by most measures observers would call us healthy and successful, yet we still need to ask ourselves whether we have answered the call to live as the whole body of Christ.

Spellers defines the second way of becoming a church that embraces God and embraces the Other as being an Inclusive Congregation. Whoa! I was amazed, when I first read her excellent analysis to see that there are more steps beyond Inviting! You see, the inviting congregation’s plan largely draws those who reflect the cultural identity of the existing church community. An inclusive congregation will begin to explore what it means to welcome those outside their cultural group (as defined by factors like race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age) Yet, very often, congregations will be inclusive - but only on “terms.” These inclusive congregations may open their doors to marginalized groups, but that invitation usually goes out to certain, “acceptable” members of the marginal group, often the ones who share the dominant group’s class, culture, or aesthetic values. For example, from Spellers’ book, “Black Ivy League graduates, gay bankers, young classical music lovers, articulate homeless people, and so on.) These members are trusted as leaders. However, other, more marginal, representatives might not get that welcome. This helpful analysis encourages us to wonder, “What are our ‘terms’ of relationship we might hold in our life and church?”

If the Inviting Congregation’s limit is with assimilation, the Inclusive Congregation’s limit is with incorporation. The inclusive church offers marginalized people or ‘differences’ a place inside, but still on “terms” that allow the church’s power structures and cultural identity to remain essentially unchanged.

Then, what makes a Radically Welcoming church?

Spellers says, “The movement from inviting to inclusion to radical welcome is the move toward cultivating (a) mutually transforming relationship.” It’s important to note: The terms and power have shifted.  

In a community that lives Radical Welcome, people on the margins, people with privilege, those who have been in leadership positions, those who have just started coming, those who bear the social attributes of the dominant culture or those who do not, all are invited to open themselves to conversion - in truth, to be open to experiencing continuing, constant and ever-transforming conversions, like in today’s story of Cornelius, Peter and the core members of the Christian Jewish church. They’ve re-written the “contract” (all terms are removed; circumcision and race, no more a requirement.) to welcome Cornelius, (important!) beginning with the initiation of Cornelius as he requests his baptism and acceptance.

God is big. God has always and will always be bigger than our current understanding of God. Saying yes to Jesus means that we have agreed to rewrite the terms of the contract. Speller says our mainline churches shouldn’t be like this: providing us with security, stability, control, beauty, comfort, familiarity, pain alleviation, intimacy, family, home while in exchange, we attend worship faithfully, contribute our money and various talents, join in service to those in need, and offer devotion to Christ. That’s a fair picture of a standard ‘good’ church- but the deal is off if the church pushes or challenges us to live values that compromise our current way of life. We need to begin to live as if ‘It is not the church of God that has a mission, but the God of mission who has a church.’ With Radical welcoming, our sense of what is possible, what is normative, what is essential, and what is holy for Christian life will find a new common ground - and grow.

This is not an easy journey, and there’s no real guarantee of us giving it an enthusiastic welcome. Because change is hard, in any place: life, church, workplaces, especially if the change means the changing and the shifting of the ground under our feet. We would most like to avoid, with all our might, being truly vulnerable and sharing or speaking about something so ‘personal’ and ‘intimate’ as fear and pain. Making change – even when some of us think of it as a simple change – can cause  others personal pain. When we engage with work that brings about adaptive changes and possibly others’ resistance to follow, we need to always remember to greet others’ fear with the same compassion that we’ve learned to bring to our own fears. Adaptive change doesn’t mean that with the necessary change, your self will disappear. You will not disappear. You, all of us will be embraced, with compassion.

In the journey of becoming a church that embraces Otherness as our new identity, and also in the personal journey to really know and embrace the otherness within ourselves and others, we begin to recognize our distinctive Christian call: We need to take up the vocation of healer in this journey (and we must) to help to initiate and facilitate conversations and conversions about fear, hope and gospel-based transformation. There’s not just the wounded, nor just the healer. “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals.” (Pema Chodron) In the horizontal circle of the faithful, we need to be steadfast and compassionate to ourselves, to our own ‘shaky and tender place’ and that of others’. We need to stay present and faithful to one another, with compassion, and to heal, not to hurt.  

The story of God’s love in Jesus is like the bud of a fragrant flower, fully ripe but as yet only in the process of opening fully. Each individual has a different and unique interpretation of the Gospel we hold in common and the kingdom life. Each interpretation opens one petal of the gospel-flower. As each petal of the flower opens, we come to behold the loveliness of the blossoming flower and smell its fragrance. … Only through a process of a multicultural, or multi-voiced, opening up shall we discern that love in all its fullness. (Radical Welcome, p. 81)

We, in our uniqueness, distinctiveness and togetherness, are the petals of the gospel-flower. Only by allowing ourselves, a petal, to be folded in with other petals can we live the life of a gospel-flower – beautiful, blossoming, blessing, embracing one another, embracing the Sun, as God, in our center.