Will Friendship Kitchen be ... Our Next Success Story?: An article for Meadowood Monitor, Spring, 2017

Will Friendship Kitchen be … Our Next Success Story?

~ Ha Na Park

Ten years have passed, but I can still vividly picture my family venturing into Save-on-Foods to shop for supper. We were like many other newcomer families in Vancouver: Min-Goo pushing toddler Peace in his stroller, and me quickly searching through the food sections, mostly looking for any familiar items from my home country, Korea, especially vegetables. Many Korean dishes - side or main - are based on a great variety of Korean native greens. I knew that without them, the menus I could create for my family’s supper would be limited. I remember how often I sighed in grocery stores, thinking, “I can’t make Korean cuisine with just spinach, bell peppers, broccoli, squash, and cucumbers. I wish I could take a cooking class. What do Canadians make with these vegetables?”

Now, I recollect when I went out for lunch with my theological schoolmates, in my first year in Canada. We all sat down in a family restaurant. I was given a menu, and was immediately confused. I asked, “Can you guys recommend what to eat? And tell me, what are Canadian foods?”

They looked at each other and began to laugh, “Canadian food! Gosh, do we have ‘Canadian food’?

“I love Thai food.” One person chimed in. “It’s hard to say what is Canadian food, because what Canadians eat is Canadian food.” 

Now, 10 years have passed. I certainly have become a better cook. I developed a great deal of skill in how to cook and finding the best places to shop. If there’s something I want to eat, no matter if it is ‘Canadian’ or ‘Foreign’, I can find recipes quickly and try one and it’s a hit! However, it took 10 years to develop these skills; I still daydream about taking a cooking class to learn how to make basic healthy salads or a school lunch that’s easy to prepare and nutritious. What’s the right way to cook quinoa? What are healthier options than just a ham and cheese sandwich for kids every day? 

The United Church in Meadowood is launching Friendship Kitchen: cooking classes for newcomers. It is starting up soon: every Tuesday from May 16 – June 20. It is a free program offered to any newcomers regardless of their religion, tradition and cultural backgrounds. I started research and planning last September. A strong partner was found: Food Matters Manitoba (www.foodmattersmanitoba.ca). A brand new small-group Friendship Circle was created to work on a long-term project on behalf of UCiM to engage newcomers in our St Vital community with relevant programs; Friendship Kitchen will be our first program.

Since Friendship Kitchen is designed as an intercultural ministry enterprise, Embracing the Spirit: Innovative Ministry Fund of United Church of Canada awarded us a grant of three thousand dollars as the start-up fund. On March 22^nd, I posted the poster on our church’s Facebook page, and BOOM – something magic happened. The responses from the newcomers’ community and local community organizations were explosively positive. Within 23 hours of the first post, TWENTY individuals and local community organizations such as Morrow Avenue Child Care shared our Friendship Kitchen post widely, and 2500 people were reached - in less than a single day! The next morning, when I contacted Healthy Start for Mom and Me for promotion, the staff told me, “We were already talking about your program!” 

Since then, we have steadily received registration requests from newcomers. All the applicants have told us that they are so excited about our program and how much they’re looking forward to participating. One person who came from Ethiopia last year told me, on the phone, that her English class teacher recommended this program, and she’s very excited. Note: I have really never contacted any English class for promotion. Next week, I’m going to meet a dietitian from Youville Center to discuss both the possibility of promotion and a community development plan.  

What does this story tell us? First of all, it proves the power of communication through social media. Social media is a great medium of reaching out to the community around us if our programs meet the priority needs of the community. More importantly, I believe it also tells us our program has potential to foster intercultural relationships and even membership growth. It may be a slow process, but I believe it is a ministry worth investing in. We’ve just opened a door. We’ve just opened a box. We cannot make prejudgment on or limit what results, what gifts, what future experimental, innovative, intercultural ministry can bring us and help us to see! 

I hope you are excited about Friendship Kitchen. The community around us is excited and enthusiastic about it. Own this ministry, and expand it. I hope this can be UCiM’s next success story! 

Friendship Kitchen cooking classes for newcomers will be more than just an outreach or social service for the benefit of newcomers. (Note: newcomers are diverse. There are middle-income and low-income newcomers. Some drive their own vehicles. Others take buses. Some have a big family. Some are LGBTQ members, too. Some emigrated from a stable country; others went through very hard traumas.) Our program aims to build a community within the community. Our volunteer line-up looks very strong: it is a wonderful mix of newcomers and non-newcomers, and the joint work of our own church members and members from the outer communities. All our volunteers will help the participants and each other to feel welcome, safe, and respected within a community that supports their new journey in Canada. Countering social isolation through friendship is our goal.   

JOIN US FOR…

Nutrition education: eating healthy in Canada

Cooking nutritious food

Meeting new friends through cooking and eating together

Volunteer opportunity

Bus tickets and childminding will be available.

If you are interested, please don’t hesitate to call the UCiM Church office 204.256.7002.

Blessings,

Ha Na

Sermon: What does it mean when we say, "We made a mistake. It was a mistake"? (John 9:1-41), March 26, 2017

Sermon: What does it mean when we say, "We made a mistake. It was a mistake"?

Text: John 9:1-41

Have you ever put the first button in the wrong buttonhole?

It’s usually not too bad, because by the time you are buttoning the last buttons on your shirt, you realize you have made a mistake – you see yourself in the mirror, or you see that your hem is crooked – even before leaving your bedroom. No one has seen it. No embarrassment. Fine. You just need to button yourself up again. 

But how about in your real life, or in your job, when you realize, ‘Oh, what have I done? I made a mistake!’ What is the first action or step you take to fix the situation? How do you try to right the situation? How are you buttoning it up again?

How about when you’re part of a community, and you realize, “Oh. It’s terrible. What have we done? We’ve made a mistake!”? How do you fix what’s gone wrong when there’s more than one pair of hands involved?  

Let’s go a bit deeper. As a faith community, we put our wisdom together, we engage with each task from our best judgement in a real, tangible way (with the financial statements in hand). We put our faith in God into each process. We do our jobs with great care, because we do really care about our beloved community. However, it is also true that challenges still emerge, unwelcome surprises may overwhelm us, disappointments and worries can swamp us. In recent weeks, I pondered upon a question: as a faith community that puts our whole faith into each process with which we engage, “what does it really mean when we say, ‘We made a mistake. It was a mistake”?

Our Gospel story begins with a dialogue whose context is not the same to this question, yet we can relate. In the story, when Jesus walks along, he sees a man blind from birth. His disciples ask him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Even though the context may be different, I would like to highlight the perspective Jesus’ answer can give us. Jesus answered, “Neither this man or his parents sinned:” The man was born blind “that the works of God might be made manifest in him.”

… Hmm. But what does Jesus’ answer mean - “The man was born blind that God’s works might be revealed in him.”?

It was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud paste, spread the mud on the man’s eyes, and opened them. Sabbath means God’s rest. The Sabbath day, in the religion at the time, called for no one to work, in emulation of the story that God rested after the 6 days of creation.

When Jesus says, “It is not that he or his parents sinned.” he means that neither the man born blind or the parents who gave birth to him were the cause of his blindness. They were not the first wrong buttons. It does not mean that there is an earlier, real, ‘first wrong button’ that preceded the parents, either. It also does not mean that God is the first wrong button as God intended his blindness from his birth.   

What Jesus really means may be there’s no such thing as ‘the first wrong button.’ It’s not Adam. It’s not Eve. It’s not even the ‘original sin.’ BECAUSE ‘God is working still and I, Jesus, am working.’ God’s work is in the present progressive form. God was, God has been, God is, and God will be… very intently, creatively, immeasurably, unimaginably working in every single moment of the history of time. Can we say that the moment when the man in the story was born with blindness lacks God in any depth or fullness? God encompasses all time. God is the divine element in the process which has, and still is consecrating our life, our being, our community. God is sacramental. We may be frightened about the uncertainties of the future. From our experiences, we all know how the unwelcome surprises of life can suddenly greet us like a monster with two horns, out of nowhere. We may be frightened because what happens in the world and what happens in our lives may have led us to no longer believe in a benevolent universe. We don’t always get the best roll of the dice – we may even feel like the dice are loaded against us.

However, I invite you to ask what can be your antidote to fear. For me it is learning and ‘couraging’, to trust in the process our life is deeply invested in, BECAUSE we can. Jesus calls us to See (in verse 5): “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” It is not just that ‘on the other side is light.’ but Jesus is encouraging us to see the light in this side of where we are now. 

But how? 

I find the answer in TRUSTING. It’s not just an attitude like optimism. It is not the same to just manage our life to keep afloat. Trusting is more like diving in. Trusting means that we carefully discern what our gifts and strengths are, and investing them in the process of new creation. THEN, (the next part is more important) we must know that we will not fail. That means we trust! Jesus makes a strong statement: when it is daylight, (Jesus is the light of the world), YOU will not stumble. Trusting is courage and nurturing the inner power for us to see the light in this creative process. It requires a leap of faith that God’s essence, power, and nature works innately to bless us.  

From a faith perspective, there’s no wrong hole for the first button. Faith calls us to develop a different way of Seeing and understanding how things work - how things change and how things evolve - and find a different way to make judgements. When we say, “We made a mistake. It was a mistake,” that is a very valuable work of evaluating the history of how the community has been working together; at the same time we are more encouraged to affirm God in the process who is the Light: resilient, creative, life-giving and blessing.  

I used to be the kind of thinker who viewed things in a cause and effect relation. If a bad thing happened, I understood it should be the consequence of a bad decision or a choice made previously. There must be the first button wrongly placed - somewhere! The weakness of this cause and effect approach is when a bad event happened, our first reaction we take is to trace down the history of the situation only to look for what was the first wrong button. We might miss the relation of the causes which are much deeper than they seem. And this approach lacks another important thing: how we spiritually understand ourselves and the situation; how the works of God have been and are being manifest in us throughout time – even in the event and action of the ‘wrong first button.’

As we engage with spiritual evaluation, our Sabbath position – comfort – is challenged to open to God’s creative interruptions.

I learned: a simple analysis of cause and effect does not produce any spiritual growth in us. We just gain an analysis! Even if we may not point a finger of blame, it might also lead the community to a place of making judgments and blaming others.There’s a proverb, “A stitch in time saves nine.” However, the first wrong stitch and the first wrong button do not have the power to tell us how the Glory of God is made manifest and is revealed in the nine stitches and the other buttons. The community is not a stitch or a button. The community and who we are still evolve even after a mistake or a mess.

We are in the Lenten journey. Look up to the cross. The cross is never a mistake. Jesus died on the cross, but Jesus’ decision to go to Jerusalem was not a mistake. The disciples were worried and predicted that Jesus would be stoned, killed or taken to court, yet decided to be obedient - and their decision was not a mistake. Could Jesus’ humble birth be a mistake by God? Why not in a royal palace? (If Jesus had been born in a royal palace his royal status might have saved him from the start.) But we know that being born in a peasant family was not the cause of the cross. The Roman Empire’s oppression was not the cause of the cross. The Jews who accused Jesus of blasphemy and insisted upon his death were not the cause of the cross. Why are they not the cause of the cross? If we say that they are, we would be limiting and reducing and nullifying God’s redemptive plan for the whole of humanity through God’s glory WHICH IS THE CROSS! (God’s glory is not just in the resurrection, but already the cross IS God’s glory, upheld.) We all have to see how God works in all events in our life, even in the sacredness and terribleness of the death of our own. God continues to bring us healing, wholeness, and redemption: God saves us from our own plans.  

Last Sunday, during the theme conversation, some of you may remember the story I shared with our children: “The Universe in a Tea Cup.”

In the story, the teacher affirmed that looking deeply, we can see the interwoven elements that have given rise to the cup. The potter, her clay, the water to mix the clay, the elements of fire and air, (because the fire needs air to burn and all human beings breathe in the air), the wood in the kiln, the forest the wood came from. Then the teacher asked, “Ananda, if you took away heat and returned it to the Sun, if you returned the clay to the earth, and the water to the river, if you returned the potter to her parents and the wood to the forest trees, could the cup still exist?”

You have not made a mistake. You have not failed. Our journey has never been a mistake and is not and will not be a mistake. Because we are here today as who we are now, and if we overturned(returned) our past decisions, actions, joys, challenges, growth together, we do not exist. We just can’t make who we are now without these chains of blessings and growth. No one person, one group, one community, one past action, one past motion is the wrong first button. From the very first, the Christian community have been gathered again and rebuilt in the Holy Spirit, just as we are, as God perfects the imperfect.  

Sermon - You are Safe (Mar 5, 2017)

Sermon - You are Safe

Our first reading from the Psalms 104 (v. 24-28) declares that God’s works are myriad in form and shape. It says God has made them all in wisdom; The earth is full of God’s creatures, including ourselves: We are part of God’s holy earth. If you have participated in getting ashes or in taking clay from the stations this morning … through this experiential liturgy and exercise, you have received the truth: God’s creative work with you and within you is not yet done. Has anyone here been warming the clay in your hands and kneading it? (pushing it and shaping it, using your thumbs and fingers) How does it feel? Does the clay become pliable? Has anyone made it into a certain shape? (In the given instructions, you could make a bowl, symbolizing your ‘receiving’ God’s love) 

Our being created is not yet done; creation is still being active with us. Maybe it’s because we are not like water-based clay, which dries quickly once it’s shaped or sculpted and left alone. Yes, you may paint it or bake it, make it more beautiful. Yet once the creative process is finished, it can’t be redone. 

But we are not like that. Our creation does not end like something made of water-based clay. Our body - maybe. When we get older, our body does not move like when we were younger. However, our mind, our spirit, the depth of our being - We ARE spiritual beings - is more like wax-based clay. 

                                                  Permoplast modeling clay

You know wax. It doesn’t get dry. It never gets hardened. Instead, it responds to warmth. This clay needs warmth to be in the creative process: in your hands or by being placed under a window that receives full bright sunshine. The shop owner of the Sounding Stone where I bought the clay said to me, if I put the clay stick on the windowsill on a warm spring day, it will become like butter! 

We are Spiritual beings. We respond to warmth. We respond to God’s hands - touching, pushing, pulling, kneading, holding, shaping, stretching … We and God respond to each other in movements and actions, in love like the lovers. Love makes sense. Love enables creation. 

I believe Jesus refers to the dimension of love when He calls us friends. Jesus says “You are my friends, if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends.” (John 15:12-17)

Servants act based on the orders they receive. The hierarchy and system enforce the work. The relationship between the servant and master is based on fear, not necessarily understanding. However, Jesus wants us to know that God works by love, not fear, trust, not intimidation, understanding and listening, not being on top of us, in control. 

Jesus teaches us how we can be ourselves, how to become ourselves in this world. I wonder the key is in how we become less fearful.  I learned a lesson from the last experience I had with our youth when we made ashes in the church parking lot last Sunday. On Ash Wednesday we mark our foreheads with ashes, saying the words from Genesis: “Remember you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.” Normally we consider dust as not being clean. It is everywhere. It stains what is clean. It is light. It blows. It is not important: at home, we try to get rid of dust by dusting or vacuuming. There’s not much we can think to do with a handful of dust. However, I learned something enlightening: the ashes that come from burning the past year’s celebratory palm leaves - the dust - when our youth gathered them from the metal pail, they were not just ‘unnecessary’ or just ’stuff’ any more. It became a sacred ritual when we rubbed the ashes between our thumbs and fingers, mixing them with the oils on our skin. The beautiful blackness became clean, pure, sacred. (The reason why we bought a new metal pail is to make sure nothing else gets in to the ashes - you don’t want any old, dirty stuff from the last barbeque mixing in with the new ashes) I realized that how we are created - our ‘dust-ness' - may be the same. The pureness, the cleanness, the sacredness is us. It never changes. I see it in you and you see it in me. A wise person said, “Don’t be surprised if anybody doesn’t like to be marked on the forehead. It tells us we normally avoid being defiled.” 

But you know, we are never defiled. Never. We as the creation and part of God’s holy earth will never be defiled. Trust in the way all of us are created. Pure, clean, sacred. Never lose the sense of deep reverence upon your being: your body, mind and spirit. Knowing that you will never be hurt, that you are safe in God, can be a spiritual awakening: nothing that happens to you, even the terrible things that have happened to you can’t damage the fact that you are deeply loved; you belong to God. No life conditions can create or break the profound essence of who you are. The right sense of security comes from inside, not through finding security in exterior ‘conditions’. Only when you know you are safe and that you will never be harmed will you know you are in the right territory to find your meaning, purpose, and identity. 

Jesus wants us to know that we don’t journey alone. Our journey is not “Lonely Planet.” After worship today we will have our Budget Talk: you are invited to come and join us to talk about all the questions you have about our community, where we are going, what plans we have. Next Sunday, everyone is called to join and participate in our 2017 Annual Meeting as members and friends. Please know that in these meetings, you are asked to be our friends. By saying, “be our friends” I am not just talking about the need to respect each other and their voices. Or be polite and nice, avoiding anything that would offend or hurt anybody’s feelings. What I would like to emphasize is, “Be involved.” “Be engaged.” “Be invested.” I passionately invite all of us to come and know what our community is doing, how we move into the future, how we evolve, how we invest in the next adventure with purpose and goals. What I find amazing in Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel is that Jesus is very clear in teaching us that fear never creates friends. Fear has no capacity to make two people become friends. If you call one another friend, what it really means is that you are interested and you are willing to invest in knowing what your friend is doing and what he or she is passionate about. Being a listener and companion is your calling as a friend. Fear is simply incapable of creating potential to grow a vibrant spiritual community, but friends can create a powerful, safe space between them – even build a community that is strong enough to share its purpose even in a situation of fear or foreseen uncertainty. 

Friends of God, there may be many answers and lots of advice about what we can be and how we are and how we become ourselves in this world … But I hope that these reflections help you find your own answer. 

Find the spiritual source that helps you develop a deeper sense of security. 

We are not in control of everything around us, but even in the times when we are out of control, we can trust, 

because the depth of our being never loses the sense of who we are. 

Know that we are not alone in this journey of finding ourselves. 

We are

creatures of the earth.

Children of dust. 

Beloved of God. 

Disciples of Jesus Christ. 

Lastly, we are called to be friends. Join us in our next adventure as friends would do. Engage, participate and Invest your friendly interest in knowing us. Help us to evolve into a future that has plans, purpose, and a powerful sense of joy and mission.