GOD LOVES THIS WORLD, NOT ONLY NICE PEOPLE

Numbers 21:4-9, Psalm 107, John 3:14 – 21

March 9, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

In early years of the church, there were many rumours about Christianity. Some people even accused Christians of practising cannibalism. Disturbing and incredible as it may sound, there were many good reasons for outsiders to misunderstand some Christian customs. You see, Roman authorities banned this new religion because it did not recognize the divinity of Caesar. Even those, who did not like the Romans, the Jews and the Greeks alike saw Christians with suspicion. So Christians had to often meet secretly at night in places like underground cemeteries called "catacombs". When people met, they often observed Communion in which they broke bread saying, "Take eat. This is my body. Drink of this cup. This is my blood." Remembering the broken body and spilt blood of Christ is the essence of communion, which to this day is the most important and cherished sacrament of our faith. Of course, cannibalism was a totally false and unfair accusation. And yet the wording of the liturgy could sound upsetting to many people who did not know the Christian faith. We too have to come to grips with the language of sacrifice in our faith.

In order to understand the meaning of sacrifice, it is necessary for us to remember the ancient Hebrew belief about God”s justice and love. People of the Old Testament believed, as we still do, that God was just and loving. However, often justice and love, or righteousness and mercy could run into conflict with each other. What do you do when someone you love is unjust? Do you forgive and condone evil? Or would you fulfil the requirements of justice and deny the impulse of love? The notion of sacrifice emerged to solve this dilemma. To commit sin is like owing God a debt. The idea that someone could pay the debt for another person evolved into the idea of sacrifice. In the old Hebrew traditions, animals without blemish were sacrificed to pay that debt to God, so that injustice was properly dealt with. The innocent animals gave up their lives for the sinners. This was how the debts were paid and the books were balanced. The innocent one who was merciful paid a huge price. But through its sacrifice, justice was done. This is how the notion of Jesus being the ultimate sacrificial lamb evolved, to explain the love of God expressed in the death of Jesus on the cross. It was an first theological attempt to explain, in our limited human vocabulary, the mystery of God”s amazing grace in Jesus Christ.

When the Gospel says, "For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son.", it said "the world" without qualification. God loved the world of nature and human beings, the world where good and bad, material and spiritual, beautiful and ugly, are all co-existing. It does not say that God separated them and loved only the good people, only the one belonging to the spiritual world, and only the beautiful things. It says that God loved them all, as though they were all mixed up as one entity. This is a constant reminder for us who come to church. Yes, God loves us. But God loves those who are not in the church, also. Not only do we need to remind ourselves that we are not the only ones who are loved by God. We have to treat those outside of the church also as ones who are equally loved by God. We must never hold an "us v.s. them" attitude, because God doesn”t.

One of the difficult situations I, as a minister, face from time to time is the expression of guilt on the part of people who don”t come to church. Whenever people see a minister, inevitably some people begin to explain why they don”t come to church. I always have an urge to say to these people, "I don”t care. I like you anyhow." I understand some people don”t want to or can”t come to church. I did not go to church for a period for different reasons. For many of you, and for me, going to church is extremely important like breathing and eating. We get to show our faith in a safe place, and get fed with spiritual nourishment. But we do not have right to say that other people must feel the same as we do. God does not make a distinction between church goers and non-church people. God loves us all.

I like the attitude of medical doctors and nurses in this respect. They don”t judge people for their conduct. They treat saints and sinners alike. They do their best to treat a person even if the patient is ethically a hopeless case. Doctors and nurses do not discriminate about patients nor pass judgement about them. Likewise when God loves the world, and he does not discriminate. The difference from the medical people is: God is also the God of justice, who hates evil. In this context, it becomes all the more important to remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The cross of Jesus Christ was the God”s way to love the world without compromising the principles of justice. When justice demanded retribution, God paid off our debts through Jesus Christ once and for all.

When I was a child, I heard a story of a dedicated and caring government official in Taiwan. Let us call him Mr. Song – a common Taiwanese name, because I forgot his name. He was sent by the central government into a remote region where mainly Aboriginal people lived to oversee its governance. He was a good man, and people came to love him dearly. Over the years, people came to regard Mr. Song as though he was the father of the tribe. But there was one problem even this good man could not solve. This particular people used to practice human sacrifice in times of great distress. They raided other tribes when plagues struck or crops failed, captured a prisoner, and made a human sacrifice and dedicate the head of the prisoner to appease angry god. The Government, of course, prohibited the practice of such a cruel custom, and meted out severe punishments whenever this happened and was discovered. But the barbaric practice never stopped. Once there was a great famine, and Mr. Song could tell that people were again ready to go back to their old barbaric custom. So he decreed that the government would overlook the practice of human sacrifice one more time – but henceforth after that, the practice would be met with an unimaginable and severe punishment. There was also a condition. Fir this last sacrifice, they would not be able to stage a raid into another people”s village: they would have to take whatever stranger who happened to pass the village. So the villagers captured the first stranger who came into the village. It was only after they beheaded him that they found this human sacrifice was their beloved Mr. Song in disguise. People wept for many days regretting their stupidity. As the story goes, from that day forward the barbaric practice of human sacrifice was never repeated in Taiwan.

For us, Christ was the final and ultimate sacrifice who paid the price of all of our transgressions once and for all. All we need to do is to believe this, and pledge to be forgiving and charitable to all of our neighbours. The sacrament of Holy Communion is our symbolic act to remember Christ”s final and ultimate sacrifice that paid off all our debts of past and future. Let us celebrate it joyfully and go out of this place as happy free people.

SEEING GOD FROM BEHIND

Exodus 33:17-23, Psalm 99, Matthew 22:15-22

October 20, 1996, by Tad Mitsui

I am fascinated by the image of Moses seeing God only in retrospect. Moses had his face covered when God Passed in front of him. A full view of God may be frightening, but the idea has fascinated the human race ever since its appearance on earth. The people of Israel also demanded to see God, because they were tired of hearing God”s plans only through a mouthpiece – Moses. But when they actually were allowed to be in the presence of God, they were terrified of the sight and the sound and begged to be spared of any further frightening experiences. Moses did not see God either. He only heard him. When at last he saw God, it was from behind. It was a rather limited view, you must admit. But it was enough to affirm the direction in which God was going.

Our society operates on the basis of "hindsight". We make choices consistent with past experience, based on known and already visible. It is more comforting that way. We resist change. In physics, this is called inertia. What is stationary tends to remain so and what moves tends to keep moving without changing direction. As a society and individuals we tend towards inertia. This is why we often reject visionary views of the future. We would love to know what future God has laid out for us, but are also terrified to know the truth. As hindsighted creatures, we can only cope with knowing so much. God alone possesses a complete foresight. Yet despite our limits, God keeps us moving forward, nudges us towards a better world, towards the kingdom of God. Our fear of change – of what the future foreseen by God may demand of us – is why we have often disliked and persecuted persons who had some sense of where God was leading.

Jesus was one of those people. He lived in occupied Palestine. When the Pharisees asked Jesus if the Jews should pay taxes to the Roman emperor, they were trying to trap him with a loaded question. If Jesus said Jews should, he was encouraging people to compromise their religion. But if he said they should not, he was inciting tax evasion and inviting wrath of the Roman authorities. For the Jews, it was a problem to use money which had images of the Caesar, because Caesar Augustus had decreed that he was a god. Caesar had claimed divinity in order to make his power absolute. The Jews naturally rejected that, because for them there was only one God: the God of Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. So they showed their rejection of the emperor”s claim for absolute authority by using traditional Jewish coins for their offering to the temple. But the fanatics argued that if they should remain good Jews, they must not use Roman coins even in business and commerce. So the answer Jesus gave was unexpected and ingenious. He told them to live like a good citizen while committing themselves to remain God”s people. This has been the norm of Christians in this world ever since.

To the extent that we are striving to be Christians by coming to church, we are distinctively the people of God, while living in this world just like any other people. We perform civic duties like any other citizens, but we keep our own unique values. We pay taxes and engage in business in the same way as any other persons do, using money with an image of secular authorities on it. But we do not worship that image. And this is the difference; state, business, and money are not absolute for us. In the mean time, we listen to the word of God, and try to live according to God”s merciful and just design. God”s ways are often different from the accepted norms of society. They are often inconvenient, and sometimes downright subversive to the existing customs and norms.

So people who follow the teaching of Jesus Christ seem a bit odd at times. Other times, they look outrageous or like fools. For example, why didn”t Jim Houden who willed so much money to our church, spend more money for his own pleasures before he died? We are surrounded by people, who did strange things like that, because they were Christians. No doubt, Jim Houden loved Howick United Church and its people. And I can understand why. But many ordinary people would not understand him unless they know what it means to follow God”s ways. Many prophets and saints not only were ridiculed by their contemporaries, but also were often badly persecuted. It was because they listened for the voice of God to tell them how things should be. They were ahead of their time; they knew things too early. They had strong sense of God”s foresight long before other people began to see the wisdom in divine visions.

Does this mean we can ignore the conventions and norms of this world in order to live according to God”s scheme? Jesus said, "No." He said that Caesar should receive what he deserved. Jesus said that because he believed that all authorities of this world should follow God”s path, even though they might be far behind God. Jesus did not believe in anarchy, though he believed that things must change according to God”s plans. We must live in this world as ones who know that things should change towards a better world. Yet we must not give up on this world. You must try hard to change it as a person who knows better, as someone who has glimpsed the direction in which God is headed. This is a tension we live with as ones who live in this world but know that there are problems that need solving.

As Christians, all of us live in this world with this tension. We are in the world but not of the world. We must pay taxes and give what is due to the state, but we do not completely belong to any country. Our real citizenship is of the kingdom of God. So we do not worship the image on the coin, even though we perform our civic duties by using that money. We do not believe that secular powers have absolute authority over us.

As people who have a sense of God”s plan for this world, we must constantly strive to move the world forward, towards God”s goals. Even if that glimpse of what lies ahead makes us uncomfortable sometimes. Seeing God only from behind seem like a limited view, but accepting that limit frees us from relying on "hindsight" alone to guide us. It is enough to give us an idea where God is headed – to turn our hindsight into foresight – and keep all the caesar of the world in perspective.

IF YOU HAVE NO PAIN, YOU ARE DEAD

Exodus 14:1-35, Exodus 15 VU876, Matthew 18:21-35

September 11, 2005 by Tad Mitsui

580, 635, 642, 641a

One day, a doctor was listening to a patient”s endless litany of aches and pains. The doctor had his turn. He said, "At your age, sir, when you get up in the morning and don”t have any pain, you are dead." Pains are God”s way of telling you that you are alive, but that you have to pay attention to a ceratin parts of your body. Pain is a warning. There is something terribly wrong with you, if you don”t feel any pain. Pain is a gift just like pleasure is a gift. A leper does not feel pain, because his body is rotting. Some of us try to ignore pain and wonder why disasters happen to us. Disasters like 9/11 and the aftermath of Katrina are the result of such denial.

The Bible teaches us to appreciate God”s gifts, be it a pleasure or be it a pain. The memories of the past can be good and bad. We all like the memories of good times that make us feel happy, and do not like bitter memories that make us feel angry or sad. You have to be able to take up the uncomfortable part of your live as a warning, just as much as you appreciate the joy of life.

On the shore of the Red Sea, the Hebrew people faced a difficult situation. They were caught between the sea in front and the enemy behind. They complained bitterly to Moses, "Did you have to drag us all out into this God forsaken desert only to be killed by the Egyptian army? Back in Egypt we aere slaves, but at least we were stewing meat for supper." Obviously, they had completely forgotten all the miracles God performed to free them from the life as slaves. Those who refuse to appreciate God”s gifts, can see only the negative side.

When you don”t like a challenge and do not want to see any problem as a warning in life, you see everything in front of you negatively. Future is always hopeless for those who can not accept a challenge, because they have no eyes to see the gifts of God. They cling to the nostalgic memories of the past and refuse to go on with life. This is what happens when you do not recognize problems and hate challenges. You see future only as a pack of troubles.

In the face of water on front and enemy behind, Moses took a walking stick and dipped it into the water. A strong wind blew the water away and they were able to walk across the bottom of the sea. Those who were brave enough to face an unknown future as a challenge won the day. They had courage to wrestle the bull by the horn.

The Hebrews remembered God”s mighty acts of the past with gratitude, thus could see a potential trouble as a difficult path but as an exciting adventure. They must have been terrified but they trusted God”s unchanging love and found the way out of the trouble.

The Jews could run fast because they were a bunch of escaping slaves carrying very little possession. The Egyptians, on the other hand, were a mighty army wearing heavy armours riding the horse-drawn chariots made of metal and wood that weighed tons. So the Egyptians got bogged down on the muddy sand. When the tide came back, they drowned. How true this is in our lives too. We surround ourselves with stuff. We love stuff. There is nothing wrong in that. But we must also be ready to let go of it. Otherwise, possessions may drag you down and will make you immobile when you have to move fast.

Of course, you must give thanks for good things. But do not dwell in nostalgia of good things past. You must also learn to appreciate the lessons that the difficult experiences teach us. Otherwise, you will end up hating the world, and everybody and everything in it. This is why forgiveness is a most essential life skill. Forgiveness allows you to let go of the bitter past and go forward in your life.

It is clear from the Gospel reading for today that Jesus thought forgiveness most important. It is letting go of the bitter past in order to get on with life. Jesus said that we must forgive not just once, but seven times, even seven times seven – 49 times. Forgiveness makes it possible for people to let go of the past and to accept each other. Our lives can not go on without acceptance and support of each other.

Two things are sure in our lives. We can not go back to the Garden of Eden, no matter how wonderful it is. We can not look back on the pot of stew in Egypt and dwell on it. Also, we have to let go of the bitter memories of difficult times. Like Paul said, "When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways." Let us thank God for the good things, let us forgive the past while appreciating the lessons learned, and move on like adults. If you keep the balance of good and bad of the past, life before us is wonderful.

Isaiah 7:1-16, Psalm 80, Matthew 1:18-25

I don”t think I am the only father who squirmed when he saw his own newborn child for the first time.  It took me a little while to begin to feel real loving attachment towards a tiny, funny looking lump of flesh wriggling in an incubator.  Father”s experience with a new born child is different from mother”s.  Mother has nine months of bonding with her child.  But for a father, bonding is an art – a process to learn to connect with his child.  You may think that one does not have to learn to love one”s own child.  Love for your own child comes naturally, because a baby is the most adorable and lovable.  I suggest that it is not always like that.  Everybody does not love a new born baby.  A baby is very vulnerable.  I believe that God chose to come to be with us in a form of an infant child, because a baby is helpless, powerless, vulnerable, weak, and an easy object for abuse and exploitation.

Because we live in Canada, we have no trouble believing that all the babies are always loved and treasured.  But that is not always the case.  Children are in fact the most deprived persons in the world today.  They are not treasured as much as we think they are.  For example:  We assume that normally people die of old age, and that only a small number of babies die.  But this is not the true picture if you look at the conditions in which children live in the world.  Fact is; a much greater number of infants die than the number of old people.  On the average according to the UNICEF statistics, 44 thousand infants die everyday in the world.  We don”t talk about this awful statistics because infant deaths happen mostly in the poorer parts of our planet.  They die mainly because of malnutrition.  The weakest ones are always the first ones to suffer the consequences of poverty.  This was the situation of the children at the time of Isaiah, at the time of the birth of Jesus, throughout history, and I say is the case even today.  It is not the universal truth to say that children are always loved and treasured.

Yet, Isaiah dared to predict that a baby who would be born to a young woman would be called "Immanuel".  The word "Immanuel" means "God is with us."  Why did God choose a new born child as a vehicle to come to live among us?  I suggest that an answer lies, among other places, somewhere in the art of bonding with a new born child.  By coming to be with us in a form of a new born child, God demonstrated his love by becoming one of the least and the most humble.  You can understand the logic of this God”s action when you know how to love.  In other words, love is the eyes to see God. 

When a father holds an infant child in his arms for the first time, the power of love transforms a "funny little squirming lump of flesh" into the most precious and the most beautiful thing in the world.  You can hear him whispering, "I love you so much.  You are the most precious and the most beautiful thing in the whole world."   It is love that turns a most helpless and unattractive thing into the most precious and the most beautiful.  The real test of love is to love someone when that someone is most difficult.   When you learn to tolerate a squawking cat at 4 a.m. or a snoring husband who keeps you awake all night, you have begun to learn an art of love.   When a baby cries all night or causes all sorts of grief, when your teenage child is determined to annoy you, or when your aging parent is gradually falling into a state of dementia and doesn”t know who you are any more and tells you to get out of the room, and yet you love them dearly, you have glimpsed the sight of God.  Love is the eyes to see God.

Another important point is that a new born child symbolizes future.  There is no other power more powerful than a faith in the future.  When you can see God in the most helpless new born child, you have capacity to hope for the future no matter how it looks grim.  That kind of optimism makes the small and helpless the most powerful.  On the other hand, when you can”t see an enormous potential in children but see them only as powerless and useless appendix to a society, you are the most pathetic being, because you have no eye to see future.  It seemed easy for the King Herod to kill the Messiah when he was a baby together with hundreds of other baby boys as a preemptive action against a future rival, because babies are helpless.  But Herod also killed his own future, and is remembered as a most pathetic figure in history.  A society that does not put priority in children has no future and is doomed.

God did not come to be with us as an infant child because babies are naturally adorable and easy to love.  The child was called Immanuel, because he was vulnerable.  Also a baby is not always easy to love.  If you love a person who is difficult, you are in the presence of God.  During this season of Christmas, let us learn to see Jesus by learning to love the unlovable.  Let us learn to see God like Mother Teresa did.  She saw God among the poor dying on the streets of Calcutta.  After all, the Son of God was born in a form of a powerless and helpless child who did not even have a luxury to be born in a decent house, but was born in a stable among the bails of hay and the piles of manure.  God is with us, because He came to us as a baby in a stable.

JOB”S STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND SUFFERING

Job 19

We normally don”t think that doubting is a nice thing to do. Having said that, I must admit that it is dangerous to hide one”s doubt and pretend to be certain about something we are not sure. It is better to be honest and say "I can not believe it." Life is not simple. Simple answers to difficult questions of life may not be the answers at all.

There is in the Bible a story of a man who never gave up askig questions. His name was Job. He was a rich farmer. He and his wife had seven sons, and three daughters, all successful. He had many animals: seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, one thousand draft oxen, and five hundred donkeys. So he had many hired hands. That was enormous wealth. Not only was he rich, but also he was a good and righteous man, believing in God and his words. He was an extraordinary man.

But all of a sudden, serious misfortunes unimaginable befell on him. A messenger came to report that there was a massive invasion of the enemy forces. They not only took his land but also stole all his animals and killed all employees. As Job and his wife were listening to this devastating news, another messenger came to inform that a sudden gust of wind, like a tornado, hit the house where all the sons and daughters were having a party with friends. No one came out alive. Job was stunned. He was so much in pain and sorrow that he shaved his head and tore the clothes he was wearing. He fell down on the ground and did not move. The shock kept him silent for a long time. But when he came to his senses, in stead of cursing God he said, "I was born of my mother”s womb naked, and I will go back to earth naked. God gave us everything, and he took it away. Blessed be the name of God."

This is an incredible man. It would be natural for him to start cursing everybody and everything. We would understand it. What kind of a man was this man Job? Is he crazy or possessed by some kind of religious fanaticism? But a real breaking point came when he himself was hit by a terrible decease. Very soon after all those calamity hit Job, he became seriously ill and his body was covered with loathsome sores from head to toes, some kind of skin infection that is still prevalent in the Middle East. He was so itchy all the time that he had to sit in ashes. Scratching with his own finger nails was not enough to sooth itchiness. He had to use pieces of broken pottery to scratch himself until he bled.

He was miserable. He cursed the day he was born. However, he did not curse God even though he was beginning to show the signs of bewilderment as to why such calamity befell on him. In other words, he still trusted God, but he did not understand why God was allowing such pain and suffering to happen to him. Not only was he miserable himself, but also he must have been a sorry sight to watch. His wife, who had so far shared his misfortune as bravely as Job, could not stand to watch her husband”s pain any longer. She said, "Why are you insisting to keep your integrity? I don”t understand you. God has been so cruel to you. Isn”t it easier to curse God and die? You will at least be free of your misery." She must have loved him very much. There must have been enough trust between them to suggest such a terrible act.

Do you remember the case of Jean Brush? She was recently found not-guilty of mercy killing of her husband, who was degenerating into a vegetable state because of Alzheimer”s decease. For her, not-guilty verdict was somewhat irrelevant, because she loved him so much that she was ready to sacrifice her integrity and ready to be condemned as a murderer. St. Paul also said, "For the love of my people, I would willingly give up my salvation." I know I am on a thin ice here. I don”t want you to hear me as someone advocating mercy killing. I can not give answer to that tricky question, because I don”t have an answer. I am simply saying that it took courage and true love to suggest what Job”s wife did to save her husband of his misery.

But Job did not curse God nor did he take his own life. He stubbornly kept questioning God, "Why, why, why? What did I do to deserve this?" It”s like a dog with a bone in his jaws, Job did not let go. We don”t normally do this. We give up too easily, and lose hope, become depressed or get drunk. This dogged, obstinate persistence can only be the result of genuine trust. We give up often too easily, because we don”t love enough. For Job, God can not be wrong. So he kept on asking, "Why?" Children can be trying for parents at times. I am sure that the children will say the same thing, about their parents. But what divides successful relationship from not-successful one is, a true love relationship never gives up asking questions. This is because, love trusts and never gives up. So we keep asking why, though the answer does not come easy.

Job was visited by his friends who had easy answers. Three good friends came to comfort him. But seeing how desperately miserable Job was, they just stayed away from him for seven days while remaining within the sight of him. They did not know what to say. So they kept silence. They must have been good friends, because they did not go away. Only answer they could find was: Suffering is a result of guilt. Job is being punished for his wrong doing. He should admit his guilt and repent. Then he will be saved from his misery. So they started to suggest to Job that he should renounce sin and repent. They were desperate to save their friend from suffering. In retrospect, it would have been better if they stayed silent, and stayed with Job. Often a simple act of being with your friend in silence is much more comforting than an easy but inappropriate answer.

Job was not ready to accept such an easy answer. "So far as I know, I have not done anything wrong. How can I renounce what I don”t know." Besides, Job asked, "if what you say is true, how come the wicked people often prosper better than the honest people. What did I do wrong? Tell me about my wrong doing, and then I will repent." Friends could not find any guilt in Job, because he was a righteous man. So after long hours of argument, they fell silent. Then there appeared another friend, who was older and wiser than the previous three. He started to expound a theory that suffering is God”s way of testing and educating people. We learn something every time we encounter suffering. Job could not accept this easy answer either, because his suffering and pain are too great for a mere lesson.

At the end of the story, God finally spoke to Job directly, and that was enough for him. He now understood that God”s greatness was one that surpassed all understanding. Furthermore, he was satisfied that God did not abandaned him. So he said, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes have seen you." For an ordinary mortal like me, the story has no conclusion. We learn and admire the persistence of Job to go after God. We Christians believe that in the resurrection of Jesus, we have seen the solution to the problem of suffering. Love wins. Resurrection of Jesus proved that.

PASSAGES – METAMORPHOSES

Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 118, John 20:1-18

Easter Sunday, 1997 by Tad Mitsui (Confirmation Service)

They say, cats have nine lives. But when we think of the changes we go through in our life time, we also have many lives. We may not change our appearances as much as an egg does when it hatches into a yellow baby chick, and then grows into a full grown chicken. But when you pull out some old pictures of yours, you realize how much you have changed. These big changes in life are called metamorphoses. Those people who confirmed their faith and joined the church today are making a lot of changes. They may not realize it, but even in those five short months of confirmation class, they grew up so much. From birth to death, all of us go through many transformations, almost as often as once in every ten years. And we call each period of time of change a passage. The message of Easter is that death is also a passage, not an end to life but a metamorphosis. Jesus showed us the way through a difficult passage called death, making our transition from mere physical existence into a state of spiritual being.

Passages often feel like difficult tight spaces to go through, which we must pass. When I am not well, I often have a nightmare of a dark, endless and narrow passage like a tube where the air is tight and suffocating. I awake gasping for air. It is frightening not only due to the fear of suffocation but also for the fear of unknown at the end of the tunnel. I don”t know what”s out there, and that”s scary. Psychologists suggest that at some level we remember the first passage we go through in our journey into the world; from our mother”s womb through the narrow, dark, and suffocating tube into open air. We usually do not consciously recall this because it is too scary to remember. We forget something we don”t want to remember. But our body remembers – so it comes back in bad dreams. After the birth passage, we go through other difficult new experiences in the first few years as a baby. Babies cry a lot, because often they don”t know what”s happening. And that”s frightening. When they are hungry, they cry because they don”t know why their tummies hurt. When they are wet, they cry because they don”t know why they have that yucky feeling on the bottom. When a baby cries, it is calling you to pay attention. It is a God”s call to love.

Puberty is another difficult passage of life. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, we go through incredible amount of change, in our bodies and in our mind. I remember I stumbled a lot because I had not realized how fast I was growing up. Friends begin to look more important than parents, though we are still very much dependent on them. Suddenly you become aware that people begin to pay more attention to you. You don”t realize that you are more attractive in appearance. You are like fresh bread just out of oven. And the attention people give you is not necessarily the kind you want. It is a difficult time.

When Jesus was twelve, he proved to the parents that he was growing not only in height but also in spirit. The mind begins to work differently at that age. Jesus and his parents went to the big city of Jerusalem for the spring festival of passover, which for us is the same time as our Easter. When they started to head home, they lost Jesus. But they did not worry. He was a big boy now. He had begun to spend more time with friends and grown-ups. They travelled looking for him among friends and relatives who were also going home. They could not find him for three days. Now they were really worried. So they went back to Jerusalem. After a frantic search of the city, finally they found him in the temple. He was talking with teachers of the Bible and the law. They were so fascinated by the young Jesus who had so much to say about religion, that they kept him in the Temple for three days talking with him. Jesus said to the parents, "Why are you worried? Don”t you know I am in my father”s house?" When you reach twelve or older, mere facts and figures alone are not as interesting as they were when you were younger. But now you want to know the meaning of things. The factual world is not enough. Also openly or secretly, you begin to be more interested in the other sex. Relationships are suddenly very important. Your interest has shifted to what is emotional and spiritual. So you ask "why" more often. You are now ready to enter into adult world just like Jesus was when he was twelve.

This is why in many cultures, the special training period for young people entering adolescence is important to prepare them for the shock of adulthood. The end of this training period is celebrated with gusto. It is important to mark this period of passage, because it is important for them to feel welcomed by a community of people who care for them. The adult world they are preparing to join is not an easy place. They must know that there are people beyond family, who have same values and same outlook in life. They must know that there are people who share happiness, and help you and support you in times of trouble. It is a way of God to tell us that he loves us. Schools do not do this.

I wish there were more celebrations of our lives” passages. Not only baptisms, weddings, and birthdays, but also occasions to acknowledge and show support for our friends and loved ones when they go through a mid-life crisis, or serious illness, separation, or retirement. They are difficult times and important times. In all those passages, we change, just like a butterfly in its different stages of development. We must have a community to celebrate together and affirm together the fact that God loves us. The community of faith is a group of people who stick with you no matter what. When we live in such a community, even death can become believable as another passage of life just like it was for Jesus, who came back from death and promised to live with us forever.

WHY WE DON”T LIKE TRUTH?

1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, John 9:1-41

March 14, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

The other day, someone asked me about a meeting I attended last Sunday. She had a second hand report about it. What she heard sounded like quite wrong to me. According to this person who reported it to my friend, the result of one particular vote was a complete opposite of what I thought it was. When you run into a situation like this, you realize that truth can be so elusive.

Jay Ingram is a science reporter, who used to host a science program on the CBC Radio. He recently wrote a book about human brains. In it, he quotes an interesting market research done by a women”s clothing manufacturer. Volunteers were led into a room with a pile of pantyhose, and were asked to pick one pair of pantyhose they would buy. After careful examination, every volunteer picked one best pair they would buy. They were asked to give reasons for their choices. They mentioned such things as superior materials, more comfortable, more agreeable colours, etc. But unbeknownst to them those pantyhose were exactly the same; knitted by the same machine, in the same size, of the same colour, and using the same material. Objectively speaking, none of the reasons they listed could possibly be true, because all of them were exactly the same. But Jay Ingram was sure that all of those women were sincere and truly believed that everything they said was right. Could this be one reason to say that there is no such thing as the universal truth? Is it all in your mind? It is up to you. Is it? But we believe that there is truth. Truth from God. Trouble is that we can not handle truth. We can not even agree on a simple fact. The story of healing of a blind man in the Gospel according to John is a typical example of human behaviours that always manage to make truth all muddled up.

One day, Jesus healed a blind man. He had been born blind, but now he could see. He had had to beg for living, but now he had a chance to make his own living. Healing is not just a matter of restoring the eyesight or of correcting physical problems. It is a deed to restore dignity and wholeness. The blind man, when he gained sight, discovered faith in God and in himself. He was not afraid to tell the truth any more. But what a furore this simple episode of healing provoked! Neighbours did not believe that it was the same blind man who was healed. They began to say, "Surely this is not the same man, who was blind and a beggar." Many of them saw what happened with their own eyes. But they did not believe what they saw, because they didn”t see what they didn”t want to see, and they forgot what they didn”t want to remember. So they asked the parents of the man if it was the same man, and they said it was. So they turned to the man who was blind and asked him if he was truly the same man who had been born blind, and he insisted that he was. They could not handle the truth they did not want to believe. But he was not afraid to tell the truth, and he did not shut up. Healing gave him courage to tell the truth no matter how much it annoyed people. So in the end, they ran him out of town. They banished the man, when they saw the truth and didn”t like it.

Pharisees had other problems about the truth. Jesus healed the blind man on Sabbath. According to the laws of Moses, nobody should work on Sabbath. But what is work? It was left to the lawyers to figure out those details of the law. Healing was work as far as the Pharisees” interpretation. They tried hard to perfect the laws by defining fine points of the laws. But sometimes lawyers forget the spirit of the law, when they try to figure out the meaning of the laws. That”s how they grab more and more power over people. That”s how they can tell people, "It”s all complicated. Leave it to me." For Pharisees, Jesus violated the Sabbath law, and he was not a qualified person to perform healing either. So the Pharisees scolded the man for allowing himself to be healed by a sinner. They told him to "Give glory only to God. We know that the man who healed you is a sinner." But he said, "I don”t know whether this man is a sinner. Only thing I know for sure is, though I was blind, but now I can see." He didn”t know the fine points of the law, but he knew the truth that counted. The laws are God”s instruments. They are there to help us to know God and to live accordingly. God is not bound by those instruments. God is bigger than any of them. But if your job is to maintain those instruments, you are tempted to guard them as though it is more important than God. This is how you get trapped in a folly, "My mind is made up. Don”t confuse me with facts."

The Church, too, have made the same mistake many times as the Pharisees did with Jesus and the blind man. It is only recently, the church at last admitted that the mistake was made by the church, during the sixteenth century, when it condemned those scientists, including Galileo Galilei, who said that the earth went around the Sun. The church used to say that the earth was the centre of the universe and the Sun and stars went around the earth. Some of them were burnt at stake as heretics for speaking contrary the church”s teaching. Many women were also burnt at stake during the medieval ages and as recently as two centuries ago in Americas branded as witches. Often their crime was their knowledge of herbal medicine, which they acquired while looking for edible plants. They were looking for herbs and spices for flavour and taste in food, they discovered healing properties of some plants. But medicine was reserved for men. So those women had to be punished for stepping on to men”s toes, even though their herbal medicine worked and must have cure diseases. We know today that herbal medicine works sometime better than the chemicals.

We too keep repeating the same mistake over and over again, and reject truth, because sometimes it does not suit us or threaten our vested interests. You can see how Jesus, as good and loving as he was, could end up being crucified as a criminal. During this season of lent, let us admit our prejudices and vested interests that cloud our mind. Let us start all over again and again with open mind. That is one way to know the truth about Jesus Christ, and how good and loving he was.

RICH AND POOR

Proverbs 22:1-2,8-9,22-23, Psalm 125, James 2:1-10

September 10, 2000 by Tad Mitsui

An idealistic young man went to Africa. He wanted to bring light into the darkness and to educate natives to have a better living. He was appalled to see how poor people were. He was sure that the cause of their poverty was laziness. He saw a young man having a snooze under a palm tree in the middle of the morning. "Wake up," he said. The man opened his eyes and said, "What?" The man from overseas told him, "Get up and get to work." "Why?" "You can earn some money." "Money? I have enough." was the response. "But, if you have more money, you can eat better food." "I can eat what I like. There are lots of bananas and mangoes in the tree." "You can buy things with money." "What things?" "Nice clothes, furniture, and stuff." "Stuff? What for? I have enough stuff." "But if you have more money, you will have security. If you have security, you will have no worry. You can relax." By then, he was quite fed up. He spat out, "Relax? What did you think I was doing before you rudely woke me up?"

This story illustrates an old debate about religion and wealth. Which is more important; to have enough or to be saved? Should the church work to eradicate poverty, or to bring people to Christ to save their souls? The United Church of Canada has always been strong in Social Gospel. Many people in our church consider bringing justice to the poor people a Christian duty. The former Moderator Bill Phipps represents that section of our church. He believes in helping the poor and the suffering, and fight for social justice everywhere. Meanwhile Evangelical Christians, (there are many Evangelicals in the United Church too,) emphasized the importance of the spiritual aspect of the Gospel and accused the people like Bill Phipps of being too much humanist not enough Christian. But

the Bible is not much of a help to solve this dilemma either. Compare the difference, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and Luke. Matthew 5:3 says "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Here Jesus, according to Matthew, is speaking about people who are in need of spiritual fulfilment, not about people who are poor as such. But Luke 6:20 says, "Blessed are you who are poor." There is no mention of Spirit. In other words, Luke seemed to have heard Christ”s concern for the people who were poor. What do you do when you find such radically different versions of the words of our Lord?

Social activists love the Luke version of the Sermon on the mount, because it affirms their concerns for the poor people. Meanwhile, the Evangelicals find an affirmation of their belief in Matthew, because Jesus was concerned about spiritual needs, not material needs. But when you become familiar with the way the Bible tells you about the relationship between what is material and what is spiritual, you will find no contradiction between Luke and Matthew. Body and soul are one in the Bible. In other words, our religion does not see separation of spirits from the material. We express our spiritual values in the way we use material things. This is why we are willing to spend a fortune for someone we love. Love is very spiritual, and money spent for the sake of love represents that love. If you don”t know the spiritual values, you will never feel rich even if you are a billionaire, because you don”t know where the goal of your life is. So you don”t know when to stop. This is why so many rich people are still unhappy, because they feel they never reach the goal in life and frustrated. On the other hand, people who seek spiritual values often know how much is enough, and often quite happy with what they have. Remember the African man snoozing under the palm tree? Persons like Mother Teresa never owned anything in their lives, but they died happy, admired, and loved by many people.

This is why today”s scriptures, both the Book of Proverbs and the letter of James, are saying that the question of the relationship between a rich man and a poor man is not just an economic matter, but it is an important matter of our faith. This also means that the Bible is very much concerned about those people who do not have enough to enjoy decent living. The Bible never says, "If you endure the hardship of this life, you will be rewarded in heaven." Everybody is entitled to a decent living here and now. We all have responsibility to work for justice, so that everybody has go in earning a decent living. A work for justice is a spiritual work.

I end with a story told by a man who spoke about his experience of poverty. He said, "Three days ago my brother Randy died. Two months ago, my first grandchild Jacob was born. The holiness and the beauty of those two events are gradually sinking in. I"m sure I will never fully understand the mysteries in them. But the Spirit has been speaking to me. Jacob came to us in the poverty of birth. He was so small, weak, and naked. He was completely dependent on others. He had nothing but his need. But one day, soon after he was born, I lay down on the sofa with him asleep on my chest. I wept for no reason. I can”t explain. It was just overwhelming. I guess I was overcome at the wonder of it all. Like the poor widow who gave all she owned – a few copper coins, Jacob had no idea the size of his precious gift of love and trust and joy he gave me. And my brother too, there on the hospital bed, the morphine shutting down his eyelids, we spoke to each other from the poverty of his dying and the poverty of my grief. All I could say was, "I love you Randy." And from the pain-racked poverty of his dying, Randy gave the most precious gift he had ever given me. "I love you, too," he said.

Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God. They are so rich that they could give such a precious gift. They have nothing to give but themselves. So they give all they have – themselves. We should do the same.

YOU CAN NOT GO BACK TO EDEN

Exodus 14:1-35, Exodus 15, Matthew 18:21-35

September 12, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

One day, a doctor was listening to a patient”s endless litany of aches and pains. At one point, the doctor had his turn. He said, "At your age, sir, when you get up in the morning and don”t have any pain, you must be dead." Pains are God”s way of telling you that you are alive, but that you have to pay attention to a ceratin parts of your body. There is something terribly wrong with you, if you don”t feel any pain. A leper does not feel pain, because his body is rotting. Pain is a gift just like pleasure is a gift. Pleasure gives us the joy of life. And pain makes us realize that we have a responsibility to ourselves.

The Bible teaches us to appreciate God”s gifts, be it a pleasure or be it a pain. The memories of the past can be good and bad. We all like the memories of good times that make us feel happy, and do not like bitter memories that make us feel angry or sad. You have to be able to take up the uncomfortable part of your live as a challenge, just as much as you appreciate the joy of life. If you want to move on to the next phase of your life, you must appreciate both good and bad. Then you have dealt with the past and can let go of it. If you don”t, you will become obsessed with the past. You will be sucked into a bog of nostalgia or bitterness and get stuck there, while life passes you by.

On the shore of the Red Sea, the Hebrew people faced a serious predicament. They were caught between the sea in front and the enemy behind. They complained bitterly to Moses, "Did you have to drag us all out into this God forsaken desert only to be killed by the Egyptian army?" Obviously, they had completely forgotten all the miracles God performed for them. Because of those miracles, they were freed from the miserable life as slaves. Those who refuse to appreciate God”s gifts, can see only the negative side of things. A story has it that there was once a woman minister. She was kind and caring; she had visions, worked hard for the church; and to top it all, she was a mighty preacher. She was one of the best in the church. But no matter how good she was, always there were people who did not like women ministers. One day, she performed a miracle. She walked on water. But her antagonists said, "See? I told you. The woman can”t even swim."

When you don”t like a challenge and do not want any problem in life, you see everything in front of you negatively. Future is always hopeless for those who can not accept a challenge, because they have no eyes to see the gifts of God in what is not familiar. They cling to the nostalgic memories of the past and refuse to go on with life. They do not want to admit that they are conveniently ignoring the fact that what they remember is only half truth, because they forgot what they didn”t want to remember. This is what happens when you do not like challenges. You see future only as a pack of troubles.

Seeing that people were very upset in the face of a potential disaster, Moses took a walking stick and dipped it into the water. A strong wind blew the water away and they were able to walk across the bottom of the sea. A theory has it that the Red Sea in the Bible actually is what is known today as the Sea of Reeds on the Red Sea coast. It is a swamp full of reeds, which allows people and animals to run across to the other side when the tide is low. Some people, however, believe that it was a miracle – an act of God just like the Bible described it. In either case, the point is the same: those who were brave enough to face an unknown future as a challenge win the day. The Hebrews remembered God”s mighty acts of the past with gratitude, thus could see a potential trouble as a difficult path but as an exciting adventure. They must have been terrified but they trusted God”s unchanging love and found the way out of the trouble.

The Jews could run fast because they were a bunch of escaping slaves carrying very little possession. The Egyptians, on the other hand, were a mighty army wearing heavy armours riding the horse-drawn chariots made of metal and wood that weighed tons. So the Egyptians got bogged down on the muddy sand. When the tide came back, they drowned. How true this is in our lives too. We surround ourselves with stuff. We love stuff. There is nothing wrong in that. But we must also be ready to let go of it. Otherwise, possessions may drag you down and will make you immobile when you have to move fast.

You must give thanks for good things. But from time to time, you may have to let go of them to get on with life. Do not dwell in nostalgia. You must also let go of the memories of bitter experiences. You must learn to appreciate the lessons that the difficult experiences teach us. Otherwise, you will end up hating the world, and everybody and everything in it. What is the point of living if you hate life. This is why forgiveness is a most essential life skill. Forgiveness allows you to let go of the bitter past and go forward in your life.

It is clear from the Gospel reading for today that Jesus thought forgiveness most important. It is letting go of the bitter past in order to get on with life. Jesus said that we must forgive not just once, but seven times, even seven times seven – 49 times. Our lives depend on forgiveness. Forgiveness makes it possible for people to let go of the past and to accept each other. Our lives can not go on without acceptance and support of each other.

Two things are sure in our lives. We can not go back to the Garden of Eden, no matter how wonderful it is. We can not look back on Egypt any more either. We have to let go of the bitter memories of difficult times. Like Paul said, "When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways." Let us thank God for the good things, let us forgive the past, and move on like adults. Life before us is wonderful.

HONESTY OF A DIVINE FOOL

Isaiah 60 : 1 – 6, Psalm 72, Matt 2 : 1 – 12

Saturday, according to the church calender, was Epiphany when the some churches celebrated the coming of the men from the East.  They were the ones who followed the star to pay respect to the Baby Jesus.  Also on this day, Moderator Marion Best asked us to think about the plight of the vulnerable people in our country.  It is interesting to compare the two things that we are about to reflect on today. 

Those men who came to give homage to the baby Jesus were astrologers.  They should not have had anything to do with the Jewish Messiah.  Studying the movements of stars to tell fortunes was not quite the practice of the Hebrew people, thus those men were so-called foreign pagans.   Marion Best wrote a letter to all of us, commenting on the situation of the poor and the sick, and she was accused of stepping out of her line of work.  She was severely criticized by Canada”s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, for being naive about economy.  But the important question is:  "Isn”t Marion Best telling the truth, just as much as the men from the East revealed the truth about the birth of Jesus?"

According to the accounts by Matthew, those men came from the East following a star and looking for the king of the Jews.  Astrology was more widely observed by the Babylonians and the Persians, present day Iraq and Iran, not by the Hebrew people.  In other words, these men of the East were not familiar with the Hebrew prophesy; they were considered pagans.  This is why they needed help from specialists to know the exact location of the birth of the Messiah.  Of course, the specialists, priests and scribes – ministers and theologians, had all the tools for research and could tell them that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.

But those priests and scribes did not go to worship the Messiah, even though he was supposed to be theirs.  Those foreign practitioners of a pagan religion did.  The political situation was too complicated for the experts to just get up and go.  The priests and scribes had too much investment in the existing order.  Knowing the kind of man King Herod was, they could not simply declare that the Messiah had come.  They had to carefully calculate the implications.  So they just sat and witnessed the slaughter of the infant children in Bethlehem by the jealous king.  It was too risky to commit themselves to another king on account of a mere prophesy.
On the other hand, those star gazers packed their bags and took off.  No one knows where they came from.  But surely they came from far.  And travelling in those days was not easy.  It was expensive and dangerous.  It was not like packing a few things to fly to Florida.  There were no seat sales in those days.  There were no buses nor planes.  You had to pay the full fare, and often pay with your own lives, too.  Those men from the East gambled everything and travelled many days to find the Messiah.  What were their rewards?  No one reported if they gained anything from this gamble.  Were they crazy?  Maybe.  But thank God for them.  They did not use political complications as the excuse to stop doing what they had to do.

Sometimes, the people who make amazing discoveries are not experts.  A large number of astronomical discoveries, for example, have been made by amateur star gazers, who watch the stars in their spare time, only for the love of doing it.  They have no preconceptions.  Everything they see through their telescope is a miracle and a wonder.  They take note of everything and check it, often to the annoyance of the experts at the observatories, who have to validate their claims of discoveries.    But because they do not take anything for granted, they find stars the experts might have missed.  They may be crazy, but they run into wonders of creation which until then were not known.

When Marion Best wrote to all United Church congregations asking us to think about and pray for society”s most vulnerable people, who were being affected by the governments cutbacks, she did not expect the thunderous wrath of the editorial board of the Canada”s biggest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail.  I don”t think she expected any big reaction by saying things that are almost customary for the church to say before Christmas.  But the Globe and Mail roared; "How easy it is for United Church Moderator to say such an irresponsible thing from a cosy protected pulpit, surrounded by pious like minded people, without having to cope with the reality of life!  How naive!  Doesn”t she realize that our social policy is bankrupting the country?"  The thunder was so loud that, I wonder if Marion”s argument touched the nerves of the advertisers in the Globe and Mail.  It sounded like an anger of an expert who was upstaged by an amateur.

How little do they know.  Marion Best is a nurse, who practised until recently and knows the sick and the weak.   More recently, she was a free lance consultant, helping hard pressed United Church congregations to readjust and reorganize themselves to survive  harder times with fewer members and lower giving.  She knows  finance from the perspective of the grass-roots and small struggling congregations.  How wrong they were if they thought that Marion Best was like a bishop in his colourful clerical splendour, living in a palace like the Pope.  She simply asked, "if the government is in a serious deficit situation, is it the fault of the poor and the sick?  Could it be because of years of bad government management and small minded politics?  She does not deny that the deficit is a serious problem.  What she is asking is:  "Is it the poor and the sick who have to pay for someone else”s mismanagement?"  In this case, an amateur, not the economic gurus, hit the sensitive truth.  It is like the time when those pagan practitioners found Baby Jesus because they were ready to gamble their own lives in search of him, while the experts who should have looked for him were not. 

We must remind ourselves that, just like the case of amateur discoverers of stars, the humane conditions of our society have often been improved by a few dedicated people who naively asked simple questions.  Like those crazy Quakers in Britain during the last century, who asked the question, "Is it right to buy and sell people like cows?"   They began, in effect, to dismantle one of the most established components of the human economic structure – slavery.  We thank God that there were some people, crazy enough to  ask the right questions.  It would have been much easier to not challenge the accepted order of things, and keep slavery.  Slavery lasted so long because it was so very profitable; it made good economic sense.  Like those priests and scribes who surrounded King Herod, keeping quiet and saving their hides, many people who felt slavery was immoral kept silence.  But those Quakers and other visionaries took the risk of appearing to be naive fools.  They asked embarrassing questions.  Were they naive?  Maybe.  But were they telling lies?  Definitely not.  Were they crazy?  Yes.  They were crazy enough to say exactly how it was, without avoiding the issue by saying, "it is rather complicated."
 
We should not forget the fact that among those Canadians, who dreamed up such a crazy idea as making health care available to everyone, were a United Church minister and a Baptist minister?  James Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas.  Were they fools?  Now Marion Best, a lay woman and faithful Christian has tried to raise the question of what will happen to our society if we risk doing away with such a social safety net.  Because of her concern for the vulnerable and her belief in justice, she too has risked sounding economically foolish.

Celebrating the role of the Hebrew people who would give the world its Messiah, Isaiah said, "Arise, shine, for your light has come."  Later the Evangelist John said in regards to the light,  "When the light shone in the darkness, the darkness did not accept the light."  Of course, light is the end of darkness.  Yet we often find it impossible to acknowledge the obvious and the inevitable, like the light which shines in the darkness.  We always say that abolishing something is not that simple; life is too complicated.  But often the so-called ”complication” is a smoke screen to hide something quite simple.  It is our task to join the ranks of other faithful amateurs like Marion Best to clear the smoke away, and challenge the opinions of the experts.  We are invited to follow an unpopular and unusual path with her in search of an epiphany for our present day.

FORGIVENESS

2 Samuel 12:1 – 13, Psalm 51776-777 John 6:25-29

VU 602, 608, 472, 662

August 6, 2006, at Picture Butte

We all suffer from guilt. We all need forgiveness to go on with life. Today”s story of David and Prophet Nathan teaches us that. It’s a disgusting story! King David orders the death of his brave and loyal soldier in order to go to bed with his wife. David”s behaviour was immoral. Pure and simple. How could he be so horrible? Yet David remained a God”s most favoured king in the Bible. The child from this unholy union grew up to be King Solomon, who was the most successful king in the entire history of Jewish people. What is going on here?

We will not understand the point of this story fully until we realize that David”s behaviour was no different from other kings. You don”t have to read the stories of Henry VIII to find out that the kings did the same kind of things, or even worse things, all over the world throughout the ages.

The point of the story of David and Bathsheba is not to highlight David”s sin. David”s sex life was no better nor worse than other kings. So, the point of this story is to tell us that everybody sins and even a king is in need of forgiveness like everybody else. It says that nobody, not even the king, can get on with life until one”s guilt is taken cared of. King David was a great king because he admitted his guilt, and not because he was a morally better human being.

I am not saying that David did nothing wrong. He was guilty for sure. But I am saying that everybody without exception makes mistakes and has a past history that causes guilt feeling. One must acknowledge that. It is a first step towards forgiveness. David was a sinful man like everybody else. But he was more honourable in his honesty than many people. Nobody wants to admit one”s fault. This is why so many of us are busy working too hard to escape from the deep menacing feeling that somehow we are not OK.

When someone touches that sensitive spot, you would get angry and hate such a meddler. If you were a king, you would probably kill such a person. Prophet Nathan had a superb skill to tell King David that he did wrong without making him angry. The story of a rich man and a poor man”s sheep Nathan used sounded so much like a day-to-day kind of court case King David would have heard in his court. Nathan had to be careful even though as a prophet he was paid to tell the truth. He could have lost his head. John the Baptist was virtually decapitated, by telling the truth about King Herod”s personal life.

But the most important point of this story is that God does not demand perfection, but accepts those who honestly admit guilt and forgive them. David was a good leader, not because he was without fault, but because he was honest to admit his faults and accepted his guilt. He accepted equality of all people before God in their sinfulness. Greatness of King David was that he acknowledged himself to be just another miserable guilty man in need of God”s mercy. This was how he could get on with his life and move onto do greater things for the nation, trusting in God”s forgiveness and mercy.

A woman I knew well told me about her son”s recent divorce. My wife and I were very sorry to hear that, because we cared about the young couple and a baby girl very much. She was angry with her son. But she blamed herself more than anybody for bringing him up to be such a man of many faults, who could not make his marriage work. Not being able to see her grand daughter as often as she used to added injury to her anger. But eventually love towards her son and the grand daughter proved to be strong. Love did not allow her to dwell in a blaming game too long. She loved her son very much and had to forgive and accept him. When she could forgive her son, she felt that she was also forgiven. She felt forgiveness as she forgave her son. When she experienced forgiveness, strangely grudges she used to hold against some people had also disappeared. Experience of forgiveness changed her views of people.

It is indeed wonderful. We are forgiven people. We are not ashamed nor afraid of our past any more, because God has forgiven us and took care of our past. We can accept ourselves as we are. Christianity is not a religion of perfect people who never do anything wrong. It is a religion for forgiven sinners. A theologian once said, "Good News of Jesus Christ is like one beggar telling another beggar where to find food." Thank be to God.

LIFE IS NEVER SAME – EASTER

Acts 10:34-43, Psalm 118, Matthew 28:1-10

April 4, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

The changes that happen to human bodies between twelve and sixteen years of age, are exciting ones. Boys are transformed into young men, and girls into young women. Voices change, beards start to sprout. Curves develop where there was none before. Some changes may be embarrassing or even scary. But we know those physical changes are normal – not just normal but they are exciting and wonderful, because they tell you that you are growing up into a whole new world. We must celebrate those and many other signs, because your bodies have begun the preparation to join the grown-up society.

There are other big and normal passages into different stages of our lives. A fetus leaves mother”s body and changes into a baby, a child into an adolescent teenager and into full adulthood, and an adult into a senior and eventually into a next stage of life through a passage called death. There are also small changes that happen all the time in the normal course of life. New cells are born and old ones die in our bodies every second by the billions. We get rid of dead cells little by little, whenever we take a shower. Butterflies, dragonflies, and snakes shed their old skins only a few times in their lives, but we get rid of old selves bit by bit every second, everyday. Our bodies are completely new every three months, if you speak about them only as cells and their chemical components.

Life is like a river. It is never the same, and that”s normal. You wish that an adorable and cute a year old baby stays the same forever. Never mind, it will soon turn to be a little devil of a terrible two. When your daughter – a little princess – treats you like you are the most precious thing in the world, just wait a few years until she turns to be a teenager. She will treat you like a public enemy number one. But that too will pass. Life moves on.

When two women, both of them called Mary, went to the grave where Jesus had been laid, they could not find the body. They were told by the angels, "He is not here." Don”t look for a live person at the same place. He is not there. A live person moves on. That is the message of Easter. Jesus went through the passage of death, and moved on to another phase of his mission. And he showed us that we have nothing to fear from change; transformation is always about discovering new life. Death is never the end of the story. So, let us not mourn the passing of the old. Let us celebrate new phases of life, even if it is old age, or even death, because it is a normal passage of life.

This is why the church has a celebration for every passage of life: Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, and Funerals. I personally think that there should be more, maybe once in every ten years, because all of us keep changing through out our lives. We welcome babies into a community through Baptism, and promise to support the parents to bring up the new born in the best way possible, the way of Jesus Christ. We welcome adolescents into the adult community by receiving them into full membership of the church. We mark those passages of life and celebrate them as a community.

But life goes on. It means there will be many twists and turns, ups and downs, happy and sad, easy and difficult. Children leave home, and people may quit the church. But you must remember, Christ is alive and lives within you and me. No one will ever be able to be separated from the love of God in Jesus Christ. God bless you.

JESUS THE CAREGIVER

Acts 2:42-47, Psalm 23, John 10:1-10

April 25, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

I imagine that losing one”s memory with Altzheimer”s disease is like being lost in a strange place and finding yourself among total strangers. Every time I go to see my mother these days, she first looks at me puzzled. But then she extends her hand to take mine as she does to all visitors. I take her hand firmly and say, "Hello, Mama." She breaks into a big smile, "Oh, Tachan! (that”s how she calls me.) Thanks for coming. How is your mother?" Obviously she doesn”t quite know who I am yet, but somehow knows that I am someone very close to her, and she can trust me.

It is amazing what a mere touch of someone”s hand can do. We surround ourselves with all sorts of chemical and technological wonders that are supposed to banish all anxieties and discomforts. But I observe that we are not as happy as we could be. We in fact may have become lonelier and unhappier, because machines keep people away from each other. We still find that a smile, kind words softly spoken, or the touch of a friend works wonders where even pills fail to heal a wounded soul.

According to the church calender, today is designated as "Good Shepherd Sunday." It is the day to highlight Jesus as a kind and caring leader. However, "shepherd" is not a familiar image to us. In our culture, not very many people know what it means to herd the sheep in the badlands. I wondered what would be another image for us today that would fit the character of a shepherd of old. I decided to suggest the image of a caregiver. I am suggesting that Psalm 23 can be paraphrased something like "The Lord is my nurse in the recovery room." Or the words of Jesus in the Gospel of John could be, "I am the wife of a terminally ill person, who always stays with him, feeding him and changing him, holding his hands."

There are many images for God in the Bible. The Creator, the Righteous One, the Holy One, the Merciful One, the Redeemer, the Shepherd, the Spirit, the Lord, to name a few. God can never be known by us totally. So people described their particular relations with God using different images that fit their experiences. The most frequently used image, however, was the "Lord". It was an image of the powerful king. But Psalm 23 qualifies that image by saying that, "Yes, God is the most powerful king, but he is also gentle and kind like a shepherd." Like the hymn says, "Saviour like a shepherd lead us." And this is the image Jesus chose for himself too: "I am a Good Shepherd."

We believe in God who is the king – the powerful leader. But also this leader is like a shepherd who is kind, helps us find security and comfort, and stays with us even in the dark shadow of death. By adopting the image of a shepherd, Jesus clearly described himself as the kind of a leader who would not abuse his power for his own benefit. This leader is not like a despotic king you heard about in history, or a dictator like Hitler or Milosevic, who thinks nothing of sacrificing human lives to stay in power. One hopes that our political leaders are not like those despots and dictators. But watching political scenes around us, I sometimes wonder if even our politician”s top priority is to be re-elected and to stay in power. In a perfect world, you run for an office in order to serve people. But I have not known very many political leaders who have put people”s interests before the prospect of their own re-election. The image of the shepherd as the king makes it absolutely clear the true nature of Jesus” leadership. He leads like a caregiver who puts the wellness of people before all other concerns. We must recover the image of Jesus as the compassionate man who was not afraid to touch lepers, and washed disciples” feet like a slave.

Professor Rodney Stark is a well known specialist in the Sociology of Religion. He has studied the rapid growth of the Christian Church in the first four centuries. The speed with which the number of Christians increased was phenomenal. Beginning as just a handful of followers of Jesus, increased their number so fast that they overtook the Roman Empire within a few centuries. It is even more remarkable when you consider the fact that the Jesus movement grew so fast while banned as an illegal religion and the Christians were persecuted severely. Stark was particularly impressed by the fact that, when two devastating waves of plague (probably small pox) reduced the population of the Roman Empire by a third in the third century, the number of Christians increased even more rapidly in the same period of time. Stark attributes this incredible phenomenon to Christian charity.

During those days, people did not know anything about bacteria or viruses. All diseases were considered to be caused by evil spirits. So sick people, especially those with repulsive skin conditions like leprosy, small pox, and boils were thought to be cursed and were often abandoned and isolated as untouchable. But the Christians followed the example of Jesus, and stayed with the sick and took care of them, while even the doctors did not go near those who contracted plague for fear of the wrath of gods. In fact Stark quotes the diary of a doctor, who went away for holiday because everybody in his care got sick, and there was nobody he could care for. For sure, many Christians contracted the disease and died. But because the sick people were well looked after, a larger number of them survived in the Christian community compared to the population at large. Many outsiders thought that the Christians were practicing powerful magic, and joined the church in droves. But it was not magic nor miracle, not even medical science. It was simply the touch of a friend, kind words softly spoken, and the warm company of concerned people that gave the sick courage to live on. They were following the example of the Christ the caregiver, God the shepherd.

The power of Christ the king is not the force that conquers, it is the courage to love. That”s what the image of God the shepherd means. That”s why I think that the image of Jesus as a caregiver fits very well.

DOES GOD ALLOW SICKNESS?

Job 1:1, 2:1-10, Psalm 95, Mark 10:13-16

October 5, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

When you are sick, often you find that emotional questions trouble you more than the question of what ails you. Anxiety, guilt and damaged self-esteem is more serious than the actual sickness. I have recurrent migraine headaches. When I have a migraine, I feel useless and guilty staying in bed for a whole day. These feelings are worse than the headache itself. When we are seriously ill, we suffer as much from what illness does to our self image and sense of security as from what is does to our bodies. We often ask the meaning and reason for our sickness. I don”t think other animals ask such a question. When you ask "why", you are asking spiritual questions. The book of Job asks why we suffer.

The book of Job belongs to a category of old Hebrew scriptures that are called "Writings". Books like Job, Jonah, Ruth, Esther and Psalms, which belong to this category, are stories and poems written by people, who were seeking God”s plans in their lives. Because of their origins, it is OK for us to appreciate their good points, challenge some others, and sometimes say, "I don”t agree." The author of Job teaches us many important lessons about faith. But in the end, I, for one, don”t agree with his conclusions. I rather take the position taken by Jesus Christ, which is different from Job”s.

You see, the author of Job interpreted life as a stage where a contest between God and Satan took place. The story has it that God was proud of faithful Job. But Satan challenged God by saying, "Job is faithful to you because he is happily married, has good and hard working children, and is wealthy and healthy. But if you take away those good things from him, he will betray you." So they had a contest. God allowed Satan to take away the good things, one by one. After losing everything, Job contracted an ugly disease. His body was covered with boils and scabs. His wife thought that her husband was a fool, and told him it would be better to "curse God and die." But Job remained faithful to God. So God won the contest with Satan.

I don”t agree with the suggestion of this book because I don”t believe God, who loves us, will ever treat a person like a football in a game with Satan. God, who became like one of us and suffered for us, would never treat us like a pawn, a chessman, or a football. I wonder if the presence of Satan in this book is really the presence of our own self-doubt and frustrations with sicknesses that limit our energies and plans. Looked at in this way the contest that the book of Job teaches us about is not a contest between good and evil but a contest between our self-doubts and our faith in God”s love for us. The book makes clear that Job, who in the end accepted his suffering as the will of God, did not give up easily. He kept demanding an answer, pointing his finger at God and saying, "I did not do anything wrong. I never betrayed you. Yet you make me suffer so much. Why? Why? Why?" I do admire Job”s determination in asking questions. He never gave up, while many of us just give up and fall like a dead leaf. Job teaches us about the uniqueness of being a human. We ask, "why?" Animals don”t ask such questions. They just take whatever comes. Job”s refusal to stop asking why, shows his continued faith in a God who will respond despite all his other losses, Job did not lose his self-esteem and sense of being a valued child of God.

Buddhist philosophy stands in marked contrast to the lessons we might learn from the book of Job. Buddhism is based on the idea of "giving up" as the best way to solve of life”s problems. The founder of Buddhism, Gautama Siddhartha, knew that life was full of misery and suffering. As a wandering monk he searched for a solution to misery and suffering. After many years of search, he reached the conclusion that all sufferings came from desire. All suffering would disappear when we were free from all cravings. In other words, we must not expect anything from life and accept whatever comes to us as fate. Then we will no longer suffer. This is a philosophy that teaches people to accept suffering without asking questions. Job would make an bad Buddhist.

To accept suffering without asking questions can lead to a kind of fatalism that is damaging to ourselves and to others. To not ask why, means we may fall into the trap of seeing ourselves as our fault. Guilt is an enormous barrier to healing. To view our sickness fatalistically can also lead to discrimination against others. This is how our society justifies discrimination against mentally ill people, people with AIDS, and people with the kinds of sickness that generate feelings of disgust. We think that there is something wrong with them and they got what they deserve.

People in the Bible had a similarly fatalistic attitude towards the sick: they thought that lepers and mentally sick people were cursed by God. They made those sufferers outcast of society. This is why when Jesus touched and healed the sick people – those untouchable, it was a shocking incident. He refused to accept suffering as unchangeable. His miracles were the expressions of his concern towards people who were suffering. They were also a response to people who actively sought his help. Like Job who continued to demand an explanation from God, these people believed that their suffering was not the end of the story. From this, it is clear that God does not want anyone to suffer. He cares about us when we suffer. He expects us to have the same attitude towards sick people as Jesus did.

I can not tell you why God allows sickness. The Bible does not give a clear answer. But what is clear is that God does not expects us to accept suffering fatalistically – either the suffering of others or our own.

The book of Job reminds us that to question is to be human. It also teaches us that we must continue to believe that there is a God who will respond even if it is a response that we are not comfortable with. God does not play games with us. As Christians we have faith in a God who reaches out to us in our suffering. Believing this, not just patiently but persistently, means we may just hang in long enough for a miracle to happen.

Luke 1:26-38, Luke 1:47-55

In order to learn the language in Africa, I lived in an isolated mission which was two hundred years old.  It was a compound of about ten acres, with a bush, a vegetable garden, a spring, a cemetery, and a huge house made of mud and cow dung.   Looking at the grave stones in the cemetery, I often wondered how missionary families survived in the last century.  Many children were buried there.  Infants died before they reached their first birthdays, with quite a few dying at birth.  The life of the missionaries must have been hard.  I can”t begin to imagine how hard it must have been for women to go through the pain and suffering of giving birth and then seeing many of their children die.
 
My knowledge of child birth is from watching TV programs and films.  My daughter was born at the time when fathers were not allowed in the birthing room.  It all looks and sounds so painful.  I don”t like pain.  This is why it is hard for me to understand how any woman would be willing to give birth even in civilized conditions.  And yet, birth happens all the time, billions of times.  Without women”s acceptance of their painful role in procreation, our species should have been extinct a long time ago.  I sometimes wonder how women can accept child birth as a blessing.  If it is, and I am sure they think it is, it is a costly blessing.  The story of Annunciation is about a costly blessing and about Mary”s huge faith in God”s plan which she largely did not get to see realized in her life time.

When Mary received the news about her pregnancy, the angel Gabriel said to her, "God is giving you a big favour.  You will bear a child.  He will be great and called Son of God."  But Mary never sounded convinced that she was hearing good news.  "How can this be?  It can”t be true."  She said.  You realize that she was only a teenager of maybe 15 or 16.  But I don”t think she was completely gullible despite her age.  She must have known the fate that awaited a pregnant unmarried girl.  It was not just the hazards and pain of child birth.  At best, it could mean being cast out from the community for being a loose woman, or, at worst, death by stoning as an adulterer, which was the sentence for a woman who became pregnant outside of marriage.  Mary was right.  How can this be a blessing?  It sounded more like a curse than a blessing.

Her fiancé, Joseph, saved her from this cruel fate.  Without his incredible graciousness in accepting Mary”s claim, we would not have Christmas.  He believed a message he heard in a dream as God”s words.  He wanted to believe in God, because he loved Mary so much.  He swallowed his pride, and accepted Mary”s story and her faith in God.  Christmas is a story of love.  It is a story of the faith of a man in a woman, of a man who decided to believe an impossible story because he loved her dearly.  Today, if we heard a teenage girl say just like Mary, "God made me pregnant," we would probably ridicule her for being gullible and stupid, if not downright insane.  The story of Joseph is another miracle of Christmas.  It is also a story of a brave young girl who accepted as a blessing what looked like a curse.  She believed in God”s plans, although she didn”t understand what it was all about.  Mary believed what she heard and accepted the fate that awaited her and her son.  "I am a servant of the Lord; may it happen to me as you have said," she said.

The Annunciation is the beginning of a story of a costly blessing.  Mary”s life with Jesus was mostly the story of a mother”s suffering.  She was distressed many times as Jesus outgrew Mary”s capacity to understand.  Her son said many outrageous things in public, offended and angered many important people.  She didn”t understand him.  She tried to take him home, because she was so afraid of her son”s safety.  One time, she even thought that her son had become insane.  She was very happy, when her son became a popular healer and preacher.  Thousands followed him everywhere.  But the good time was short lived.  He was soon arrested, publicly humiliated, and died an excruciatingly cruel death on a cross.  What an ordeal for a mother!  How could such a son”s life be a blessing for mother?

But Mary was a mother.  Mothers understand the costliness of blessings, because they live through the pain of birth.  Though there weren”t many visible rewards for Mary in her life time, the annunciation became a blessing, nevertheless, because of her faith.  She never knew that her son would be adored and worshipped so universally two thousand years later.  She only knew for a few years the small daily joys of watching her child grow.  She had never imagined that she would be admired for her courage and faith, in the arts and music, and named in some faith traditions as the "Mother of God."  Her faith gave birth to a blessing for all of us.  Thank God for Mary and Joseph, and their faith in each other and in God, which made Christmas possible.

CRUISING DOWNTOWN IN A FERRARI

Proverbs 1:20-33, Wisdom 7, James 3:1-12

September 17, 2000 by Tad Mitsui

I had a stroll around the old Montreal last week. There were many people enjoying what seemed to be the last summer day. Cars were clogging the narrow streets inching forward their ways. I was so glad that I left my car in the Angrignon parking lot. Then I saw a red Ferrari. What a magnificent car it was! Everybody stopped to take a look at it. A young man in the driver”s seat was obviously enjoying the attention he was getting. In half an hour or so, I thought another red Farrari came around. No, it was not another Ferrari. It was the same one. He was just "cruising", I guess, showing off his two hundred thousand dollar Ferrari. He came around three times while I was there. If he wanted to be admired for his prized car, he did not do so well. He looked ridiculous. When I read today”s passage from the Book of Proverbs, I thought about that young man in a Ferrari – someone who should know better doing a stupid thing.

There is nothing wrong driving a beautiful and expensive car. I understand people who want to possess things that are beautiful and of good quality, though expensive. Cars, clothes, even pots and pans; anything can be a piece of art. When God looked at his creation and said it was good, I am sure that God appreciated its beauty as well as its usefulness. I enjoy looking at beautiful cars just as much as I enjoy looking at beautiful paintings. We should enjoy God”s creation in many ways; sight, smell, and sound as well as the benefits it gives. But some people possess beautiful things, and use them unwisely and managed to look stupid or even to harm themselves. Knowledge is one of those things that is good and valuable and makes us intelligent. But knowledge can make us unwise, too. Wisdom must be in a driver”s seat, when handling knowledge. That is what the passage from the Proverbs is telling us. "Listen, wisdom is calling out in the streets, at the city gate, and in the market-place…It is the Lord who gives you wisdom. Wisdom comes from the word of God."

You may think that knowledge always makes you wise. But the Bible says not necessarily. Today is an information age, and today”s economy is the knowledge based economy. Knowledge made Bill Gates rich. Young people are required nowadays to learn the computer and get on the "Information Highway", if they want to find a job and survive in today”s knowledge based economy. Knowledge replaced gold and diamond. Information is wealth, and knowledge is power today. You show-off what you know, just like you show-off your Ferrari in downtown.

But just like an expensive car, mere information is useless unless it becomes useful knowledge. Many people are proud of the fact that they have access to so much information and know so much. But they are silly. Mere information is something like a telephone book in your hand. It doesn”t mean you know everybody in Montreal and have many friends. Information must become your own knowledge to be any good. There is a internet site that shows how fast a piece of meat rots. Very slowly. Do you know that everyday 3 million people click on to that internet site and see how much it decomposes every hour everyday? Stupid, isn”t it? But there are people, who are proud of the fact that they have such unusual information, and make you feel stupid, if you don”t know what they know. But they don”t realize that information is rubbish until it is a useful knowledge. The Proverbs say, "Foolish people, who make fun of knowledge!" It is better to have a little knowledge and to be wise than millions of pieces of useless information.

My late father-in-law was a Canadian Air Force mechanic during the war. He was proud of his knowledge of airplanes. Every time a plane passed overhead, he said something like, "There goes DC10, 767," or whatever. Kids were mighty impressed. After he died, Muriel”s sister Lynne asked Mom how come he knew so much about planes. Mom just smiled. He was fooling them all the time. I was impressed. Dad managed to fool all those smart kids for forty years!

This story is interesting on two accounts. Men are usually the ones who like to show-off their knowledge of useless titbits, or to use things foolishly, like cruising on a Ferrari just to show-off. But women do not show off knowledge of trivia as much as men do. Muriel”s Mom just smiled at her husband”s innocent vanity. The Proverbs refers to Wisdom who cry out in the streets and in the marketplace as a woman. I find it fascinating that the Bible refers to the wisdom of God as "she". Chapter 1, verse 20 says, "Wisdom cries out, she raises her voice..At the city gate, she speaks,..etc." In fact, the word for wisdom in Greek is a female "Sophia". This not only reminds me of Muriel”s Mom, but also of my own vanity of wanting to boast the knowledge of useless trivia. Is the Bible hinting that women know something men don”t know? Do you think that”s why there are more women in the church than men? Something to think about, isn”t it?

Lastly, the Book of Proverbs says that mere knowledge without wisdom is not only foolish, but is dangerous. "Complacency of fools destroys and kills," says the Book of Proverbs. Scientific knowledge brought to us so many benefits. But don”t forget; our technology is also driving God”s creation to a cataclysmic disaster. Our highly developed technology that gave us unprecedented prosperity is causing the polar ice to melt, and driving many species of plans and animals to extinction. When the environment as we know is destroyed, we may be the next ones on the list of endangered species. But, like the Book says, fools who may possess knowledge don”t listen to wisdom.

I believe that it is about time to slow down and listen to the wisdom coming from the love story of Jesus Christ. I have nothing against loving a nice car. But for God”s sake, let us put wisdom of God in the driver”s seat and travel towards the love of God. Then, incredible human achievements will shine, and sing the hymn for the glory of God. Then, a red Ferrari may be worth the money.

Isaiah 42:1-9,
Psalm 27,
Acts 10:34-43

We just saw in Asia the worst natural disaster in known history.  Outpouring of generosity and support for the victims is truly admirable.  I am proud to be Canadians. But we must go further led by today’s scripture lessons.  We must remind ourselves that conflicts between peoples kill, by far, much more people than natural disasters.  For example, one bomb dropped in Hiroshima during the second world war killed 200,000 in a split second – more people than the total number of dead victims of the recent Tsunami.  The second world war killed tens of millions of people in mere four years.  We have to ask ourselves if the question of who is right and who is wrong is so important that so many people must be killed?

We are all different just like each of our faces are different.  So, if you think you are always right and others are always wrong, you will be the cause of conflicts and the menace to the world.  We all wish that other people would accept our ways, but they don”t.  We will not be able to live with other people, if all of us insist that “only my way is the right way.”  All of us eventually have to compromise in order to live in harmony.  Only immature people can not learn to compromise and do not accept other people’s ways.

We just lived through the most destructive century of conflicts in history.  And we continue to live in dangerous times, because we still don’t know how to live with differences.  The human race made amazing advances in science and technology.  But we also committed incredible acts of stupid self-destruction, because technology made the result of violent conflicts catastrophic.  The two great wars in the 20th century were the bloodiest and the most murderous in human history because of advanced weapons.  Millions since have been killed in Africa, Asia, Balkans, and Middle East.  All sides of conflicts believed that God was on their side.  Today the main cause of conflicts is three religions which believe in one God of Abraham, and follow the same book – the Old Testament.  Many Christians, Jews, and Muslims kill each other because of the difference in interpretation of the Bible.  Many think that Muslim terrorists are trying to kill Christians.  Many Muslims think that the war in Iraq is the new Christian crusade against Islam.  Some Jews believe that Arab Muslims are trying to destroy their country. 
The scripture lesson from the Acts records a sermon Peter preached in the Palestinian city of Caesarea.  Simon Peter spoke about Jesus to a group of people who were not Jews.  He baptized them right there after the sermon.  This event was a shocking event because Peter went into a house full of non-Jews and ate with them.  In those days, Jews were not permitted to eat with non-Jews because they were considered to be unclean.  The early church always met for meals, which later became our Communion Service.  Furthermore, Peter baptized those so-called unclean people without first making them Jews through circumcision.  By this action, Peter made it clear that the Jesus movement was a new religion.  Peter indicated that everybody was welcomed as soon as he/she accepted the teaching of the church.

It was unacceptable to the first generation of Christians because they didn’t believe that Jesus started a new religion.  They thought that the way of Jesus was a reform movement of Judaism.  But Peter declared that Christianity was a new religion.  Many people could not accept this.  So the church was split.  There was a faction based in Jerusalem, who still insisted that non-Jews had to be circumcised and become Jews before Baptism.  Peter believed that the church was open to all people as they were.

The conflict ended when the Church in Jerusalem disappeared.  But the other churches, which opened up their doors to all people, continued.   Peter didn’t ask "Is God on our side?" but asked "Are we on God”s side?"  Are we ready also to compromise for the sake of harmony and peace?  That is the most important question.  Those Christians who  followed Peter were Egyptians, Ethiopians, Jews, Romans, Greeks, and many other nationalities.  They were willing to give up what they held dear and compromise.  We must also be ready to give up something in order to follow what is real and true.  We should do the same between husbands and wives, between friends and co-workers too.  We must ask, “What can we do to resolve the difference?” not “I’m right, and you’re wrong.”

The three wise men who came to worship baby Jesus were astrologers – star gazers.  They didn’t know the Bible nor did they worshipped God of Abraham.  But they gave up everything and travelled in search of truth.  God led them to find the new born baby.  God will lead anyone to the truth if they earnestly seek to find it.  So, the question is:  "Are we ready to give up our ways, and follow God?" 

Whenever we run into a conflict situation, let us not think of my way or their way.  But let us think of God’s way not so much the way to win others over to our side, but of the way to find God’s way together.

WE ARE ALL BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIANS

Isaiah 6:1-8, Psalm 29 (VU755 John 3:1-17

VU 315, 375, 509, 661

June 11, 2006 by Tad Mitsui

Once I went to a hypnotism show. He led a whole crowd in the theatre through an exercise to divide us into two groups: those who could be hypnotized and those who could not be. I found that I was I was too sceptical and could not easily be hypnotized. So the show went on only with people who could be receptive to suggestions, and I was a spectator. I had a lot of fun watching people making fool of themselves. There are people who are more affectionate and emotional, and others like me who think a lot and are more sceptical. There is nothing wrong with either of them. Today’s story from John tells us that we need both kinds.

A young woman asked me one day in a cafeteria, "Are you born again to Jesus?" I said, "Yes." Then she asked, "When?" I said, "Everyday." She looked sceptical, obviously didn’t accept my answer. But I believe if we believe in the Bible, we all have to be born again Christians. Today’s story tells us that thinking people need to be born again to be more passionate and passionate people need to think more.

In the Gospel according to John, you find the expression "Born Again" first used by Jesus. He said that no one could be his follower and enter the kingdom of God unless one was born again. The story has it that one night a prominent Pharisee leader by the name of Nicodemus came to see Jesus. He said, "Teacher, I know you come from God." Jesus said to him, "If you really want to follow God”s way, you must first be born again."

This really threw Nicodemus off balance. "Born again? I am a grown up man. I can not go back to my mother”s womb." He was a man who used the brain to think. He was a scholar. He was not used to be confronted with things that made no logical sense. But he came face to face with the fundamental fact of faith, that is: faith is about life and life is one with both mind and spirit together. He had to integrate reason with passion to start afresh in the life of faith – to be born again in spirit.

It is not easy for a person who is used to logical thinking to give oneself to emotion and passion. For a thinking person a passionate person looks silly. This is why Nicodemus came to see Jesus at night. He was the leader of the scholarly lawyers. He had a hunch that Jesus had to come from God. But his cool reasoning didn’t allow him to jump to such a conclusion. He had to be careful. So he came secretly at night. But faith must involve a whole person. The whole person includes feelings: emotions, and passion, in addition to a cool mind that reasons. Faith requires a whole person. A whole person is a person who draws on both mind and spirit.

There was a paediatrician who became famous in a movement to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. She was once asked why she was so emotional when she spoke about the danger of nuclear weapons. The insinuation was that "Emotional women are not reasonable. If you want to be heard, speak like a reasonable man." She answered that ”Yes, I am emotional about this. I am a woman and a mother. If my patient does not get emotional about her child, she is a psychopath. I ”ll refer her to a Psychiatrist."

Faith is not complete if passionate belief does not seek reason. Mind is a God”s creation, as much as spirit is a gift of God. Faith has to grow in mind and spirit. When faith comes into our life through emotion and passion, it has to be fed with reason as it grows. Faith does not stay alive by emotion alone. Sometime those who believe with passionate faith criticize those people who study the Bible scientifically, and examine our beliefs systematically. But those people must be born again to integrate their passion for God with reason and logic. A whole person is one with both passion and reason.

We are all called upon to be born again. Made new today, tomorrow, and many more times being born again. There are some people who can pinpoint the time and the day when he/she was born again. But we are different. For some of us, "born again" is a quiet process that repeats itself many times. I try to live like a new person everyday, refreshed by the belief that God loves me. God will help us with an inspirational or emotionally high experience. After such an experience, we must settle down and think, like a bowl of hot jelly cools and settles in a fridge. At other times, our cool rational belief system has to be shaken, perked up, and refreshed with stirring hymns or by the love of a friend. In either case, we are born again as a new Christian person.

HE IS NOT HERE

Matthew 28:1-15

Tad Mitsui, Easter, 1996

One day, I ran into a crowd of people who were watching a dead person being dragged out of the water. It was a long time ago. I was on the way home from school. At first, I was afraid to look. But curiosity got the better of me, and I joined the crowd of spectators. It was not a pretty sight. Suddenly there was a shriek. A woman was running down the river bank. She grabbed the body and hugged the lifeless figure, while she cried aloud. She could have been the mother, or maybe the wife. Whoever it was, it was obvious that the drowned person was someone special to her. I felt ashamed, watching this tragedy as though it was a spectacle. For those who did not know the man, it was just another dead body. But for the woman who loved him, it was an entirely different experience. It was the body of a person she loved, from whom separation was an impossible nightmare.

We can not understand resurrection, unless we love someone dearly. We can not understand resurrection unless we know that there is difference between the spiritual body and the mere physical body. We can not believe in resurrection, if we think that we are just flesh on some bones. But when we recognize spiritual elements of our existence as reality, we will be transformed into another being. When I became a father, for example, it was a spiritual experience. When I saw my daughter for the first time, she honestly looked to me like an ugly lump of flesh. But soon a something hit me inside. The realization engulfed me; it was my own child. That same lump of flesh was transformed into a being with an entirely different significance. She had become someone who would always remain an integral part of my being and for whose safety I would even exchange my life.

When we speak about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are speaking about this special aspect of life, which turns a mere physical entity into a precious being with infinite significance. When two women, both called Mary, came to the tomb to put spice and ointment on Christ”s body, they found it empty. An angel told them that Jesus was not there. He had risen and went to Galilee. The angel also told them that there was no use looking for the living person among the dead.

When you love someone, there is an added dimension to the physical body of the one you love. That extra dimension goes beyond this visible world. When someone you love dies, for you, this person changes appearance. It is difficult to adjust to the new manifestation, because your love has been attached to the physical body you became familiar with. But soon you will know that a spiritual existence lives on, even though it is not visible in this world. Even if your memory fades, spiritual life goes on in God”s love. This is how we believe in eternal life. Eternal life is the life that lives on in the realm of God”s loving care. Science says that there is no evidence to prove that there is spiritual reality, and that life goes on in another form. It does not matter what science says, because science deals only with the physical aspects of this visible world. We know that there is a lot more to our existence beyond the mere touchable and visible reality.

So if you look for loved ones only in this visible world, there is no end to grief. The angel said to the women at the tomb, "He is not here. He went to Galilee." In other words, there is no use looking for the living person in this perishable world. He went ahead of you to your home in Galilee. Some students of the Bible suggest that Galilee traditionally meant a frontier, beyond which there is an unknown territory. It was not the known world of politics and religion like Jerusalem. He went to the frontier, into the future, in his new form of life. Jesus was the first one to put on this new life. When Mary said to the dispirited disciples, "I have seen the Lord.", she was testifying to the new form of reality. It was a spiritual experience but real. I can say it was real, because that is the only explanation for how a group of people in absolute despair suddenly turned into a band of brave, even reckless, evangelists, people who dared to talk about the one executed for blasphemy as Messiah.

You can not mourn the dead for ever. You have to get on with your life and venture into the future, into an unknown territory of living. Then you will find your loved one there – in the future. He has preceded you to Galilee – to your future. It is difficult to forget the body which the loved one used to wear, because that is what you knew. But the real person you loved has simply changed into another attire and has preceded you into the future.

When risen Jesus appeared before Mary Magdalene, she first thought that he was a gardener. It was only when he called her name, she realized that it was her master, the one she loved dearly. The shriek of a woman changed an ugly drowned body into someone”s loving husband or son. When I saw my own daughter, first I only saw a lump of flesh, until magic of love triggered a whole chain reaction of mind and emotion to make me realize that it was my own flesh and blood. It is only when a gardener changes into Jesus Christ, that the spiritual body becomes visible to us. Death is not the end. It is a door into another reality, into the spiritual world. Jesus Christ is not here. He is no longer with us in this perishable domain. But He is risen and lives with us for ever.

THE CHURCH”S HONEYMOON

Acts 2:42- 47, Psalm 23, John 10:1-10

April 28, 1996, by Tad Mitsui

In the beginning of married life, we only think of our spouse and do romantic and silly things. We call this period the honeymoon. Most of us move beyond it in a few years. But some people never do. Secretly we may envy them, because it is kind of nice. But we know that we all have to grow up sometime. Ideally, the initial love matures, and we grow wiser to avoid excess and to start looking outward. The Christian Church went through a phase similar to a honeymoon after the first Easter. But the church in Jerusalem never matured beyond the honeymoon phase and consequently almost disappeared, and the active Christian church developed outside of the Holy Land.

After the resurrection of Jesus Christ, his followers were so excited and happy that they got together all the time and talked about their encounters with the risen Jesus. It soon became their custom to come together weekly on the day of resurrection. This is how the Christian Church began to meet on Sundays, the day after the Jewish Sabbath when Jesus rose from the dead. When they met, they followed the custom of the Synagogue: reading the Scriptures, singing Psalms, and listening to the followers of Jesus tell stories of Jesus Christ. After that they always had a meal together to remember the last supper Jesus had with his followers.

In the beginning, they did not think that they were starting a new religion. So they met in the synagogues, and called themselves people who followed "the Way". Soon it became difficult to meet in the synagogues, because other Jews began to suspect that the people of the Way were practising heresy. Some fanatical scholars, like Saul – who later became Paul – began to persecute the Christians by harassing them, putting them into jails, and sometimes executing them for advocating blasphemy against Judaism.

So those who followed "the Way" began to live in the new way of life especially in and around Jerusalem. They began to live in the communes eating together and making each meal like Holy Communion, and sharing all earthly possessions. Archaeologists dug out the ruins of similar communities in Palestine. One of them was called the Essenes and is well known today, because of its likelihood of being a community where John the Baptist or even Jesus himself might have lived. The Essenes located their communities in the mountains and deserts, in order to safeguard the purity of their belief.

This communal living might have been necessary. It was too dangerous to live alone as Christians in a hostile environment. But it was not just due to a need for security that they lived like this. It was mainly because of their enthusiasm and passion for their belief. Perhaps it was excessive, but they were so happy to be together, sharing the knowledge that Christ had risen. They lived in ecstasy. It was their honeymoon in their new faith.

They believed that the way of loving that Jesus taught could only be put into practice through a total sharing. They believed that if they loved their brothers and sisters in faith, they should share everything they owned. So they abolished private property. Some people kept a few possessions for themselves secretly instead of giving them all up to the communities. But they were made to feel ashamed. The Bible recorded the story of a couple who did not give everything away and secretly kept a portion of their money. They died of a heart attack because their deception was exposed. Some people stopped working for living, and devoted themselves to a life of charity and prayer. Some of them even stopped paying taxes, because they believed that Christ would come soon and establish a new kingdom of God. So they were prosecuted for tax evasion by the Roman authorities. They may have been idealistic and their devotion touching, but they were naive and not very practical.

This is why the first Christians who lived in Jerusalem became very poor and destitute. Those Christians who lived outside of Palestine, in Turkey, Greece, North Africa, and in Italy had to support them by raising funds to help them. But many of the Jerusalem Christians remained the same and stubbornly stuck to their ways. They did not fully accept those later converts who were not Jews. They insisted that these Gentiles convert to Judaism first through circumcision before they became the people of the Way. They became a cosy little group, never changing their ways and not wanting to welcome newcomers. Because of this obstinate attitude, the Church in Jerusalem nearly disappeared. The active Church, in its stead, developed in North Africa – in Egypt and Ethiopia, in Asia Minor – in Turkey, and in Europe – in Greece and Italy.

This is a classic case of people who never grew up. They never moved beyond the honeymoon. They remained inward looking and exclusive, like a newly married couple. They did this in the name of Jesus Christ. Love that does not mature becomes stale and poisonous. Their "way" became a huge boulder that blocked the road to growth rather than a highway on which to journey to maturity. The way, like a road or a street, is useful only when it allows you to move and go somewhere. The Christian way is an avenue for a movement. It challenges us to grow and move with change.

There are two lakes in Palestine, Lake Galilee and Dead Sea, which are connected to one river system – the River Jordan. One is alive and the other is dead. One can drink water out of Lake Galilee; fish are plentiful. But the Dead Sea has no visible life form living in it. One can not even stay in the water more than a few minutes, because water is too salty. The lake, as its name implies, is dead. What makes them so different though both of them get the water from the same river? Lake Galilee takes water in and lets it flow out. So fresh water moves through it continually. On the other hand, the Dead Sea is located below the sea level, and water has no place to go; it sits stagnant and evaporates leaving chemicals behind. So the lake died and killed other living things. Christ”s way of life, the way of loving is like a flowing water. It involves constant movement – that movement allows life to grow and thrive. Change allows love to become more mature.

But how? John”s Gospel today gives a very interesting hint. A true guide who leads you to safety is compared to a shepherd, but the one who leads you astray is called a thief and a bandit. Shepherding and thieving are both ways to make a living. But a shepherd makes a living by looking after others. A shepherd lived with the animals rain or shine: the welfare of the animals was the welfare of the shepherd. Shepherd made a living by caring, loving, and sharing. We know a lot of people like that. They make decent living, but equally they give well. Thieves on the other hand make a living by exploiting others without giving back in return. They certainly aren”t concerned with looking after the welfare of the victims. Their goal in life is to look after themselves, and nobody else. Others are all potential targets for exploitation or enemies. Their goal in life is strictly taking, and absolutely no giving. This kind of living will eventually leads you to self-destruction.

Just like the love life of honeymoon eventually dies and becomes poisonous unless it matures, the church that remains inward looking concerned only with itself also dies. I believe that, like the hymn we used to sing in Sunday School, "There”s a church in the valley by the wildwood" language of the church says too often "Come, come, come," and not often enough "Go, go, go." It is good to create a lovely caring community. You have in large measures succeeded in making such a community in Howick United Church. I would much prefer to be here than in a large and prosperous downtown church with bells and whistles, a paid choir and a large salary. But we must keep growing up. We must remember to consider what to do and how to do it when we leave the church building, just as much as remembering to come together for worship and fellowship. Do not forget, our guide and our teacher is like a shepherd who calls us out to journey through green pastures and dark vales, as often as he brings us back to a comfortable home through his gate.

It is he who shares the honeymoon with us as well as calls us forward to a more mature love.

COMMANDMENTS AS THE MEANS OF GRACE

Exodus 20, Psalm 19, Matthew 21:33-46

October 3, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

 A boy went off the trail and got lost because he did not obey the first bush commandment, "Thou shalt not go into the woods alone." When he was found after two days and two nights, he was covered with thousands of mosquito bites, dehydrated, starving, and nearly delirious. He learned the price of disobeying the rules in a very hard way. He nearly lost his life.

Though rules and regulations exist for our own good, they have a bad name – "boring". Many people believe that it is more fun to break a law than to obey it. "Don”t get caught." is a slogan more people seem to believe in than those who obey the laws. The laws are normally the expression of God”s concern for us. But they don”t fully appreciate that the laws are intended for their safety and well-being. Ten Commandments were given to people, as the means for God to express his concern for people. But we don”t appreciate them as such. We think that the laws restrict our freedom and tie us down to a boring life. Therefore, many people think that the religion is a whole bunch of "Thou shalt not." So they think that religion is boring and takes fun out of life.

We must admit that, as soon as we see a rule, our first impulse is to break it. A story has it that one day a town council erected a sign with the inscription, "It is forbidden to throw stones at this sign." Guess what happened. Within a week, the sign became illegible because so many people threw stones at it. This story tells us about our ambivalent relation with the law. Nobody thinks that laws are bad. In fact, we will probably be very upset if people break the laws openly and get away with it. But why then do we cheat the laws – customs regulations, tax laws, and traffic laws, etc? I don”t think that there are many people who have never broken any of the Ten Commandments. Governments are worst offenders of the Ten Commandments. Paul described this problem in his letter to the Romans, "If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. If the law does not say "Thou shall not be envious.", I would not have known what envy is."

This is a unique problem for human beings. Animals can do only what nature tells them to do. They do not have freedom to choose, so they can only follow the laws of nature. They know no other way, so they do not need rules. Whereas humans are free. So we have options. We have knowledge of what is good for us. But we do have freedom to obey the law as well as to break it. God”s laws are the means of his grace. The knowledge of what is good for our well-being is revealed to us in a form of the commandments – the laws of God. So we have freedom to choose to live well, if we decide to follow the commandments. Freedom is a precious gift. It means that God respects us, and recognizes our dignity as independent individuals.

But we can choose to disobey the laws too. We can exercise our God given freedom by choosing what is not good for us. If we don”t have this option, we are not truly free. So the important question is; what is it that make us want to choose the God”s way, freely. What does it make what we only know in the head, into something we really want to do from our heart? What does it make the mere knowledge of what is good into heartfelt desires? What does it change the laws into the means of grace? The Bible says it is love that makes what is in the head into a matter of heart. Jesus said that love is the fulfilment of all the laws. Love makes the laws work. But without love, the law can be a temptation to break it, as Paul put it.

I can not name myself an excellent driver. But when I was young, I was worse. I was reckless. What changed me, at least into a more careful driver was the arrival of a child in my life. Though I am far from being an excellent driver even now, following the traffic laws began to have a whole different meaning with my child in the car. A concern for the safety of the child made me realize that the traffic laws were good things. And I began to hope that all drivers obey the law for the safety of my loved one. It is love that makes sense out of the laws. It is love that make you want to obey God”s commandments.

We are celebrating the Lord”s Supper today. It is a memorial of our Lord”s death. We remember that God who gave us the laws is the same God who forgave those who crucified Jesus on the cross. God commands and forgives, because he loves us. As we partake the symbolic meal to remember the love of God, let us also remember that it was the same God who loves us through the commandments. Remembering his love, let us appreciate the God”s way and give our best to live accordingly.

KNOWING A PERSON BY NAME

Jeremiah 18:1-11, Psalm 139, Philemon 1-21

September 6, 1998 by Tad Mitsui

I have a friend who made it big in business. He jets around the world these days. A few years ago, he and some of my old cronies invited us to a reunion in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Tokyo. After the dinner, we went on our separate ways by taxis and public transport; no sane person brings a car into downtown Tokyo. Muriel and I walked to our hotel with this businessman friend. He had his chauffeur and the Mercedes limo waiting for him, not in the restaurant parking lot but quite a few blocks away. I could kind of guess why my friend did not want to be seen with a chauffeur driven limo. He wanted to relive our good old innocent days, when none of us had money. When we needed a place to sit and talk, we went into restaurants and spent hours talking, pretending to have difficult time deciding what to order. We kept sipping glass after glass of water. In the end, we walked out pretending that there was nothing that interested us. We called ourselves "Waterman”s Club". We were poor, but we had lots of fun together.

The status symbols like clothes and cars can build barriers between people. A millionaire and a street person do not become friends easily. The letter of Paul to Philemon tells a unusual story of two Christians who broke a barrier between them. It is a letter Paul wrote to his good friend Philemon. He was a prominent leader of the church in Colossae. The letter was carried and hand delivered by Onesimus, who used to be Philemon”s slave. Onesimus, according to the letter, was a runaway slave, who managed to reach Rome from Turkey and became a member of Paul”s inner circle of friends. Paul was under house arrest waiting for a trial. Before he was executed, he sent Onesimus back to Philemon asking him to accept him back as a Christian brother.

If you know the status of slaves during those days, you realize how incredible this story is. Slaves did not have any place as a human being in society. They were regarded to be the same as domesticated animals, and were bought and sold like animals. An ancient Roman document has it that on one occasion an escaped slave, after being captured, pleaded with his master not to throw him into a crocodile pond as an entertainment for guests. Even as recently as the last century, the slave ships used to lose, on the average, a quarter of their cargo between West Africa and the U.S. Their cargo was African men, women, and children who were abducted and sold as slaves in the United States. Many died of disease and suffocation in the cargo hold. Also, the slaves were often thrown overboard during the storms to save the ships. We treat our cattle and pigs better than they used to treat slaves.

When a News paper reports about a traffic accident, it does not report the names of cows. They are just animals. So were the slaves. The price of a slave could have been cheaper than a prized horse. Today, we believe that the slavery is absolutely unacceptable. Slaves were people, not animals. But it took nearly two thousand more years from the time of the Bible for all of us to realize that the slavery is unacceptable. So, you see how amazing this letter is. How incredible it is to see Paul not only calling an escaped slave by name, but also calling him "my child". We know nothing about the friendship between Paul and Onesimus; how they met and how they became close friends. But the fact that Paul called him by his name alone, says a lot.

Paul didn”t have a grand scheme to abolish slavery as such. He was merely following the examples and teachings of Jesus. He accepted each person as a child of God just as Jesus did, ignoring the kind of things that normally created barriers between people. Jesus befriended the rich and the educated, attended their banquets and parties. He loved the company of children, too. Also he was a friend of social outcasts like sinners and prostitutes. He treated the untouchable like lepers and insane people just like he would the ordinary people. The lepers, in those days, were obliged to warn people that they were coming, so that the ordinary people had time to go inside of the house and lock the door. But Jesus talked to them and touched them as one human to another. Nothing came between Jesus and people.

Paul summarized Jesus” attitude towards people in the letter to the Galatians, "There is no longer Greek or Jews, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female. We are all one in Christ." You realize that even today in some countries you will be jailed for saying the same thing as Paul said. But Paul was merely following the examples of Jesus Christ.

When you follow the examples of Christ, and get to know people as persons by their names not as the adjectives like rich, poor, good, bad, healthy, sick, African, French, or English, all the barriers that divide people come down. You don”t have to start a revolution. The society will change when everybody gets to know and learns to love each other. I am not underestimating how difficult it is to ignore those barriers. There was an elderly woman in Vancouver who lived alone in a downtown rooming house, who became a good friend. I met her when I was delivering Christmas hampers. I always enjoyed visiting her. She kept saying that one of those days she should come to church. She had to keep me honest, she said. But she never came. Before I left Vancouver, she apologized for having never heard my sermon. She said, "I really wanted to come. I didn”t lie. But I had no clothes to wear to church." It was clothes that stood between the church and this woman who really wanted to come. I didn”t know whether I should cry or I should clobber her.

When you think of our church, you realize that even in our small congregation, you have so many nationalities and people of different back grounds. But those differences are not barriers for us, because we think of each other as just friends. Thank God for that. We are all one in Christ after all.

THE WISE AND THE FOOL

Proverbs 1:20-33, Psalm 19, Mark 8:27-38

September 14, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

I once had a colleague who came from Cape Breton Island. She told me that there were eight Gaelic words meaning "fool." They were all graded, from the ordinary kind found everywhere to the absolutely hopeless case. According to her, the worst fool in Gaelic means an "arrogant and stubborn old man." The book of Proverbs lists two kinds of fools. My Bible has two words – "simpleton" and "scoffer". Others versions use words like insolent one, brazen one, ignorant one or one who mocks. It shows that there are many kinds of fools. However, a common feature in all of them is their inability to hear the voice of wisdom, either because of stupidity or of their arrogance.

I heard of a man who drove around and around the gas station that sold cheap gas until the tank was empty, so that he could fill it with cheap gas. He thought he was being smart, I guess. And the worst foolishness is an inability to hear the voice of wisdom. "Fools despise wisdom and instruction." says Proverbs. On the other hand, the truly wise person fears God. Proverbs says, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." When you respect God, many human attributes fade into the background. In other words, a wise person is humble and sensitive enough to be able to listen and to see things beyond the surface. Humility enables one to discern wisdom despite appearances. On the other hand, a fool can not see beyond the surface.

If you fear God, you find wisdom everywhere. Proverbs describes wisdom by saying, "She cries out on the streets, in the town squares, and in the market places. But fools do not see her nor listen to her." When I was working for the church offices in Toronto, I used to change street cars at the intersection of College Street and Yonge. On that corner , there was a street preacher – a big black man with a beautiful baritone holding a placard that said, "God loves you." His booming voice could be heard on every corner of that noisy and busy intersection. He said simple things like "Repent. The end is near." Or something like that. Of course, nobody paid any attention to him including me. I was too embarrassed.

Imagine the same kind of a scene played at the market in St. Chrysostome on Friday afternoon? Of course, it might also be a fraud, someone who”s out to get you, maybe into some strange cult or suck you dry of money. You must be careful. Imagine that it is a woman who is crying out, "Repent." A woman, especially a woman, is not expected to do things like that….unless she is a well-known high profile person like Mother Teresa. They can get away with it, because of the special status we accord them. If it is an ordinary woman, probably we would look at her as though she was crazy. Maybe I am reading too much into Proverbs and making a big deal out of wisdom being referred to as a woman. A ship is referred to as "she", so is a country. Many people call their countries the "Mother land". Maybe it is significant. I, for one, think that Proverbs has very a important message to give us by referring wisdom as a woman.

When those Proverbs were written a few thousand years ago, the status of women was much lower than it is today. Women were virtually men”s properties. In such a situation, there had to be some important reasons to refer to wisdom in female terms. By presenting wisdom as a woman – a most unlikely metaphor in those days – it is saying that it would take a considerable amount of humility and open-mindedness to see something extremely important and valuable. If you truly respect God, you will be so open-minded as to see truth beyond any unlikely looking surface. Also when men see women, they often see only their appearances and can not see beyond sex. There is, of course, nothing wrong with appreciating someone”s appearance. What is wrong is men”s inability to simply acknowledge beauty, let go of it, and then see beyond the surface.

There was once a highly respected monk, known for his devotion to meditation and his wisdom. Many young men became his followers. One day, the sage was reading the Holy Scriptures quietly in the woods. Some of his disciples joined him in this meditation exercise. In the course of the day, a beautiful woman came for a walk in the woods and passed by those monks. The sage lifted his eyes and watched the woman as she passed by. He resumed his meditation after she disappeared from his sight. The disciples were very upset. They were very disappointed with their master for even looking at the woman during a meditation and told him so. But the sage said to them, "Can you not let go? Why should beauty bother you? Poor foolish souls. It is wonderful to appreciate the beauty of nature and the wisdom of God”s words." By referring to wisdom in the female terms, the writer of Proverbs challenges us to see truth beyond what is sometimes superficially attractive, as much as behind an unlikely or even ugly facade.

In Proverbs, wisdom expresses righteous anger towards people who do not see nor listen to her voice. People do not heed her warning, because meeting wisdom on the street is, at least, inconvenient, mostly annoying. When Peter was asked by Jesus who he thought Jesus was, he gave the right answer. But as soon as Jesus started to tell him the suffering and death that awaited him in Jerusalem, Peter was very annoyed. He scolded his master for saying such nonsense. It was impossible that people would reject the messiah whom they were waiting for, and make him suffer. Peter could not see the true nature of God”s love. He expected the good to meet an happy ending. He could see the end of the story of the prince of peace only in terms of "And he lived happily ever after." Peter is not any different from the rest of us. However, the anger Jesus showed to Peter at that moment was quite exceptional. He called Peter "Satan" for seeing things in a human way not in God”s way. It was just like the anger of wisdom in Proverbs.

God”s wisdom can be found often in the most unlikely places. Mother Teresa found God in the slums of Calcutta. I don”t know how many of you have actually seen slums in some of the poor countries. The worst slum I have ever seen was outside of Nairobi, Kenya called Mathare Valley. About a million people lived there, in an area about the size of Chateauguay. Skeleton like figures were walking about like living corpses in rags. Stench from all sorts of waste was unbearable. There was ankle deep mud everywhere. I could not stay there too long. And yet Mother Teresa took the hands of those dying in such a bog of human misery and looked after them in their last days of their lives. And there, she said, she "touched the face of God."

The wisdom of God is found by people who can see beyond day-to-day superficial values. This is why Paul said, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. For the God”s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom." God”s wisdom is beyond our wisdom. You may think it is impossible for us to attain such divine wisdom. Even Peter could not see it. You may think that it is only Jesus who could. And I say we can. In love, divine wisdom and our understanding come together. Think of Mother Teresa, think of any mother, who sees potential beyond the appearance of an awkward child. We can hear divine wisdom everywhere in the logic of love. Maybe that”s another good reason to describe wisdom as a woman.

Isaiah 7 : 10 – 16,
Psalm 80,
Matt. 1 : 18 – 25

Just imagine; if this is not a Bible story.  A man had a nightmare.  How could it be just a dream?  His young fiancé told him that she was pregnant.  He and she were the only ones who knew that he was not responsible for her pregnancy.  It took tremendous amount of faith, love, and trust for Joseph to believe Mary”s explanation. Stories around the first Christmas are full of faith and love.  And the story of Joseph is one of them.

A mother is the only reliable natural link between a child and the family.  This is why a Jewish person must come from a Jewish mother regardless of the father”s nationality.  The love of a father for his child begins with trust.  A father has to learn to love a child, he has not carried it inside himself for nine months.  And if Joseph did not trust Mary, Christmas would not have happened, because she could have been stoned to death for adultery.  The laws regarding adultery applied also to engaged couples.  What could Joseph do?  He was a law abiding man, but he also loved Mary dearly.  The child could not be Joseph”s child.  And Mary makes a preposterous excuse.    She says, "It”s God who made me pregnant."  Oh, sure.  Imagine?

So he was going to quietly annul the engagement to make it look as though it had never happened.  She might be branded as a loose woman by giving birth to a fatherless child, but her sin would not be labelled adultery.  Being a loose woman was shameful, but it did not signify she broke faith with her husband, or husband-to-be, because there was no such man.  This way, Mary”s life would be spared.  Then one night he had a dream.  An angel appeared and told him that indeed Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit and that he should name the child Jesus – Yoshua, "he who saves people."  He wanted to believe such a message because he loved her.  That was enough.  He decided to travel with her to Bethlehem to register their marriage and possibly their new born child.  According to the custom of the land at the time, when a couple of a man and a woman undertook a journey together without chaperon, they were considered to be legally  married.

Evangelist Matthew told this story of Joseph to remind the Jews who were under Roman occupation of what happened about 800 years before to King Ahaz.  During the reign of Ahaz, the kingdom of Judah was under tremendous pressure from an alliance of Syria and Israel which was ready to invade and conquer Judah.  At first, Ahaz could think of no other way out but to enter an alliance with Egypt, though he knew that was a bad idea.  Egypt would surely absorb his tiny country eventually.  It was a Catch 22 situation.  The Prophet Isaiah agreed with Ahaz”s analysis that this alliance would be a problem and told him not to enter such an agreement.  But Ahaz needed a sign that he was taking the lesser of two risks by not entering into the alliance.  Isaiah gave him a sign from God as an alternative course.  The sign was, "A young woman becomes pregnant and bears a baby boy.  He will be called ”God is with us”.  He will bring people milk and honey, and other powerful nations will be no more."  

Who could have believed in such a preposterous sign?  King Ahaz didn”t.  Many of us still don”t.  But Joseph did, 800 years after Isaiah”s initial prophecy.  Joseph believed it,  because he loved Mary and wanted to believe in her faithfulness badly enough to trust God”s message.   He could believe that a baby of a questionable origin could be a sign of hope for the whole people.  Love is powerful.  Crazy?  Maybe, but it is the only way.  Joseph teaches us that love and trust are the only way to make this world work.  Even economic and military alliances do not work where there is a lack of the basic ingredients of human civility and decency, based on trust.  Where there is no trust even Empires will fall, because of the weight of the cost of maintaining a credible deterrent against possible betrayal.  [That”s how the Soviet Union fell.  Disintegration of our societies can not be stopped by toughened measures against crimes, where there is no trust between people.  When the police realized that they can no longer catch up with the rising crime rate at the time of shrinking tax dollars, they devised community policing.  They brought back foot patrol, and introduced bicycle squads and store front mini-stations to get to know people.  They want to restore trust between people and the police.]  A society that lacks trust is always under a threat of  disintegration.

Believing that the future of the human race rests in a baby, born by a young woman is not preposterous.  Giving birth to a child is a pilgrimage of trust and Joseph journeyed through that.  He can not be left in the background for he teaches us one of the most profound message in the Christmas story.  A sign from God that is overlooked can not change the world.  Incarnation alone means little.  But to believe in a dream, to act on trust animates that incarnation.  Joseph steps forward and shows us the path we must take as pilgrims who journey in trust.  It”ś his path that leads us to Bethlehem… and beyond.

JESUS CHRIST – SUPERMAN OR JUST A MAN?

Exodus 17 : 1 – 6, Psalm 78, Phil. 2 : 1 – 13

September 29, 1996, by Tad Mitsui

Paul was in a Roman prison writing the last letter of his life to the Philippians. He knew that his death was imminent. He was probably beheaded soon after he sent that letter. Despite the circumstances, the letter was filled with joy. He used words like "happy", "joy" or "rejoice" more than 20 times in a short letter, and asked the Philippians to join him in his happiness. How could Paul be happy in such a situation? Or was he just trying to be brave? I have no definite answer why anyone could be happy in a prison. But in this circumstance, he wrote the famous verses extolling the self-emptying love of Jesus. "Though Jesus Christ was in the form of God, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave being born as a human." But I think that in his belief in the self-emptying love of Jesus, there is a clue to know why Paul could be happy despite his imminent demise.

Paul was a well educated man of high society. Now he was sitting in a prison in Rome because of his faith in Jesus Christ. If he had any doubt about the self-emptying love of Jesus Christ, he would have been screaming at a prison wall out of total frustration. On the surface, it appeared that Paul wasted his life completely. He was born of a successful, affluent, and industrious family. He grew up in a foreign country and was fluent in the universal language of the day, Greek. Because of the prominent position they held, the entire family was accorded the rare privilege of Roman citizenship, though they were Jews.

He also belonged to the Pharisees – the elite class of lawyers and scholars in the Jewish society. He was educated in the highest educational institution in Jerusalem. Therefore, his promotion in the ruling class was remarkably quick. Even when he was a law student, he had already supervised at least one trial and execution of a heretic. A few years later, he was given authority over the entire region of Syria to arrest and imprison the followers of the heretical teaching known as Christianity. When he became a Christian he threw all those privileges away. I am sure that his past in the Jewish establishment must have made many Christians suspicious of him. Not only that, he had a hard time convincing other Christians about the legitimacy of his ministry, because of his more liberal understanding of the Gospel, which stemmed from his education and overseas experiences.

We have a bad habit of discrediting good people, when we find a few blemishes in them. We somehow feel familiarity gives us a license to discredit virtues. When you hear the praises of someone you know well, you feel that you have a right to diminish their apparent virtues by adding the inside story. I know this, because I do it myself. For example, I have had the privilege to get to know many saintly people in my life. On more than one occasion, I got angry at or spoke ill of such godly persons as Mother Teresa or Desmond Tutu, because I had seen first hand their idiosyncrasies and got impatient with them. Shame on me! Knowing this particular human tendency, Jesus said that prophets were rarely accepted in their own home towns. As people got to know the Prophets well, they always found faults in them. We must find ways to keep the respect for people with whom we have become familiar.

I suspect that the same psychology is at work when we think of Jesus Christ today. We might crucify him again, if he lived among us and if we knew him well. But because we have not lived close to Jesus in the flesh and do not know him as someone who is like us, it is easy for us to respect and praise him. We have no problem to say, "He is God." For us, he is someone like Superman, who came from outer space and could perform wonders. Therefore it is impossible for us to feel responsible for his death, because we respect him too much. We can not think of ourselves killing the son of God. "It was those bad people, not us, who crucified Jesus." We don”t realize that our presumed innocence is based on our unfamiliarity with the person of Jesus Christ. This is why, for many centuries, the Christians persecuted Jewish people as the nation responsible for the death of our Lord. That was, of course, totally unjust.

We have a real problem comprehending one of the important articles of faith. It is the humanity of Christ, because that makes him like us. If Jesus remained God, and stayed far away from the likes of us, there would not have been such a problem. We would not see him. We would not see anything we didn”t like in him. We would be able to continue to worship him, if he stayed away from us and remained God. But is this the real Jesus? What do we do with the verses like, "He emptied himself to become like us and lived among us."

Ralph Milton once did something very interesting, when he led a Bible study of the same passage we read today. He drew a long horizontal line, and marked one end as "100% undiluted God" and the other end as a "kinda nice person". In the middle of the line was "a saintly person". First he asked people to position Jesus on this continuum. The most of the people put Jesus on "100% undiluted God" or somewhere pretty close. Then he mentioned a few names of people they who were well respected and they knew personally. He also mentioned some godly people they respected but never met, people like Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Albert Schweitzer, etc. None of the people who they were familiar with made it to "saintly persons". They were mostly "Kinda nice people" including their own ministers. Only a few famous people, whom they did not know personally, made it close to the status of "saintly persons".

It is difficult to understand the notion of Jesus Christ being a 100% undiluted God and a 100% undiluted man at the same time, in the same person. Many Christians do not understand how Jesus could be human while being completely God. The people of Jewish and Muslim faiths do not accept that either; no human could be God, no way, no how. This is because we do not see God in people. Consequently, we are too quick to find faults in good people and reject them, as soon as we get to know them well. We must learn to see a bit of God in every person. Remember the creation story? God created humans, according to the likeness of God. We are not perfect, of course. But a bit of godliness is in every one of us. But often, because we know some people, we overlook their godliness. Disrespect increases rapidly, once someone you see in flesh does something you don”t like or something which goes against your interest. This is why the people in Jerusalem cried out for Jesus” death. They got to know him in flesh, and did not like what they saw in him, even though many of them thought that he was Messiah in the beginning.

Jesus was a human being. He was tempted to abuse divine power, when he was hungry. He was attracted by political power, and was even dazzled by worldly riches. He wept over the death of his friend. He cried and sweated all night, begging God to let him avoid the agony on the cross; he could not stand the thought of such extreme pain. On the cross, he even fell into the depth of despair and accused God of abandoning him. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!" One neglected clause in the Apostle”s Creed is, after Jesus was crucified and died, "He descended into hell." Jesus went to hell? We thought it was the place only bad people went. No matter how it should be interpreted, it is quite clear that Jesus saw everything any human person would experience, including that of hell.

Jesus Christ was a 100% undiluted human being. And people could hear, see and touch him. It was easy to hate him, because he was close to them and visible. Likewise, we can dislike people who are close and do something against our interest, even though they are doing the right thing. Yes, we can crucify Jesus all over again, unless we learn to see God in every human being. Unless you know how to see godliness in every human being, you will not be able to see this 100% undiluted human being called Jesus Christ, who was at the same time 100% undiluted God. Let us go back to Paul”s prison cell in Rome. I could see him saying something like: "My humanity – all the failures, wrong directions, thwarted projects, and warts – is what Jesus become when he emptied himself. And in doing so Jesus showed me the godliness in my humanity."

SEARCHING THE LIFE AMONG THE DEAD

I Cor. 15:20-26, Psalm 118, Luke 24:1-12

and John 20:1-18

April 19, 1998 by Tad Mitsui

There was a man, a lonely man. He was a senior civil servant in a city hall. His burning ambitions, passionate love, and sweet dreams all failed him, with nothing but bitter disappointments, a broken heart, and cynicism. He now lived by the recipe for a successful civil servant: "Never miss work. Never late to work. Do nothing." At forty-eight, he was only looking forward to retirement and time looking at his stamp collection. One day a doctor told him that he had only a few months to live. Despair and hopelessness overtook his life; he became pickled in alcohol.

One morning after a night in town, he found himself waking up on a strange bed in what looked like a shabby rooming house. A child brought him a cup of coffee. She was selling roses in the bar last night. Her mother had already gone to work, she said. He watched the girl playing with a cheap stuffed monkey he gave her. He picked it up somewhere in his drunken stupor. He was moved to see how the girl was absorbed in the play with the cheap dollar store stuffed animal. She looked utterly happy talking with a monkey in her pretend home. She looked so much alive. It was her very first toy in her entire life. He realized then that he was with people who lived in a slum area of town. A few years ago, the residents of this area asked the city to provide a playground for children. Their petition was sitting in his file for years. He had had no intention to do anything about it. But that morning, he became a changed man. He was late to work, because he had to look at all possible sites for the playground, before he got to the office. He ordered the Parks Department to draw up a plan and make a cost estimate, immediately. He encouraged the residents of the area to organize themselves and start lobbying the mayor and the key city councillors. He pestered his superiors to move things faster. He stepped on far too many toes and annoyed everybody. They thought that his thus-far-safe career in the city hall was ruined.

On the day of the official opening, the mayor came, gave a speech and cut the ribbon. After everybody went home, the now-very-sick man and the girl were on the swing, swinging back and forth, singing the old Japanese favourite, "Life is short, let us fall in love." Everybody remembered "that man" in the city hall, whenever they came to the park. Death made him more alive in people”s mind. But nobody remembered anything he did during his twenty-five year career in the city hall before the playground.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ tells us that there are some dead people though may be dead, can still be very much alive and continue to communicate with the living. On the other hand, a person may be biologically alive, but is, in truth, as dead as the dry bones. We believe that our Lord Jesus Christ was the first person who died physically, but is very much alive among us today.

The Jewish people believed that at death absolutely everything was over. Many people do not realize that the ancient Jews did not believe in the life after death. Life after death was an ancient Egyptian belief. Read the Old Testament carefully. You will not find the notion of life after death in it. At death one entered into nothing – void. This is why the Hebrew word "Hell" in the Old Testament is the same word for "Death – sheol." Because life ended with death, they treasured this life very much. They tried to live life – here and now as fully as possible, because to them this life was their only chance. So, they tried very hard to live this life in the best way possible. They enjoyed all the pleasures of life with gusto. But also they tried to do it right so as not to waste it. This was why the law became the very important guide to them.

This was how they came to the conclusion that the life that was wasted without joy and without purpose was not worth living; you might as well be dead. Also they decided in the same logic that sin was the same as death. Life is so precious that it had to be lived correctly and fully. Authentic life and death were not the same as biological life and death. Jesus Christ was the first fruit of the authentic life that did not die with biological death. He loved people completely. He enjoyed life, too. You notice how many times the Bible mentions about Jesus at the banquets, and about a dinner in his parables. He knew how to live fully and joyfully by loving people absolutely.

It is ironical. Isn”t it? Because he loved people unconditionally, he had to die. The society could not tolerate such love. So the people who had vested interest in the existing system had to kill him. People who hold power hate changes. But because Jesus truly lived by loving others, death did not have the last word. We can not prove this scientifically, but we know he is alive today. In Jesus Christ, we find a genuine life that travels back and forth between the biological divide of life and death.

There is not much point looking for the living among the dead. Mary came to the tome to embalm the dead body. But she did not find it. She was weeping by the empty tome. She didn”t know what to do; she was lost. It was only when she turned around in the direction of the voice of an unknown person, she saw a life truly living – the life that was not defeated by sin which tried to exterminate love; she met the risen Christ.

In the desert of the Western Sudan, many women and children were trying desperately to eke out meagre living on the perched dry sand. Their husbands and fathers are either missing or dead during the two decade long civil war. But life goes on despite the stupid greedy and power hungry men who don”t want to make peace. Men, who are determined to keep fighting for power, caused the two decade long civil war, which gave people nothing but misery, poverty, and death.

Women used to cultivate land when they were living among the green lush hills and fresh water lakes of the Southern Sudan. Now the dry sand of the refugee camps in the Sahara desert does not allow them to grow food as they used to at home. Only way they know how, to make a living in such a situation was to make beer out of sorghum and sell it. There are many thirsty men who buy it, though it is illegal under the Islamic law to consume alcohol. The prisons are full of women who were caught selling beer. So the church has been teaching them the different ways to make living; making soap out of palm oil and crushed lime stones, tie and dye cotton material, and sewing clothes. The church has a rotating loan fund providing them with money to buy sewing machines and start up their own businesses. Some of them started to crush peanuts into butter while waiting for customers and sold them besides dresses and materials. Others collect frankincense in the desert and sell it besides their tie and dye. Their children are now fed and have change of clothes now. There is life in the desert. Children are laughing and running in the dry land.

Jesus conquered death, not in the battle ground or in the forum of politics, but by loving people absolutely. That”s why Jesus is alive today, tomorrow, and forever. Hallelujah!

TENDER LOVE AND TOUGH MIND

LUKE 14 : 25 – 33

True love requires an intensely tough mind. Such toughness is so intense that sometimes it feels almost like hate. We should not ignore this, though this probably is one of the most difficult aspects in the art of loving. Jesus in today”s Gospel is telling us that if we do not deal with this love/hate relationship, we do not really understand his love. The lesson from Jeremiah also makes the similar point about the difficult demands God makes of people, like a potter who smashes up imperfect pots and remoulds them until he sees perfection.

The backdrop of the story in today”s Gospel was Jesus” final journey to Jerusalem where he died on a cross. By then he was an enormously popular man. He was always followed by a large crowd of people. But were they all truly dedicated followers of Christ? Some of them might have been. But, the majority were not. In fact, many of them soon turned their backs on Jesus and became the very crowd that demanded the death of Jesus. Jesus put a difficult test to them so that they would realize how tough it is to be true disciples.

The test was, indeed, tough. Most of us do not understand what he meant at a first glance. He said, "Anyone, who does not hate father and mother, brother and sister, himself or herself, and does not carry the cross with me, is not my true disciple." It sounds like a complete reversal of everything Jesus stood for. We don”t understand why he used the word "hate".

In the case like this, I usually look at the same story in other Gospels, like Matthew and Mark. They used a little milder expression to say the same thing. Jesus said, "If you do not love me more than you love your father and mother, etc." Difference in language shows that Luke felt more strongly about the point that Jesus was making than other writers of the Gospels. In other words, Luke felt it so strongly, that a negative word like ”hate” was necessary to make the same point.

We must realize that hate is not the opposite of love. Love”s opposite is apathy, or lack of care. Hate, like love, is a powerful emotion that takes over your whole being. Yes, hate is extremely negative. But if you don”t care, you don”t hate. It is why love often causes negative emotions like jealousy or hate. Some Old Testament literatures even describes God”s love by saying, "God is a jealous God." This is no puppy-love.

What then does it mean to love Jesus more than to love anyone else? If you love Jesus intensely, you will be shocked to see the contrast between his enormous capacity to love and our way. The difference shows up so starkly that it is like looking at yourself in a very sharp uncompromising mirror. If it is a good mirror, it shows us in detail. It does not necessarily flatter us. You can”t be fooled by what you think you look like and how you really appear. Jesus was an embodiment of perfect love and a perfect human being. By loving Jesus, we see an honest refection of ourselves in contrast to a perfect model of human being.

Likewise when we look at our parents, our spouse, our children, and ourselves in comparison to the best model of human being, Jesus Christ, of course, we will find them lacking. There are some people who are exemplary, but most of them are still far from perfect. Yes, we do admire most parents for the way they love their children. Yes, there are many saint-like people whose sacrificial dedication to good causes is amazing. But we still believe that God”s love shown in the life and death of Jesus Christ is far superior to any human examples, even of Mother Teresa or of Albert Schweitzer.

If we ignore what is lacking in us, we are in danger of making an idol out of something that is less than perfect. That would be very dangerous, because that lets us create a world of illusions and live in lies. But it is extremely difficult to name the problems in our intimate relationships, especially when we love each other. But an important test of relationship is whether one can deal with something imperfect in a loving fashion. Ignoring the problems of your loved ones is not kindness. Indulgence by ignoring problems is a weakness, a lesser love and a beginning of a dangerous relationship. Parents often make that mistake by ignoring the children”s problems and by continuing to believe that their kids are perfect. There are many extremely kind and loving persons, who ignore the problems and continue to be nice to people they love. It is very difficult to tell them that their softness in love, in the end, is unkind. True love is tender but tough. I know a woman in my family in Japan who is married to an alcoholic. It is so very difficult to tell her that she must be tough, because she is very kind and obviously loves her husband. I feel rotten to have to tell her the reality of life.

By telling us to love him more than we love anybody else, Jesus meant to tell us that if we truly love anyone, we must name the problems honestly and deal with them squarely. Because there is no human being who is perfect, by loving Christ as the perfect model of our life, we should be able to deal with the problems of our imperfection. Love is the tenderest thing. But a true love is also tough. It does not encourage cheating reality. It faces reality and deal with it. Love is courageous and tough. Tender love requires a tough mind. Loving is not cheap, not just sugar and honey. You identify the problems by looking at the Christ mirror, and name them and deal with them.

Remember; Jesus was led to the cross by those who believed in cheap love. They believed in him as a popular magician, or a politician who would give them what they wanted. They did not want to see the tough side of God”s plan and terrible sacrifice required by God. They wanted milk and honey without the wilderness nor the crossing of the river. Cheap love can turn one into a traitor overnight. This is why Luke felt strongly enough to use the word like ”hate”, to stress the importance of looking reality right in the eyes, and hating the shortcomings one is bound to see in any human being. It was an act of the hatred of sinfulness that Luke was talking about, and not the hatred of persons. True love does not allow for avoiding of reality. This is why Paul said, "Love rejoices in truth."

King Lear, in a Shakespeare”s play, did not understand this. He disinherited the youngest daughter Cordelia and banished her. He thought that she did not love him, because she said things he did not want to hear. Yet, she loved him truly thus spoke the truth without fear. He did not like that. Often truth is harsh. So he divided kingdom into two and gave them to the other two daughters, who were all sweet on the surface, but who, in the end, betrayed him. By the time the king realized the true nature of Cordelia”s love, it was too late. She was murdered.

We see from time to time some tragedies in relationships, not so much because people hate each other, but because their love was not tough enough to confront reality, and because they ignored their problems. Let us remember that in our journey through this life, we must learn love”s toughness as well as its tenderness.

WHO FOUND JESUS?

Isaiah 60:1-4, Psalm 72:1-7, Matthew 2:1-12

January 5, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

January 6 is known as "Epiphany" according to the traditional Christian calender. The Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on this day. It is the day to commemorate the coming of the wise men from the East bearing gifts to worship the baby Jesus. They were foreigners – gentiles or pagans to the Jews. They believed that divine revelations were visible in the movements of stars. We celebrate this day, because it was the first time Jesus revealed himself to the believers of a different religion. The story of the wise men also tells us that God will find us when we find meaning in our occupations and are committed to the things we do in them.

What is interesting is the fact that the Bible reports only two rather odd groups of people who visited the baby Jesus. They were the shepherds and the wise men of the East. Priests and scholars knew that the Bible had predicted that the birth of a special child would take place in Bethlehem. But they did not bother to go to Bethlehem. The king was interested to know about it solely because he wanted to kill the baby who might become a threat to his throne. The inn keeper who refused Mary and Joseph, obviously, did not know anything about the birth of the Messiah. Other ordinary people did not know anything about it. The shepherds and the magi were the least expected kind of people God would invite to meet his new born child.

The shepherds were nomads who were in search of grazing land all the time. They did not have normal homes. They cooked, ate, and slept in the open or in tents. Their security was all in animals, and was always precarious. They had a hard life. They wore rags, rarely washed themselves, and had weather-worn leathery skin. Being a shepherd was not just a job; it was a full-time way of life. Ordinarily, they lived on the edge of the human community, away from normal social life. They must have been like modern-day Gypsies, who still live on the edges of settled communities, often in trailers in parking lots of England and other continental European countries. They are never like other people nor do they try to be. They live their own lives. They are stubbornly bonded to their life-style.

The magi came from the east of Palestine. There were people from ancient Persia, which is the present day Iran, who believed that stars determined the destiny of people. It was in ancient Persia where astrology was developed. *Many people in our society today believe in astrology, as you know.* Because every movement of stars was important, watching stars, recording and predicting their movements were a full-time occupation for many highly educated people. They were a respected class of intellectuals, because people believed that they could predict the future. But they were definitely not priests, prophets, or teachers of the Jewish religion. They were not expected to make an important discovery about the religion of the Old Testament. They were after all gentiles – pagans. Why should these unlikely people be the ones who found Jesus first? It”s humbling to realize that the Bible is speaking about the believers of another religion and homeless herders as the only ones permitted to meet the Holy Child during his very first few days in this world.

Here you must understand the notion of vocation to understand this puzzle. The word – vocation comes from a Latin word – "vocatio". It means "to call" or "to summon". It comes from the idea that God called or summoned you to do a certain thing. It can be the same thing as a job or an occupation. But often it is not. You are lucky if your vocation and your job are the same thing. In your vocation, you are committed to the things that you do, because you believe that God is calling you to do them. Your vocation makes your life important and meaningful. It makes your life a pleasure: something worth living. One person told me that she just loved what she did, and that she felt lucky to be paid for what she does. Some people have a job in order to pursue a vocation which is different from the job, because their vocation does not provide a living. Many artists are committed to pursue their art, which often does not pay. So they are used to the idea that they have to have jobs to support themselves, to allow them to pursue the real purpose of their lives, which are their vocations. Many Catholic religious orders are operating on that principle. They make a living by making cheeze, teaching school or becoming nurses; but they do these things only so they are able to pray, to study the Bible, or to serve people.

The wise men of the East and the shepherds had vocations. They were totally committed to doing what they were doing. In fact, those men from the East must have gambled everything they owned to undertake the journey to Bethlehem. Travelling in those days was a hazardous undertaking. They had to provide their own modes of transportation, which were not affordable to many people. There were no maps. Predators of both animal and human kind were many. It was a very costly venture. It was a gamble. They might have believed in a different religion, but they were totally committed to what they believed to be their vocation. The shepherds were committed to their vocation, too. They were not ashamed of their work, though other people thought them to be a lower class. God rewards those who are committed to their vocations by revealing the truth.

On the other hand, some people corrupt their vocation by compromising their commitments. Those priests and Biblical scholars who surrounded the king did not want to displease the king. So they did not follow what they were supposed to have believed. They did not do what the Bible said they should. Ministers of religions, medical doctors and nurses, lawyers and judges, and teachers have the types of jobs that require a sense of vocation. But we know that, unfortunately, some of them don”t live like the ones who have vocations. Ambitions for wealth, power, and often mere vanity corrupt them. They lose their vocations by making them mere jobs they do for living. They no longer have commitments. They no longer feel that God is calling them to do anything. Those without a sense of vocation will inevitably miss the new born Jesus, even if they know, in theory, where to find him.

The story of the wise men of the East is an indictment against those who compromise themselves and pursue ulterior goals while pretending to work for noble causes. It is also a celebration of those who find meaning for their lives in what they do, and are committed to doing the things they believe God called them to do. All of us have been called by God to do some meaningful work in our lives. Salvation is revealed to those who find meaning in their work. When you find the meaning of life, you have found the baby Jesus.

WHO FOUND JESUS?

Isaiah 60:1-4, Psalm 72:1-7, Matthew 2:1-12

January 5, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

January 6 is known as "Epiphany" according to the traditional Christian calender. The Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on this day. It is the day to commemorate the coming of the wise men from the East bearing gifts to worship the baby Jesus. They were foreigners – gentiles or pagans to the Jews. They believed that divine revelations were visible in the movements of stars. We celebrate this day, because it was the first time Jesus revealed himself to the believers of a different religion. The story of the wise men also tells us that God will find us when we find meaning in our occupations and are committed to the things we do in them.

What is interesting is the fact that the Bible reports only two rather odd groups of people who visited the baby Jesus. They were the shepherds and the wise men of the East. Priests and scholars knew that the Bible had predicted that the birth of a special child would take place in Bethlehem. But they did not bother to go to Bethlehem. The king was interested to know about it solely because he wanted to kill the baby who might become a threat to his throne. The inn keeper who refused Mary and Joseph, obviously, did not know anything about the birth of the Messiah. Other ordinary people did not know anything about it. The shepherds and the magi were the least expected kind of people God would invite to meet his new born child.

The shepherds were nomads who were in search of grazing land all the time. They did not have normal homes. They cooked, ate, and slept in the open or in tents. Their security was all in animals, and was always precarious. They had a hard life. They wore rags, rarely washed themselves, and had weather-worn leathery skin. Being a shepherd was not just a job; it was a full-time way of life. Ordinarily, they lived on the edge of the human community, away from normal social life. They must have been like modern-day Gypsies, who still live on the edges of settled communities, often in trailers in parking lots of England and other continental European countries. They are never like other people nor do they try to be. They live their own lives. They are stubbornly bonded to their life-style.

The magi came from the east of Palestine. There were people from ancient Persia, which is the present day Iran, who believed that stars determined the destiny of people. It was in ancient Persia where astrology was developed. *Many people in our society today believe in astrology, as you know.* Because every movement of stars was important, watching stars, recording and predicting their movements were a full-time occupation for many highly educated people. They were a respected class of intellectuals, because people believed that they could predict the future. But they were definitely not priests, prophets, or teachers of the Jewish religion. They were not expected to make an important discovery about the religion of the Old Testament. They were after all gentiles – pagans. Why should these unlikely people be the ones who found Jesus first? It”s humbling to realize that the Bible is speaking about the believers of another religion and homeless herders as the only ones permitted to meet the Holy Child during his very first few days in this world.

Here you must understand the notion of vocation to understand this puzzle. The word – vocation comes from a Latin word – "vocatio". It means "to call" or "to summon". It comes from the idea that God called or summoned you to do a certain thing. It can be the same thing as a job or an occupation. But often it is not. You are lucky if your vocation and your job are the same thing. In your vocation, you are committed to the things that you do, because you believe that God is calling you to do them. Your vocation makes your life important and meaningful. It makes your life a pleasure: something worth living. One person told me that she just loved what she did, and that she felt lucky to be paid for what she does. Some people have a job in order to pursue a vocation which is different from the job, because their vocation does not provide a living. Many artists are committed to pursue their art, which often does not pay. So they are used to the idea that they have to have jobs to support themselves, to allow them to pursue the real purpose of their lives, which are their vocations. Many Catholic religious orders are operating on that principle. They make a living by making cheeze, teaching school or becoming nurses; but they do these things only so they are able to pray, to study the Bible, or to serve people.

The wise men of the East and the shepherds had vocations. They were totally committed to doing what they were doing. In fact, those men from the East must have gambled everything they owned to undertake the journey to Bethlehem. Travelling in those days was a hazardous undertaking. They had to provide their own modes of transportation, which were not affordable to many people. There were no maps. Predators of both animal and human kind were many. It was a very costly venture. It was a gamble. They might have believed in a different religion, but they were totally committed to what they believed to be their vocation. The shepherds were committed to their vocation, too. They were not ashamed of their work, though other people thought them to be a lower class. God rewards those who are committed to their vocations by revealing the truth.

On the other hand, some people corrupt their vocation by compromising their commitments. Those priests and Biblical scholars who surrounded the king did not want to displease the king. So they did not follow what they were supposed to have believed. They did not do what the Bible said they should. Ministers of religions, medical doctors and nurses, lawyers and judges, and teachers have the types of jobs that require a sense of vocation. But we know that, unfortunately, some of them don”t live like the ones who have vocations. Ambitions for wealth, power, and often mere vanity corrupt them. They lose their vocations by making them mere jobs they do for living. They no longer have commitments. They no longer feel that God is calling them to do anything. Those without a sense of vocation will inevitably miss the new born Jesus, even if they know, in theory, where to find him.

The story of the wise men of the East is an indictment against those who compromise themselves and pursue ulterior goals while pretending to work for noble causes. It is also a celebration of those who find meaning for their lives in what they do, and are committed to doing the things they believe God called them to do. All of us have been called by God to do some meaningful work in our lives. Salvation is revealed to those who find meaning in their work. When you find the meaning of life, you have found the baby Jesus.

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA

II Samuel 11:1-5,14-15,24 & 12:1-7 Psalm 14(VU735 John 6:1-21

July 30, 2006 by Tad Mitsui

There are some stories in the Bible which are not suitable for children; and this is one of them. It’s a story of adultery and murder. A woman is bathing nude on a rooftop, a man sees this and takes her to bed and makes her pregnant. The man was completely infatuated and wanted her so badly that he arranged her husband to be killed. How do you read a Biblical story like that? Especially the man in question is the most admired king of Israel, David. There are two different interpretations. One makes the woman a seducer, a temptress who used sex as a way of becoming a queen. The other interpretation makes David a bad one, who committed adultery and murder. In this case, the woman, Bathsheba becomes a victim of a forced sex by a man who abused power to satisfy his illicit desire. I take the second one. However, I believe that the story is not so much about adultery as it is about the abuse of power.

Let me begin with Bathsheba. A woman was bathing on a roof-top. The first interpretation that I spoke of assumes that she knew that she could be seen from the palace, and she wanted to seduce the king. I don’t think this was the case. In fact, Bathsheba was bathing according to the law. A woman was supposed to take a ritual bath on the eighth day of menstruation, according to the book of Leviticus. Bathsheba was going through a religious act. No one was supposed to see it. But of course except the king, whose palace is higher than ordinary people’s homes.

Also, anyone who has been to tropical countries can easily acknowledge that this interpretation which makes Bathsheba a loose woman is off base. It is not uncommon sight to see people bathing in public in hot countries. They do it in rivers and lakes, as well as in their back yards. They know how to present themselves discreetly to maintain modesty even when they are naked.

If anybody was a culprit in this story, it must have been King David. According to the law of Moses in Leviticus, it was taboo to even share a roof with a woman who was not completely cleansed after menstruation. David knew why Bathsheba was bathing; every adult woman did it after her period. And yet he sent for her. He knew that he was violating twice the religious law in one act. There is no denial that David did something terribly wrong. But the question is; what kind of wrong did he commit? Of course, adultery is not commendable conduct. But that is not the main point of this particular story. It was how adultery was committed. It was primarily an abuse of power that is being condemned here.

You see, if you consider the accepted practices in those days, and even as late as one hundred years ago, for a king to take women other than his own wife was usually accepted as a tolerable royal indiscretion. King David married many wives and took many more concubines, according to the II Samuel. Solomon took more than one thousand wives and concubines according to the I Kings. Even after Europe became Christian, though the church allowed only one wife, it still closed its eyes on kings taking concubines. Remember Henry VIII? And the practice continued until even more recently. What is known as "le droit du seigneur", where dukes and marquis had the right to take the new brides of their subjects to bed before the weddings, was carried on even in the last century in Europe. The Opera, "Marriage of Figaro", or the story of the famous "Braveheart" referred to that barbaric but accepted practice. I am not saying that what David did was acceptable. What I am trying to say is that the kind of thing that David did was nothing extraordinary for the king in those days. So what is the point? For what reason did the Bible take exception and give this story such an important place. What was it trying to tell us?

I believe it is a warning against the abuse of power. No one is allowed to use power in order to exploit other persons for one”s own benefit. David was getting old. He could no longer lead an army; that’s why he was back home in Jerusalem. He was aware that he was losing power. It is common knowledge that sex crimes are committed by people who feel powerless. For them preying on the weak – women and children – is the only way to feel that they still have power over someone else. The prophet Nathan skilfully gave that message in his story of a poor man”s sheep and a rich man”s greed. You see, our religious tradition has never been comfortable with the idea that any person should wield power over others. We recite "for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever" in the Lord”s Prayer, because we believe, since the time of the Old Testament, that ultimately only God has power. The power any human being holds is given in trust on a certain number of conditions. We believe that we are all children of God, hence we are all equal. Power is given to some people on the condition that they do some of the God”s work. If anyone abuses the God given power for one”s selfish purposes, one is committing a grievous sin.

All of us have power over other people in various ways. As parents over our children, as owners of assets and properties, as holders of offices and positions of many kinds, we all have power to oblige others to do what we want. Particularly, politicians and business executives have tremendous power to determine the fate of other people. For all of us, the story of David and Bathsheba gives us an important lesson. It is, "Don”t ever use power to exploit others." We must remember Jesus Christ as the ultimate role model of a power figure. Though he was the son of almighty God, he exercised his power only to care for others, even though that attitude cost him his own life. That should be the model of a person with power. Not like David who used his power to satisfy his own selfish desire at the cost of another person”s life.

John 20:1-18

A week ago last Saturday, two very important things happened on the new Star Trek series : Voyager. When two ugly but very scientifically advanced life-forms were beamed up and arrested, Captain Janeway was ready to kill one of them in order to recover the lungs which they stole from one of her crew members – Neelex and had used in a transplant operation. But she discovered that these life-forms were being driven to extinction, because of some virus which was destroying their organs. So what did Captain Janeway do? She decided to let him live and go. I don”t know what she was going to do with the dying crew member, who was being kept alive on a life-support system. The story never said. The second clip was about a crew whose lungs were stolen, thus he was on the verge of certain death. He was prepared to die, but didn”t because a woman offered to give one of her lungs to save his life. The story never made it clear but she had some special attachment to this particular crew member.

What did I get from those stories? Compassion and love win at the end of the day. Despair and hopelessness do not say the last word. We don”t know how it works, but love leads us to go beyond what looks like the end of all possibilities.

Mary Magdalene loved Jesus dearly. The Bible makes it quite clear that for Mary, Jesus was her life. So when he died on the cross, her life was also gone. She was in despair. Nothing mattered any more, there was no hope. Anyone who lost a loved one knows this. When my father died suddenly when he was 50 and I was in early twenties, I thought that the whole world came to an end. It simply was not possible to think of any future without him. Death in this case was more than physical end of brain or heart activity, and the beginning of the process of decomposition of our physical bodies. Death here means an absolute hopelessness.

So Mary was sitting outside of the cave where the body of Jesus had been brought in, and crying. What else was there to do, there was nothing in her life any longer. She asked two men to come, hoping that they would do something to recover the remains of her beloved teacher. But they went away as though they could solve the emptiness in their lives by being busy. We men often do that. But Mary stayed by the empty grave. What was she hoping by doing that? Nothing. She had no other thing to do, because life was impossible without him.

And he came, Jesus. She saw him. But she thought that he was a gardener. A person without any hope can not see what really is. She looked at him, and they even exchanged a few words. But she could not recognize the man in front of her as the dead beloved teacher, who came back to life. Despair inhibits the ability to see reality. Then he called her name. A very personal way to remind her of the nature of their relationship. And at last she recognized him. We parents all know that there is some unexplainable but special quality in the way your child calls you. My daughter is a grown woman. But she still calls me, "Daddy". Maybe its childish. But every time any body calls his or her father "daddy", I always have hard time controlling my tears.

There was no more despair. He was alive. How? We don”t know. We may never know how Jesus came to life again. I don”t think it matters. The main thing is that for those who loved him and owed their lives to him, they saw him and believed that the evil did not have the last word on their beloved teacher. He is risen, and lives among us.

It was obvious that Jesus came back from the dead beyond what we normally understand as physical realities. Perhaps, He came back in a spiritual form. So he walked through doors without opening them, appeared in many places at the same time. But you can not dismiss it, simply because it can not be proven scientifically, or does not fit our normal definition of what”s possible. That”s nonsense. The problem of today”s world is that many believe that spiritual world is less real than the scientifically provable world of facts. I believe that our society is sick because people dismiss the spiritual world less important than the world of science. We dismiss affection, love, beauty, joy and despair, goodness and evil as less than real. We must realize that this kind of common sense is the core of our problem.

But because Jesus loved each one of them, he came back and showed his love in a very personal way. For Mary it was calling her name. For a scientist like Thomas, he offered a physical proof. Thomas is a very modern man. He doubted everything, until it was proven with undisputable evidence. So Jesus said to Thomas, "Touch me, if you don”t believe me". For other disciples, that was not necessary. They sensed he was alive and this alone gave them new hope. Why should anybody need further proof? If you have to keep on giving expensive gifts to prove your love, love in that relationship is dead. True love does not need proof, it only needs to be expressed. So Jesus was sorry that Thomas needed proof. Jesus said, "Happy is the person who can believe without seeing and touching." But because Jesus loved each one of them in uniqueness and in their idiosyncrasies, he offered Thomas proof of this victory of love.

Mary saw risen Jesus beyond despair. Thomas saw Jesus which should have been impossible according to common sense. Star Trek may seem like a long way from the Easter story. But in both cases, Easter and Star Trek, we come to the same essential truth. Love leads us to go beyond what looks like the end of all possibilities.

Christ is risen! Hallelujah!

MERCY AND WORMWOOD

Lamentation 3:19-26

October 4, 1998 by Tad Mitsui

Instead of "the wormwood and the gall", which I just read, another translation of the Bible, the passage from the book of Lamentations, chapter 3 verse 19 had "the wormwood and poison". The difference surprised me because the one I read reminds me of how, when I was a child, my mother used to give me a tiny bit of black powder for indigestion. It was shavings from what was supposed to be "bear”s gallbladder", a dry black ball about the size of a golf ball. It was bitter. I hated it. "The thought of my affliction and homelessness is the wormwood and the gall." I looked it up in a book on herbal medicine, and sure enough, it says that a gall bladder produces bile which is good for breaking up hard-to-digest fat in the stomach. I am not sure if it was really a bear”s gallbladder that my mother gave me, but it sure was expensive medicine. There were stories of people selling pieces of property in order to buy "bear”s gallbladder" many years ago. So I looked up "wormwood" also in the book on herbal medicine. It says that dried wormwood has been used as a traditional remedy for indigestion. It is also very bitter. Bitterness seems to help digest food: an interesting idea, isn”t it? And one that gives the passage from Lamentations a very different meaning.

The Book of Lamentations is a book of mourning. The author was bitter about the demise of the Jewish nation, which was defeated by the Babylonian army. He spoke about the desolation of Jerusalem. He spoke about the city of Jerusalem as though it was once a proud princess who completely lost her former glory and dignity. She had had many admirers but now none of them could comfort her. Her friends turned out to be sellouts to the enemy. Even her own children deserted her. She was not just a princess of a defeated kingdom but became a slave of the former enemies. It is a book full of bitterness. Yet in the midst of all this grieving, the author remembers God”s mercy. He was reminding himself that there still was hope. He says "the thought of my affliction and my homelessness is the wormwood and the gall. God”s mercies are new every morning." It is bitter, but it is not poison. Instead, it is powerful medicine. And he sees plenty of hopeful signs in the midst of desolation and despair.

There are two periods in the history of the Jewish nation when they made a great leap forward in their spiritual journey. They spent forty excruciatingly difficult years in the desert after the liberation from slavery in Egypt. It was during those years, they were given the basic laws from God, and learned to live under the rule of law. They learned to live like a nation of decent human beings, and not like animals in the desert. That was how they survived as people. The second most important period was the 150 years when the leaders of the nation spent in captivity in Babylon. This period began with the defeat and destruction of Jerusalem, which the book of Lamentations was mourning about. It was a bitter experience. All the political and spiritual leaders, in fact anyone who could read, were expelled from their homeland and forced to live in Babylon. There, they were forbidden to use their language and were prohibited to practice their religion. The intention was to destroy the Jewish nation. When the spiritual tradition of the nation is lost, the nation loses its identity; the Babylonians knew that. But they didn”t succeed. The Jews did not lose their religion. They managed to keep the language through the Bible. In fact, it was during this period, the Jews collected the books on the laws of Moses, the Prophets, and other literature like poems, stories, and proverbs. Eventually they were bound together and became the Hebrew Bible – the present day Old Testament. The intention of the Babylonian captors completely failed. When the children of the captive Jews were allowed to return to Palestine, one of the teachers named Ezra took the collection of the Books and went back to Jerusalem. The Book, the Biblos in Greek, became the foundation of the faith of the Jewish nation. It was also the only Bible available to the early Christians for about four hundred years until the New testament was authorized as a part of the Bible by the Church. The Babylonian captivity was bitter medicine, but it was an effective medicine. It brought health back to the people and made them survive and thrive.

The God of the Bible is not one to praise the virtue of suffering. God does not want us to suffer. However, God does not stop it either. Often, suffering is caused by human failures and sin. God”s greatest gift to humans is freedom. So if humans choose the path of a sinful life, God does not stop them. God does not cause suffering but we do; for ourselves and for others. Suffering comes to everyone, just like rain falls on good people and bad people alike. The difference is: the faithful people never lose sight of the God”s mercy even in the midst of suffering, and find hope beyond. In other words, the faithful find strength to go through the difficulties, and are always able to praise God for his mercies at the end.

This is why the author of the Lamentations could sing the praises of God even in the midst of mourning the loss of a nation and the desolation of his beloved city. "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end, they are new every morning." When I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, I see signs of my aging process. But perhaps, instead of mourning the loss of youth, I should say to myself "Tad, you look wiser today. Thank you, God." I should learn to love myself anew everyday, and gain strength to face a new chapter of my life.

It”s easy to feel bitterness over losses in our lives – whether that”s youth, or health, or glory. It is a very human response. But remember, bitterness can also be medicine for renewal. Instead of just mourning the loss and dwelling in bitterness, isn”t it also time to remember how merciful God has been throughout the good days and how sweet those days were? Then we realize that his love and mercy are new every morning, even today. We swallow our medicine, and thank God.

POVERTY IS A PROBLEM OF RELATIONSHIP, NOT OF MONEY

Proverbs 22:1-2,8-9,22-23

Psalm 125, Mark 7:24-30

September 7, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

In Africa, my salary was $91 a month in 1968. At the time the minimum salary of a United Church minister was about $300. It was the policy of the church not to give the impression that a missionary was just another rich foreigner. I must confess, I was worried about such a small salary. However, I found that such a small income in Canada was very large compared to the local average income. We were fabulously rich people in Lesotho. The question of who is rich or poor depends to a large extent how rich or poor other people are. It”s all relative.

The book of Proverbs says, "A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches. Favour is better than silver or gold." In other words, the question of rich and poor has a lot to do with happiness. Wealth can bring happiness when it helps to create good relationships with other people. There is not much point in being rich, if wealth causes unhappiness. Princess Diana found the purpose of her life working for unfortunate people. Royal title and wealth made her unhappy. Mother Teresa was a nun vowed to live in poverty, and dedicated her life for poor people. But her life was richer than those of many rich people. Where there is justice, wealth can create happiness. So to seek justice and to try to narrow the gap between rich and poor, is not just a matter of high minded religious devotion or sacrifice, but according to the Proverbs it is common sense wisdom. Today I am going to speak about two subjects in dealing with the sayings from today”s lectionary selection. I will speak about wealth, and about wisdom.

The book of Proverbs is a part of the Bible called "wisdom literature." Wisdom literature also is in a larger category in the Old Testament called "Writings", which are literally people”s writings, such as Psalms, creative stories like Job and Ruth, and sayings like the Proverbs and the Ecclesiastes. Though they are the words written by human beings and are not God”s words as such, those creative writings make very important points about our faith. This is why those words by mortals are in the Holy Bible.

There are some interesting things to note about wisdom literature. For one thing, Proverbs seldom quotes God”s words. They are the collection of many pieces of common place folk wisdom. The book is full of sayings like: "Watch the ants you lazybones." "Fools think their way is always right, but the wise listen to advise." You don”t need to refer to God to use your common sense. You don”t need to mention God to say, "Take your muddy boots off at the door." Of course, our ordinary day-to-day common sense wisdom is God given wisdom without saying so. Another interesting thing is that the word "wisdom" is referred to as "she" in Proverbs. It means that Wisdom is a feminine side of God. In fact, the Jewish book of Biblical interpretations called the Talmud refers to wisdom as God in a feminine term – something like saying "Mother God."

I am not quite sure how some ideas can be feminine and others male. I can see that "war" is male, and "nurture" is female. But that "wisdom" is female? I suppose that no-nonsense down-to-earth common sense can be female, and pompous sounding "command" is male. I can venture to say that an idea like "Good relationships with other people makes you feel rich." has a woman”s touch. It recognizes importance of emotions and feelings, with which men are often uncomfortable. Men like to refer to logical conclusions and commandments. The wisdom literatures like Proverbs tell us that it is as important to be common sensical as it is to be knowledgeable about commandments. In fact, I dare say that without wisdom, mere knowledge can be useless.

Speaking about knowledge, we know so much more today than any other time in history. With our television sets, we have access to virtually hundreds of channels from all over the world through cables and satellites dishes. (We could watch Diana”s funeral as it was in progress thousands of miles away.) With a modem on your computer, you have access to virtually billions of pieces of information about anything, anywhere, anytime. We are living in the information age. But are we wiser because we have so much information and know so much? I don”t think so. It is like keeping telephone books of many cities. They are absolutely useless to most people. No one thinks that a winner of the Trivial Pursuit is automatically a wise person who can run a country.

Information, no matter how much is available, is useless to us unless we know how to find what we need and use it wisely. Many forbearers of our faith did not know as much as we do. Prophets did not go to universities. Many disciples were illiterate, and Jesus did not have a University degree. We are better educated people than those in previous generations. But are we wiser than our uneducated fathers and mothers of our faith? I doubt it.

In fact, we are probably more unwise. We can behave more stupidly as we pursue more knowledge about everything. Likewise, we seek more wealth without asking what we are going to do with it. We want to know more and more, even though so much information is absolutely useless or even harmful to ourselves and to others. The recent tragedy of Princess Diana”s death is the result of the public”s desire to know more and more about everybody and everything. As we seek to know more, we have lost common sense respect. Respect comes from the true knowledge of other persons available only in relationships. Without relationship, the knowledge of another person is very superficial. Superficial knowledge without feeling does not generate respect.

I was once the spectator of a scene where a drowned man was being pulled out of a river. There were many other people like me who were watching the tragedy with morbid curiosity. The dead man was just an object of curiosity, it might as well have been a dead mouse, until we found that it was someone”s beloved husband. Suddenly we heard a shriek. A woman ran to the body, hugged it tightly, and started to wail as though the world came to an end. I was so ashamed of myself for being there watching a personal tragedy. I felt like a peeping Tom. There are many things that can be meaningful only in relationship. The life and death of a person are two of them. Wealth is another one of them. Wealth is good for you only in order to live with other people harmoniously. Otherwise, it can be a source of conflict and unhappiness. This is why it is wise to seek justice, not just because it is the right thing to do. Caring relationships make a whole world of difference.

Isaiah 2 : 1 – 5, Matthew 24 : 36 – 44

A period of four weeks before Christmas is called Advent.  It is the time of waiting for the arrival.  As children wait for Santa Claus, we look forward to the coming of the new world brought to us with the birth of Jesus Christ.

This expectation for the new world is expressed in one word in three languages; Salaam in Arabic, Shalom in Hebrew, and Khotso in Sesotho of the African Bantu.  They all have the same meaning, somewhat inadequately translated into English as "peace".  All of them are used still today as a most common form of greeting.   It means "Hello and good-bye." –  for meeting and parting.  When they meet, they wish each other peace.  And likewise they bid each other peace as they go separate ways.  They don”t think  about the meaning of the word nowadays just like we don”t think about the meaning of our greetings.

It is a pity  because I believe that this is the world”s most profound way of greeting.  A theology professor at Harvard Theological School by the name of Harvey Cox once told a touching story about the use of this word for greeting.  When a Jewish mother was separated from her child before she was shipped off to a Nazi extermination camp during the second world war, she hugged the child and said, "Shalom."   They ran into each other at the port of Haifa in Palestine five years later.  Miraculously both the mother and the child survived the death camps.  When they hugged each other, in tears they only said "Shalom."  That was enough.

It was enough because the word contains all the important ingredients of the perfect world under the reign of God.  Prophet Isaiah in today”s lesson described very succinctly this notion of shalom.  God will bring justice to the world.  And when that happens people beat the swords into ploughshares and will hear of war no more.  There is justice hence there is peace.  In the language I learned to preach in Africa, the same notion of peace is expressed in the word – Khotso.  It also has all the important ingredients of the better world, just like the Hebrew word – shalom.

In Lesotho, when you finish a dinner, for example, the host will ask you, "Uena ka Khotso?" – Are you at peace?  It means, "Have you had enough?  Are you satisfied, happy?  Are you at peace with yourself?"  They believe that when you are physically well, you are spiritually content also.  It also means there is justice thus no discord.  There is no violence among people.  When one comes into a village or into a home, one stands at the entrance raising both hands with the palms open showing that one holds no weapon, and says "Khotso."  This gesture means, "I come in peace, I am defenceless. Please include me in, and treat me like one of you."  In a society where everything is shared, being admitted into a community means one is treated justly.  They firmly believe that there is no peace without justice, and there is no want with justice.  You never starve unless everybody starves.

We can learn a lot from those nomadic traditions about peace and about justice.  On the other hand, our idea of peace has long been dominated by a notion of "Pax Romana" – Roman peace.  It comes from the idea that there is peace when a powerful nation dominates others by force, just as the Roman Empire did and controlled all of the Mediterranean region with its armies and wealth.  For as long as we know in human history, the idea has been firmly entrenched that peace could be achieved only when one dominates the others absolutely by force .  We still believe in it.  The idea never worked because justice and peace of mind were ignored.

When we lack inner peace we tend to resort to violence.  When one is frustrated or insecure, one tends to be violent.  Secondly, one is driven to anger and unhappiness, when one is treated unjustly or sees injustice done to others.  Humans have had this notion of peace combined with justice, for tens of centuries.  But we have not taken the idea seriously and have made the same mistakes over and over again. 

No empire has ever achieved enduring peace.  The longest lasting empire we have known in history was the Roman Empire, that lasted for about six centuries.  But the millennium that followed was a history of bloody conflicts, including crusades, 100 year war, 30 year war, the war of roses, etc.  The British one lasted not even two.  Domination by the Americans and the Russians has not even lasted one century and is already slipping.  And when they fall, violence and blood-shed follow.  Many of the regional conflicts today are rooted in the histories of empires.  It shows no sign that the peace enforced by those empires has any lasting effect.  Hatred that has been festering while being ruled by force demands settling of scores.  Look at Northern Ireland.  Look at former Yugoslavia.  The whole of Balkan is suffering from the memories of three fallen empires. The Roman Empire gave the Catholic Croatians upper hands over the Orthodox Serbians.  The Ottoman Empire gave upper hands to Muslim Bosnian over both Croatians and Serbians.  And the Communist Empire gave Serbians upper hands over Croatians and Muslims.  Consequently they still remember the atrocities committed to each other and by those empires.  And they fiercely hate each other.  Has the British victory at the Plain of Abraham produced an enduring peace in Canada?  It seemed to have caused more enduring dissatisfaction on the part of one group of people than it solved, judging from the never ending threat of separation.

When do we ever learn?  When do we ever learn to beat swords into ploughshares?  Haven”t we ever learnt that there can never be enduring peace unless there is justice?  Haven”t we ever learned that there can never be justice unless there is peace of mind?  Where there is no peace of mind there is no love.  Where there is no love, there is greed and self-centredness.  And greed and self-centredness drive us into participating in a structures of injustice.  A vicious circle goes around and around.

Today marks the beginning of the preparation time to for the imminent arrival.  We are waiting for the arrival of the gift from God.  What is this gift that we are waiting for?  We are waiting for the completion of the heaven in this world that began with the birth of Jesus.  We are going to celebrate the birthday of the one who declared the new regime.  How long do we have to wait?  Noone knows.  But it is coming surely because it has been declared and is here partially. 

Do we then just wait?  It all depends what sort of waiting you do.  You can wait by just sitting doing nothing.  Or you can wait actively.  When you wait for someone or something and look forward to the arrival, you do all sorts things for preparation and remain mentally active by letting your brain tick, tick, tick.  It is so exciting to wait though a bit anxious.  Likewise, when you wait for the gift of God, completion of the Kingdom of God, you wait actively by working for the Kingdom of God. 

When you are not keen on the coming of something or somebody like a dentist”s appointment, you wait passively and do nothing.  You even dread its arrival.  You hope that it goes away.  But when we wait actively, we prepare joyfully.  We can show our love of others with gifts to the loved ones and to show our concerns about the people who had set-backs, met misfortune, and are not well.  Those are good projects to participate in the building up of the Kingdom of God.

Let us wait actively for the coming of peace – real peace of shalom, salaam, and khotso, with excitement, joy, and determination, not just this season of Advent but also in our daily life always.

Salaam, Shalom, and Khotso – Peace

During the early stage of Intifada – Palestinian Uprising during 1980”s, I ran into a situation in Gaza Strip that changed my perception of the word "Shalom".  I still have a problem accepting the word as it is supposed to mean, whenever it is said by a good Church person.  Obviously I have not reached a resolution and am still troubled by use of a word which gives different messages.  

People should remember those days when Safari suits and Army fatigue types of casual clothes were popular.  Well, I was in one of those outfits, touring Gaza Strip with a friend from the Middle East Council of Churches, looking at Mothers” Clinics which were supported by Canadian Churches.  Young children began to greet me by saying "Shalom".  I responded innocently "Shalom".  My friend suddenly told me that we should go immediately and pulled me into the car.  There, he told me to go back to the Hotel and change clothes, and never say "Shalom" to anyone.

Of course, I should have known that Army fatigues were worn only by Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Territories.  Safari suits looked suspiciously like Army outfits.  And the word "Shalom" is a most common greeting in Israel.  It is almost like the way we say "Hi".  Most of the Israeli do not think of the meaning of the word, as we United Church people attach some profound significance to the word.  Of course, this is nothing unusual.  Most of us do not think of the meaning of the words we use for greeting.  Have you thought about the theological meaning of the word "Hi" recently?

Those two innocent actions on my part on that day in Gaza Strip, clothes and the Hebrew greeting, simply meant to young Palestinian minds symbols of oppression.  Israeli occupation of their home land and the occupiers.  A possible target of a sling-shot.  A Canadian friend thought that this was ridiculous.  She said, "Have you seen an Israeli who looks like a Japanese?"
 
My friend obviously did not know about a group of Japanese who migrated to Israel.  They believed that they were descendants of the remnants of the "Lost tribe of Israel" who supposedly ended up in Japan centuries ago.  They believe that they are Jews and live in Israel.

In some ways, I was pleased to find that the word "Shalom" became common usage, during my twelve years of absence from Canada.  People know that there is no peace without justice.  Friends conclude their letters wishing me Shalom.  When I left Canada to go to Africa in 1968, the word was understood only by small number of so-called progressive Christians in the same way as the Hebrew Bible writers meant.  They were the types of people who read Harvey Cox.  I learned also from him the meaning of the word which was far more profound and wider than what English word "Peace" would convey.  It definitely meant Peace with Justice.  

Even as late as 1982, however, people were still engaging in some fierce debates about whether peace is more important than justice, or vice versa.  At the World Council of Churches Assembly in Vancouver, I saw some pointed graffiti to indicate that many people still did not understand the meaning of the word "Shalom".  One of them on a bulletin board said, "Injustice kills thousands, but wars kill us all."  Those were the dark days of the threat of nuclear holocaust.

In 1968 I went to Southern Africa, and learned Southern African languages.  African theologians like Desmond Tutu taught me also how some of the African traditional spirituality  had commonalty with other nomadic traditions like that of Hebrew people.  Desmond often compared the Hebrew Bible with Bantu oral traditions.  He was an Old Testament professor.  I taught other things I was not trained for, but that”s another story.  The word for peace in Sesotho (one of the dominant Southern African languages) is "Khotso".  This is why the office of the South African Council of Churches is called Khotso House.  I learned that the meaning of Khotso is almost identical to Shalom, as it is to the Arabic word "Salaam".

They greet by wishing each other "Khotso", which also means, "I wish you, your family and neighbours full stomach".  They say the word with hands raised with palms open showing that they hold no weapon.  A very simple way of wishing peace with justice.  An agent of the South African government bombed the Khotso House during the late eighties”.  It is clear that an idea of Peace with Justice was subversive for the Apartheid regime.  

Problem is:  when some words are used daily as part of common expressions, their original meaning wear out.  People use those words not knowing what they originally meant.  They become mere labels of their culture – like famous "Gooday, mate" for Australians.  You can not ask people to think of the meaning of the word they use daily.   It may be asking too much to expect people to behave according to the ideal of Shalom, Salaam, or Khotso.  It is too bad, however, that a meaningful and perfectly wonderful language is spoiled by some social and political situation.  But it is a fact that languages change, and we have to be sensitive to people”s perception of certain words.  I was once asked to use an old Methodist Prayer Book for a funeral by the family of the deceased.  I followed the book faithfully except one word.  I found the word "intercourse" a few times in prayers, which I replaced with the words like "social discourse" and "relationship".

Another example:  When I was working with a Japanese Congregation, I took a group of teenagers to a United Church youth event.  One of my young people could not eat an orange which was offered to him by an innocent friend. "Hey, want a ”Jap orange?"  Obviously he did not know that the word "Jap" evoked a hurtful memory among Japanese Canadians.  Because of that kind of experiences, I decided that if any word offends other persons, it will not come out of my mouth.  Often I could not understand why they offend some people, but I don”t use those words.  It was easier to understand why people insisting on inclusive language.

As I have not found an alternative, whenever I want to wish my friend something meaningful at closing a letter, I write "Khotso, Salaam, Shalom!!" indicating my appreciation of those people who crossed my paths and  enriched my life while overseas.  Other times, I say Shalom to Jewish people, Salaam to my Palestinian friends, and Khotso to my Southern African former colleagues.  For Canadians, how about "Peace"?  

DO YOU KNOW HOW TO BE GOOD?

Genesis 12:1-9, Psalm 33 #5, Matthew 9:9-13

June 5, 2005, Picture Butte

There is a scene in Richard Nash’s play, "Rainmaker." Rainmaker is a smooth talking travelling salesman, who goes around countryside. Rainmaker seduced a lonely, spinster daughter of the family at midnight in a barn. Her outraged brother took out a gun to shoot the Rainmaker. However, the Rainmaker’s action would restore her sense of womanliness and her confidence. The father, a wise old rancher, grabs the gun away from his son, saying, "Noah, you’re so full of what’s right you can’t see what’s good."

When there is a conflict between what is good and what is right, we often think that Christian way is the righteousness not goodness. In this respect, Jesus often surprises us.

Matthew was a tax collector, and knew that nobody liked him. But Jesus not only accepted Matthew”s invitation for a dinner, but also made him a disciple. No wonder the righteous people were scandalized. At the time, Palestine was under the Roman occupation. Administration of taxation was given to some selected Jewish persons on a commission basis. In other words, tax collection was privatized. The tax collectors invented many methods to impose taxes. They were a enterprising lot. Many of them made fortunes took bribes, pounced on the vulnerable people who were often poor and weak. They became not only morally corrupt, but also because of their immoral practices, they were branded as religiously unclean, in the same class as lepers, prostitutes, and thieves. Priests and Pharisees refused them in religious events. As a class, they were not only traitors working for the enemy but also became excommunicated, so-to-speak. They became rich but they had no friends.

I could understand why the category of tax collectors was synonymous with the one for sinners. But what happened to those who were honest. They could be just doing an unpleasant job to earn a living? There is some evidence in the Bible to indicate that there were some less corrupt ones who would have loved to redeem themselves and to be accepted by society. Matthew was one of those people. This is why Matthew had no hesitation to follow Jesus, leaving his job and money behind when he was called to be his disciple. He must have suffered bad conscience about his job, but did not have courage to quit. But the encounter with Jesus gave him currage to get out of a profitable but questionable occupation.

From time to time, we run into a situation where we find ourselves in a bad company but do not have courage to get out. It is a big problem for many of us. But as soon as we acknowledge that we share collective guilt, we are on the way to redemption. Jesus understood the pang of conscience of some tax collectors like Matthew. And when you can feel the pain, Jesus, like a doctor, can help you. But if you don”t feel it, no one can help you. This is why it is so important to admit that there is a problem and to recognize that you are in need of help.

Here was the problem of the righteous people like Pharisees. They did not acknowledge that there was any problem in their lives. They either denied it or did not see it. They were determined to be God fearing and righteous people. In order to achieve their goals, they made for themselves a set of rules and followed them faithfully. Unfortunately, however, in the process of becoming righteous people they forgot to be good people. They forgot to be loving and kind. While they were on the way to be righteous, they became judgmental and lost the core of being Godly, which is being merciful. They became law-abiding but lost their heart. They forgot that laws were instruments of justice and love. Laws that do not achieve justice are empty shells and burden to society. The worst problem, however, for the Pharisees was the fact that many of them did not see any problem in obeying laws faithfully without being compassionate.

Paul described this state of empty piety in his letter to Corinthians, "If I have all knowledge of God”s words, ability to preach wonderful sermons, faith to move mountains, charity to give everything including life itself, but if I don”t have love, I am nothing." What is most important is what is inside of ourselves. If we do not have kindness and mercy in our hearts, any visible signs of righteousness can be an empty shell and even inhuman. We can easily be hypocrites. The tragedy of the righteous Pharisees was that in their eagerness to be acceptable to God, they became legalistic, heartless and judgmental people. Their worst problem, however, was that they did not think there was anything wrong with them. They thought that they were perfectly acceptable to God because they knew that they obeyed the laws to the last iota.

Their ignorance of how they were wanting was the worst illness, worse than that of sins acknowledged and regretted. People who know the pain of guilt have a much better chance of being made whole. If you do not admit that you have a problem, no one can help you. Socrates in the ancient Greece said that the best knowledge was the knowledge of oneself. "Know thyself." , he said. However, he said that the most valuable knowledge is the knowledge of one”s ignorance. When you know that you do not know, you have a whole unknown world open before your eyes. If you think that you know everything you need to know, the world is closed. And you slam the door shut yourself. No one can help you.

This is why Jesus thought that the sinners, who knew that there was something wrong with them, had far better chance of being saved than the righteous people who believed that they needed no help or no lesson to learn. He said, "A healthy person does not need a doctor." The irony of the context was a sick person who did not believe that they were ill had absolutely no chance of getting to the doctor, because they closed the door by themselves. Thank God for occasional pain. Pain itself is not a good thing. Don”t look for it. But it is a signal. Through pain, God tells you that you need to seek help, to change and to grow.

WHY LOOK FOR THE LIVING AMONG THE DEAD

Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 118, Mark 16:1-8

April 23, 2000 by Tad Mitsui

A few days ago, my sister and I had a telephone conversation about our visit this summer in Japan. She told me about a party being organized for us by an old friend of mine. Apparently he recently started a Bible study group at his home. This surprised me, because the man I remembered was more interested in making bucks than religion. Apparently, he had a near death experience. His heart stopped. While the medical team was busy trying to revive him, he was outside of his body watching himself on the operating table. He also saw his family and friends huddled together outside of the operating room, and he felt much loved. My sister says that this experience spurred his quest for his spirituality.

This is not an unusual experience. We heard a similar story experienced recently by the leader of NDP in Alberta. She resigned from her seat and began a new life in search of spirituality. Books were written about that kind of near death experiences. There are two common features in those stories: an experience of leaving one”s own body, and an intimate and warm feeling towards the loved ones who surround the body. These stories may not satisfy scientists who demand material evidence, but they do point to the direction towards some kind of existence beyond this material and bodily life. In fact, our belief that Jesus Christ defeated death and came back to life again is the foundation of Christian faith. We do believe in life after death and believe that Christ was the first who came back.

However, there is no scientific evidence to prove that a physical body survives death. Scientists say that all those life after death experiences are the result of brains” momentary glitch caused by a powerful surge of despair or wishful thinking. I believe that this kind of arguments with science is pointless, because we are asking the wrong questions. When someone says that he loves you, you don”t ask him how much money he has right off the bat. It”s simply a wrong question at a wrong time. The message of Christ rising from the dead is not about the fate of our earthly bodies. It is about our life with God. Our life with God goes on beyond death. It is the belief that "Love overcomes death."

The significance of our physical body in our spiritual life will have to be asked sometime, but that is not the most important question to ask on Easter. The Easter message of the Bible is "God will destroy death and wipe away the tears from everybody”s eyes" as Isaiah said, and as an angel said to three women who came to look for Jesus in a tomb, "He is not here. Why look for the living among the dead?" The message of Easter was not about the physical aspect of life and death, but about hope and love that overcome despair.

For the writers of the Bible physical facts were not the point they tried to put across. If you are looking for some physical evidence of resurrection in the Bible, the facts are very confusing and often contradictory. Jesus sometimes had a very physical presence after resurrection in some accounts; eating breakfast of BBQ fish with Peter and Andrew on the beach, and showing Thomas the wounds on his hands. But in other parts, he appeared as a spiritual existence. He went through the locked doors without opening them, could disappear into the thin air after breaking bread in Emmaus, and could appear to three thousand people at the same time. These stories obviously mean to tell us that the risen Christ was in a spiritual body.

Instead of trying to make sense out of contradictory evidence, we should pay more attention to the main theme of the life of Jesus Christ. Because God loved us, Jesus Christ came to the world to live among us by being like us humans. He came to demonstrate his commitment to the love of God by living by it. He could have saved himself from humiliation and the painful death, had he compromised a little. But he didn”t. So, he had to die because he was totally committed to love. The people who do not believe in love get their kick out of defeating others. To them, other people”s death is an ultimate victory, because they believe that death marks the absolute end. But for the people who live by love get their satisfaction in life by sacrificing themselves for others, even at the cost of one”s own life. In the world of love, a grain falls on the ground and rots as it empties itself to bring forth sprouts – a new life. In a world of love, even death can be a sign of victory, because it shows an uncompromising love. We believe this because Christ showed us that death is not the end. The tomb was empty, because he went away to continue his ministry of love.

Christ transformed the meaning of life and death completely. True life is a living by the rules of love. It goes on beyond the end of the physical existence. Life has conquered death in Jesus Christ. In the meantime, death can occur while a process of physical life is still in progress. The life without love is the death appearing to be physically alive. Leo Tolstoy, in one of his children”s stories, spoke about people who breathed death. They were the people without love. They were the "living dead."

Three women went to the tomb where Jesus was laid, discovered the body missing, and ran away. But one of them came back. Her name was Mary Magdalene. She had nothing left in life. Life without Jesus was empty – as good as she was dead, so she came to join the dead at the grave. She did not recognize the living Christ, because she came to find the dead Jesus. It was only when he called her name, she saw the living Jesus. Love is intensely personal. You can not love without a name. And love never dies. So when she felt this intensely intimate moment of love, she could recognized the life which conquered death.

Let us, on this Easter day, renew our resolve to live by love as God commanded. We will taste eternal life, if we know the art of love that never dies. We will feel the presence of Christ who live with us when we believe that.

TWO BEGINNINGS

Genesis 1:1-15, Psalm 29 , Mark 1:7-11

January 12, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

A famous entrepreneur Cecil Rhodes, who opened up Africa for the British Empire, asked the colonial authority to send many missionaries to Africa because, "They are cheaper than the policemen." Slave owners of the American South made church attendance compulsory for the slaves, because they believed that the church made them docile. There are many other examples of miss-use of religion in our history. When people lack self-confidence and feel insecure, they are easy targets for exploitation. Many times in our history, people in power used religions to impose their will on others. Their standard lines were: "You are a sinner. you are not good enough. So you must follow me, because I know what God wants. Just trust me." Abuse of power of the church is legendary in the Quebec politics until only twenty some years ago.

God created the world and everything in it, and he said it was good. The one of the most important points here is that it was good and that God was happy with it. Affirming the basic goodness of creation is very important for us. I say this because we are often not too sure about ourselves and we get hurt easily when we are criticized. When someone reinforces our sense of inadequacy and convinces us that we are not good enough, we often find ourselves defenceless against other people”s ways.

People in power, from time to time, abused religion in order to exploit people by emphasizing the original sin and by down-playing the original blessing of creation. The creation story, if you read it without prejudice, tells us that the world began with a blessing. "That”s good.", said God after he created each item. God wanted the world and everything in it to be the way they are. The world is not bad. We are not bad. Let us not be deceived to think that there is anything wrong with us. God loves us. We do make many mistakes in our lives for sure. But that does not mean there is something fundamentally wrong with us. There is nothing wrong with us even though we make mistakes. Let us celebrate goodness in us and around us.

Incidentally, there is an important lesson for parents here. We have duties to teach our children difference between right and wrong. But, while we do this, we must never give the impression that our children are not good enough. They make mistakes, but they are not bad. Punishment must be meted out, if you must, to correct their mistakes, not to condemn them. We must always make sure our children know that their parents always love them even when they make mistakes and have to be punished. When they do not feel that they are not loved, hence do not feel that they are accepted, they make themselves open to evil suggestions. We are not bad, but evil will come into us when we can not believe in our goodness.

We humans began our life on this planet by being good and acceptable. So we began with blessing. So did other animals, plants, and other natural elements. However, the Bible also tells us that there is difference between human being and other creatures. We do not know the exact nature of this difference. Genesis describes the difference by saying that God created humans according to God”s likeness. Even though we do not know what makes us distinct from other creatures, we know that it comes from the belief that all of us have a bit of God in us. And we call it spirituality. We are different from other creatures, because we are spiritual.

In our Christian tradition, we affirm our spirituality in baptism. When Jesus was baptized, he heard a voice of God saying, "You are my beloved son. I am very pleased with you." You notice the resemblance between the above sentence and God”s expression of satisfaction in the story of creation. But the difference is: in the creation story, God”s expression of satisfaction was a monologue. He was talking to himself that he was happy with what he made. But at the time of baptism, God spoke to Jesus and told him that he was pleased with him. Likewise, God wants humans to know that God is happy with us, because we are created with a spiritual ability to discern God”s will. We are capable of appreciating what it means to be acceptable in the eyes of God.

Practice of baptism is not unique to Christianity. Many religions use water as a symbol of divine cleansing power. In Judaism, converts went through water as the final rite to become Jews. However, at the time when Jesus lived, there were a group of Jews, who wanted to revitalize their religion by forming a community of committed believers. They were called the Essenes. They lived separately in the desert in a community of men and women, just like monks in a monastery. And baptism was the rite of entry into this community. For them, the act of going through water symbolized cleansing of their tired old religious life, and entry into a renewed spiritual life. We now know that John the Baptist belonged to the Essenes. In other words, Baptism was not only the rite of entering into a community, but also affirmation of the original blessing: of being accepted and being loved by God.

Today the strength of traditional religions are on the decline in the West. In this juncture, it is very important for people like us who are still committed to the spiritual way of life to affirm the purpose our lives. Recently, Bill Gates, founder and the CEO of the computer program producer Microsoft at the age of 41 the America”s richest man , was interviewed by the "time" magazine. On paper, he made $10.9 billion last year, $30 million a day. He has made money by reproducing a bit of human brains in computer programs. He was asked by the reporter if ever computers can completely copy and replace human mind. He had to think for weeks before he answered in writing. He said, "Human mind is a creation that must not be compared to computer programs. Even the parts of human mind that can be explained by science have an underlying purpose that can be explained only by religion." In baptism, we celebrate our spiritual being, the part that is beyond science; the part that explains meaning of our existence; the part that enables us to accept and love other beyond reason.

Adam and Eve represent the first human beings in physical sense. For Christians, however, Jesus represents the first human who acknowledged Godliness in every one of us when he was baptized. Let us celebrate goodness of creation. And let us celebrate godliness in all of us.

WHO FOUND JESUS?

Isaiah 60:1-4, Psalm 72:1-7, Matthew 2:1-12

January 5, 1997 by Tad Mitsui

January 6 is known as "Epiphany" according to the traditional Christian calender. The Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on this day. It is the day to commemorate the coming of the wise men from the East bearing gifts to worship the baby Jesus. They were foreigners – gentiles or pagans to the Jews. They believed that divine revelations were visible in the movements of stars. We celebrate this day, because it was the first time Jesus revealed himself to the believers of a different religion. The story of the wise men also tells us that God will find us when we find meaning in our occupations and are committed to the things we do in them.

What is interesting is the fact that the Bible reports only two rather odd groups of people who visited the baby Jesus. They were the shepherds and the wise men of the East. Priests and scholars knew that the Bible had predicted that the birth of a special child would take place in Bethlehem. But they did not bother to go to Bethlehem. The king was interested to know about it solely because he wanted to kill the baby who might become a threat to his throne. The inn keeper who refused Mary and Joseph, obviously, did not know anything about the birth of the Messiah. Other ordinary people did not know anything about it. The shepherds and the magi were the least expected kind of people God would invite to meet his new born child.

The shepherds were nomads who were in search of grazing land all the time. They did not have normal homes. They cooked, ate, and slept in the open or in tents. Their security was all in animals, and was always precarious. They had a hard life. They wore rags, rarely washed themselves, and had weather-worn leathery skin. Being a shepherd was not just a job; it was a full-time way of life. Ordinarily, they lived on the edge of the human community, away from normal social life. They must have been like modern-day Gypsies, who still live on the edges of settled communities, often in trailers in parking lots of England and other continental European countries. They are never like other people nor do they try to be. They live their own lives. They are stubbornly bonded to their life-style.

The magi came from the east of Palestine. There were people from ancient Persia, which is the present day Iran, who believed that stars determined the destiny of people. It was in ancient Persia where astrology was developed. *Many people in our society today believe in astrology, as you know.* Because every movement of stars was important, watching stars, recording and predicting their movements were a full-time occupation for many highly educated people. They were a respected class of intellectuals, because people believed that they could predict the future. But they were definitely not priests, prophets, or teachers of the Jewish religion. They were not expected to make an important discovery about the religion of the Old Testament. They were after all gentiles – pagans. Why should these unlikely people be the ones who found Jesus first? It”s humbling to realize that the Bible is speaking about the believers of another religion and homeless herders as the only ones permitted to meet the Holy Child during his very first few days in this world.

Here you must understand the notion of vocation to understand this puzzle. The word – vocation comes from a Latin word – "vocatio". It means "to call" or "to summon". It comes from the idea that God called or summoned you to do a certain thing. It can be the same thing as a job or an occupation. But often it is not. You are lucky if your vocation and your job are the same thing. In your vocation, you are committed to the things that you do, because you believe that God is calling you to do them. Your vocation makes your life important and meaningful. It makes your life a pleasure: something worth living. One person told me that she just loved what she did, and that she felt lucky to be paid for what she does. Some people have a job in order to pursue a vocation which is different from the job, because their vocation does not provide a living. Many artists are committed to pursue their art, which often does not pay. So they are used to the idea that they have to have jobs to support themselves, to allow them to pursue the real purpose of their lives, which are their vocations. Many Catholic religious orders are operating on that principle. They make a living by making cheeze, teaching school or becoming nurses; but they do these things only so they are able to pray, to study the Bible, or to serve people.

The wise men of the East and the shepherds had vocations. They were totally committed to doing what they were doing. In fact, those men from the East must have gambled everything they owned to undertake the journey to Bethlehem. Travelling in those days was a hazardous undertaking. They had to provide their own modes of transportation, which were not affordable to many people. There were no maps. Predators of both animal and human kind were many. It was a very costly venture. It was a gamble. They might have believed in a different religion, but they were totally committed to what they believed to be their vocation. The shepherds were committed to their vocation, too. They were not ashamed of their work, though other people thought them to be a lower class. God rewards those who are committed to their vocations by revealing the truth.

On the other hand, some people corrupt their vocation by compromising their commitments. Those priests and Biblical scholars who surrounded the king did not want to displease the king. So they did not follow what they were supposed to have believed. They did not do what the Bible said they should. Ministers of religions, medical doctors and nurses, lawyers and judges, and teachers have the types of jobs that require a sense of vocation. But we know that, unfortunately, some of them don”t live like the ones who have vocations. Ambitions for wealth, power, and often mere vanity corrupt them. They lose their vocations by making them mere jobs they do for living. They no longer have commitments. They no longer feel that God is calling them to do anything. Those without a sense of vocation will inevitably miss the new born Jesus, even if they know, in theory, where to find him.

The story of the wise men of the East is an indictment against those who compromise themselves and pursue ulterior goals while pretending to work for noble causes. It is also a celebration of those who find meaning for their lives in what they do, and are committed to doing the things they believe God called them to do. All of us have been called by God to do some meaningful work in our lives. Salvation is revealed to those who find meaning in their work. When you find the meaning of life, you have found the baby Jesus.

CHILDREN SHALL NOT DIE

EXODUS 12, PSALM 150, MATTHEW 18:18-20

September 8, 1996 by Tad Mitsui

Passover is the most important holiday for Jewish people. It is the day to remember their liberation from slavery and the beginning of the Hebrew people as a nation. For us Christians also, Passover has a lot to do with our idea of salvation. Jesus Christ instituted Holy Communion as he celebrated a Passover supper with his disciples before he was crucified. Today”s Old Testament reading describes how it all began.

Having said that, however, I have real problem celebrating salvation which was achieved because children”s lives were sacrificed. You might say that those who died were the children of the Egyptian oppressors. But I have difficulty accepting the idea of salvation where innocent children of other people had to be sacrificed, while the deaths of their own children were considered to be something abhorrent. I feel strongly about this at a time when so many crimes against children are being reported.

The problem is that the Bible described this tragedy for Egyptians as something good. It saved the God”s chosen people, the Hebrews. I can not accept such logic. For me, our God is for all people, for Jews and for Egyptians, for Canadians and for Iraqis. We are obliged to examine our attitudes towards the Bible when we have this kind of dilemma. How should we read the Bible? This is a very important question. Is it possible to justify such an extreme ideas as hating your enemies so much as to rejoice in the deaths of their children, as this Exodus story seems to be doing. It depends on how you read the Bible. Many deaths and abuses of innocent children and women during the wars have been tolerated or even justified because, "They were infidels, Nazis, or communists, etc." This logic seems to me to be very much against the core of the teachings of Jesus Christ to love your enemies and to give children a place of glory. Prophet Isaiah also declared that in God”s ideal world, "Children shall not die."

There are two very easy solutions to the question of how to read the Bible. The first one is to believe that every word of the Bible is a word of God to be accepted as truth. Those who say this are called literalists or more often fundamentalists. The second solution is to treat the Bible like any other literature, and not to take it too seriously. The first group calls the second group "humanists" and does not accept them as Christians. Neither is the belief of most United Church people including myself.

We believe that the Bible contains the word of God. The key word here is "contain". I did not say it "is" the word of God. In other words, by reading through the Bible we will know the will of God, but every word is not necessarily God”s word. It is like letters from a loved one. They are usually random descriptions of their day-to-day life and work. But reading through those letters, you can feel the palpable strands of love woven into the whole fabric. The German reformer Martin Luther compared the Bible to the crib where Baby Jesus was laid. He said that it is preposterous to treat every straw in the mattress as though it was Jesus himself, even though straws of the mattress are important for his well being. The crib is not Jesus. But if you don”t look for the crib, you won”t find the Holy Child. Likewise is the relationship between the Bible and the word of God. The Bible is an imperfect vessel for the word of God. But it is the only one we have.

But because of the views I have just expressed, people like me and many people in the United Church are often called humanists, and accused of being not 100% Christians, by those who believe every word of the Bible as the word of God. Many heated discussions took place because of this difference, they sometimes split the church. Even though fundamentalists may be sincere as Christians, we must also stand firm in our way of believing as the best one for us.

According to our way of reading and interpreting the Bible, the part of the Old Testament we have been reading is a record of the Hebrew people”s journey of discovery. They journeyed through many trials and errors in their search for the way of God. At various points, some of their prophets had nearly achieved the same level of spiritual perfection as Jesus did later. At the same time, they also overstepped the bounds in their eagerness to be faithful, and made many wrong assumptions. The Bible does not try to hide those mistakes. This is why you find many contradictions in the Bible. For example, to rejoice in the deaths of innocent children, simply because they happened to be the children of those terrible people who had enslaved them, is wrong. But, no human being should be a slave of another. So the Hebrew people were right to firmly reject the notion of enslavement as against God”s will.

Furthermore, people”s idea of God progressed throughout the history described in the Bible. In earlier writings, the Old Testament speaks about people, even the Hebrew people, who believed in tribal gods, not just one God. Each tribe had their own god. Often battles between nations were considered to be battles of gods. Their notion of divinity was that there were many little gods who were concerned only about their own little groups exclusively.

This is why, for Moses, it was important to know the name of the god who was speaking to him in the desert. He had to have some authority to persuade people to make a move that was so brave it seemed crazy. He had to convince people that this God is the real one, not like others. The interesting thing is that God refused to be named. "I am who I am." said God. "You can not describe me in your limited vocabulary. You will find me as you walk with me." This is progress in terms of achieving a better understanding of God as one who is much larger than a mere tribal god.

I am saying all this based on the observation of the whole Bible. Many years after the period that the Exodus speaks of, Prophet Isaiah said that in God”s world children shall not die. And Jesus Christ underlined Isaiah”s conviction in many of his sayings. For us Christians, Jesus reached perfection in what the Hebrew people had searched for throughout their history. In other words, for us, Christ is the measure against which every experience in the Old Testament can be judged. Through Christ, the whole experience of the Hebrew people was opened to all of us. And the journey continues. So let us not be shy about our honest questioning of the Bible. This is not a rejection. It is a journey of discovery and of a deepening of our faith.

HOPE BEYOND HOPELESSNESS

EZEKIEL 37:1-14, PSALM 130, JOHN 11:1-45

March 21, 1999 by Tad Mitsui

 When I think of the disasters and tragedies that some people, including some of you, have managed to live through, I am astonished that they had courage to endure it all and to come out smiling. Today”s Scripture lessons deal with the kind of despair that defies any notion of hope. And yet, the message is very clear; that there is hope beyond hopelessness. What else is there that can symbolize utter hopelessness than a pile of dry bones or a four day old decomposing corpse? Prophet Ezekiel was told to start preaching to the pile of dry bones. He could not believe what he was told to do. It ignored all common sense. But he did, and spoke the words of the living God to the bones. Lo and behold, bones began to put on flesh, sinews, and skins, and came back to life. Four days after his death, Lazarus was a smelly heap of decomposing flesh. But Jesus told him to walk out of the tomb. And he did. In both cases, life came back through words. Words from the mouths of God”s agents conveyed amazing power of spirit proving that there was hope beyond hopelessness.

I read about a minister who had served as a military Chaplain for the U.S. Marine Corps, who was a witness to the power of the Gospel story. The war in the Pacific was finally over, and he and his regiment were on a troop ship going home. Veterans who have seen action know that going home is not always a happy process. Surviving the battle field leaves one with so much anxiety and trauma. Many of them come home psychologically sick. It is called "Post Trauma Stress Disorder". One such Marine came to see the Chaplain. He was in a deep depression. He was a well educated man. When he was called up into the service, he was in the midst of articling after completing his law degree. But now he was in a state of absolute despair. He had never been able to bring himself to tell the chaplain what had been troubling him; what kind of experience he had gone through, what he had seen, had done, or had been done to him. At any rate, he did not want to go home, he did not want to see any one back home, and he had no more courage to live on, but did not have courage to kill himself either. He was a living dead man. But one morning, the young man came to see the chaplain, a completely transformed man. He said that he had been so excited that he could not sleep that night. The story of Lazarus was the Gospel read at the evening prayer. There was no explanation of the passage nor any sermon on it. It was a simple service of a lesson and a prayer. The message of the son of God telling someone he loved very much to come back to life touched him deeply. In the battle field, soldiers often had to live with sight and stench of rotting corpses. The power of the words loaded with love that defied utter hopelessness had moved him. He gained strength to come face-to-face with his psychological scar.

Resurrection stories are not uncommon in many ancient cultures. The resurrection of the Sun goddess who gave birth to Japanese archipelago is one example. A man who saw her dead, and thus became the first witness of her resurrection, was severely punished, because no human was allowed to know that the goddess could be so vulnerable and died sometimes. There are numerous similar stories of the dead coming back to life in every culture. From this, we know that resurrection stories were a form of ancient literature teaching people the meaning of life and death. So, to try to prove the uniqueness and divinity of Jesus by the stories of miraculous resurrections which he performed does not succeed, because there are many other similar stories in other religions. I am not criticising those people who believe that that was the exactly the way it happened. They must believe what they feel right for them. But the important thing to remember in reading a resurrection story is that each story is different. We must find the uniqueness in each story and identify a distinct message.

What then is the point of the story of Jesus bringing life back to Lazarus? Let us make sure first that we know what it is not. We can all agree that this story is not same as the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lazarus came back to life, but to become an old man, and to eventually die. Jesus, on the other hand, came back to a different kind of life to live forever. We believe that he lives among us even today. He lives a life that never dies. This is the fundamental difference. In fact, what happened in the story of Lazarus was a story of resuscitation not resurrection. Lazarus did not solve the problem of death; he came back to the same perishable flesh. But Jesus Christ by his resurrection demonstrated that his life was more than physical reality. His life goes on beyond death. His life is more than mere flesh and blood.

What is the meaning of the resuscitation of Lazarus? What is different about this story from other stories is the gruesome details John went into to say that Lazarus was truly dead. In other resurrection stories, of which there are at least four, the dead persons all died immediately before Jesus” arrival, making one wonder if they were only in a coma. But for John”s Gospel, when Jesus asked people to remove the stone that entombed Lazarus” remains, his sister Martha warned that he had been dead for four days and the stench would be unbearable. What could be more hopeless than a decomposing body? Why did John tell the story in such a graphic manner? I believe that John wanted to convey a sense of absolute hopelessness and the ugliness of despair. Remember also, the Jews during those days believed that body and spirit stayed together for three days after death. But on the fourth day, the spirit would depart from the body, allowing it to start decaying.

I think that John is trying to tell us that despair is not only dark and stormy and suffocating, but is also so smelly and ugly in a metaphorical sense that repels relationships. When you fall into such a deep depression of despair and hopelessness, you will not be able to climb out of it by yourself. You need help. But you can not seek help yourself, because you are not in a state to see how help from the outside could do any good. So the one who truly needs help looks hostile, unapproachable, and unlovable. We must remember that often the person who is hostile, spiteful, and difficult to love is lonely and in need of love more than anyone else.

Jesus loved Lazarus. He and his sisters, Mary and Martha, often provided Jesus with hospitality. He stood in front of the tomb where Lazarus was laid, and wept. He wept so much that everyone could tell that he loved Lazarus very much. Then he spoke, despite the ugliness and stench of despair. He spoke forcefully to Lazarus to get up and walk. And Lazarus got up and walked. I don”t want to analyze the power of words of love. But this story has made it clear to us that love intervenes forcefully in the situation where all hope had gone. It tells us that the words of love always give us hope where there is no hope, even in the tomb of our despair. Love brings life back to us, and calls us back to life.

Luke 1:26-38, Luke 1:47-55

In order to learn the language in Africa, I lived in an isolated mission which was two hundred years old.  It was a compound of about ten acres, with a bush, a vegetable garden, a spring, a cemetery, and a huge house made of mud and cow dung.   Looking at the grave stones in the cemetery, I often wondered how missionary families survived in the last century.  Many children were buried there.  Infants died before they reached their first birthdays, with quite a few dying at birth.  The life of the missionaries must have been hard.  I can”t begin to imagine how hard it must have been for women to go through the pain and suffering of giving birth and then seeing many of their children die.
 
My knowledge of child birth is from watching TV programs and films.  My daughter was born at the time when fathers were not allowed in the birthing room.  It all looks and sounds so painful.  I don”t like pain.  This is why it is hard for me to understand how any woman would be willing to give birth even in civilized conditions.  And yet, birth happens all the time, billions of times.  Without women”s acceptance of their painful role in procreation, our species should have been extinct a long time ago.  I sometimes wonder how women can accept child birth as a blessing.  If it is, and I am sure they think it is, it is a costly blessing.  The story of Annunciation is about a costly blessing and about Mary”s huge faith in God”s plan which she largely did not get to see realized in her life time.

When Mary received the news about her pregnancy, the angel Gabriel said to her, "God is giving you a big favour.  You will bear a child.  He will be great and called Son of God."  But Mary never sounded convinced that she was hearing good news.  "How can this be?  It can”t be true."  She said.  You realize that she was only a teenager of maybe 15 or 16.  But I don”t think she was completely gullible despite her age.  She must have known the fate that awaited a pregnant unmarried girl.  It was not just the hazards and pain of child birth.  At best, it could mean being cast out from the community for being a loose woman, or, at worst, death by stoning as an adulterer, which was the sentence for a woman who became pregnant outside of marriage.  Mary was right.  How can this be a blessing?  It sounded more like a curse than a blessing.

Her fiancé, Joseph, saved her from this cruel fate.  Without his incredible graciousness in accepting Mary”s claim, we would not have Christmas.  He believed a message he heard in a dream as God”s words.  He wanted to believe in God, because he loved Mary so much.  He swallowed his pride, and accepted Mary”s story and her faith in God.  Christmas is a story of love.  It is a story of the faith of a man in a woman, of a man who decided to believe an impossible story because he loved her dearly.  Today, if we heard a teenage girl say just like Mary, "God made me pregnant," we would probably ridicule her for being gullible and stupid, if not downright insane.  The story of Joseph is another miracle of Christmas.  It is also a story of a brave young girl who accepted as a blessing what looked like a curse.  She believed in God”s plans, although she didn”t understand what it was all about.  Mary believed what she heard and accepted the fate that awaited her and her son.  "I am a servant of the Lord; may it happen to me as you have said," she said.

The Annunciation is the beginning of a story of a costly blessing.  Mary”s life with Jesus was mostly the story of a mother”s suffering.  She was distressed many times as Jesus outgrew Mary”s capacity to understand.  Her son said many outrageous things in public, offended and angered many important people.  She didn”t understand him.  She tried to take him home, because she was so afraid of her son”s safety.  One time, she even thought that her son had become insane.  She was very happy, when her son became a popular healer and preacher.  Thousands followed him everywhere.  But the good time was short lived.  He was soon arrested, publicly humiliated, and died an excruciatingly cruel death on a cross.  What an ordeal for a mother!  How could such a son”s life be a blessing for mother?

But Mary was a mother.  Mothers understand the costliness of blessings, because they live through the pain of birth.  Though there weren”t many visible rewards for Mary in her life time, the annunciation became a blessing, nevertheless, because of her faith.  She never knew that her son would be adored and worshipped so universally two thousand years later.  She only knew for a few years the small daily joys of watching her child grow.  She had never imagined that she would be admired for her courage and faith, in the arts and music, and named in some faith traditions as the "Mother of God."  Her faith gave birth to a blessing for all of us.  Thank God for Mary and Joseph, and their faith in each other and in God, which made Christmas possible.

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

Exodus 16: 1 – 15, Psalm 111, Matthew 20: 1 – 16

September 22, 1996 by Tad Mitsui

There is no universal standard to determine, "how much is enough." For some people, what is enough is so little according to other people”s standards. On the other hand, for some other people there is no such thing as enough. According to the World Value Survey in 1995, only 8% of people in the Republic of Ireland said they were not happy. Americans, Canadians, Germans, and Japanese, in contrast, who are on the average twice as rich as the Irish, a full 20% of people said they were unhappy. It is clear that being rich is not a guarantee for happiness. The scripture lessons for today tell us that God provides enough. And it is up to us to be happy about it.

One morning when the Hebrews ran out of food in the desert, they found some edible fluffy and sweet stuff on the ground. Moses said that it was gifts from God called manna. We don”t know what it was. Whatever it was, it must have been very perishable. Those who collected more than they could eat in one day, found left-over completely spoiled next day. We know that some food stuff must be eaten very fresh like sushi. Many people think that it is revolting to eat raw fish. What they have to know, however, is that only very fresh fish, no older than a day, is good enough for decent sushi. And when it is fresh, it is very good. It is addictive. Ask Muriel. This is why in most of the Oriental fish stores, the fish is sold in aquariums like we do with lobsters.

Most food stuff are the best when they are fresh. And fresh food is good for health. There is a Japanese saying, "The way to good health is to eat the fruits of the season." I now can affirm this ancient wisdom as we enjoyed fresh produce from our garden this year.

"One day at a time." is one of the important articles of faith for the Alcoholic Anonymous. Things change unexpectedly. We will never know what exactly lies ahead of us. It is because God”s world is alive and dynamic. Yes, it is important to plan ahead. But also we should be humble enough to know that we can be quite wrong in our predictions. When we depend only on our ability to see future, we will never find peace of mind. This is why those brave people in the Alcoholic Anonymous who have guts enough to admit that they have problems have decided to look at themselves only one day at a time. They know that on the next day, something unexpected can happen and they may go back to bad old habits. All of us fail from time to time. So the day after they will try again. They trust that God knows best and is watching over them lovingly and patiently, like a mother who watches over a toddler learning to walk.

So how do we know when we have enough? It is when we are happy with what we have, and stop wanting more. Happiness and material things are two important components of knowing when we have "enough". They must come together. It is never enough when you have nothing. Everyone needs a certain amount of material things. This is why the Christians do not believe that there is such thing as purely spiritual happiness totally devoid of material things. So we believe that to work hard to eliminate poverty is an important Christian duty. However, at some point, we have to be satisfied with what we have. Otherwise we will never feel we have enough. Then we won”t know when to stop working. Simply accumulating things will never make us content, unless at one point we feel happy with what we acquired and stop. Some people never feel they have enough, even if they have the whole world at their disposal. It is because material things alone does not give you satisfaction without deep feeling of contentment. And it comes only from spiritual part of you.

We learn two lessons from today”s scriptures. First, we must believe that God provides enough for every creature. Secondly, we must know when it is enough and when to stop wanting more. Otherwise greed takes over, and there will be no stopping. Greed will stop only when everything is destroyed including the one who is greedy.

Each one of us has to do our share of God”s work as much as we can. However, God created this world where every creature could be sustained. As all farmers know, we can produce a lot more food. No one denys that agriculture can feed a lot more people than there are on this planet now. The world God created has an enormous capacity to sustain us. Then how come some people are malnourished and even starve to death. We know it is not because of shortage of food. It is because of the world does not have a good distribution system. So some people can not buy food, though food is there.

When I was assigned to the job of coordinating famine relief in Africa ten years ago, one of the projects I participated was to study the cause of starvation. In no time we discovered that the problem was not producing not enough food. We humans can produce a lot of food. Even Ethiopia, where about a million people died from starvation ten years ago, exported more food items, like coffee, sugar and beef, to Europe during the famine, for cash. They needed cash to buy armaments to fight a civil war. Many people who were outside of the government, military, or cash crop sector starved, because they had been given no credit to produce food thus had no money to buy food when crops failed. There is a lot of food available in the world. I am sure many of you want to produce a lot more food, if there are buyers. The problem is that there are not enough people who have money to buy food. So people continue to starve, while food is wasted.

So God does provide, so long as all of us do our share of work. Even those who were unlucky to find work at the last hour of the day can have share of world”s goodness to live. Problem is greed. If there is no greedy people in the world, it will be easier to create a system that distributes enough things to everybody. Greed does not like equality. The one who worked all day did not like what they saw when the one who worked less got the same pay. A seed of greed was germinated when envy entered his minds. Once greed has taken over, it will not allow you to stop. It is like going down hill on ski without knowing how to stop. You have to crash into something solid to stop. You may seriously injure yourself at best, you may even lose your life.

Ask a bunch of very rich people if they have enough. Few would say they have enough, I am sure. They need, I am told, on the average, 30 % more to be happy. Funny thing is that the people with median incomes also want the same 30 % more, also. Greed will never let you feel that you have enough. Also greed never allows you to be happy when you have as much as your neighbour. Greed thrives on inequality. So our society ends up with some people having too much and some too little. Today”s lessons tell us that is not the God”s way.

Have you ever stop to think sometimes that our affluence can be actually harmful? By 1967, the most of the western countries reached the level of affluence that provided all the basic necessities for our healthy life. Anything that has come after that are extra. We really do not need them, but it is nice to have them. We enjoy them, but some of those extras are actually harming our well being. For example, we all know that many of the top killer diseases are preventable if we consume less. Have I told you about my former anti-white student who became the Director of Botswana Meat Board? His job was to sell beef to Europe? With a cheeky smile, he said, "I am killing Europeans slowly."

So, let us remember and trust that God provides enough. And let us be happy and grateful for it. Many of us love our work, that”s O.K. Consequently many of us produce more than we need. That”s O.K., too, so long as you have time to enjoy it. The trick is not to get caught up in a rat race of accumulating surpluses we don”t need. We should know the time to say, "That”s enough." and stop to enjoy and to share. And don”t forget to say "thank you" to God who provides.

WITHOUT LIGHT, THERE IS NO SHADOW

Exodus 14:19-31, Psalm 114 , Matthew 18:21&22

September 15, 1996 by Tad Mitsui

Every new experience of life is a process of growth. And we know that a ceratin amount of pain is unavoidable in a process of growth. You can complain about it, or you can celebrate it. As soon as God led the people of Israel out of slavery and out of Egypt where they lived for nearly four hundred years, they ran into hardship and some scary experiences they did not anticipate. They complained about them bitterly and wanted to go back to become slaves again, because at least it was the place they knew.

As the story goes, calamities befell the Egyptians, one after another. The Egyptians did not blame God but blamed the Hebrews for their many misfortunes. The king wanted them to go as soon as possible. But Moses knew that the king would change his mind. He had done it many times before. So the Hebrews left Egypt in a hurry. According to the Bible, God instructed them not to wait for bread dough to rise before they baked it. They were told not to gut the animals before they roasted them. There was no time to waste. They ate the dinner without sitting at the table, standing, already dressed to travel. They left in a hurry.

They were happy as they started out. They were free! No more hard labour in the hot sun, mixing mud, moulding it and baking bricks, day after day. They were no longer other people”s slaves. They were free and independent human beings. But as soon as they got out of the city, they found themselves in the desert. It was not just hot sand and prickly bushes, but it was also a long stretch of hard rocks with sharp edges, or exhausting process of trudging up and down of the sand dunes. Also, there were many hungry predatory animals. Worse still, Moses didn”t tell them clearly which way they should be going. At that point, he didn”t know that either. It was a test of trust in God. They were so busy getting out of Egypt, they didn”t have time to think about those details. So reality set in as they inched forward with heavy loads on their backs. It was hot and dry. "How long do we have to keep walking? We have no more jobs. How are we going to make a living? Where does our next meal come from?" Many troubling questions began to bother them. You would do that when your trust in God wanes.

Then they came to a swamp with reed bushes. The water looked deep. Also there was another problem on the horizon. The king had changed his mind again. He wanted slaves back. No Egyptian would do such a dirty job as cheaply as the Jews used to do. They were important for the country”s economy. So he sent his army to bring the slaves back. They were ordered to kill them if they refused to return. There was dust rising on the horizon. The Egyptian army! Now what? Speak about the devil and the deep blue sea: They were in between. So now they were really complaining to Moses. "Just look at the mess you got us into. In Egypt, we had work, enough food at least and place to live. But here, we have none of them. And now we are either going to be killed by the soldiers or drown in the sea." Notice; they blamed Moses, not God. It is always easier to blame some one nearby than to look at a larger picture like God”s plan.

When we first think about something new, it always seems so attractive and exciting. In our excitement, it”s easy to overlook that what is new is also unknown and therefore can be frightening once you actually face it. Where there is light, there must be a shadow. Once we step into a new phase of life, we suddenly realize that we don”t know anything about the new territory. It is scary to realize this. It is like crossing of a sea. There is no bridge on which to go back. We seem suddenly to be surrounded by all sort of dangers. The real test for an adult who desires to be free and independent is how to face those problems.

You can avoid them, complain about them, or ignore them as though they don”t exist. But that means you have decided to not grow up. One can never learn to live by avoiding your problems. One can never learn to swim without getting wet. We must know that unresolved problems always seem an impossible challenge. Two summers ago, we discovered water slides at a park in the Laurentiens. We enjoyed the thrill of going down those steep and twisting slides. It must be like learning to ski down hill, which I have not done yet. But I have yet to go down the steepest straight down slide. We”ve looked at them every time we went there. It looked like jumping straight down from the top of a cliff. It looked like a sheer terror. But I suppose, once you have tried it, it must be such an exhilarating experience. That”s why we saw people, young and old, who kept going back up and shooting down. I don”t want to trivialize life”s serious experiences by comparing them to ski or to water slides. But the psychology behind overcoming the fear of unknown is basically the same. Unless you try it, you will never know.

To give birth to the first child must be very scary. The first day at the school, or at a new job can be very frightening. But we learn not to fear them from others” experiences of having gone through them. Also it helps to know that someone you love and trust is with you, going through the frightening experience with you. Then how come we always complain about any new situation that challenge us. We are just like the Hebrews on the banks of Red Sea.

The Hebrews witnessed many incredible and powerful acts of God that redeemed them from the bondage in Egypt. But how soon they forgot those favours they received from God. As soon as they came face to face with some fresh difficulties and dangers, they regretted that they had ever wanted to be free. When you can”t remember the love of God, you will never appreciate what it means to be a human being. The Hebrews wanted to return to the easy but sub-human life of slaves, because they forgot the love of God. When they were slaves, they did not have to make decisions, never had to exercise their imagination to solve problems. They were like babies letting others make all the decisions. In fact, it is the life of domesticated animals they wanted to go back to. They completely forgot how they hated the way they were treated like animals. When one is in such a mindset seeing only the past with nostalgia, one can not see any possibility of resolution because one is not looking forward. If going back seems impossible, sulking and whining are the only thing left for them to do. This was the case of the Hebrews by the Red Sea with the Egyptian Army behind them. "Why did you force us to do it? It is all your fault." We whine when we decide to give up, refusing to look at what is possible. When we give up, nothing is possible. Even if there are many avenues visible before us, we don”t see them.

Anyhow, when the whole company of Hebrews were in a state of panic, God told Moses to touch the water with his cane. We will never know what exactly happened. But the sea parted, and dry land appeared. Some translation of the Bible suggests "Reed Sea" instated of "Red Sea", which is Northwest of Red Sea and a border region between Egypt and Sinai desert. It is now a part of the Suez Canal system. In that region, from time to time, a strong gust of wind from Sahara desert can blow away water from the marshy reed bush, and animals and people could walk across the swamp for a short while. But it is also dangerous, because you never know when the wind stops and water comes back. The Egyptians did not make it. No one can tell if this was how it actually happened. The point is, however, that if you look hard enough, most problems are solvable. But if you give up and only complain, they are insolvable.

If you believe that you are acting according to God”s plan and you are a co-worker with God, you will be more determined to face life”s difficulties. You will not give up, because God is with you, as he promised to Moses. The most important lesson of the story is that the Hebrew people were always reminded that they were travelling with God, as he promised Moses that he would. Even when they forgot about God”s presence, there were many signs that reminded them of that. There were pillars of clouds in the daytime, and of the fire at night, which signalled God”s presence and his guidance. The same promise is with us. If you look around, there are many signs of God”s presence. If we forget, there are many faithful witnesses who point those signs out to us. Those witnesses are everywhere; some of them may be sitting next to you.

BUYING LAND BEFORE A WAR

Jeremiah 32:1-3,6-15, Psalm 91, Luke 16:19-31

September 27, 1998 by Tad Mitsui

Katharine White was a long time Gardening columnist for the New Yorker magazine. When she sent for the spring bulbs from the catalogue for the last time, she knew that she would never see them grow. Her husband wrote about her planting spring bulbs in the last autumn of her life before she died of cancer. He observed "her studied absorbtion in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her own detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection."

Today”s story of Jeremiah tells us about the same kind of faith in the future. Jeremiah bought a piece of land and hid the title deed in a stone jar, just before Jerusalem fell into the hand of the enemy troops, and was totally destroyed. Jeremiah knew that he would never take possession of the land. Jeremiah is not known for his optimism. In fact, he was a prophet of doom and gloom. He constantly accused the king and the people of Israel for their lack of faith in God and their immoral life style. He had warned that the result would be a total destruction of the nation. He had predicted the defeat of the Judean kingdom by the Babylonian empire. Soon enough, Jerusalem was besieged by the enemy troops. The king was annoyed and angry with Jeremiah and put him into prison. Yet Jeremiah was telling the truth. But nobody likes to hear the truth if it is a bad news. So what was the idea of buying a piece of property in a city which was about to be destroyed and occupied by the enemy? This story is telling us that the people with faith in God never lose hope, even though the immediate future does not look bright.

However, how can anyone be as optimistic as Jeremiah was, while they are angry with a corrupt world? Some people who get angry with the unjust and immoral world, act on their anger causing terrible destruction. We see them in Israel and Palestine. We saw them in Unabomber, or in Kansas City. We saw them in Northern Ireland, and recently in Kenya, and Tanzania. They are angry with the people who treat them unjustly or do not obey their God. They are not mere criminals. They are worse than criminals, because they are convinced that they are doing the right thing. They commit those terrible acts out of conviction, often ready to sacrifice their own lives for what they believe to be right. What separates those terrorists from the angry Prophets like Jeremiah is faith in a loving and merciful God. Jeremiah was angry with the corruption and knew that the future of the country was bleak, and yet he bought a piece of land. He never lost hope. He had faith in the future of his people, because he believed in the love of God.

When your belief in moral living is based on the laws of a loving God, your deeds are always motivated by love and never by hatred. Love does not diminish even in anger. There is nothing wrong with being angry, so long as love is the cause of anger. But when anger drives you to hateful and destructive acts, it shows that you don”t see any future. There is no love in your anger. Love is always hopeful, because love always anticipates the future. Love knows that there will be spring and summer beyond the coldness and darkness of winter.

There is nothing wrong with being angry with an unjust and immoral world. It is too bad that righteous anger is considered to be out of fashion. Many people in the church think that antagonizing people by speaking about the evilness of the world is not a helpful thing to do these days. They think that the church must be attractive. We have to offer nice music and a good time, to make people think that the church is a nice place to go. I don”t entirely disagree with this way of thinking. The church must give comfort to people and encourage people with strength to live on in this difficult world. But we must also remember that our religion has another important spiritual tradition. It is the tradition of the Prophets. Prophets say things that are right even though they may annoy people and make them feel uncomfortable.

Let me tell you a story. Old Michael was in his death bed. A priest came to give him the last rites. "Well, Michael," said the priest, "Are you ready to renounce the devil and make peace with your Creator?" "Yes, Father," answered Michael, "I am prepared to make peace with God. But as for the devil, I really am not in a position to antagonize anybody." We must know that in our religion, you can not have it both ways.

When we see injustice done to people or corruption in high places, we must be angry. It is worrisome when we see people forgetting spiritual values and pursuing pleasures as the only goal of life. When a nation loses spiritual values and moral principles, it is doomed. We must keep on speaking about justice no matter how unpopular that will make us. But in the mean time, we must remember that God who demands justice is also a merciful God who forgives and gives us a second chance. Therefore, we speak about righteousness out of love, not out of hatred. Love is always hopeful and anticipates the future.

One person who contributed more than many other people to bring justice into the world is Martin Luther King. He was once asked what he would do if the world ended the next day. He answered, "I will plant a tree." People like Jeremiah and Martin Luther King teach us that there is always hope even in an evil world, because God is good and merciful. I want to be hopeful as they are.

PRIMARY BLESSING: Food and Drink
Exodus 16 : 2-4,13-20, and John 2:1 – 3, 7-11

Christmas is coming.  It’s time when everybody thinks about food.  Bake cookies, fruit cakes, maybe a time to start looking for a recipe for a different kind of stuffing.  I love eating.  I think that food and drink are the signs that God truly loves us.  There is a good reason for the Christian Church’s most important ritual, Communion,  involves eating and drinking.  

I will tell you a story of a first communion.  My father grew up in a Buddhist home in the beginning of the twentieth century in Japan.  He became a Christian through an American woman who came to his village, and started a Sunday School.  My father’s parents heard a rumour that this missionary could deal with any rambunctious and uncontrollable teenage boy.  My dad apparently was one.  So he was sent to Sunday School.   Anyhow, he liked the Sunday School, especially the singing.  He eventually became a Christian to the consternation of his parents.  They wanted the American woman to fix their son, not to make him a Christian.  One day, as my father told me, the missionary announced that a minister would come to baptise them and celebrate the most important dinner for the Christians.  So the congregation was quite excited about it, and looked forward to the first visit of an ordained minister, and a special dinner.  That day came but the minister was delayed. The congregation came hungry expecting a big feast.  So they decided to have the dinner without the minister anyway.  They didn’t have bread and wine.  So they thought that sake and sushi would do.  They had a good time feasting.  By the time the minister finally arrived, he found a very happy and noisy congregation indeed.  He was a Methodist minister who believed in total abstention from alcohol, so he was very annoyed.  They had to wait until they became sober before they were baptized, and observed the first communion with bread and wine.

I think that this story tells us something about a problem of the communion service of our church today.  As you know, another name for communion is  “Eucharist.”   It means thanksgiving.   We celebrate the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ by having a symbolic dinner together.  It is meant to be a joyful occasion.   The communion was a congregational dinner in the early church, like the one we had a month ago.  When it became a ritual in the established church by the Roman Imperial authority, we lost that sense of joy and became a solemn formality.  I don’t know how we can recover that sense of gratitude and joy in our communion.

Humans always marked special occasions by eating together.   We eat not only to celebrate happy occasions but also to celebrate the loving community of supportive people at  not-so-happy-occasions but significant ones like funerals.   We do this because food and drink always bring people together.  A loving community always share a joy of life.  There is a good reason why the Gospel tells us of the miracle at the wedding in Cana as the first act that Jesus performed in his ministry.  Jesus providing wine for a party!  God blesses a joyful occasion with food and rink.
                                  
Food used to be a huge source of happiness before.  It is too bad that we don’t appreciate food as much now.  Our society is so affluent that it’s not too much of a struggle to put food on the table.   If anything we eat and drink too much.  We have forgotten that food was a real blessing and a source of great happiness.  We live in a society where the grace before meal became just a formality and does not have as much meaning as it used to.  Abundance diminished pleasure of God’s blessing.  Greed and gluttony spoiled blessing of God.  All of us have weight problems and less appreciation of food.  Our affluence made food a curse.  What a great pity!

There is an expression in Japanese language, “Kappuku ga iidesune.”  It more or less means: I see you got fat. You must be successful.  Congratulations!   Food used to be scarce and precious.    People could not afford to eat so much to be fat.  So not only in Japan but also in many countries, being overweight meant affluence and success.  You ought to be congratulated.

When people of Israel were freed from slavery, they had to wander in a desert for many years in search of land to settle down.  There was not much food in a desert.  They became hungry, and complained to Moses, “When we were slaves, we were not free, but we ate meat.  Now we are free but we are starving to death.”  So, as the story goes, God provided food.  God sent down quails for meat and some stuff that looked like marshmallow for starch and sugar.  They were told not to collect too much, only what they needed.  But some of them got greedy and stocked up for next day.  But they found surplus food rotten and smelly next day, full of worms.  Now today in Canada, food is plentiful and cheap.  30% of food is thrown out.  We became greedy and glutenous just like the people of Israel in the desert.  Overweight is now a major health hazzard.  Food is supposed to be a blessing.  But greed made us glutenous, and food has become a major health issue.  This is how we turned the blessing into a curse.  There is an important lesson to be learned from the Book of Exodus.

Doctors advise that three items to be avoided if you want to stay healthy: fat, salt, and sugar.  But they are very important substance that our bodies require.  Sugar is an easily digestible source of energy, fat is a way to store carbo-hydrate in time of need, and salt is needed to retain water in our bodies when engaging in a physical activity.  We need them and thank goodness we like them.  But now that food is easily accessible but we do not move our bodies as much, those essential ingredients became poisons that make us sick.  They are still the essential requirements if we take them according to the need.   What God told Moses was a lesson against greed and gluttony not against food.  We can recover the sense of blessing of food, when we take the experience of the Israelites in the desert seriously.

There is a good reason why the church’s most important ritual – communion involves food and drink.  As we partake of it, we must remember that food is a primary sign of God’s love.  Let us drink and eat and be merry with our loved ones during the festive season and be grateful.  As we partake the communion, let us remember to enjoy God’s blessing.  And let us not turn it into a curse.  

 COMMUNION IS SHARING John 6: 1-14, Acts 6:1-6

I am warning you this right off the bat : Some of you are hearing this sermon for the second time.  It’s not that I am getting lazy in my old age.  I am doing this because this is the first of the trilogy about communion I am planing.  I want us to think about the communion in sequence.   When you look up the Oxford Dictionary, the word “Communion” is defined as “sharing in a very deep level.”    So, this morning we will think about the communion as sharing.  In November I will touch on the dinner table as a community builder, and in December we will celebrate the “Pleasure of Eating.”

The scriptures read this morning,  the Corinthians and the Acts are both touching on the difficulty of sharing in the early Christian Church.  You may know this: In the early Christian church the worship services always began by eating together.  It was a proper dinner.  An apostle began the dinner by breaking bread and sharing the cup in memory of Christ, according to his command.   This was the harbinger of the communion service, which today is only a symbolic act.  However, it looks like in some cities particularly in Corinth, there was a problem.  The poor people, the widows and those who were not Jews were often discriminated against.  When they came to the table often there was no more bread and wine left while some others were already drunk because they had too much.  This is why the apostles selected  some good people as elders to make sure that everybody had a share of food and drink.  That was the beginning of the office of “Elders” in the church.

This reminds me of the communion services in African.  In a country called Lesotho, I taught at an university for eight years.  But, I was called upon to conduct the communion service sometimes.   At the communion elders surrounded me like body-guards.  Then I was shocked to see them pushing some people away.  Apparently they grabbed too much bread, or drank too much wine from a common cup.  I realized how they were hungry.  In a country like Canada where the major problem is eating too much, it is hard to understand this.  But in a poor country, where people are hungry all the time, even a bit of bread and a sip of wine is precious.  They never had enough food.  So, like in the early church, elders’ job was to keep the order and to make sure that everybody had bread and wine at the Lord’s Table.

Today, we are all concerned about energy.  But our attempt to reduce our  dependancy on oil  had caused hunger and starvation in the poorer parts of the world.  When industries discovered that corn can produce alternative fuel to run a car, price of corn shot up.  Many poor people in the countries where corn is a staple food could not afford it anymore.  So, many people became hungry and rioted.  The rich world is worried about sources of fuel to run a car, but the poor people are worried about food.  It’s such an unequal world.

It is said that today one billion people are hungry and malnourished.  In the meantime, here in North America, a major health problem comes from eating too much.   Health problems caused by over-weight are replacing cancer and heart diseases as the major causes of death.  I’m told that a half of our children are over weight and a fifth of them are obese, while in the rest of the world thousands of people die everyday  from diseases caused by malnutrition.  Food is killing us while lack of it is killing in the rest of the world.  Sharing food is a big challenge today.

Many of us think that a massive food aid is the answer.  Just send them food, you say.   The price of our agricultural products will go up and the farmers will benefit.  But I don’t think that will work.  For one thing, who is going to pay for it.  The government, our tax?  And secondly, food aid often destroys food producers in the receiving countries.  It was cheap rice from South Carolina destroyed once thriving rice production in Haiti in the last century.  I saw the same thing happened many times in Africa.  When I went to Lesotho, Africa in 1968, there were some old farmers who still remembered the days when there was a movement among Africans to “Send food to save hungry English people.”  It was after the second world war when the whole Europe was starving.  What made Africa food aid receiving continent afterwards?  A good question.  There is a lot of debate about this but I believe that commercialization of agriculture in a global scale deprived of the small farmers’ dignity as food producers and made them beggars.  Cheap food from industrialized world drove them out of the market.

The lesson from the Gospel according to John teaches us something important in this context.  When Jesus asked if there was food for many peopel, Andrew came up to tell Jesus, “Here is a boy who has 5 loaves of barley bread and two fish.”  This nameless boy probably gave up food for the family dinner and offered all he had.  That’s how the miracle of the feeding of five thousand happened, through a willingness of one boy to share all he had.  Even if you don’t believe in a miracle, there is still an important message.  That is: when you fight for food, there is never enough of it.  But when you share it, there is enough.

The answer to the problem of hunger is not food-aid.  It is in giving back the dignity of growing their own food.  Give farmers everywhere farm credit.  You have no idea that in the poorer part of the world, farmers have no crop insurance nor farm credit our farmers take for granted.  So a few years of drought do not kill our farmers, but in Africa even one drought is a total disaster and many people starve.   Then, how come our foreign aid program does not include farm credit?  I know why.  We rather keep producing food we can not possibly consume, and give away the surplus.  There is no way we will allow our government to give financial incentive to the farmers of other countries.  Agriculture is a very competitive market.  We don’t want more competitors.   We rather destroy other food  producers, and make them customers of our farm products, and recipients of our food aid.  Production is a source of dignity.  We really don’t want to share such a precious right.  Sharing all we have is far too much of sacrifice.

When I first went to Lesotho, everywhere I went I was surrounded by beggars.  I hated it.  One day, a school teacher who taught me the language told me something I didn’t know.  He said, “We have a sharing society.  If you have something others don’t have, you will share it.  That’s why every mother teaches her children to leave a tiny portion of dinner for a hungry stranger who may knock on the door anytime.”  Demanding something you don’t have from someone who has is no shame in our culture.  To prove his point, my teacher suggested an experiment.  When you go into a village and run into a beggar, you beg instead, saying  “I’m hungry.”  That’s what I did to a nearly naked herd boy who was looking after a bunch of sheep.  I said, “Ke lapile.  M’phe lijo.”  I’m hungry, give me food.  To my surprise, he pulled out without hesitation, a roasted corn on the cob from under his dirty blanket and gave it to me.  He probably gave up his lunch but he looked happy.  He helped a hungry stranger.  Sharing surplus is good only temporary, but sharing something important lasts longer.  That is what communion is about: It’s a symbol of sharing what is precious.  Remember Jesus shared himself.  What can we share to mend a broken world?  

A SCANDALOUS DINNER
 Luke 5:27 – 32,  7:36-39

Have you ever been with someone you should not be seen with in a place you should not be?   I have.   When I was a newly ordained minister, I was asked by an Immigration officer to accompany a young woman to a clinic for the sexually transmitted disease.   She was suspected of attempting to enter Canada illegally.  I was asked to be an interpreter.   All the time I was in the waiting room I was praying very hard that noone I knew would come in.  I admit: I was worried only about my reputation, not at all about a person who was about to be deported.  She could have been an innocent victim of human traffic.  I  still feel ashamed that I was only concerned about me not about her.

When Jesus was seen eating dinner with tax collectors and other socially unacceptable characters, some Pharisees asked his disciples, “How come your teacher eat with such people?”  It must have been terribly embarrassing to the disciples.  Particularly in ancient times like the time of Jesus in the Jewish society which had a very strict code about eating.  There were many rules about what to eat, how to prepare it, how to eat it, and whom to eat it with.  No respectable Jew would be seen sitting at the same table eating dinner with a character like a woman of ill-repute or a tax official.  Tax-collectors were seen at the time as corrupt traitors who sold their souls to a foreign occupation authority for profit.  You see, at the time the tax collectors were contractors who made their living from commissions.   So you understand why they were hated and shunned.    What Jesus did was a scandal, eating with such people!   Even today, it is assumed that you have dinner only with someone close, special, and respectable.  It was much more so in ancient times when the dinner table was a very private place like a bed room.  We are going to observe communion this morning.   It is a commemoration of the dinner with Jesus.  You must understand the communion service in that context.  It is important to remember whom Jesus had dinners with.  Jesus gave a clear message that no one in his world should be exclude.

Jesus is telling us that everybody is a family and a friend.  Every one is invited to his table.  This is quite a revolutionary idea.  Many people thought he was crazy.  Even today such an act is often unacceptable and easily misunderstood.  It would be like eating at a Macdonald’s with a sex-trade worker.   Clearly, Jesus is rebelling against the accepted social order.  His idea of the universal love and inclusiveness is alien to our common sense even today.  You see how an animal eats, and how it growls when anybody comes close.   Food must be protected.  Herd animals eat together only with the close knit group of the same species.  It is natural to eat only with your family or with very close friends.  Food is precious.  You have to always fight for it and for the sake of your family.  So most of the living creatures are very picky about their dinner companions: that’s natural.  

So you can see what Jesus did was unprecedented.  He declared a new order.  Prophet Isaiah a long before Jesus advocated for a such world: the new world order where a lion and a lamb eat together, and a baby puts its hand into a poison snake’s den without being harmed.  No one in this new world will be harmed by another.  That’s Isaiah’s vision of God’s world.   Jesus was acting to demonstrate it.

Not only did Jesus eat with social outcastes, he also ate with rich people and people in high places.  He did not discriminate his dinner companions.  Why did he do that?  I believe he did that because he wanted to show the world that the human race is one, and noone should be excluded from the family of human race.  When you pray, “Thy kingdom come” you are praying for such an inclusive world.  He ate many dinners like that, and wanted his followers to remember such a dinner at his last supper.  He ate the last supper with those who betrayed him, and abandoned him.  Remember?  Everybody at that table ran away when Jesus needed friends, during his trial before the high priest.  Even the top cat disciple, Peter, said, “I don’t know him, I’ve  never seen him,”  three times.  Judas was not the only double-crosser, all the rest of them ran away too.  What a bunch of scums!  And yet he ate the last supper with them.  That is what he told us to remember and that is what we are remembering this morning.  We must remember what Jesus taught us during the first communion:  to be inclusive in our daily life – “Don’t exclude anybody!  Everybody is my friend and a friend of yours.”

Of course, you can not be eating with your family and close friends exclusively all the time.  There will be an occasion when you have to eat with someone not so intimate.  You have to eat with someone you have to make a business deal, you have to eat with someone you don’t know well but whom you have to honour.  You have to do this but under a set of rules.  This is why humans developed customs and table manners.  You can not just walk into anybody’s home for supper unannounced because you are hungry.   When you think of the customs and table manners, you realize that most of them began as safety measures to avoid bad feeling, unequal share of food, even violence.  You have to be nice to the guests, and share everything on the table.  This is why the person who presides over the procedures of eating together, particularly the one divides the food and drink must be respected.   This is why such a person is called the one who does the “honour”.  It is because such a person must be respected and trusted.  Jesus Christ was the first person who did the “honour” in the new world.

When I was working for an Ecumenical organization, conversation took place at a coffee break one day about Communion Service, more specifically about how different churches handled the left-over elements –  bread and wine.  A Roman Catholic woman said, “Of course, the priest locks it away.  It’s the body of Christ.  It’s sacred.”  An Anglican said, “the priest drinks and eats all the left-overs at the end of the sacrament.”  An United Church woman said, “I stuff my turkey.”  Each church has a different custom according to a particular belief.  But those are important manners with which to observe communion.  Like a dinner, each family has an unique custom.  We follow the custom of the communion service as an important ritual no matter how different the ways we follow it.  It represents Christ’s fundamental teaching of universal love and acceptance.  We are all in it together.  
                            

FEEDING THOUSANDS
Psalm 23 (Voices United 747), Mark 6:30-44

The word, ‘communion’ means first of all ‘sharing’ in the Oxford dictionary.  But when we use it in the church, it is a Sacrament to remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  I wish that the church would emphasize‘ the sharing’ aspect of the service more prominently.  Today’s miracle story, the feeding of thousands, should also be understood as a story of sharing.  But first let me begin with a story from Africa.

I worked for eight years in Lesotho, a country in Southern Africa during the 1970`s.   The church I was sent to work with, has the communion service  held only once or twice a year jointly with several neighboring congregations which share a minister.  This is because of a dire shortage of ordained ministers and because  the church was too poor to pay full time ordained ministers for all congregations..  By the way, the most of the congregations are looked after by trained and certified part-time lay preachers under the supervision of an ordained minister, who often looks after several congregations.  Most of lay preachers are full time farmers or teachers.  It has been like this for years.  So such an occasion as a joint communion has come to be called  ‘mokete.’ or a feast.  It commands the attendance of a few hundred to a thousand people.  The host congregation provides a meal for the whole crowd after the communion service.  People come from near and far on foot and horseback, sometimes taking a whole day to get there.  It`s a joyful occasion which many congregations share together.  A host congregation hold a special fund raising to feed the whole crowd.

In the communion service, everyone goes to the alter and takes a bit of bread and sip wine from a common cup.  It can take sometimes hours to serve a thousand people in this way.  Long hours don’t bother them; people sing their favorite hymns and spend the day visiting friends waiting for their turn to be served.  It feels more like a giant party rather than a worship service.  When I first officiated at such a communion service in Lesotho, I was surprised by the number of elders surrounding the bread and wine.  They formed a circle like an honor guard.  I had a double shock when I found them pushing people away after they took communion.  People were hungry.  So everybody tried to take as big a chunk of bread as possible.  This was quite a revelation because I never thought of communion as food.  For me, it had been a ceremony with a symbolic bit of bread-like substance and a drop of liquid with an undefinable taste.  But we must remember that in the early church, when the communion service was held, it was always a liturgy at the beginning of the communal meal.  The Communion service in Lesotho recovered that style out of necessity.  

The Act of Apostles in chapter six records such occasions where people met for communion which was followed by a  meal.  However, sometimes distribution of food was not done justly and some people like foreigners and widows were discriminated against and had to go hungry.  This was why the elders were elected for the first time in the history of the church to help the apostles administer the communion so that the elements and food were shared equally.  

The clue to understanding  the story of Jesus feeding thousands of people with five loaves and two fish lies in the significance of sharing.  And the meaning of our communion service should be understood as a symbolic act of sharing the goodness of life with others.  It should remind us that all the necessities of life must be held in common.  Communion which is not followed by a  life of sharing in the community is meaningless.  We must remember that Jesus himself shared his own life with us.

Many people believe that the story of the feeding of five thousand is a miracle which proves Jesus was God.  There are a few problems with this interpretation.  For one thing, many scientific-minded people think this is ridiculous. It could never happen.  Secondly, for persons like me and others, we know that there are many other religions which have similar miracle stories: it does not prove that Jesus Christ was the son of God because of this miracle.  For me, if we are a community of people who love each other, this is a story to stress the importance of sharing with others.

According to the Gospel of John, five loaves and two fish belonged to a boy.  The Bible does not say if the boy offered the food willingly or if the disciples just confiscated them.  The point  is that one boy fed five thousand people with what he was carrying for his lunch, because it was shared.  When people share precious things, miracles happen.  To give up something important for others is the message of this story.  The boy gave up all he had, not what he could spare.  Also it tells us that when people give up something precious for others, something amazing happens.

When I went to Africa, I was young and immature.  I don’t think I was a racist, but there was one thing that I disliked about the local people.  It was begging.  I just didn’t like being surrounded by He told me that, the Basotho have a culture of communalisms, something which we who live in a culture of individualism should think carefully about.  The Basotho still hold a notion that everything is a gift of God, and belongs to everybody.  When one has more than others, it is natural that one shares with those who don’t.  He suggested that next time I ran into someone – a beggar who wanted something from me, I should see how the beggar would react if I also ask something from him.  So that’s what I did when a shepherd boy wanted money from me.  I said, “Ke lapile.  Mphe lijo.” – “I’m hungry.  Give me food.” in response.  Immediately without hesitation, he pulled out a roasted corn on the cob from his tattered blanket.  I was embarrassed because I lied but the boy thought I was serious.  I had to take his gift.  Probably that was his only meal for the day.  But he gave it to me, because I said I was hungry.  Then I realized that we in the west have lost something precious which bound a society together.

We have lost a spirit of sharing things that belong to everybody.  This is why the world practically ignores starving people in Africa.  We are more concern about increasing our wealth which are already more than enough.  Not many people want to think about a staggering number of people who are starving.  Last week a news report gave a figure of one billion people on the earth who are starving.  And it is not because we lack food supplies.  Even in the countries where people are starving, people can produce food.  Food shortage is cause by poverty, not by shortage of food.  There is food but people can not buy it.  Where there are people who can produce food, they have no access to bank credit like our farmers do.  But the current economic system does not allow that.  Food production is a highly  competitive business.  Rich countries which can afford so much credit to the food producers produce so much surplus food.  We don’t want more competitors in Africa who can supply food much cheaper than we can.  Rich countries give our surplus food rather than changing global economic equation.  We want them to remain beggars.  We do not want any more competitor in the already crowded food market.

Here is the crux of the matter.  Just like the boy who gave up all he had so that Jesus could feed the thousands, are we prepared to sacrifice our well established position in the global economy in order to make African to be food sufficient?     Communion is about sharing.  True sharing is not giving what we have in surplus, but giving up something that forces us to sacrifice our affluence.  Jesus gave his own life to share.  If we are ready to give up something so precious that it hurts in the giving, there will be a miracle just like five loaves of bread and two fish fed thousands at the time of Jesus.   Just like a Jewish folk tale of Stone soup.

WHERE DOES GOD LIVE?

2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-19, Psalm 24, Mark 6:14-15

July 12, 2009

Mrs. Thomson’s Sunday School class was discussing the house of God.  Jenny’s hand went up.  She said, “God lives in a big house in Montreal.  It’s a church called Notre Dame.  That’s where Celine Dionne got married.”  But Bobby thought God lived in the bathroom.  “Why?” asked Mrs. Thomson.  “Every morning, Dad stands in front of the bathroom and shouts, “My God, are you still there?”  You may think that Jenny and Bobby were funny and they were wrong.  But you really can not laugh at them, because grown-ups make the same kind of silly mistakes too.  

There are so many people who believe that God lives in the church building or some  place like Jerusalem.  That’s the only way we can understand why so many people throughout history spent so much money on the church buildings; cathedrals and basilica.  Not only that, they fought over those church buildings, , even killed each other.  They thought those buildings were as important as God himself.  Speaking about the place God is supposed to live, think of the way people of different faiths fight over the Holy Land in the Middle East shedding blood. God does not live in the Middle East only.  They are all wrong.  We should know that God does not live in just a brick and stone building or at one place.     God is everywhere.  

The idea of where God is has changed over the years, even among the people who wrote the Bible.  The earliest writing in the Bible about where God lives is in the Book of Genesis.  God was described as an old man who could not stand the heat of the day and strolled in the cool evening breeze in the garden of Eden.  As the time went by, the ideas changed and God became a spirit like a wind not an old man.  Jesus said, “Nobody has seen God, because  God is spirit.”   Spirit comes and goes like a wind.  We know God is there, but nobody know where he comes from and where he goes, and when.   In fact, the word for spirit in the Bible is the same word as wind or breath in both Hebrew and Greek.  What this is saying is that depending on how one sees God should look like, the idea of  where God lives has changed over the years.  Some people believe the Bible word by word as facts.  They don’t like me talking like this.  I don’t mind if people believe that the every word in the Bible is a historical fact, it’s their business.  But I for one and many others see the Bible as a precious record of people’s search for God, in a form of made up stories, poems, and metaphors.  So I believe that people made wrong assumptions in the process.

By the time Moses appeared, humans had invented letters and characters to write words.  So when God told humans to live according to the  basic rules of behaviours, Moses wrote them down on two slabs of stone.  They are called ten commandments, because there were ten basic moral principles God wanted us to follow.  So the Hebrew people thought that those stones on which God’s commandments were written were where God could be found.  They made those two stones holy and put them in a box and called it “the Ark of God.”  The story of the Old Testament which has been selected for today’s reading was about that box those holy stones were kept.  People treated them as though God himself.  Furthermore, the building that housed those stones was as important as the commandments, almost like God himself.  They were not allowed even to touch the box.  Now we know that such an idea is wrong.  God does not live in the words nor a box that contains such words nor in the building that contains the box.  Neither the Temple in Jerusalem nor the stones on which the Ten Commandments were written exist today .  But God is with us because God is everywhere.

In fact, when King Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem, he realized that no matter how big and splendid the building was, God was too big to live in any building made by humans.  So on the completion of the temple, he prayed, “But can you, oh God, really live anywhere on earth?  Even heaven and the highest heaven can not contain you, much less this house that I have built.”  

Here appeared a new assumption, “heaven” as the place where God could be found.  For a long time, God was thought to be “up there” in heaven.  That’s why the writers of the Bible at some point began to speak about God who lived in  heaven.  Heaven became holy the same as God, because that was where they believed God lived.  The problem is, nowadays we know the earth is round, and ‘up there’ in Canada is ‘down there’ in China.  When the second Soviet astronaut went into the space during the sixties, he said, “I went up into the heaven, but I didn’t see God.”  Of course, he didn’t.  God does not live up there.  He is everywhere.

Now back to the temple and the box that housed it.  It is interesting that King David’s son, Solomon was able to build it, not King David.  It was David who won many battles to bring the Box of Ten Commandments to Jerusalem.  In our mind, it should have been David who had a privilege to build the temple, not his son who inherited his father’s achievements.  The reason Solomon was given this honour was because, by the time Solomon was on the throne, there was unity among people, no more fighting.  Because there was peace and unity among people, Solomon was able to undertake and complete such a big project.  The temple was a symbol of unity, people of Israel stopped fighting among themselves and were able to cooperate in building a house of prayers.  The temple made people come together, work together, and pray together.  The building was the people’s house when peace and unity among them were achieved.  The real church is possible where there is peace.  We make mockery of God and ourselves when the church is divided.  We come to church to hear the word and to pray together in peace and harmony, not to settle the score.

My wife and I went to Cluny in the Burgundy region of France two weeks ago and saw a ruin of then the biggest church in Christendom before St. Peter’s cathedral was built in Rome.  It was so huge that even our city block looks smaller.  The church was so powerful that one of the most powerful politicians in France like Cardinal Richelieu was once the Abbott of this church and the abbott of Cluny always had a palace in Paris.  But today, it is a ruin.  Only parts of the building are left to be dug out by archeologists.  People destroyed it during the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, and took the stones away to build their own homes.  The fury of the people’s anger against the church is unimaginable.  The church must have been seen an oppressor and the enemy of people.  They must have hated the church so much that they didn’t want anything of that church building left standing.  It took years to demolish it.  But people did it: made it completely devastated.  The church is no house of God where there is no love and mercy; nor peace and harmony.  Where there is peace among people of God, there is no need for a building, because God is everywhere.

God is everywhere.  Most importantly, he lives within each one of us when we accept the spirit of Jesus Christ, and try to live according to his principle of love.  This is the reason why Paul called our bodies the temple of God.  This notion is the very basis of our moral principles.  Because God lives within ourselves, we must keep ourselves clean and loving.  Inevitably, a house collects dust and falls into disrepair.  That’s normal; we don’t have to be ashamed of that.  We clean it up from time to time.  So look after ourselves, like mothers look after themselves for the babies and for themselves.  When you look after yourselves, you are looking after God who lives with in.  We must also be kind and nice to each other, because our friends and neighbours are also the temples of God.  God is with us and in us.

            CONNECTED TO LIFE
                 Psalm 84 (VU 800), John 15:1-11
                       232,376, 703, 603
                               
                   May 10, 2009 by Tad Mitsui
                               
A tragedy hit my friend’s family some years ago.  Their
young adopted son committed suicide.  He was born of an
alcoholic mother and suffered from fetal alcoholic
syndrome.  One of the symptoms affected him was that he
could not receive nor understand other people’s
affection.  Consequently he was incapable of trusting
people.  Like a branch that was cut off from a tree, he
cut himself off from life despite his devoted parents
who loved him dearly.

The parable of the vine and the branches is a metaphor
of our relationship with others.  But it also speaks
about cruelty of pruning and the fate of the branches
which have been cut off.  We must know that the point of
this parable is the importance of being connected to
life, and not about being cut off and burnt in fire.  It
is about “Stay in my love.” 

A certain business man fires people by quoting this
parable of Jesus.  “He removes every branch that bears
no fruit.  Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away
like a branch and withers: such branches are gathered,
and burned.”  This man is an example of those who
ignores  Jesus’ main message and uses the word of God
for one’s selfish advantage.  There are two glaring
mistakes in his logic.  He is not Jesus, for one thing.
So he is not a life-giving vine.  Secondly what Jesus
meant by the word “fruit” is not his profit.  Jesus was
speaking about the vine as the source of life, and love
as the sap of life.  The vine according to Jesus is
certainly not a money tree.

Some religions also abuse this parable.  In order to
keep loyalty of members, leaders of some churches use
this parable to black-mail their members so that they
would stay on or agree with their teaching.  Anyone who
criticizes the church or its teaching is threatened to
be kicked out and to be damned.  This is why it is very
important for us to know the point of this parable.  We
must resist temptations to use the story to suit our
purpose.

What then is the point of this parable?  A simple rule
of thumb to read any parable is to take the first
sentence as  the main point.  So in this case, the point
is:  “I am (Jesus Christ is) the true vine and God is
the vine grower.”  In other words, God gives and
sustains life through Jesus Christ.  The emphasis should
be the vine that gives sap of life.  Life of the branch
can not be sustained without being connected to this
vine.  And this is not meant to be a threat.  In to
emphasize the positive aspect of this connectedness, I
would like to use the metaphor of the fetus in mother’s
womb.

The first nine months of our existence is a life of
total dependency in the mother’s womb.   We are
connected to the mother through the umbilical cord and
receive all we need from her.  The mother’s womb is the
source of life, like the vine is for the branch.  It is
also the very first most comfortable and life giving
experience of our lives.  This is why we curl up in a
fetal position, when we feel miserable.  Instinctively
we try to return to the most comfortable and protected
time we remember, in mother’s womb.  Most of the time,
we receive from mother what we need sufficiently.  This
is how we develop our equipments for survival and
learned to reject what endangers our life.   This is
also why on a very rare occasions when a fetus receives
substance that is harmful, it is shocked into developing
abnormal resistance to anything external.  Fetal
alcoholic syndrome is an example.  It is dangerous
because the fetus learns not to trust and accept.  In
our mother’s womb, we learn to receive life and accept
love.  And that is the normal development.  When we grow
normally in the womb, we develop all the organs and
capacities for us to survive after we leave our mother’s
body.  When we are born, we will have fully grown lungs
and digestive systems to breathe and to take in
nutrition. 

The experience in our mothers’ womb is mostly about our
physical development.  However, when Jesus spoke about
the vine and the branches, he was telling us about
spiritual life that was sustained by being connected to
him.  And spiritual life is as essential for us as air
is for our physical body.  Without air our bodies die.
Likewise without spiritual life we die as human beings.
Just like for the young man, of whom I spoke about in
the beginning, who could not trust anyone, thus life
became impossible, we will not be able to live without
the fruits of the spirit.  Paul says that the fruits of
the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
faithfulness, gentleness, generosity, and self-control.
It does not take too much imagination to see how those
fruits of the spirit are essential for our existence as
human being. 

Imagine a life without love or joy?  It will be so
miserable that it is not worth living.  Imagine a
society where people refuse to be gentle to each other
and live only by impulse without any self-control?  It
is a description of hell.  It is scary to see today that
many people decided that spiritual life is not important
in their lives.  When we are cut off from the source of
the spirit, we die as humans.  People do not realize
that by ignoring the spiritual life they are creating a
society that does not function.  And without functional
society, our civilization dies.  For us Christians,
Jesus Christ is the source of spiritual life. 

So, we have a mission.  We must teach our young people
and tell others that spirituality is a basic ingredient
of our life and that we must be connected to the spirit.
It is a fact of life, not a threat.  How then can we
remind of this reality without sounding like a
blackmail.  Let me go back to the very beginning of our
life.  The first thing we must do as soon as we are born
is to let the air through the wind pipe and into the
lungs.  Not a second should be wasted, because lack of
air will caused irreparable damage of the brain.  This
is why it is absolutely necessary for the baby to cry as
soon as it is born.  Everybody around the newborn must
encourage it to cry and make the first sound of life.
We slap the bottom and do other such things.  It is a
loving act to remind the child how to start using one
most important survival equipment.  It is a plea; it is
a prayer, urging the baby to, “Live, my love, live.
Breathe, cry and live!”  It is not a threat nor
blackmail.  Threats and blackmails are the messages of
death.  But the message of the vine and the branch is
the message of life and love.

Jesus Christ is the vine and we are the branches
connected to him.  Through this metaphor, God is telling
us to live in his love by being connected to life.

            WE ARE WHAT WE EAT.
                 Psalm 98 (VU 818),Acts 10:1-16
                       401, 375, 371, 684
                   May 17, 2009 by Tad Mitsui
                               
When I was living in Africa, one day I found in the
fridge a bowl full of termites.  My daughter and her
best friend brought them home, roasted them alive in
the oven, buttered and salted them.  It’s a favourite
snack for our African neighbours. So my daughter and
her friend loved them too.   This father knew nothing
about good food, told them to throw them out.  The
native people who live in the Arctic do not like to be
called Eskimos, because it means in their language
“people who eat raw meat.”  Europeans called them by
that name to insult them, because they thought eating
raw meat was disgusting. 

It is interesting.  Isn’t it?  We often consider foods
other people eat disgusting, and forget that our food
could also be disgusting to some people.  In Japan,
eating red meat use to be a disgusting behaviour
according to the Buddhist belief.  Europeans introduced
beef into Japanese diet.  A story has it that the early
ones brave enough, or crazy enough, to taste red meat
were bad boys in high school.  They had no respect for
traditions.  They cooked it outdoors, because parents
did not allow them to bring it inside the house.   This
is why the famous Japanese beef dish is called
“Sukiyaki”, meaning cooking on a spade.  They must have
sauteed the steak outdoor on something like a spade as
a frying pan.  It was the early Japanese BBQ. 

We are very particular about food, because food is
intimately personal.  We keep personal things like
personal habits and favourite food private.  They can
be the source of misunderstanding unless we know each
other well.  This is why being in a position to share
the intimate moments is an important mark of a close
personal relationship.  Only family members and very
close friends share what is private.  Food is one of
those things.  We are very particular about what we eat
and with whom.  We can now see the meaning of the story
of Peter and strange animals as food in the book of
Acts.  In this story, God gave Peter a lesson about his
relationship with a non-Jewish person – called
Cornelius.  The Bible is telling us in this story that
by eating other people’s food, you are accepting other
people as your own family.  You understand why people
were scandalized to see Jesus having dinner with
prostitutes, tax collectors and sinners.

Throughout the Acts of Apostles, you find one central
and important message from the early church.  The
Church that began on the day of Pentecost was open to
absolutely everybody.  It was firmly grounded on the
belief in One God, the Jewish God of Abraham and Sarah
for sure, but through Jesus Christ, it has become the
religion for all peoples of all nationalities.  On the
Pentecost, the Apostles began to speak in many
languages, so that all nationalities could hear the
stories of Jesus in their own languages.  When Paul
began to baptize non-Jewish people, he did not require
them to be circumcised.  In other words, he did not ask
them to become Jewish before they became Christians.
Peter’s vision about food was another sign making Jesus
Christ for everybody.  Christianity is an inclusive
religion.  It is a religion that accepts everybody;
saints and sinners alike.  Accepting others through
love is the central belief of our religion.

Unfortunately, some people feel that they have to
protect themselves against any strange thing.  They
say, “My way or no way.”  All of us are like that
sometimes.  It is easier for us to demand others to
change their way, rather than trying to understand
different views and adapt.  The Church which began with
the missionary work of Apostles like Peter and Paul
thrived in Europe because of their open-mindedness, and
became the foundation of today’s church.

I watched on PBS an interesting program about the
Vikings in Greenland.  The program probed the reason
why the once thriving Viking settlements in Greenland
completely disappeared.  Scientists discovered that
when the last ice age came, the Vikings could not
sustain their cattle and sheep based agriculture in the
ice covered Greenland.  Most of the people gradually
died out of malnutrition and diseases, leaving
magnificent stone houses and churches in ruins.  In the
meantime, in Iceland the Vikings switched to fishing,
changed their diet to sea food, and survived.
Greenland Vikings did not learn anything from their
Innuit neighbours.  Historians speculate that because
Innuit were pagans, the church prohibited any contact
with them.  The result was that the Vikings had no
chance to learn the Innuit’s survival skills in the
extreme cold climate.  They didn’t learn to fish and
hunt.  Least of all, they never learned to eat fish,
seal and whale meat raw.  They would have provided
plenty of fat and vitamins to protect them in the cold
and long winters.  They never thought of wearing seal
furs and skins like their Innuit neighbours.  So when
their sheep died, they had no more wool to make
clothes.  Their fear of pagan practices didn’t allow
them to survive in the extreme cold.  So they died out.

I am not saying to know other people and their ways of
life is just a survival skill.  Even if loving and
accepting others is costly, Jesus’ most fundamental
commandment to love God and to love neighbours still is
our most precious Christian tradition.  But the history
often proves that an exclusive and rigid attitude
causes disasters, and an inclusive and flexible life-
style leads to survival.  Remember what Peter heard in
a vision?  “Don’t call anything God created unclean.”
We must accept and understand other people’s views and
life-styles.  It is an act of loving our neighbours,
and perhaps the only way for our species to survive.

                       CONNECTED TO LIFE
                 Psalm 84 (VU 800), John 15:1-11
                       232,376, 703, 603
                               
                   May 10, 2009 by Tad Mitsui
                               
A tragedy hit my friend’s family some years ago.  Their
young adopted son committed suicide.  He was born of an
alcoholic mother and suffered from fetal alcoholic
syndrome.  One of the symptoms affected him was that he
could not receive nor understand other people’s
affection.  Consequently he was incapable of trusting
people.  Like a branch that was cut off from a tree, he
cut himself off from life despite his devoted parents
who loved him dearly.

The parable of the vine and the branches is a metaphor
of our relationship with others.  But it also speaks
about cruelty of pruning and the fate of the branches
which have been cut off.  We must know that the point
of this parable is the importance of being connected to
life, and not about being cut off and burnt in fire.
It is about “Stay in my love.” 

A certain business man fires people by quoting this
parable of Jesus.  “He removes every branch that bears
no fruit.  Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away
like a branch and withers: such branches are gathered,
and burned.”  This man is an example of those who
ignores  Jesus’ main message and uses the word of God
for one’s selfish advantage.  There are two glaring
mistakes in his logic.  He is not Jesus, for one thing.
So he is not a life-giving vine.  Secondly what Jesus
meant by the word “fruit” is not his profit.  Jesus was
speaking about the vine as the source of life, and love
as the sap of life.  The vine according to Jesus is
certainly not a money tree.

Some religions also abuse this parable.  In order to
keep loyalty of members, leaders of some churches use
this parable to black-mail their members so that they
would stay on or agree with their teaching.  Anyone who
criticizes the church or its teaching is threatened to
be kicked out and to be damned.  This is why it is very
important for us to know the point of this parable.  We
must resist temptations to use the story to suit our
purpose.

What then is the point of this parable?  A simple rule
of thumb to read any parable is to take the first
sentence as  the main point.  So in this case, the
point is:  “I am (Jesus Christ is) the true vine and
God is the vine grower.”  In other words, God gives and
sustains life through Jesus Christ.  The emphasis
should be the vine that gives sap of life.  Life of the
branch can not be sustained without being connected to
this vine.  And this is not meant to be a threat.  In
to emphasize the positive aspect of this connectedness,
I would like to use the metaphor of the fetus in
mother’s womb.

The first nine months of our existence is a life of
total dependency in the mother’s womb.   We are
connected to the mother through the umbilical cord and
receive all we need from her.  The mother’s womb is the
source of life, like the vine is for the branch.  It is
also the very first most comfortable and life giving
experience of our lives.  This is why we curl up in a
fetal position, when we feel miserable.  Instinctively
we try to return to the most comfortable and protected
time we remember, in mother’s womb.  Most of the time,
we receive from mother what we need sufficiently.  This
is how we develop our equipments for survival and
learned to reject what endangers our life.   This is
also why on a very rare occasions when a fetus receives
substance that is harmful, it is shocked into
developing abnormal resistance to anything external.
Fetal alcoholic syndrome is an example.  It is
dangerous because the fetus learns not to trust and
accept.  In our mother’s womb, we learn to receive life
and accept love.  And that is the normal development.
When we grow normally in the womb, we develop all the
organs and capacities for us to survive after we leave
our mother’s body.  When we are born, we will have
fully grown lungs and digestive systems to breathe and
to take in nutrition. 

The experience in our mothers’ womb is mostly about our
physical development.  However, when Jesus spoke about
the vine and the branches, he was telling us about
spiritual life that was sustained by being connected to
him.  And spiritual life is as essential for us as air
is for our physical body.  Without air our bodies die.
Likewise without spiritual life we die as human beings.
Just like for the young man, of whom I spoke about in
the beginning, who could not trust anyone, thus life
became impossible, we will not be able to live without
the fruits of the spirit.  Paul says that the fruits of
the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
faithfulness, gentleness, generosity, and self-control.
It does not take too much imagination to see how those
fruits of the spirit are essential for our existence as
human being. 

Imagine a life without love or joy?  It will be so
miserable that it is not worth living.  Imagine a
society where people refuse to be gentle to each other
and live only by impulse without any self-control?  It
is a description of hell.  It is scary to see today
that many people decided that spiritual life is not
important in their lives.  When we are cut off from the
source of the spirit, we die as humans.  People do not
realize that by ignoring the spiritual life they are
creating a society that does not function.  And without
functional society, our civilization dies.  For us
Christians, Jesus Christ is the source of spiritual
life. 

So, we have a mission.  We must teach our young people
and tell others that spirituality is a basic ingredient
of our life and that we must be connected to the
spirit.  It is a fact of life, not a threat.  How then
can we remind of this reality without sounding like a
blackmail.  Let me go back to the very beginning of our
life.  The first thing we must do as soon as we are
born is to let the air through the wind pipe and into
the lungs.  Not a second should be wasted, because lack
of air will caused irreparable damage of the brain.
This is why it is absolutely necessary for the baby to
cry as soon as it is born.  Everybody around the
newborn must encourage it to cry and make the first
sound of life.  We slap the bottom and do other such
things.  It is a loving act to remind the child how to
start using one most important survival equipment.  It
is a plea; it is a prayer, urging the baby to, “Live,
my love, live.  Breathe, cry and live!”  It is not a
threat nor blackmail.  Threats and blackmails are the
messages of death.  But the message of the vine and the
branch is the message of life and love.

Jesus Christ is the vine and we are the branches
connected to him.  Through this metaphor, God is
telling us to live in his love by being connected to
life.