The Kingdom

Manuscript for 6th April 2013
Negros Occidental, Philippines

We come to church this morning mindful of the violent world we live in. This is the way things are this side of heaven. This is the way earthly politics works. But today I come to you bringing a message of another kingdom, a message of a new politics. Keep that in mind as we listen for the Word of the Lord today.

As we see our children grow up, we try our best by the grace of God to raise them to be God-fearing men and women. We want them to be good Christians and good Adventists. We want our children to be successful, to be productive citizens of our country, to be strong in the community. Our parents wanted the same thing of us. So naturally, as our children, our young people reach an age where they are to make big life decisions; they try their best to make good choices. And they will ask questions to figure that out.

Why am I alive?

Why am I here?

What is my purpose in life?

These are all leading to one of the greatest questions we can ask ourselves: What is the will of God in my life?

We may still be asking ourselves these questions even now as adults. Even in an older age, as adults, we may still be asking what is the will of God in my life?

This is a good question. This is an important question, and that is something we will answer.

We will answer that question What is the will of God in my life? and and maybe I can explain why I am here in this part of the world today.

Draft: On my mother's cooking

I’ve lived away from home for nearly six years now - that’s more than a quarter of my life - I turned twenty not too long ago. I went to boarding academy for high school and I’ve been away for college and my time abroad. Naturally when I come home or if somebody starts talking to me about home, they might ask “I’ll bet you miss your mother’s cooking.” And I’ll smile, but inside I really want to say, Why would I miss my mother’s cooking? We’re not an African-American family from the South or an Italian clan from New York. 

Honestly, I wonder, what could be so special about one’s mother’s cooking? No offense to my mother or anything, it’s not like she’s a horrible cook, but I just don’t understand what could be so great about her cooking?

Perhaps now I should provide some sociological context to explain my disillusion with the prestige placed on matriarchal gastronomy. My family is Asian so we’ve got the rice and tofu thing going on, and we’re also Adventists so we have a strong emphasis on vegetarian dishes. …

See, I don’t say I terribly miss my mother’s cooking because to say I miss my mother’s cooking seems to support a misogynistic complementarian ideology. It suggests an image of her slaving away in the kitchen while I sit at the table waiting to be served. That’s not the way things were with me and my mother, so maybe that’s part of why I can’t say I miss my mother’s cooking. 

You know what I miss? I miss my mother. I miss working in the kitchen with her, experimenting with cooking techniques or trying new recipes. I miss discussing the ingredients we used and ways we tried to make it healthier. I miss looking at a cookbook with her and planning a course for a potluck, or a party, or a Friday night dinner. I miss going to a restaurant with her and critiquing the food, telling ourselves we could do it better. I miss the table discussions where we talked about our week, our plans for the next, or my goals for the future.

Maybe part of it is that there is an egalitarian agreement between me and my mom. From a young age she could see that I was independent and that I could lead. She started giving me household responsibilities and I started taking motherly duties seriously. Eventually she started seeing me as something of an equal when I became an adult. Sure I’m still her dear little boy; I’m her son and still subordinate to her, but when it comes to things like laundry, or gardening, or the kitchen - it isn’t about what she can do for me. It’s about what we can make together. So that’s why I don’t miss my mother’s cooking. Because it isn’t about her cooking - it’s about us coming around that table together. That’s what I miss.

Ryan

Manila, Philippines

On that trite ridiculous cliche on faith

     “On airplanes, I dread the conversation with the person who finds out I am a minister and wants to use the flight time to explain to me that he is “spiritual but not religious.” Such a person will always share this as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion against the religious status quo. 

     Next thing you know, he’s telling me that he finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking trails and … did I mention the beach at sunset yet?

     Like people who go to church don’t see God in the sunset! Like we are these monastic little hermits who never leave the church building. How lucky we are to have these geniuses inform us that God is in nature. As if we don’t hear that in the psalms, the creation stories and throughout our deep tradition.

     Being privately spiritual but not religious just doesn’t interest me. There is nothing challenging about having deep thoughts all by oneself. What is interesting is doing this work in community, where other people might call you on stuff, or heaven forbid, disagree with you. Where life with God gets rich and provocative is when you dig deeply into a tradition that you did not invent all for yourself.

     Thank you for sharing, spiritual but not religious sunset person. You are now comfortably in the norm for self-centered American culture, right smack in the bland majority of people who find ancient religions dull but find themselves uniquely fascinating. Can I switch seats now and sit next to someone who has been shaped by a mighty cloud of witnesses instead? Can I spend my time talking to someone brave enough to encounter God in a real human community? Because when this flight gets choppy, that’s who I want by my side, holding my hand, saying a prayer and simply putting up with me, just like we try to do in church.”

Lillian Daniel

On the God who cries with us

Jesus’ outcry ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ echoes every victim’s outcry. When a hungry child cries in starvation, a child is sexually or physically abused or molested, a child is despised and discriminated against because of the color of his or her skin, a woman is raped, a homosexual person is murdered, a poor person shivers in the cold, a prisoner in a dungeon is tortured, a person is injured or killed in a war, or an AIDS victim dies, Jesus’ shrill outcry ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ reverberates across the valley of the shadow of death.

Andrew Sung Park

"Triune Atonement"

Draft: Eureka–I have found it

The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hides and for joy therefore goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field.

Eureka. I have found it.

I have found it in movement, in traveling through a sky as the sun sets and the stars wheel forth from their daytime hiding places, or in traveling along the trite journey of this life.

I have found it in stillness, in the echoes of Beethoven’s joy on a piano, in the peace that comes with Earl Grey in the afternoon.

I have found it in reading, in the stories and the writings of martyrs who died because they found it, or in the carefully chosen thoughts inscripted on the first page of a book from my mother who's always prayed that I'd find it.

I have found it in buses I rode in projects in tired old towns, riding with kids who came to our church youth programs probably wanting candy more than they wanted to hear about values and God, but we knew we were making a difference.

I have found it in a coffee shop in the university district as I sought advice from a dear pastoral sage, and I found the edge to go a thousand miles chasing a dream.

I have found it in a simple hidden café along a Midwestern road, where every Friday afternoon I wrote ideas and sought refuge from a school where nobody knew my name, but the waitresses here did.

I have found it in the homes of students I tutored - homes of single parents and of immigrant families, moms who worked hard to see their children succeed, and I was there to help where they couldn't.

I have found it in the vegetarian meatloaf my mother makes nearly every Sabbath eve, except it's horrid when I try to make it - so I ask for the mercy of the Chef Upstairs, that I may be found at least faithful to the recipe; this isn't just any Special-K loaf – it itself represents the shalom of the Shabbat for me.

I have found it in the smiles of street urchins - you know, the kids you meet on mission trips; they follow you around and it’s like you're Jesus on the mount, and they don't have much but you see they are richer than you.

I have found it in the rain, as it splatters on your head but you don't care because you've solved some great world crisis, or you've fallen in love, but neither of those things have happened to me, still I've found it in the rain on my head anyways.

I have found it in the gracefulness of my aging and slowing grandmother whose eyes twinkle with consistency, not knowing if there'll be tomorrow, but knowing there'll be that morning.

I have found it sitting in a train passing through the heart of rural America, the blue sky and wispy clouds above me, fields and farm houses passing by, and the steady peace rhythm of the tracks below; and in this fifty-hour long cathartic journey I thought long and hard about my life and my future, and though I didn't get answers, I found peace.

I have found it in my blue necktie, when a local person whom I don't know sees me wearing it on a Saturday afternoon, and contextually figures I'm an Adventist, asking me, "Are you working today?" and I say, "No. I'm not a minister just yet," but I am delighted knowing I look like I fit the role.

I have found it in the words of a president who said we find ourselves in this crisis because of our collective failure to make hard choices, but we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of rebuilding (in our case, not America, rather) the kingdom of God.

But there are times when it seems I have lost it—

I have lost sight of it when I see a dark growing chasm between conservatives and liberals, as fundamentalists work to marginalize outsiders and those who think differently.

I have lost sight of it when believers make the grave error of entwining nationalism and faith, undermining the cultural transcendence of the kingdom; or when preachers confuse prosperity and power with the gospel, destructing the integrity of the image of the suffering God.

I have lost it when I see Christians submitting to antipathy and exclusion, clinging to guns and the myth of redemptive violence, and failing to heed the prophets' calls to beat swords into plowshares, to seek justice and champion the oppressed, or to love our neighbor.

But then I find it again—

I find it again when I wearily walk home from school at night along a quiet broken road, and in that great Adventist posture I look up into the sky, straining my eyes to see where I know someday I will see Jesus, and I ask him, "How much longer?"

And I find it again – when he responds.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they have found it.

Suffer the little children to come unto me, for they have found it.

Take up your cross and follow me, and you will find it.

Seek, and it shall be found.

Manila, Philippines