Dear Friends,

Here we are, a third year into the pandemic. The threat of viruses is still here with us. But there is a sign of light at the end of the COVID tunnel tenuously appearing. Yet many of us feel as exhausted as at any time in the past two years.

Memory problems; short fuses; low energy; low motivation; fractured productivity that alternately puzzles and shames us; sudden drops into despair and for some, like myself who has history, feels frighteningly like a depression. We’ve felt disembodied and like we’ll never be the same again. Today, we as a nation, are facing an epidemic youth mental health emergency.

It had taken a collective toll on our emotional, mental and physical health with incredible stresses and losses. Isolation and loneliness from the pandemic have exacerbated the condition. But we just kept going.

What I’ve also experienced as I look back on the past 2 years and its many chapters, unprecedented wild fires and unstable weather patterns stemming from global warming and climate change, mass shootings in schools and public places, including the death of George Floyd, the racial reckoning and rupture, the drama of the election, the January 6^th Insurrection, the assault on the bedrock of our democracy of peaceful transfer of power. There was a lot of adrenalin and stress hormone cortisol that got generated. These layers of trauma that we’ve been through, that just haven’t paused to acknowledge them, and to process and grieve.

I invite us to find time to pause for a while and slow things down to re-member what our bodies, minds, and souls went through and going through. Let’s cut some slack and practice self-compassion to our pandemic-beleaguered bodies for what we endured. You may want to repeat the manta to yourself, and possibly daily, to remind yourself that you are good enough.

I do enough.
I have enough.
I am enough.

As we turn the page from 2021 to 2022, I share this poem, “Ring Out, Wild Bells”, In Memoriam, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850.

“Ring Out, Wild Bells”

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

As we enter the new year and face the various complex challenges of our time, may we open our minds with new possibilities that God has in store for each of us, with the wisdom of the past, and with the emerging visions of the future. May we laugh regularly, never taking our selves too seriously. May we celebrate every moment for the gift that it is. And may we be grounded in God, extending love and compassion, first to ourselves and from there, to all beings from the core of our peaceful, radiant hearts.

In Christ, we live, breathe, and have our beings in unhurried rhythm of grace.

John

I write this column as a concerned citizen of the United States of America. I emigrated from South Korea in the summer of 1968 when Lyndon B. Johnson was the President. Before receiving an appointment last year at the Watsonville First UMC, I served as a campus minister at the UC Merced in the Central Valley. I play tennis and one day at the court, I was having an exchange of opinions with the retired judge who was deriding Hillary Clinton who was running for presidency against Donald Trump. I made a few comments critiquing Trump’s character and behavior. The judge told me, “Why don’t you go back to North Korea!” I was shocked by his hurtful words but I was able to collect myself and immediately retorted, “I’m offended that you can’t tell the difference between North Koreans from South Koreans.”

Benjamin Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Ben understood the difficulty and fragility of keeping and maintaining the democratic republic. It will require everyone buying into the ideal of democratic republic and abiding by the constitution. And, thus, the experiment in democracy was born.

The bedrock of democracy is the representative government of the people, by the people, for the people and the peaceful transfer of power. These two foundations of our democracy are being assaulted today. America has been downgraded from a democratic nation to quasi-democracy by the international watchdog organization. Switzerland has now surpassed us as the oldest existing democratic nation that U.S. once perennially occupied.

Here is a brief history of the birth of democracy in South Korea. In 1948, Rhee Syng-Man, a Princeton Ph.D. graduate and hand-picked by the President Harry S. Truman’s administration, became the first president of the Republic of Korea with the democratic-constitutional government resembling the American government following the 40 years of Japanese occupation of Korea from 1905-1945. But it didn’t take long for coup d’état to occur in 1963. The military general, Park Chung-Hee, stormed the “Blue House” (equivalent to our White House) with tanks and guns with his military. He ruled with iron fist and impunity for 16 years until he was assassinated by his own Korean CIA Chief, Kim Jae-Gyu. Another military general at the time, Chun Doo-Hwan, declared a state of emergency, executed the KCIA Chief, and took over the government in 1980 and ruled for 8 more years as an unelected military dictator. Chun was sentenced to death in 1996 in a trial for his role in the Gwangju Massacre of demonstrators but was later pardoned in 1977 by President Kim Young-Sam.

It wasn’t until 1988, the first national democratic election was held and Roh Tae-Woo was elected President of South Korea. Every president thereafter came to power through free, democratic election. Once the public tasted the sweet freedom of democracy, there was no going back to military rule. The democratic consciousness has been irrevocably shifted and inculcated in the hearts and minds of the public. It was a long and hard-won struggle paid with blood. They know how precious democracy is. No one will dare coming to power through undemocratic means because they will face the reckoning of the public fury.

To get this point of establishing democratic republic, a lot of innocent blood was spilled in the streets and hundreds of thousands of young lives lost and tortured from the first coup in 1963 and the end of dictatorship in 1988. As a child I witnessed firsthand the military coup in 1963 as armed soldiers and the US provided tanks rolled into the streets of Seoul towards the Blue House. I saw from afar on the US shore, the unrelenting courage of young people from all across universities and colleges demanding freedom and democracy from strong men who were hellbent in holding onto their power by any means. These young protesters were the tip of the spear of the democratic movement in South Korea. Finally, the general public decided to join in to support young protesters when they saw their sons and daughters being massacred, imprisoned, and tortured. The tide turned and dictatorship came to an end with the free democratic election in 1988.

Why am I sharing this story of democracy in South Korea? Because South Koreans, Canadians, and Western countries, are in dismay as they see America, the beacon of democracy for other nations to emulate for centuries, is slowly being unraveled and dismantled. There is a story of a Republican and a Democrat who met on a bridge. The Republican asked the Democrat, “Are you a Republican or a Democrat?” The man answered, “Of course I’m a democrat! My great-grandfather was a Democrat. My grandfather was a Democrat. My father was a Democrat. So I’m a Democrat.” The Republican retorted, “Do you mean to tell me that if your great-grandfather was a horse thief, your grandfather was a horse thief, your father was a horse thief, you’ll be a horse thief?” The man answered, “Of course not. That’s Republican.”

Today there are 27 states led by GOP state lawmakers and legislators passing over 100 bills to suppress voters who they think will vote democrats from voting. Polling finds that the overwhelming majority of Republicans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected and that about one-third approve of using violence to achieve political goals. Put those two numbers together, and you have a recipe for extreme danger.

Carol Gilligan, an American psychologist and ethicist, wrote, “Democracy is like love. It only works when everyone has a voice.” The House recently passed the Freedom to Vote/ John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and sent the bill to the Senate. We need to pass this bill to ensure our democratic republic is preserved.

The 16th U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in The Gettysburg Address in 1863 proclaimed, “that these dead shall not have died in vain– that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

May it be so. God bless America!

Please Pray with me: O God, open our hearts and minds to the Light of your word read and preached this day. May the meditations of ALL of our hearts be acceptable, God, our Rock. And salvation. Amen.

My focus today is going to be on our Christian day of Epiphany, January 6, this Thursday, when the church traditionally celebrates the coming of the Magi to Jesus. When we talk about Epiphany, we need to go back to our Bibles, and sort out all the traditions that have surrounded this passage and this holiday. Many, if not most of the traditions, are NOT in the Bible Story. Whether it is a Sunday School Christmas pageant, or classical art or Christmas cards, or the hymns we sing! We see depicted three Wisemen or Kings. The Bible does not say there were three visitors. We assume that number by the list of gifts that are given, which are recorded in the Bible.

Nor were these visitors Kings. Wise they were, but more about that later. Of course they were men, knowing the era and the cultures. There are also many traditions about other characteristics of these visitors. Some say one was old, one middle age and one young. Others say they represent parts of the then known world, or are from different races.

The next traditions that are not in the Bible are the meanings given to the gifts. Theologians have suggested the gifts symbolize Jesus’ royalty (gold), his divinity (frankincense), and his suffering (myrrh), but it’s difficult to say this was the magi’s intent. As this narrative ends, the Magi are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, and “they went back to their own country by another route (Matthew 2:12). Note, there is nothing that makes specific their country, not to mention it is singular, not plural. So let us focus for a few minutes on the things we DO know and that are true about this story in Matthew, that is a story that changed the meaning of who this baby Jesus, the Christ and Messiah was and is!

The reign of all of the Herods we read about during Jesus’ life, were known for their terror and horror. All were egotistical, insecure petty potentates, in with the Romans and clueless about God. This is Herod the Great, who ruled from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C. Any study of Herod will immediately show that the man was a ruthless and paranoid tyrant. He would easily kill his own sons, or one of his wives, or the high priest, if he thought any of these were in any way conspiring against him. And so the thought of a king being born was an immediate threat. Especially if it was the promised Messiah, the king of the Jews. Herod, you see, was not Jewish. He had tried to ingratiate himself to the Jews by marrying into a Jewish family and by building the temple in Jerusalem. But he could not be trusted; and he himself trusted no one. So he and his court were thrown into a panic.

The magi may have come from a land that was antagonistic to Rome, to whom Herod was responsible, and so their visit raised many questions. Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart released a fascinating translation of the New Testament in 2017.* For him, Matthew 2:1 reads : “Magians arrived in Jerusalem from Eastern parts….” Magians? The Greek” magoi” in the first century were “men of the Zoroastrian priestly caste of the Persians and Medes. These Zoroastrian priests divined or knew the future through interpreting dreams and astrology. It is important to remember these traveling men are Gentiles. These Magi were famous for their learning, and wisdom. When they observed the movements of stars and planets they carefully recorded everything they saw. Anything out of the ordinary was taken to be some kind of an omen.

Now they had seen a star that could not be identified. These men were diligent to discover what it meant. The text suggests that the Magi had learned the star indicated one who was to be born would be special, worthy of worship. “Where is the new born king of the Jews? We’ve seen his star in the east, and we’ve come to honor him.” [v.2] Then, when they came to Israel, where would they have gone looking for a “king” but to the palace? These Magi followed a star. They knew that the heavenly sight they saw was this new King’s star! Yes, there has been immense speculation through the ages that what the Magi saw was the conjunction of two planets or a comet, or some other celestial phenomenon but that is not key to the point of this story.

The Jewish scholars knew exactly where the Magi should look for Jesus. They referred to what a prophet wrote and we know that was the prophet Micah and is found in Chapter 5 verse 2 of that Old Testament book and is quoted in this Matthew passage. This is also Matthew’s way of confirming that Jesus was indeed the promised Shepherd of Israel.

The Magi brought gifts to this child they found when the star they had followed stopped over a house. The gifts they brought were those that honored and acknowledged Jesus as royalty, as a king! Another prophet, Isaiah, had indicated [60:1-6] that God will shine upon Israel and nations will come to this Light and radiance. People will come from everywhere and they will come with gold and incense, or frankincense as Matthew names it. Isaiah also talks about “countless camels” [v.6] which are often in Nativity creche scenes. But Isaiah didn’t have the advantage of Matthew, to know how Jesus had suffered for pushing for truth and justice and so today’s scripture says myrrh, an ancient medicine, was also a gift. Knowing the horror of the reigns of all the Herods, we wouldn’t need to be warned in a dream not to return to nasty king Herod!

Now to some thoughts about how important this story is for who the Messiah is! James C. Howell says he imagines Matthew winking a little, hoping we will notice his subtle clue about what life is like once we’ve met Jesus. Nothing is the same!! you find yourself going another way!! Herod certainly represents the response of the unbeliever to the news of the coming of the Messiah. He wants to know about it, but is not interested to go four and a half miles to see for himself. In fact, he is more concerned that the presence of the Christ will interfere with his power and position. The world is filled with
people who like Herod want to know, but are not actually looking for the One who will save them.

The Magi were very diligent to learn all they could about the star and the “new king”. Do we take an example from them in being as diligent in reading and meditating on the Bible so we keep grounded in Jesus? The magi can teach us something about giving. What would a baby do with gold or incense, much less myrrh?. They brought gifts of immense value; they brought what was precious to themselves. They parted with what they adored to adore the Lord. We are not so wise in our giving. [James C. Howell] So we probably should simply say that these were costly gifts, and so they were certainly appropriate for a king.. And, they would have been welcomed by Joseph and Mary who were very poor. Do we give gifts that are welcomed by the poor?

At Christ’s manifestation to the Magi, even as a child, they also worship. The worship of Christ’s person pervades Matthew’s Gospel in a way that is a clue to Jesus’ ultimately divine identity. That’s the Epiphany Christians celebrate: the manifestation of the Christ, even as a child, as the star-illumined divine who will be “ruler” and “shepherd” of Israel (Mt. 2:6). Worship includes submission, adoration, and homage. Only if Jesus is divine could he be worshiped. And we like the Magi need to follow the Light that is Jesus and continually worship him. The Magi gave an even greater gift–that of alerting the world that this special child came for EVERYONE, a very radical gift then– and now! We sometimes forget that the gift of Jesus is For All the World. That means everyone in everyplace, even if that makes us uncomfortable. All means All!! There are still the King Herods of the world who do NOT want the gift of Jesus, no matter how he is wrapped! The gift of inclusion is one that is hard for us to give freely. We constantly need to be reminded that Jesus came For All the World!! We need more MEN like the Magi, willing to be bold and take risks in witnessing to their faith in our time when people are lost, but they are not looking to churches for answers.

Stars are symbolic of many things. For some, they are a spiritual or sacred symbol. For example, an eight-pointed star is a Native American symbol of hope and guidance. For others, stars are a symbol of divinity, direction (as the Northern Star), or excellence. The star of Bethlehem is one of guidance. In the Bible we know that for generations the Jews have been awaiting the coming of the Messiah, literally looking to the skies. Yet, the Jewish leaders miss it all! It is Magi who have traveled from another country that understand something very important has happened. And even after the Magi leave, we know the Jewish leaders for the most part were blind to Jesus being the Messiah. He
didn’t fit what they expected and anticipated!

This reminds me of a saying that is so important for all of us to consider: “Don’t miss the gift because it isn’t packaged as you expected!” A whole sermon could plumb that saying and its implications for our ministries. Traipsing off after a star seems rather foolish; I can only hope to be yet one more fool traipsing off after the Light of the world and spreading the Good News that Jesus is for everyone. I pray everyone here is also willing to go anywhere to be a Light in the world as Jesus came For All the World!! In my family with my Dad being clergy and both he and Mom being school teachers, Epiphany, or a day near it was when we celebrated with friends. We had an open house and foods from around the world as a reminder to all who came that this special baby Jesus we had been celebrating came For All the World!!! Another reminder of Jesus coming for the entire world is displayed in the narthex, where you can see depictions of the Magi, Mary, Joseph and Jesus as portrayed in a variety of cultures. Epiphany is not only a time of celebration, but a time of closing: taking down the tree, burning the Christmas greenery, putting the nativity scenes away. As this high holy season of Christmastide ends, perhaps the thoughts we need most to hold are those opening words of Howard Thurman’s poem,

“The Work of Christmas:”
“When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:….”

Benediction/Sending Forth
Arise, and go forth to shine for all the world to see. We go to spread the good news of light and love, righteousness and justice. Go now and follow the star that will guide you on your journey this week, this year, and forever. As the Magi of old, we go forth in trust and excitement, transformed in the presence of the child of light. May the blessing of the God of light rest upon you and fill you with light. Amen.

As I Turn the Page and Greet the New Year

Facing my fears isn’t easy.
Forgiving myself isn’t easy.
Letting go and splaying my heart wide open isn’t easy.
Learning to love and accept myself isn’t easy.

Yet every time I do, my sad tears of loss and regrets turn into joyous, wondrous tears of wonderment and gratitude.

I’m releasing all that weighs me down internally and externally.
I’m living by my values: Love, Gratitude, Presence, Oneness.

I’m connected to the Source, the infinite love, God. It’s like train tracks are shifting, moving into new reality, God’s reality.

Whoever is meant to go is leaving and whoever is meant to appear will appear. I’m learning not to try so hard to control the outcome of what I want. I’m learning to surrender to God’s deepest desire for my life and others. In return, less stress and deeper peace.

Thank you for being in my world.
Thank you for sharing your heart with me.
Thank you for letting me into your heart.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

John

The gospel of John (one of four gospels in the New Testament) proclaims, “God so loved the world…” (John 3:16). It is the proclamation of the mystery of Incarnation.

Lutheran Bishop Stephen Bouman tells of standing behind an altar in a small crypt chapel of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth in the Holy Land, the place where Mary heard that she was going to have a baby. He saw some Latin words carved into the altar, Verbum camo factum est, “The Word was made flesh.” But then he noticed that there was one other little word in Latin. That word: h-i-c. Hic means “Here.” Verbum camo hic factum est. “The Word was made flesh here.” Probably whoever authorized that inscription meant it to refer to that specific location, but in reality, the Incarnation means God became flesh here on earth, for all of us. The Incarnation means that we can speak of the “hicness” of God, the hereness of God.  Incarnation means that God walks with us on earth, and that God can be encountered right here on earth, even in our very own flesh.

The mystery of the Incarnation is precisely the repositioning of God in the material world once and forever. Continual top-down religion often creates very passive, and even passive-dependent and passive-aggressive Christians. I know this as a Christian pastor for 37 years. Bottom-up, or incarnational theology (study of God), offers a God we can experience for ourselves. We have nothing to argue or prove, just something to know for ourselves.

God’s revelations are always pointed, concrete, and specific. They are not a Platonic world of ideas and theories about which you can be right or wrong, or observe from a distance. Divine Revelation is not something you measure or critique. It is not an ideology but a Presence you can directly experience and meet! It is more Someone than something.

All of this is called the “mystery of incarnation”—enfleshment or embodiment if you prefer. And for Christians, it reaches its fullness in the incarnation of God in one ordinary- man named Jesus who walked the dusty earth in Palestine over 2000 years ago. God materialized in human form, so we could fall in love with a real person, which is the only way we fall in love.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The everlasting Light,

The hopes and fears of all the years,

Are met in thee tonight.

~ from carol, O Little Town of Bethlehem

Merry Christmas!

John