One Mother’s Model for Life

Sermon

It makes a lot of sense that Psalm 23 falls in the Easter season, because it describes the new life Jesus invites us into—one of rest in lush meadows, one where our hunger and thirst are satisfied without noise, one of no despair, where dropping heads are revived and our cups are brimming with blessings, one where we’re chased after by God’s beauty and love.

It’s paired with this short story about Tabitha, where we learn that all it takes to accept this new life is to be shown it. But we’re not given much about her life. We know she was beloved by her community, that she had friends who took the time to wash her and properly lay her to rest, friends who would try anything like trying to bring her back to life. And we know when she did get up again, people were brought to believe just by being shown she was alive.

And it was not only because Peter told them that she had come back to life—there was no proof, no evidence, and no reason to believe him. It’s because her life was so clearly distinct from the “old life” that they had every reason to believe, and this new life she’s living had better be good.

And it is—the life of Tabitha is shaped by life in the house of God, a life surrounded by the calm of lush meadows, a place of rest beside quiet pools and peaceful rivers, a life with time to breathe, to stray away and to return, a life of quiet strength and courage in the face of despair, and a life of abundant fullness and joy.

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But there is also something else about Tabitha’s life that makes her special.

Her life is not motivated by her life in the house of God, but to the life of the house of God—a house she knows has not been made only for her, or only for you, or only for us.

Tabitha made clear, to the people around her, that in the new life in the house of God, “your life is just as important as my life.”

This is what draws so many people to believe through Tabitha, because whether she was a widow, divorced, or even wealthy, she went to the very people whose lives had not been treated with the respect they deserved—she breaks bread, hosts knitting and quilting groups, lives in community, builds kinship and family.

And eventually, people could see, just by the way she lived her life, that this was something radically new.

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What this looks like in practice, especially today, can sound exhausting and tiring—how can we be asked to care about other people’s lives when there’s so much going on in our own lives and we’re just trying not to feel overwhelmed?

I am absolutely not saying we need to place other people’s lives, priorities, and concerns over our own. Because that does not lead to our rest and peace, and it does not build our capacity for strength and courage.

But I am also inviting us to not place our own lives, priorities, and concerns over another’s.

Instead, Tabitha invites us to prioritize the priorities, concerns, and the life of the house of God; where the conditions for our rest and our peace are just as important as the conditions for another’s, and where, when our conditions are met, our concerns turn to those for whom those conditions are far from allowing for the kind of rest and peace in the house of God.

Because the satisfaction of only our conditions for rest and peace are insufficient conditions for life in the house of God.

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The greatest model for me of this kind of life of faith in practice, has been, to the surprise of absolutely no one here, my mother.

Recently, she has been trying to convince me that she is selfish, and that she doesn’t actually care about other people, hand-waving away her activism as a college student, everything she does for the family, for the church, for the community. Because I think she finally sees how much I’ve just been trying to follow her lead.

During my service for ordination, the pastor delivered a sermon where he let me know that sometimes my call would feel dangerous, that it would feel like I would be thrown off a cliff by my own community, by my own family, but that when it did feel that way, to have faith that this is what I was called to do, and that I would be protected. It was very affirming for me, and to my surprise, it genuinely upset my mother.

“What is Sam talking about—thrown off a cliff? Why would you get thrown off a cliff? What does he know? Why is he preparing you for danger?”

I laughed and said, “Isn’t this how you raised us?”

I was confused because my parents were student activists in the 1980s, demanding economic justice and the reunification of North and South Korea. Promoting the message that the divide was not real, that there was no distinction between North and South Koreans. They had done this, only to be called traitors by their own families and friends—communists and heretics—and they persisted.

Then they moved us to North America so that my brother and I wouldn’t be drafted into the South Korean army to kill our own people in a war Korea did not start nor want. This meant having to let go of all their comforts and familiarities of Korea so that my brother and I would not have to choose death—traitors and communists.

And then in L.A., my father pastored one of the few, if not only, church in L.A. for Koreans who had been divorced, or for Koreans whose children had their own children before marriage, or for queer Koreans, or for refugees from North Korea. So there’d be articles written in the newspapers telling Koreans never to attend our church, to have trash thrown at us when welcoming a journalist back from North Korea.

My mother was mad, because as my mother, she didn’t want that for me.

But as someone whose faith had shaped her life to prioritize the community over herself, and who viewed the lives of others just as important as hers, for better AND for worse, my mother knew she had raised us with a similar view of life.
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I only later realized that my parents had shaped for us a unique model of faith once I began experiencing exercising that faith life outside of my safer bubble.

It was about 10:30 in the evening when I finally made it back to my apartment after a long day of youth group, and I was very tired and done.

As I pulled up, the rare spot right in front of my apartment was open, and as I was parking, I noticed, right across the street, two people having a loud disagreement on their front lawn.

This disagreement was physical, and things were being thrown out onto the lawn.

“Mind your own business, mind your own business.” I avoided looking that way, grabbed my things, turned around, and started heading up the driveway.

I then started to hear clearly what was being shouted, “Somebody help me! Let me go home!”

I actually remember stopping in my tracks, and genuinely, I’m ashamed to say, that one of the first emotions I felt was annoyed. I think I threw my head back, put my stuff back in my car, and started walking across the street.

I very calmly approached, hands raised, and said, “Hello, is everything okay, is it okay if I take her home?”

He looked at me, a little dumbfounded, and pulled up his shirt to reveal a gun.

“Hey, I don’t want any problems, sir, I just hear her asking for someone to take her home, and my car’s right there… I’m happy to do it.”

He then turned and then pushed her my way, and then I drove her home. Then I finally got home at around 12, took Biggie on a walk, and then went to sleep.

When I told some people from church what had happened, the responses were all over the place.

“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Good job for not calling the police.”
“JUN, are you crazy?! Don’t be a hero!”
“Wow, don’t do that again!”

I assure you I did not feel heroic, because I very clearly remember wanting to ignore her at first, remember feeling annoyed, and because I have friends who said, “Yeah, but Jun, he didn’t like, point it at you, so it’s not like you were actually in danger.”

“Nice. Did you see the Laker game?”

When I shared this with my mother, she was shocked to hear it, in slight disbelief that that could happen to me, and she said, “Geunyang joshim-hae” —just be careful, she told me.

My mother does not tell me “good job” when those kinds of things happen, because she does not want to see me get hurt. But she also does not tell me “don’t do that again,” because she cannot tell me that my life is more important than that woman’s.

So all she tells me is, be careful.

It’s why I avoided looking their way—because I knew once I really looked at what was happening, her immediate need would outweigh my immediate desire to go inside.

And so, once that need was made impossible for me to ignore, it hadn’t really felt like a choice to me at that point. I couldn’t really be worried about my potential danger, because her life was in current danger.
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As much as my mother is concerned for my physical safety in moments like that, about my mental and emotional health in ministry, about my spiritual health, she is just as faithful that the prioritization of the community over the self is how we move toward the house of God, the kin-dom of heaven on earth.

We are invited into a life that sees beyond ourselves, invited to live a life toward the house of God, where our life is no more, no less, important than someone else’s.

And we’re invited into this, not because Jesus wants to over-burden us with the concerns of everyone, so that we’re overwhelmed.

It’s actually the opposite.

Jesus invites us to center the life of the kin-dom rather than our own lives so that we can be free.
– Free from the idea that we can reach success on our own.
– Free from the idea that our lives are any more important, or any less important, because of anything we can do or not do.
– Free from thinking we have to take care of everyone else.

When we center the life of the kin-dom like Tabitha does, like my mom modeled for me, and like how Christ calls us to do, we are free.
– Free to rely on and lean on others to succeed,
– Free to see their success as our success,
– Free to take care of those we need to take care of.

When we center the life of the kin-dom, we don’t simply stop thinking about our own lives, but we begin to think about our lives in relation to the kin-dom, to the house of God, and we see just how far away we are as a people—historic inequality and poverty, wars across the world, blatant genocide, these are not the proper conditions for the house of God.

We are invited in to see a life of liberation and freedom, of lush meadows and quiet rivers, and invited into a life where no one’s life is any more, any less, important than the life of the kin-dom, and invited to believe in the possible reality of life in the house of God, of the kin-dom of heaven on earth.