See the Love

Sermon

In the midst of grief, in the midst of anger, pain, sadness, hurt, maybe even feeling a bit betrayed, or maybe feeling like having the greatest life-changing rug pulled out from under you; in the midst of all those kinds of feelings, it makes sense that someone might be a bit distracted from seeing clearly. If you ignore those feelings, you might say something hurtful to someone else, you might hurt your own self, or you might even miss recognizing someone after walking and talking with them for several hours.

The story of these two men walking with Jesus, talking about Jesus, listening to Jesus, who are unable to recognize Jesus is a story about two people learning to see love and recognize Jesus only once the distractions, barriers, and obstacles in their way, aren’t: by way of breaking bread together.

A few weeks ago, I headed out of town to Los Angeles to see my family and friends, and I ended up missing the Easter services. A pastor friend told me, “Jun in 40 years of being a pastor, I don’t think I ever let myself skip an Easter service, good for you.”

Just another example of a millennial who just doesn’t want to work.

It was my nephew’s first birthday, which has great significance in Korean culture and there was no way I could miss that, nor would my family have allowed me to miss it. So, there was a large room reserved for an entire afternoon where there was a balloon artist for the kids, copious amounts of food, gifts, games, and time for friends to sit around a table and hang out. One of those huge celebrations where it is more for the family, than it is for the person whose birthday it is (except for the fact that he’s going to be a nurse, or doctor, or vet, or PT, something with a stethoscope).

This grand celebration for a child’s first birthday, filled with over 100 friends, families, and children, was a glimpse of a world I realized many people did not know existed. A room full of first and second-generation immigrants who had spent most of their upbringing in America, attended school, college, worked, created families, and now living into the lives our parents and their parents had allowed us to build.

And sadly, this is confirmed by the ways people talk about immigrants – as if immigrant criminals are different from any other criminal, or as if immigrants cannot decide for themselves how to participate in and contribute to society, or as if immigrants are a disposable demographic, or as if a violent enforcement agency simply needs reform so only criminals will experience the daily threat of imprisonment, deportation, kidnapping, or forced into labor camps.

Yet, the world I grew up in was a world full of immigrants, and a world that has helped build the culture of LA, making Korean American culture through music, food, tv, and film accessible across the world. Immigrants that run small businesses, grocery stores, malls, who are doctors, and lawyers, even some who are shady landlords or greedy corporate lawyers, or like, some of my closest and dearest friends, tech bro’s.

And many of whom, that do not know about the heightened threats against their lives or are less concerned, because for those same people, the threat against immigrants and communities like the ones I grew up in, is already embedded into the lives and world we have built. And despite the daily onset of justifications for grief, fear, anger, disappointment, rage, and general tiredness, love wins – in the form of individuals, families, communities, who have seen their siblings and friends endure hardships for being human, and want to create spaces where they don’t need to.

I’ve seen the love of parents sleeping on couches to give their children the one bedroom.
I’ve seen the love of parents choosing a commute of two hours both ways so their children go to a school with better resources.
I’ve seen the love of parents working through their 70’s because their grandchildren needed bigger rooms.
I’ve seen the love of friends driving hours just to sit and eat some pizza together.
I’ve seen the love of humans putting themselves in harm’s way for strangers.
I’ve seen the love of teens risking their lives to protect their siblings and parents.
I’ve seen the love of children, forced to live in hells people have created, who have the courage and strength and innate capacity for joy.

I’ve seen the love of children, teens, and people, who reject the idea they are any less valuable or that they have to do more to deserve less do what they can to ensure everyone else is loved.

And it is likely that many people have seen and recognized these kinds of loves, in immigrant communities or not. But the tragic reality is that there are worlds of human lives and the same kinds of love that we all desire as humans, that so many people have been made unable to recognize. These worlds of human lives full of love, thriving, joy, celebration, and imperfection, are seen and recognized as alien, foreign, strange, in need of repair, or control, or to be removed completely, and voted on by millions of people who have been made unable to recognize these worlds.

It is no wonder that the sentiment I receive whenever I go back to LA is either, “keep fighting the good fight, brother”, or “jeez, jun why do you put yourself through that?”

Whether it was in the south where I’d casually get called an oriental, at the conservative rallies where I’d get told I was one of the good ones, meaning liberals, not Asians even though I was telling them how wrong they were, or in the many Christian spaces where some weeks I experienced more microaggressions than my parents, military brother, or friends had in a lifetime, I have always been acutely aware that there were at least two worlds I could have both feet in.

Last week in the Adult Ed class I got to lead, I talked about this concept of “original sin” – original sin, or total depravity is, in the simplest of terms, humans are inherently not good, or sinful. And because of that, Christian living is a way to avoid living into our best selves, instead of our inherently sinful selves, but because we are imperfect, we need Jesus.

Absolutely, this is a broad stroke illustration of a centuries-old concept, but I am less concerned with getting each detail right as I am concerned about how foundational and influential this concept has been. Because this idea of original sin, or total depravity, in addition to the belief in Jesus Christ as the only path to salvation, and the capacity for religion to be weaponized as a political and institutional influence has resulted in generations of “holy wars”, religious imperialist and colonial projects, and justification for violent racism, discrimination, and prejudice, all the way through today.

But this is the idea is at the foundation of the same idea that justified the idea that “barbarous” indigenous peoples needed “civilizing”, that presumed that enslaved peoples were better off being enslaved by Christians, that lumped Asian people together during WWII when throwing them into concentration camps, the same idea that that aligned all Japanese people with the Empire of Japan, that Nazi’s used to justify genocide, and the same idea that the State of Israel now is using to commit genocide in Palestine. This idea of original sin is why I and millions of people have been othered, why worlds and lives like the ones I grew up in are safer tucked away than they are if assimilating, and why so many people are unable to see and recognize love.

Because what Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary, and the many women who accompanied Jesus knew, what the disciples had to learn, and what the two men on the walk to Emmaus finally were made to recognize, was the innate goodness of every human being, crafted in the image of God, created to be whole and perfectly human. That humans, by the very nature of being crafted in the image of God, are inherently good and deserving of “wholeness”, often through self-care, friends and families, and communities.

But a world where we see and recognize humanity’s innate goodness is not the world we inhabit. Overwhelmed by the onslaught of the rise of homelessness, increasing inequality, rising costs-of-living, local violence, global violence, we have been unable to see and recognize the worlds and human lives at stake each time a decision is made about those worlds and human lives; decisions made by people who do not even know those worlds and human lives exist.

To see the love, to recognize Jesus Christ in the day-to-day, in the humans around you and not around you, in the people you do not know and could not know, we are invited to see with the same eyes and heart of the women whose worlds and lives Jesus Christ came to establish as fundamental to the kin-dom of heaven, the same women who accompanied, saw, and recognized Jesus, and then invited everyone else to see and recognize:

In the life and body of a human, persecuted and crucified, Jesus stood with those cast to the margins, who had been forced to the desert plains or dry mountains, who had been left having to fight for a drink of water on the hottest days, forced to suffer discrimination just for crumbs.

Jesus, who did not stand with them because he pitied the marginalized, because he looked upon “their world” and felt shame veiled as sadness. Jesus stood with them because in the midst of the desert and wilderness, those who had been left to their own accord and their own humanity, those who had been forced to survive and thrive on their own, those who trusted in their innate goodness – Jesus knew they were the ones who would be the first to believe: the life-giving strength of love is more powerful than the violence of hate.

Because regardless of whether you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ or not, the women and people with whom Jesus came to stand alongside, break bread, journey, and live with, found in Jesus, the full embodiment of the hope and love that so many had been told they do not deserve, and believed so deeply, they were willing to sacrifice their own lives to wield some semblance of power so that the orphan, the stranger, the widow, the immigrant, the alien, the impoverished, the unhoused, those who had their basic human rights stripped away from them at the hands of religious political powers, could have their basic human rights met.

If you don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus, I get it, I don’t know that I would either if I wasn’t born in Korea in the mid-1990’s to a Presbyterian pastor. Believe the women then, who capitalized on an opportunity to inspire generations of people towards a kind of love that would about wholeness and equity for everyone. For this kind of love is the very message that gives Christianity life and has sustained it, so that people like myself could come to see and recognize this kind of love.