Scripture Passage

Ephesians 2:13-16

Sermon Text

In this passage, the author is addressing the hostility between two groups: the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians. So the Jews, they were people of the promise, right? God had made a promise with their ancestor, Abraham, that he would bless and make a great nation of them. So they had this promise and that promise became enshrined in the covenants that they made in the wilderness and through Moses, right? And the symbol of that covenant was the law. So the law was foundational to their Jewish identity as a people. But their existence, it was always kind of precarious. They had this great identity and promise, but what was their history like? It was filled with conquest, domination, exile and being run by foreign powers. Destiny was never in their own hands. And even now in the context of this letter, they’re under the thumb of the great Roman empire. There are a minority people, faith and religion in the sea of a great mighty power, but they had the law, right? They had the law. It symbolized God’s promise to them. And so to these followers now, Jesus was the fulfillment of this law. It was a continuation. And so the law was the access point and the entry points. But what do we have here? Now we have these Gentiles, these non-Jews, these people who are Greek-speaking and part of this Roman Empire, trying to come into our faith in our community. The Jews thought “are they just trying to come to the back door now? What, they don’t want to follow our long-cherished law that has been the cornerstone of our identity?” So these people who had lived apart from the law and the promise are trying to access. So the Jews resented these newcomers and said “okay, you want to be part of us? Do you want to follow Jesus too? Well, you have to follow our law and the requirements that it has.” In other words, you have to be like us. But was this a true community? So the Gentiles who are drawn by the message of Jesus are coming in and trying to be part of this community, but they’re sensing some restrictions and exclusion. And so there’s resentment being built, right? So the law, which was initially a beautiful symbol of God’s covenant with his people actually became a wall between the two groups that fostered hostility between them, right? In our own lives, we have our own laws, right? We have our own requirements for accepting others into our groups. 

 

Walls breed hostility

To be accepted into a group, you have to have the right personality, or you have to have the right background. Maybe you have to understand our jokes, right? You have to mesh well with me and us. So there are many requirements for acceptance. So these requirements are our current day law that we put and they are walls. If you don’t meet these requirements, you can’t be a part of us. We see these walls everywhere in the world. Today, many Canadians who have been here for generations, feel that newcomers need to pass a Canadian values test in order to be accepted here, to be a good American, you have to stand up for your national Anthem. Otherwise, you should be fired, right? It doesn’t matter what the reason is. So these are all the laws and requirements that we have to be part of the group. And we will learn today about some of these walls that are being built up in a place like Japan. You know, as I reflected, these walls are often put up by a dominant group that feels kind of under threat. You know, as they feel like their way of life or what they’re used to is being shaken from underneath them. And so what they want to regain a sense of control. And so to do that, we put up strict requirements. If you want to join us or become part of us, follow these things. In other words, you gotta really be like us be us, but does this method work? I mean sure, if what the dominant group offers is beneficial, you know, we might want to work hard to meet those requirements. I know there’s some of us in this congregation who when growing up, may not have felt a warm welcome from society. But we felt that the rewards of being part of this society, this group was worth it so we put our heads down and worked really hard, right? To get a good career, money, job and family, those are the requirements. And so for those who made it, now, we feel part of the ingroup. But what about those who are not able to meet the requirements? What if, who they are is very different from what we ask? They will feel excluded and rejected right? And it’s exclusion and rejection that breeds resentment and hostility. You know, the best-recruiting grounds for extremist militants or extremist groups are those who felt rejected and excluded from the society around them. They tap into this sense of exclusion and rejection by providing a sense of identity and purpose towards extremist ends. So ultimately these laws, they all start from a good place and are meant to protect us. But these walls breed hostility and resentment. But the message is that Christ breaks down the dividing walls and how does he do that? 

 

Hostility comes from fear and lack of control

So in verse 15, “he has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity. “He abolishes the law, the law was this cornerstone of Jewish identity, but it became that dividing wall, that bread hostility. So for the sake of making the two divided groups into one, Christ abolished it and all its requirements. God’s promise was now extended to anyone and everyone, regardless of their background. So for us, what requirements do we place on others to accept them? Christ has come to abolish these requirements for entry. Do we filter out people by their money, status, looks, popularity, racial background, behaviour? Whatever might divide one group from others, Christ has abolished so that we can be one. But you know what? Removing these barriers alone is not enough. Change can’t be forced from the outside. Now when the United States government back in the sixties, abolished segregation with new laws, these new laws, they didn’t remove hostility. Black students who started to attend previously all-white schools, they faced a lot of resentment, anger, hatred. You know, the only way for two groups to really become one is to have that hostility removed. We can experience outward peace, like no fighting or conflict, but without that removal of inner hostility, true reconciliation has not occurred. I mean, how do we do that? Alright, I don’t have all the time to give a full exposition today, but I can share a few insights. So the scripture says that Christ might reconcile both groups to God in one body, through the cross, thus putting to death our hostility through it. So hostility is removed by being reconciled to God through the cross. Now we see this cross figure every week, right? But I feel like we’ve really lost the meaning of it in today’s day and age. In the time of Jesus, the cross was the place of ultimate shame. It was a reminder of your utter powerlessness. If you’re going to resist this great power of Rome, then this is the outcome, utter powerlessness. It was a place to avoid at all costs. Yet this cross is the path that Jesus took. Jesus became powerless and took on shame. It was the ultimate symbol of Jesus denying himself and his own needs and accepting defeat, rather than being victorious with power. And so he died on the cross. But here’s the secret of our faith: through Jesus’s own weakness and self-denial, God showed his power. God used the cross to actually create new life through the resurrection. What the world saw as defeat and powerlessness, God showed his ultimate power with a new reality for a new community. So taking on this path of the cross, that leads to the death of ourselves, but a new life in Christ. Yeah, that sounds good, but what does it entail? It entails actually we need to then be aware of ourselves first. Doesn’t it? We can’t deny ourselves if we don’t know ourselves, I really believe that the source of so much hostility in this world is our own fear and insecurity and our need to compensate for these fears and insecurities by exerting power and control. You know, we’ve all had our experiences in life that have led to us having fears and insecurity. We may have been hurt, felt betrayed, suffered, experienced hardships and loss of control. I mean, all of these things have shaped us and affected us in ways that we’re not aware of. And so our fears have led us to seek control in our lives. And by doing that, we build up our own requirements in order to feel safe. But if we allow our fears and insecurities to drive us, we can never experience true reconciliation because I’m always going to want things my way instead of laying down my own wants, needs, and trying to understand and listen to what the others want and where they’re coming from. That’s the only way reconciliation can happen if we do that with each other. But this will only happen when we lay our fears, our insecurities and our darkness to God on the cross. We have to ask God to reveal what’s in our hearts to reveal the dark corners of things that are lurking. And then we have to ask God for the courage to place these on the cross because only when we can place them and die to ourselves on that cross is new life possible. And that is when we can come together before the cross in reconciliation. So this cross is the precondition of a new life and new community. Let us ask God to reveal these hidden corners of our hearts and for the courage to lay them down on the cross so that God can raise us into a new life and a new community. Amen. Amen to that. 

 

History of the Center for Minority Issues and Mission

So we have a special visitor with us today, all the way from Japan. And he’ll talk more about himself. So I’ll keep the introduction very short. David McIntosh, he’s the co-director of the Center for Minority Issues and Mission in Japan. So let’s give a warm welcome to him. Hello everyone, it’s a real pleasure to be here and to be welcomed into this place of worship on this Sunday. My name is David Macintosh and I am one of two co-directors of an organization that just started in April of this year called the Center for Minority Issues and Mission. I’ll probably just refer to it as “the Center”, as I go through my talking. I’m in Canada for about six weeks, sharing with people of the Presbyterian Church and also the United Church in Canada about the work that we’re doing. I say our work at the Mission or my work at the Mission, but it’s really all of our work because the Center receives a lot of prayer and support and also financial support from the Presbyterian and United churches of Canada. Some of you might be wondering why are Canadian churches so interested in minority issues in Japan? Some of you might be looking at me and thinking, why is this white guy so interested in minority issues in Japan? The answer to the first question is fairly straightforward. The Presbyterian Church in Canada has had mission partnerships with the Korean Christian Church in Japan for 90 years since 1927. So this is the 90th anniversary year of that mission partnership relationship. So several generations now of missionaries have been going to Japan, living among Koreans in Japan and hearing everyday stories of difficulties that they are facing, primarily discrimination that they’re facing in Japanese society. So through missionaries, especially the Presbyterian Church in Canada has heard a lot of stories about what it means to be a Korean in Japan. To answer the second question about myself, my father, John and my mother Clarabeth were from Guelph, Ontario about an hour from here. They were brought up there and my father studied theology. And as soon as he finished seminary, he took off for Japan. This was 1961. I was born but hadn’t had my birthday yet. So I kind of tell people, I went to Japan at age zero. I ended up going to Japanese schools through elementary school and junior high school. So that’s why I speak Japanese fluently as well, unfortunately, not Korean however. But many of the people in the Korean language service knew of my parents or had met my parents because, for 40 years, they had been coming to Canada every few years and talking about their mission. So many of your elders would know my parents by their Korean names. They were given sort of honourable or honorary Korean names. My father was also very engaged in social issues as well. So for about seven years, he was in a court case against the Japanese government. The Japanese government used to have a registration law. I’m old enough that I first had to register under the old registration law too. But every three years from age 14, you had to go to a local government office and have all 10 of your fingers fingerprinted and recorded. These were put on file and you had to do this every three years. So you can imagine maybe the sense of humiliation, especially for Koreans in Japan who were third or fourth generation like my friends. They were born and brought up in this society and in many cases, only speaking Japanese. And every three years, they had to go to a government office and be treated almost like they were criminals or something. So there was a court case where my father and quite a few other people took on the Japanese government and over maybe a 10 year period, they were able to at least get rid of the fingerprinting requirements. So this is the kind of work that my father used to do. 

 

Discrimination in Japan

So I’ve spent over half of my life in Japan. This is why I kind of tell people that I have four parts to my identity. I’m Canadian, I’m Japanese, I’m a Korean in Japan and I’m Christian. So I have sort of four parts of my identity. I don’t know if any of you have heard some stories about the struggles of Koreans in Japan before. There has been discrimination in employment or sometimes discrimination when you went looking for an apartment, they would say, “Oh, you’re Korean, no you can’t, you can’t live here.” There’s much less of that now, but it used to happen. There’s a Reverend Glenn Davis who was also a missionary in Japan, working with Koreans. He recently wrote a short one-page introduction letter for me to introduce to various congregations about my work. And in this letter, he was telling this story about a young man who was friends with some of the people that were in Glen’s congregation. This young man was a very bright student all the way through school. He managed in spite of all of the barriers that there are for Koreans in Japan to enter one of Japan’s most prestigious universities. He graduated with a degree that should have been really marketable, but every major Japanese company that he went to look for a job turned him down because he was Korean. He ended up taking a job, driving a dump truck for 14 hours a day, and he stuck with that for two years or so, but eventually, he sort of gave up hope that he’d be able to walk the path of his dreams and became really depressed. And one day he took his own life. I haven’t had personal friends take their own lives, perhaps because I’m a little bit younger and the situation has gradually improved a little bit, but I know at least two good friends of mine who had discrimination affect their personal relationships. Both of my friends were Koreans in Japan and they had girlfriends who happened to be Japanese, and they were very close with their girlfriends and they decided they wanted to get married. So in Japanese tradition and probably Korean too, you go to the parents to ask for their blessing. And when they did this, both sets of parents of the girls refused to accept it. They insisted that they break up their relationship. One of my two friends and his girlfriend, they obeyed and they broke up their relationship. And this caused a very long period of sadness and depression for my friend. The other couple, both parents, also wouldn’t give their blessing. So he and his girlfriend, instead of breaking up their own relationship, they decided to elope. They broke up their relationships with their own families and went off and got married. Fortunately for both of my friends, things turned for the better. My first friend, he eventually found a wonderful person whom he fell in love with and got married and now has a happy family life. The second friend, in their case, they eloped and got married and they had a child. This child happened to be the very first grandchild for both sets of grandparents, so the grandparents, I guess they just couldn’t stand the thought of not being able to see their first grandchild. So this helped to bring the family back together and they were able to and now they’re all okay. But so whether it’s in jobs or in employment situations or in schoolyards, sometimes you might hear children yell at another child and say, “go home to Korea” if they start fighting. You don’t hear about that so much anymore. The situation has improved a lot in the last 20 to 30 years, even since I can remember. If the situation is so much better in Japan today, why do we need something called the Center for Minority Issues and Mission? Well, despite many improvements in the legal, administrative and educational areas of Japan, not all is well in Japan. 

 

Current Issues in Japan

Since about 2012, there has been a rise in hate speech incidents all around Japan. It’s very kind of shocking. I think, being Korean, you would recognize the Japanese Rising Sun. It’s a symbol of the old Japanese empire and it’s almost like the Swastika in Germany. In some cases actually, in hate speech events, you have some Japanese people pulling out and waving around the Swastika too. So it’s a pretty shocking scene. And I think maybe a lot of you felt the same kind of shock earlier this summer when all that violence was breaking out in Charlottesville. So a similar kind of impact. So from about 2012, people in the churches became more and more concerned about this. And in 2014, the Korean Christian Church in Japan, that’s the partner church of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, decided to call out to international partners to have an international conference to deal with issues of minority mission. In 2015 in November, we held a conference and about 130 people came from all over the country, all over the world. The Presbyterian Church in Canada and the United Church in Canada was there as well. At this conference, we talked about the fact that hate speech and discrimination and xenophobia are issues that are not unique to Japan. We heard people from South Africa talk about history there. We heard we had participants from Germany talking about some disturbing incidents that are happening there. So we recognize that there seems to be sort of a disturbing resurgence of xenophobia that is somehow happening around the world. And therefore, as churches, as brothers and sisters, we really needed to work together. Like we used to do when the international church was trying to overcome apartheid in South Africa, the Japanese churches that were participating in that conference committed to the idea of starting up a center that would deal with issues like this. And that’s how the Center for Minority Issues and Mission sort of the ball got rolling. 

 

Minority Groups in Japan

So when we use the word minorities in Japan, you might ask what exactly or who exactly does that refer to? The first group is Koreans in Japan and until recently Koreans in Japan have been the largest ethnic minority group in Japan. There are many Koreans who have come to Japan after the second world war, but mostly when I say Koreans in Japan, I’m thinking of third and fourth and fifth-generation Koreans, descendants of people who came to Japan when Korea was under Japanese Imperial occupation. So under Japanese occupation, the Japanese government instituted something called agrarian reform or land reform. And it was basically a nice way of, a nice title that they gave to a land grab that took away ancestral lands from many farmers all around Korea. So there were thousands and thousands of Koreans who were taken off their land, and they were forced to go to Japan for financial reasons to look for work. And the work that they did was working often in factories that produced weapons or goods that fed the Japanese Imperial project. So it was a very sick sort of cycle or economic cycle that they were brought into. But ever since they came to Japan, Koreans in Japan have tended to be discriminated against. So that’s the Zainichi Koreans and there’s also the Burakumin who are similar to the untouchable class or caste. The Dalit is the word that we tend to use now in India, similar to the Indian caste system. Japan used to have an old Buddhist caste system that said people who work with dead animals or who are doing leatherwork, their jobs are unclean and therefore they need to be segregated. So there were many generations of this kind of discrimination and the Burakumin are their descendants. Similar to the Dalit system in India, the government sort of says we don’t recognize the system anymore, but still they are parts of Japanese society. For example, when somebody is getting married, parents from a good Japanese family might check the background of the spouse of their child to make sure that they don’t have any Burakumin background in them. So there’s still some remnants of discrimination there. Then there are the Ainu people, who live in the Northern part of Japan. The West Coast native peoples of Canada are descendants of Ainu, the seafaring people who kind of travelled along the circumference of the Pacific Rim and came to North America many, many years ago. So I’ve sometimes interpreted for Ainu people coming to Canada and the Ainu visitors are often expressing surprise because a native Canadian Haida person looks exactly like their uncle or aunt back home in Japan. But anyways, the Ainu had this very large area that they were masters of for centuries. But from about the 16th century, more and more Japanese people sort of crept up from the South, the Japanese population increased and they sort of settled further and further North. And it pushed Ainu communities further and further into the background, much like what happened with native peoples in Canada. And then there’s the Okinawans, who are in the South. There was a string of islands between the main part of Japan and Taiwan where there used to be an ancient kingdom, a very peaceful kingdom that didn’t have its own armies. It was just a trading kingdom, but back in the 1600s, one of the Southern clans of Japan invaded and took over the Okinawa islands. So ever since then, it’s been part of Japan. But at the end of the second world war, the United States took over Okinawa and started building a bunch of US military bases. So Japan has quite a few US military bases still in Japan, but 80% of those military bases are all concentrated on Okinawa. So even though almost everybody in Okinawa says, we don’t want the bases here, we want to be peaceful people, the American basis remains there. So, the Okinawans are treated like second class citizens within Japan. And then there are more recent groups like post world war two immigrants. Some of these would be Brazilians and Peruvians who came for economic reasons, to work in growing industries in Japan, maybe 20 to 30 years ago. The Japanese economy has sort of seen a downturn, so a lot of these people who came from Peru or Brazil who had jobs at the beginning have lost their jobs. And because they still struggle with language and different cultures, they’re facing difficulties in Japanese society. There are quite a few Filipino women, Thai, Taiwanese, Chinese, and even some Korean women who have married Japanese men in rural areas who have come. They have come because men in rural areas in Japan are having trouble finding young Japanese women to come to the countryside to live there because Japanese young women don’t want to go and be a farmer’s wife. It’s a social issue for rural areas in Japan.

 

The Four Pillars

In addition to these minority ethnic groups, we also are working with women’s groups within the church. There are still women’s issues that we’re dealing with. We work together with people with disabilities, and we’re also trying to find responsible and loving ways to try to engage in conversation around the difficult issue of sexual and gender minorities as well. I know that’s an ongoing issue here in Canada, too. So, the Center for Minority Issues and Mission has four pillars. We call it four pillars of our activities, these are struggling against racism, engaging in youth mission, developing the spirituality of reconciliation and peace and communications. So I’ll just go through each of these one at a time. The first one is struggling against racism. We want to serve as a place where all these different minority groups that I was talking about can come together and look for ways to work together because each of the groups tends to be so busy engaging with their own group’s problems that it’s kind of hard for them to find extra time to get together and discuss. So we want to be a place where they can come to, and we can look for new ways of working together. It’s also part of our job to try to work with the United Church and Presbyterian Church in Canada, but also churches in Germany and Taiwan and Korea who we’d like to work with and learn from. So working altogether ecumenically. The second pillar of work is the youth mission. We just held a minority youth forum at the beginning of this month. 25 of us met in Osaka Japan to do some fieldwork, some field study, visit a couple of minority communities within Osaka, learn about the history of Okinawans in Osaka, Koreans in Osaka and then we did some historical study. Then we had lots of discussion groups and a workshop to try to find ways of expressing what we were feeling after hearing all these stories. It was a really fun time. I think the most important thing that it made us do was to think, not just in terms of, you know, what is happening out there, but we asked ourselves what is happening in our own hearts? Are there corners of our hearts where discrimination is there? These are the kind of self-questioning questions that we spent some time on as well. We’ll have another minority youth conference or forum next year, so we’re hoping that we can get some young people from Canada to participate in that one. The third pillar is a spirituality of reconciliation and peace. I’ll just briefly mention that it’s sort of a Bible study that we have in mind here, but not just the Bible study of people sitting in a room, reading the Bible and talking about it. What we want to do is to go on field trips and hear from people who are doing work with minority groups, hear from them what parts of the Bible really motivate them and what is driving their mission? So we’ll go out on a field trip, hear these stories and then the following month, the same group of people will get together. And we’ll look at scriptures and review the scriptures that the person told them about, but also share with each other, what are some other scriptures that resonate with that? So we’re looking for ways to hear new voices from the scriptures that will help us as people interested in minority issues to engage better. And the fourth pillar is communications. Communications is simply a one-word way of saying newsletters and booklets and website and Facebook and all of that. So I brought with me two newsletters. These are in English. So if you have a chance,  I invite you to please take a look through them. I have maybe 20 to 30 copies of each of these. So it’ll give you an idea of what’s going on with us. We hope that people when they read them, they’ll feel free to write to us about ideas that they have, or perhaps experiences that resonate with what is in here.  And maybe every now and then we’ll have a booklet on a specific topic if we want to dig deeper into some topic or another. So I’d like to end by sharing a little bit about the logo that we have. You can see the words Center for Minority Issues and Mission. And inside that circle is the crown of thorns, Jesus’s crown of thorns. And then inside that circle, you will see a teeth tree stump. So a tree that’s been cut and out of that tree stump is one small branch growing with a leaf on it. This image is taken from the scriptures, Isaiah chapter 11, and it represents God’s promise of new life. Even as minorities, we may often feel discouraged or saddened or depressed about the situation that we face, but God always promises new life out of that. 

 

God’s Peaceful Kingdom

So I just like to end by reading the section from Isaiah chapter 11, so that you will have a better idea of where this image comes from. It’s Isaiah chapter 11 verses 1-9, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear, but with righteousness, he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” So this is the image of God’s peaceful kingdom that we are always all praying for and dreaming of. We, the motto of our Center is to let us spread the tent of inclusion. We want to be a part of a project where everybody can be working on spreading and stretching the tent of inclusion so that more and more people can feel welcome in society. So thank you for welcoming me. And I look forward to perhaps seeing some of the young people at the youth forum in Japan sometime. Thank you.