12-26-21 Light with Compassionate Love

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Psalm 8, Matthew 25:31-46

Light with Compassionate Love 

May Christmastide brings Christ’s peace and warm blessings! It seems to me that there has never been a time when the birth of Christ came to such a need of joy and newness like this year. May the birth of Christ be born into an eternal hope within you.

The year of 2021 presented us with many challenges and difficulties. It was a year we tried to shrug off a pandemic, a time we were angered by racial injustice, and we live in constant concern about the global ecological crisis.

God’s heart must have been filled with this woundedness and pain. And the heart of the Holy Spirit must have lamented for humanity.

Although we receive God’s love and salvation and live with blessings moment by moment, it has been a year in which we have been asking questions one after another about how we can become more authentic Christ followers.

I am deeply grateful for the efforts of our church to serve God faithfully amid this reality and to become the hope of the world. Thank you so much for your love of Christ and the church. We gather here with hope in despair, light in disappointment, and new strength in weakness.

Advent and Epiphany are seasons of wonder and God’s complete indwelling in our lives, without any condition or rejection. God is always making all things new.
I hope that you will once again receive the love of Christ, who came as the Savior and light in the darkness—this is the good news of the gospel—now let’s make the decision to accomplish God’s transformation in the world.

The biblical vision is that injustice and violence never have a permanent place. The liberation and new order declared through the prophets and proclaimed by the gospel of Jesus Christ is a dream in which good triumphs and evil retreats. The parable proclaims that injustice will not be a permanent way of life.

The fact that injustice never rules the world is our strength and prayer. To be very simple in the face of this irresistible truth, today’s Gospel of Matthew, through parable, whispers the basis of discipleship, and lift us up in renewed vision and hope.

The parable of the sheep and the goats does not simply reveal a world of judgment, but it shows very clearly how we can live the gospel, believe the gospel, and follow the gospel for building beloved community.

We want to be on the side of the sheep. We want to live as disciples who practice authentic love that changes the world, and we can decide not to stand with the goats and the systems and powers of darkness. We can decide that injustice will not be a permanent way of life.

Today’s Gospel proves it in practice how we can serve God’s kin(g)dom, not just the dominant empire of greed, hatred, and shame of human prejudice and exclusion.

Giving water to the thirsty, giving food to the hungry, loving the little ones, finding the lonely ones in prison, sharing wounds and suffering together are the essence of the gospel’s greatness. Let’s believe together and talk about the right path that Christian disciples should live. We can decide that injustice will not be a permanent way of life.

We are thinking of the Afghan neighbors who suddenly came to Wisconsin. Let’s be the neighbors they need and try our best to be the neighbors they live with.

Among the Afghan friends, over 10,000 staying in Fort McCoy Base, about 300 mothers are expecting their babies. More than 70 percent are young neighbors under the age of 18.

I remember reading an interview in which a reporter asked the poet Maya Angelou: “How can you see hope for the future in an America full of impoverished cities, rampant discrimination, endless violence and despair? That’s quite a question to consider—for her and for us.

The poet’s answer, after some silence, was this: “hospitals across America’s cities are still filled with the cries of new children being born. As long as mothers continue to have babies and love them, there is hope for America’s cities.” I imagined Afghan mothers with such hope while troubled tide all around them.

They need a community that will welcome them. They will need a stable place to give birth to children and new hope. Just as Mary needed a place to make Christ known. We have seen with our own eyes that they need a bowl of water, a slice of bread of love, and warm winter clothes.

Let’s find a way to be friends with the Afghan refugees here so that the poet’s dream becomes our dream. We need to create welcome that is able to make Christ known.

The heart of the prophetic words of scripture puts the poor at the center of history—and our story. The Gospel centers the marginalized around us that we become the center of true historical restoration and liberation. We need to create welcome that is able to make Christ known.

II. “Truly I tell you, just as you did to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” (v 43)
God is here among us to reverse the basis by which people are currently occupied by our culturally dominant way of life. God is among us in the Son of Man who resets the way by which life is valued.

God has made the center-act of the human drama “One of the least of these.” God’s reign is established by mercy and justice for the poor, not by the standards of a human empire. God’s word is among us to reverse harm and reset the world. I grew up in a very poor background on the ruins of the Korean War. The village we lived in was an island on the border right in front of the armistice line dividing the north and the south. The scars that the war left behind were long sighs, tensions and trauma that could not be shared with each other.

Looking back now, it was my grandmother who taught me hope at such a time. My grandmother lost many of her relatives in the war. She had a life of deep wounds, but she worked diligently for us and helped us to always have hope for the future. It was a regular place where beggars always stopped and came to eat a meal my grandmother offered.

It was a poor house, but it was a house that still gave love to beggars who were begging because they had nothing to eat. My grandmother always prepared kimchi and rice with great care and served them in the house as a respected guest.

The world my grandmother dreamed of always showed me a world where a handful of rice, a small amount of sincerity, love to serve people like a human being, and a world in which everyone respects and serves everyone without regard to them is a good thing—and a central thing.

My grandmother showed me a world where I live not for myself, but a world where we live together, where we cry together, laugh together, suffer together, and hope together.

This parable features a King who governs with hospitality for the least, the broken, and the despised. Christian ministry expresses the unity of love. Those who give and receive partake of the same love.

Christian unity can be the hope of the world. The simple love of unity at the heart of an open table can be a medicine that can light up a dark world.

Our church, The United Methodist Church, is a global expression of the unity of love. The Trinity expresses the openness of God to each person. In the Trinity the Father is open to the Spirit.
The Son is open to the Father. The Spirit is open to the Son, and all of them express the difference of their personhood but the unity of love. Christian ministry expresses the unity of love.

I hope that we will be more concerned about what we do together to light up the darkness rather than what we agree on and live with as dogmatic stance. I hope that the church will become a true church to save neighbors and plant the dream of the kingdom of God and not focus on where we differ over the triviality of opinion.

May we commit that Wisconsin will be a land of hospitality and racism-free as we pray and earnestly make our call to build a world where we love each other.
May we hold the belief that God’s justice will create a place of living where everyone is treated as true friends, beautiful neighbors, and fellow citizens.

Walter Bruggeman’s Love’s Win!? says: “We are free to imagine that the death systems of violence, the greed systems of poverty, and the despairing systems of exploitation have no staying power. They cannot be sustained in the face of self-giving, transformative love. They are conquered!” We can decide injustice will not be a permanent way of life!

Even if there are difficulties, we can overcome them together. Even if the pain of our history is fractured, we can be renewed if we reflect on it step by step with a reflective heart.

I believe we can decide injustice will not be a permanent way of life! I believe we need to create welcome that is able to make Christ known. I believe Christian ministry expresses the unity of love.
I hope this will be a time to make a new resolution on the way we should live together in the light of the Word. I pray that the blessing of God’s abundant blessings and new hope will be with you. God’s steadfast love and mercy is yours. Amen

Bishop Jung