Scripture that speaks to my seoul

I spent nearly eight years at a Korean church, leading Bible study, playing drums, presiding, and occasionally preaching, but I never once read scripture before the congregation in Korean. I've been serving at Broadway now for all of two weeks, yet today I was asked--about 15 minutes before service--to read a passage in Korean. It wasn't totally random because today is World Communion Sunday. In addition to Korean, other languages were incorporated throughout the service (Spanish, Urdu).

While me reading scripture in Korean is amusing, funnier still is that I noticed a Korean family seated in the back--mother and father with a pre-teen daughter and a son who looked to be about college age. My guess is that the family were either visiting the son, who may be a student at Columbia, or the parents were checking out Columbia as a prospective school for him. I'm sure they were just attending the closest church to Columbia, but I wonder what they thought when they heard John 6:23 read in halting Korean by a lanky white guy. Later in the service we also sang the first verse of a hymn in transliterated Korean, which must have left them thinking that Broadway is a little slice of Koreatown in the middle of Harlem.

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SERMON: The Great Omission (Mt. 28:16-20)

This sermon was delivered at Yale Divinity School in 2020 for the class Sacred Moments in African-American Preaching. I begin with a simple observation. Of the four canonical gospels, Matthew is the only one that ends with the words of Jesus. Mark, Luke, and John all end in the narrator’s voice, but Matthew closes with the words of Jesus. Mark ends at the tomb, with the women fleeing in terror and amazement. Luke ends with the disciples in Jerusalem, praising at the temple. John ends on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, with a dialogue between Jesus and Peter. And here Matthew ends with the disciples in Galilee, meeting Jesus at the mountain where he had directed them. Matthew gives Jesus the last word. But before we get to those last words, there are three other words in this passage that I call to our attention because I find them astonishing. Let me read verse 17 once more. “When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some do...

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Unappetizer

Every Tuesday the pastors here go out for lunch together. Yesterday we visited a restaurant owned by a church member. The restaurant's specialty is a dish known as boshintang (보신탕), which is...well...dog stew. I thought that eating dog "meat" was confined to the more rural areas of Korea, but this restaurant was in the middle of Gangnam, one of the busiest districts of Seoul. Bottom line--no, I did not partake--the restaurant offered other dishes. Only a particular type of dog is raised for its "meat," or so I've read. In Korean they are called nureongi (누렁이), which is slang for "yellow one." They are mid-sized spitz-type dogs that look a lot like the Jindo, a dog native to Korea that Koreans revere for its intelligence and loyalty. Dog ownership is becoming quite common in Seoul, especially among younger Koreans, so I hope that Koreans find it increasingly difficult to distinguish dogs that sit on a couch from those that sit on a plate. ...

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