Pastor’s Corner – June 29, 2025
Keep Your Hand on the Plow – Luke 9:51-62
It was 75 years ago today, June 25th, 1950, when the Korean war broke out at dawn; tanks crossed the 38th parallel that divided the country between North Korea backed by the Soviet Union and South Korea occupied by the USA. Thousands of bombs were dropped, and missiles fired and over the course of three years, three million lives were taken. It was a proxy war between superpowers during the Cold War. The United Nations called it “police action,” against the aggressor USSR. Three years later a truce was signed, a ceasefire and created a demilitarized zone, known today as the most militarized place in the world. No peace treaty was signed, so the region is technically still at war. As a result, millions of families were permanently separated.
I remember watching the Berlin Wall come down in 1989. I was a first-year seminarian and I believed that reunification of North and South Korea would soon be next. That’s already 36 years ago, an event that impacted my study raising questions of what it means to do theology. Already, I was profoundly affected by the historic traumas of Korean people. In the summer of 1983, while visiting my dad’s church in Daegu, Korea, the whole nation was glued to TV stations and overwhelmed by the thousands of people seeking their loved ones who were separated during the war. Not knowing whether they were alive or dead and some too young to remember and lost finding themselves in orphanages and others assuming they were left behind. What started as a family reunion show became a movement overnight with hundreds of thousands showing up at TV stations with signs of names and any clue to find loved ones. You can see the desperation and shared pain and grief caused by war, helplessly swept by history and power struggles of colonial masters and empire builders. The whole nation wept. (This news broadcast reunited 10,189 families separated by war )
This coming Sunday, Jesus is facing Jerusalem. He is on a mission and says to his disciples, “Those who have their hand on the plow and look back are not fit for the kingdom of God.” For Jesus, his priority is his mission, to upend the evil machine that affected so many lives under the rule of empire. What awaited in Jerusalem was a stage where he would play a central role as one coming from the margin, as a prophet and son of man–born of woman, and as the Messiah, Jesus the Christ. We know all too well how privileged we are when we are insulated from what the vast majority of the world’s people are suffering, simply because we are citizens of the empire. While our immigrant neighbors are deported because their legal status is either ambiguous or deemed “criminal,” families are being ripped apart and children taken away. It’s important to ask what it means to be a faith community in times such as these? Let us keep our hands on the plow and follow Jesus. Amen.
Pastor Dae