Where Everybody's Crazy

Warning: This does get a bit graphic.

So yesterday and today I have mainly been assisting at Nagahama's first Latin American funeral. This was the first Christian funeral I attended in Japan - you can read about my Buddhist funeral experience - and I get the impression it was fairly typical of the genre, despite the Latin cultural influence.

Both Christian and Buddhist funerals have two parts, the 前夜式 (zenyashiki, night-before ceremony) and the 葬式 (soushiki, funeral). The order of service was the same for each: Hymn, prayers, eulogies, hymn, Lord's Prayer, Psalm 23, sermon, hymn. The hymns were sung both in Japanese and Spanish, I led the Lord's Prayer and Psalm 23 in my faltering Spanish, and the rest was done with an interpreter.

The layout of the church was not too dissimilar in a way to the Buddhist ceremony: The pulpit was moved to the side and a high table with a white cloth and flowers on was put at the end of the church; the coffin, again white, was in front of that, and a picture of the deceased on a stand set off to the side of the coffin. At the end of the soushiki, the coffin was opened, and, just like the Buddhist ceremony, mourners filed up to place flowers inside. Given that the majority of the mourners were Latin American, there were fewer hysterics than I expected. (Although still non-zero.)

Then the coffin was closed again and taken out to the waiting hearse. I've got to tell you about the hearse, this was fantastic. On the way up to the crematorium, Takahashi-sensei explained to me about the hearse. There's only one crematorium in North Omi region, because none of the towns wanted one in their back yard. After much financial enticement, the council finally persuaded one town finally to have the crematorium, but the town imposed the condition that, since they were going to get several funeral processions a day and that's horribly depressing, the processions didn't look like funeral processions.

So the hearse was a blue-and-white Nissan minivan, looking very much like it belonged to the council's waste disposal department - because it did - and it drove so fast we could hardly keep up. It was very much a waste-disposal run crematorium, right down to the guys in greenish-grey boiler suits handling the bodies, and the web site with price list that I'm not going to translate for you, other than to point out for that Japanese language geeks that 胎 appears to be the counter for foetuses.

We had another quick hymn in the preparation room of the crem, and then the body was taken into the incineration room; the chief mourner got to press the buttons to shut the doors and start the fire.

Once the burning had got going, we were all sent away to a waiting room for a couple of hours. (Bodies are resilient.) One of the guests had brought lunch for those of us helping out (the pastor, myself, the translators). It was a nice Peruvian rice and chicken dish.

Then an announcement came over the tannoy and it was time to head to the 収骨室　(bone-obtaining-room?) where what can only be described as the smoking, charred remains of our dear friend were laid out on a trolley for us to perform the 骨上げ (bone-lifting). I'm sure that bone-lifting is a way for the deceased to get back at his living relatives. If my family really piss me off in later life, I'm going to insist that my funeral contains a bone-lifting.

Because the first thing you notice is the smell. Fried human is not a nice smell. And the next thing you notice is the bone structure. Like I said, bodies are resilient, and so while there's a lot of ash, there's a fair amount of bone still about. Hips and skull were very much still in evidence. Now in the West, we take someone's ashes away but here, they take the bones. So bone-lifting is a process where you get given a couple of pairs of long wooden chopsticks, a couple of urns, and get told to, basically, pick the bits you want. It's like the most extreme form of a Chinese takeaway.

The crematorium man got us started by taking out the hyoid bone from the neck, and then told us to start at the feet and work our way up.

I am not making this up.

That was the end, apart from the pictures, but in case you're wondering what people say around a bone-lifting, I can fill you in.

Why's that bit green?

Did he have a drip while he was in hospital?

Yeah.

Chemicals in the drip. Look, you can see where they put the wire into his hips as well.

Or:

Can someone give me a hand getting into this skull? I can't break it open.

Granddad was a stubborn bastard to the end, then.

So this week marks my second Christmas in Japan. I think this has been the least Christmassy Christmas of my life so far. I have felt like Charlie Brown (hence the sermon) for most of this month. I'm sure this is partly to do with the fact that many of the things I associate with Christmas haven't been here.

My part of Japan doesn't really do Christmas, for starters. The bigger cities have lights and decorations; Nagahama tried hard, bless it, with an attempt at a Christmas market and a cute little decoration thing, made of lots of cardboard-box houses with lights inside them.

But really, that was at one intersection of town, and I don't go there very often. The rest of town was preparing for New Year and the Ebisu festival on January 10th.

Christmas Day itself is, of course, a normal working day in Japan. However, December 23rd is a public holiday, being the current emperor's birthday. This means that most churches don't have Christmas Day services unless the 25th falls on a weekend. So our Christmas service was last Sunday, and the church was pretty much unused on Thursday - there was a funeral in the afternoon.

Most church events happened on the 23rd - we had a worship concert in the afternoon, then went out caroling, returned for a big meal (not on the scale of last years' experiment!) and the youth group had their Christmas party. The other big churchy-Christmas thing is the Christmas Eve candle service. Again the popularity of this depends what day the 24th falls on. This year was a working day, so numbers were down. I preached at Hikone Megumi Church's candle service just down the road.

From there I went to our headquarters building in Gokasho, to enjoy Christmas Day with Henrietta, another missionary couple and some Japanese friends.

Some more things about Christmas in Japan:

• They have Christmas cake, but it's iced sponge cake with strawberries. See for yourself.
• This one is so odd that I did not believe it until I personally saw it: people buy their Christmas roast from KFC. Of course only common people buy ordinary fried chicken Christmas packs; those with a bit of class buy premium roast chicken at 5600 Yen (40 quid) a bird. The KFC in Nagahama has had a board up this December saying how many Premium Chickens they still have available to order.
• I did not personally see this one, but heard it directly from the person involved: English teacher is trying to talk to her children about Christmas and find out what they know. "So," she says, "who came at Christmas? I'll give you a clue. He came from heaven, and was born to a virgin." "Oh, oh, I know!" says one of the kids. "Momotaro!"
• I have only heard of second hand: green Santa, Santa on the cross, Santa in the crib. But I would not be in the slightest bit surprised.
• I asked my high school English club why they celebrate Christmas. "It's when Jesus was born." "Yeah, but you guys don't believe in Jesus." Slightly embarrassed pause. "Japanese people don't really care about religion, we just like celebrating things." I don't think it's just the Japanese.

I've been asked to write a post about Christmas in Japan, which I will later on, but first I want to talk about the Brazilian situation here.

Around 8% of Nagahama's population are South Americans, many of whom of Japanese descent. 100 years ago this year, the first Japanese landed in Brazil as working immigrants, and their descendants have now come back here as labourers in our factories.

Unfortunately our factories are not doing well at the moment; Toyota had its first quarterly loss in 75 or so years this quarter, and the New Year will see many of the car factories shutting down for at least 10 days. Many factory workers are being laid off, and since most of them are South American, it's that community which is being affected the most. From our local newspaper:

According to the city government, out of the 2,600 contract, short-term contract or agency-employed workers, 70% are Brazilian and 30% are Japanese. This is a fall of 17% or roughly 500 from the 3,000 from August. Out of those 500 laid off, 20% have moved to other companies, 50% have returned home, 20% have moved outside the city.

The remaining 10%? Well, given that those working for employment agencies often have their housing tied to their employment, there are rumours that you can find them living in Hokou Park. Seriously, there are growing homelessness problems in Japan related to those laid off from employment agencies - very similar in a way to what happened in Kamagasaki in the 70s - and the South Americans are getting hardest hit. We are hearing of Latin church buildings being used as refugee centers. About half the people in our Latin congregation have been laid off, and last week we had reporters from the national newspapers and television come to church to interview them.

I want us to be prepared to help the homeless problem when it occurs - things are probably going to get worse, not better - but I'm meeting some resistance, and unfortunately I don't have enough time left here to change minds. Frustrating.

OK, I've just finished one of my three sermons for this Christmas - it's called, and I kid you not, "It's A Very Liberationist Christmas, Charlie Brown" - and so I'm settling in for a good rant. This one's for all of you, evangelicals and liberals alike.

I'm very disappointed in you all. Go to your room.

If your intention was the destruction of Christianity as a going concern, you're doing really well, given that we're now at the point where people judge a congregation, a denomination, a pastor, purely on whether they think two people of the same gender should be allowed to hold a certain legal status. Not whether they love God and their neighbour. Not whether they love the poor. Whether they are in support of or against Proposition 8 or ordaining gay priests, two issues on which Jesus said precisely nothing. (And no, coming up with some strange twisted exegesis about eunuchs doesn't help you. Have you met a eunuch recently?)

I've been very carefully not taking a position on this because (a) I vehemently oppose the idea that we have to take positions on everything that anyone throws at us; some time we have bigger fish to fry, and (b) for a growing number of people, hearing someone's position on Teh Gay causes the blinkers to come down, you end up calling them either a homophobe or a heretic, and hey presto, you no longer feel the need to listen to anything else they say about anything at all, however good or worthy it might be.

You have successfully reduced the whole of the richness of the Kingdom of God to one divisive hot-button issue. Well done!

Oh, and worse? Judging a future president on the same tiny little subset of ... not his own views, but the views of someone he invited to pray for him. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. You thought the Reverend Wright thing was stupid? Stop doing it, then.

And frankly, you liberals out there, if you think that someone can't be said to love their neighbour if they don't let gay people marry, you're demonstrating exactly the small-mindedness and single-issue reductionism that I'm complaining about. Last I checked, love was just a wee tiny bit broader than that. And even so, love may be imperfect according to your tiny understanding of love but it's still love.

Evangelicals, I'm not letting you off lightly either, you who would split churches and rend Christian fellowship for the sake of something on which the gospels are silent and where Biblical literalism is only selectively practiced anyway. (I know, I've seen evangelical pastors eat rare steak.)

And both of you just stop, because you're doing yourselves serious damage. You make this a single issue and not only do you lose your authority to talk on other big issues, but you become single-issue people and single-issue people, regardless of whether they are right or wrong, are boring, irritating and impossible to listen to. (Even more impossible to dialogue with.) So you're at great risk of making yourselves irrelevant.

Just stop.

A pox on both your houses.

I'm trying to prepare a bunch of Christmas messages at the moment, and have spent a long time working through Luke 2. The more I dig into it, the more I realise how political it all is. Not just Luke 2 but Matthew 2 as well.

Let's think about the main characters as they appear in the Christmas story:

• Caesar Augustus, Luke 2:1 - first emperor of the unified Roman empire. His Wikipedia biography tells you a lot about him. He was an absolute ruler, political schemer and complete megalomaniac. He claimed divinity for himself - his autobiography was called "The Acts of the Divine Augustus". He chose his name Augustus, which means "the great one". He was at pains to point out that he was the son of the deified Julius Caesar, referring to himself as "the son of God". Presumably anyone else claiming to be the son of God was a challenge to Caesar.
• Quirinius, Luke 2:2 - legate of Syria, collecting income tax for Augustus. Augustus' unification of the empire took place at the price of extremely high income tax rates - 80 or 90% - in occupied territories. Quirinius was particularly eager, taxing women as well as men. Needless to say, this went down a storm with the locals, with the taxation census nearly leading to open revolt on the streets.
• Shepherds, Luke 2:8 - Living in the fields, outside of normal society. Homeless and marginalised.
• Angels, Luke 2:13 - We all know the translation "heavenly host", but what does it mean? "A multitude of the armies of heaven." Why does Jesus need an army?
• King Herod, Matthew 2:1 - Herod the Great, king of the Jews. Yet another megalomaniac with an uneasy relationship between his Roman employers and his Judean citizens. Killed many of his family members out of paranoia of losing his power. Presumably anyone else claiming to be king of the Jews was a challenge to Herod.
• Magi, Matthew 2:1 - magos, from which we get the word "magician", referred to priests of astrological religions in Persia and Mesopotamia. Foreigners from Iran or Iraq. Number unspecified, but probably an awful lot more than three.

In the midst of all of this, a carpenter who comes to his home town - taking a couple of weeks away from work to register for taxes - only to find that nobody wants to know him, a young girl who realises that God "has brought down the mighty from their thrones", and a baby that everyone wants different things from; all of whom soon find themselves seeking asylum in a foreign country fleeing from an oppressive dictator.

Why are Matthew and Luke pointing all this out? This isn't just background information. They're very clearly telling us that there is political significance to Jesus' birth. But I honestly can't work out what it is and how it helps. Last year I preached about how Jesus entered into our shame and oppression and took them onto himself, but looking back I can't see how solidarity helps. Obviously God chose to incarnate Himself in this way - but I can't work out what He was trying to achieve in doing so.

One of the few things that the Koizumi administration achieved was the promotion of Cool Biz - an environmental campaign where government offices were encouraged to allow workers to remove their jackets and ties so that air conditioners could be set marginally higher than normal, saving energy.

Today at the bank I saw my first example of Warm Biz - bank workers in jumpers and coats because the heating was set marginally lower than normal...

I spent most of today helping to destroy a church. One of our church plants had run out of money, manpower and members, and so we made the obvious decision to close it down, end the contract on the building, revert all the alterations that had been made to it and to return it to the landlord. For some involved, I'm sure it was a sad day, but I have to admit that I took a perverse pleasure in it, laying into bookshelves and partitions with a ball-peen hammer. It's a great way to take out your frustrations. I wish I could call it creative destruction, but it wasn't, it was just destruction, pure and simple. I wish I could say that symbolically I was breaking down the building to set free the church, but no, really, I wasn't. I was just merrily swinging away, laying into pieces of wood that didn't really deserve it. And I loved it.

Now I am not a house-church-uber-alles, buildings-are-unBiblical kind of guy. Church buildings are Biblical and OK by me. I don't have a problem with church buildings. But I do have a problem with building-as-church. When church planters start a new church, they first look for somewhere to meet. They may not yet have anyone to gather together for a meeting, but they make reasonable-sounding arguments about having a visible presence - because they heard abou this one person once who came in off the street having seen the church sign, and if it saves at least one person then it must be the right thing to do - and they convince themselves that they need to hire a building.

But hiring a building means rent and redecoration and utility bills and a massive freakin' headache for your colleagues should you, oh, I don't know, decide to abandon ship without warning and never come back. But hey, all of these things are fine if you have a group of believers already who are committed to seeing the church work. But when you start out planting a church, you don't have such a group.

If you have a church but no building, you might run into problems. You can probably cope for a while, but OK, if you get too big, you might run into problems. But if you have a building and no church, you're already in deep trouble. So I guess what I am really against is disproportionality between your church and your building. If you have a church of 2 people, they can meet in a home. If you have 10 or 20 people, you can find places, like we did in Maibara, that can get you a room for very little cost and very little ongoing commitment. If you have a church of 100 people, you probably need your own building. In fact, it's good to grow this way around, increasing the commitment as you increase the need.

But if you start with the commitment where there's no need, you're making trouble for yourself and trouble for those who have to sweep up after you. We removed twenty boxes of rubble from the church today. I was sorely tempted to have them mailed to the missionary who created them.

This isn't rocket science. People do this when they buy homes for their families, for instance - you grow organically. And don't talk to me about faith for your church's growth. I may or may not have faith that my family will grow to six people, but my faith aside, I don't start with a five-bedroom house. But if you start with a five-bedroom house and realise pretty quick that you can't pay the mortgage - well, that's not sad, that's just daft.

So I refused to see my destructive work today in breaking apart a church as a shame. I said, and have always said, that it is something to be celebrated when a church runs its course and finishes its witness. It's only a sad thing if you place more worth on the church itself than on the promises and plans of God.

How many times have you heard that of people - "He really gave so much of himself to X, it'll be a shame to see it go". Whether it's a church building or a ministry or a plan, I always hear that as a shameful statement - "He allowed his own worth to be measured by X, and now it's gone." It's not a shame that a church fails if for the life of that church it witnessed to the best of its abilities. It's not a shame if a ministry ends if it touched many people throughout its lifespan. Actually it's the other way around: it's a real shame if we have to keep something going beyond its natural life just to assuage someone's self-worth problems. Why not just say "It was good and worthwhile to do; we believe its influence will last; we can't see that right now but we trust God for it, and we can feel proud of a call faithfully executed."?

Jeremiah 7 talks about people who trusted the things of God more than God. They had a church building, and as long as they had their church building they were going to be all right. But God was prepared to destroy the church building to focus their attention back to Him. Anything we trust more than Him is fair game for destruction.

So today I destroyed a church building, because church buildings don't substitute for a church. But lest you think I'm ranting about other people, also today something I trusted in more than God was destroyed.

While I was happily swinging my hammer, I got a message on my phone about tomorrow's Maibara meeting. I've already been hugely disappointed with what's been happening in Maibara. The horizontal evangelism between church members and their friends doesn't seem to have been happening. We came to the end of our English club last week and we don't seem to have the staff to take it on to the next stage, the introduction-to-Christianity course; not that I've had the time to write the course material. But at least, for my last meeting tomorrow, I will have trained others up to be able to lead meetings and take over the Bible study group themselves. At least from the whole brief Maibara experiment I could console myself with the knowledge that it wasn't a complete failure. I had that one thing.

Or so I thought, until I got the message saying that this month's leader couldn't do it and so I'd have to lead the meeting myself, wouldn't I?

Complete failure. Complete failure.

And so now I get to think about where my self-worth lies. I get to think about if it's OK for something to be destroyed, to fail, to come to the end of its life. I get to go back to my church, my mission, my family with nothing to show for the work and I get to choose to believe whether or not I still think it was good and worthwhile to do.

I had a great plan. I still think it's a great plan. But I put my trust in the plan, which is no better than putting your trust in the building. Given Jeremiah 7, it was pretty obvious that the plan was going to get destroyed. The only question is whether the destruction forces me back towards God or not. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

I got a lot done today; lots of wedding prep, flight prep, and an awful lot of programming. Unfortunately, I don't have much to show for the programming.

I've been continuing work on Songbee, to provide it with a way to flag up some songs as translations of others, and then to allow you to switch languages during worship time. This is actually much more involved than I thought it would be.

First, I realised that the "Which song is this a translation of?" dialog would need yet another list-of-songs widget, the third time I had used such a thing in the project so far. So I spent a long time trying to separate the list-of-songs into its own piece of XBL. After an awful lot of playing, I realised it just wouldn't work. Don't know why not. It just didn't.

Next I realised that some songs could be translated into several languages, meaning that my original model of metadata (just slurp the values into a hash) wouldn't work, such you could have more than one value for each key. So I fixed that in a very ugly way, and now finally you can say that song X is a translation of song Y.

The next stages is to fill in the back-links: once you've said that X is a translation of Y, it should automatically record that song Y is a translation of song X, and song X is a translation of all of the other songs that Y is a translation of. This means that at worship-time, each song has a list of all the other songs that translate it, and, eventually, I can put a nice little bar at the bottom of the window to switch between them.

All that is ahead of me, and so I wonder exactly what I achieved in my three hours hacking on that today.

Evangelistic meetings, at least here in Japan, are a funny sort of performance art.

I was at an evangelistic meeting tonight. I didn't intend to be, it was supposed to be a churches-together-in-Kyoto Christmas "festival". But when churches here think about doing something together, their thinking typically gets as far as:

• A concert.
• A speaker meeting.
• A service.
• Some combination of the above.

So at our Christmas festival we were treated to three carols and a thirty-minute sermon from some important-sounding imported speaker. I'm not going to get into (a) the lack of imagination, or (b) the way we've elevated the sermon as the only way of doing both teaching and evangelism, such that all of our events and services end up being an introduction, sermon and conclusion. Pastors like to be up the front doing stuff, and the sermon is the bit that they do, so it's natural that this becomes the focus of all our activities. Nor am I going to get into (c) the effectiveness of the sermon as a teaching/evangelism tool, which is yet to be proven. Nor will I, this time, get into (d) the need we feel to import a besuited, humourless, elderly pastor or former Bible college professor to deliver a message, presumably to give the event a sense of gravitas, when we have plenty of much more competent preachers in-house.

Instead, I want to talk about preaching.

I used to think that you should give a sermon that you yourself would enjoy hearing. But now I realise this is not good advice for anyone who's been a pastor for a few years. Because such people become so insulated - spending most of their time listening to either their own or similar pastors' sermons - that they kind of lose their grip on what is an enjoyable message. Tonight was a case in point.

There have been plenty of studies of attention span and lecturing to large class sizes, which suggest that people can pay good attention for the first 10 minutes if there is no stimulus, then reasonable attention the next 10 minutes with reasonable stimulus, and after 20 minutes you've pretty much had it. If you preach for more than 20 minutes most people aren't listening unless you're brilliant. Tonight's preacher took 30 minutes and wasn't brilliant.

30 minutes, mind you, on sin and the cross at a Christmas festival. What he said was sound straight-down-the-line Evangelical gospel. But 30 minutes? Sin and the cross? At Christmas? I started to wonder what was going on.

So I asked one of the pastors I knew there, and he told me a secret. In the sixties a great pastor with Campus Crusade - and a man of his generation and time - developed a model sermon for evangelistic meetings. His examples were timely and his delivery was dynamic, and he was very effective.

If you do something effective in Japan, it will be copied and reproduced without the slightest deviation.

And so tonight's sermon was pretty much a word-for-word recital of a model sermon given forty years ago, by someone without the same sense of delivery and with no understanding that examples, presentation style and approach gets a bit dated over that sort of time. Not to mention that culture changes and the audience's approach and interaction with the message will be a bit different too.

But I want to think specifically about the hubris of this.

Let's say you're an aging important pastor and someone invites you to speak at their event. They will be paying you an exorbitant speaker's fee, something that an evangelist should reject. And the least you can do is come up with some interesting material. Instead, you pick up your standard "evangelistic meeting" sermon - which, let's face it, you didn't even write. And you give that.

And, because this is purely performance art, everyone is happy. The speaker did what he was expected to do, the churches can be content that they put on another trouble-free event (really, they say that such things went, not well, but "無事に" - safely) and the Christians got to hear the big important speaker.

The non-Christians... well. At least the singing was nice.

If you've got a friend who's a plumber, is it reasonable to say "Can you just come around and have a look at my sink sometime?" Or maybe you have a friend who's a laywer. Would you say "Can you just defend this case for me when you have a spare moment?" Would you ask a painter friend "Do you think you could pop around and paint the outside of my house for me? I'll make you a cup of tea."

No, in most skilled disciplines you either

• learn how to do it yourself

• pay someone market rates to do it for you

For some reason, computers are different. Computer users don't need to learn how to fix problems themselves, or pay someone to do it if they know someone who can help them. Why should I fix my own problems when it's easier just to make it someone else's problem?

Amusingly, the worst offenders are career missionaries, who don't even have any skills to offer you in return...