Naomi Osaka: Who do people say that I am?

Naomi Osaka: Who do people say that I am?

July 25, 2021

For Beloved Community and Mountain Community Mennonite Churches

©Vernon K. Rempel, 2021

Bible reading:

Mark 8:27-30

Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’ And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.

Jesus does not give too much away

Jesus does not like to give too much away

about his personal identity.

He’s always using the mysterious phrase

“The son of man” in reference to himself,

and does not like any titles of higher honor.

In this passage, Peter tries out “Messiah”

and gets a stern warning not to

spread that around.

Jesus is not interested in being worshiped

by the adoring crowds or being

put up on a pedestal,

although that is exactly what

the Christian movement

later proceeded to do.

Much more than this, Jesus wants people

to understand God’s love and God’s peace,

and, I think, to understand

the way Jesus walks around.

It is “follow me” much more than “admire me.”

Follow me among all God’s people:

lepers, women at wells, heartbroken centurions.

In fact, let’s just be in community

with everyone we can.

Let’s not get too excited about

all this Messiah stuff.

But then of course he turns around

and teaches beautifully or people

get healed and so it is tempting

to put him back on the pedestal.

Naomi Osaka does not give too much away

Naomi Osaka does not like to give away

too much either. She is not a woman of

many words, although she answers

the many interview questions

with good, thoughtful answers.

She doesn’t give any of the sports cliche’s like:

I just get out there to give 110%.

It’s not about winning but just playing the game.

(She knows it’s about winning, for her.)

And she can’t say “there’s no “I” in team,

because it’s tennis!

She is elegant with her words.

But she doesn’t give too much away.

And she has a lovely smile.

But she doesn’t give that away

too often either.

She is a contained young woman, I think,

finding her way.

She learned some of this from her mother:

Naomi: Do you think that by age 22 I would have done more…

Mom: Shakes her head

Naomi: …or is this acceptable?

Mom: More than acceptable.

Her mother then speaks some responses in Japanese

and does make a nice little speech on the

occasion of Naomi’s birthday.

But she also is self-contained.

And her father makes a nice little speech.

Does Naomi have the twinkle in her eyes

from her father?

You can tell she’s taken in

joy and determination

from her parents.

She does not refuse to answer questions

in this documentary

(as she has more recently).

But she does not waste words.

But then she turns around

and and beats the amazing Serena Williams

to win the 2018 U.S. Open.

So people want her words.

But she will not lord it over others.

She might have the “champion mentality.”

But she does not have the messiah mentality.

When she beats the 15-year-old Coco Gauff

in the 2019 U.S. Open, she invites

her to share in the post-game interview.

It is tearful, sweet, and generously graceful.

There’s more grace than messiah complex there.

She said she cared about how Gauff

felt leaving the court. That’s just kind.

Who is Naomi Osaka?

She is graceful and a winner.

But then she gets bumped

from the 2019 U.S. Open

by Belinda Bencic.

Afterwards, she goes on Ellen Degeneres’ show

and answers Ellen’s first question

with one word: “yes.”

She does like to give too much away.

But who is this self-contained young woman?

She is a world-class tennis player

but like everyone else,

she has to figure out what she’s

showing up for in this world.

How does she plan to enter the world?

“Who is Naomi Osaka?”

It’s not an easy question.

I don’t know how much each

of us thinks about it,

but probably some, in any case.

What have I been doing in my life?

What do I hope to do?

What do I long for?

What would I like to let go of

and what would I like

to change going forward?

Jesus famous asks his disciples:

“Who do people say that I am?”

Is this a mid-point gut-check

in Jesus’ public movement?

People are saying all kinds of things:

John the Baptist, back from being

recently executed by Herod.

Elijah, who famously never died

but was “taken up” into heaven

in a whirlwind, like he was from Kansas. (2 Kings 2)

And maybe Jesus was

one of the prophets.

When Jesus asks the disciples directly

“Who do you say that I am?”

Peter bravely answers “You are the messiah.”

Jesus does not confirm or deny,

but doesn’t want this name spread around.

Why is Jesus so cagey

about the word “messiah?”

Some say it was because Jesus

didn’t want any more trouble

than he already had.

Some say it was all about timing:

Jesus was not going to say “messiah”

until after the resurrection.

But even then, he really doesn’t much.

There is some talk about Messiah,

but nowhere does Jesus go around saying

“I am the messiah so you better give me some respect.”

Jesus had to work out how he would

show up in the world. He clearly chose

humility, peace, healing,

anger over injustice.

Tennis great Naomi Osaka,

very young, 22 going on 23,

has a losing streak.

Her coach says that she

forgot who she was.

He noted that as long as she stays calm,

focuses on her breathing; keeping her clarity”

she’ll be fine.

When you are a champion like Osaka,

you want to win. You are driven to win.

Winning is what she wants to do.

Anything less is a big letdown for her.

Yes, she can be a cultural icon,

a fashion model,

the first Asian global tennis champion,

but she wants to win.

And yet, she can’t allow that

to create a storm in her heart.

Anxiety, and a willfulness about winning,

including temper and despair, will not do it.

She has to find her calm.

She has to understand her clarity.

Let’s consider that word “clarity.”

“Clarity” is a big word in emotional systems studies.

It is often opposed to “certainty.”

Certainty is when I’m sure I’m right

and I need to be right, and don’t get in my way.

Clarity is having the strength of vision

to understand where I want to go

and why that matters.

Certainty quickly becomes anxious.

Clarity makes you calm.

Certainty makes you want to fight to be right.

Clarity gives you the calm

of a generous pathway forward.

Now, once again, Naomi Osaka

remembers who she is,

part-way through a critical match….

She is really hacking the balls

into the net. Soon, it’s her

last chance to gain a win.

The announcer notes ominously,

“You can’t say it’s over, but it’s pretty dire.”

But then she “enters the world” with her clarity.

And she volleys a series of resounding

serves and returns, the balls popping

off her racket.

And there she wins again.

It is amazing to get clarity

about how you want to show up in the world.

It’s not easy. And it may come and go.

But wow, when it shows up,

it’s like wind under the wings.

Osaka for Black Lives Matter

Osaka is also a cultural leader,

the first Asian & black global tennis champion.

In 2020, she shows up for the Cincinnati Open

in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

She refuses to play until they delay

the match for a day.

One person notes that she’s the only

player that’s ever shut down tennis for a day.

She subsequently shows up at matches

with a different mask each time,

with the names of seven people

killed by the police.

She notes that its unfortunate that

seven masks is not nearly enough:

Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain,

Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin,

George Floyd, Philando Castile,

Tamir Rice.

Here’s a link that describes the situation

of each one killed.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/11/tennis/naomi-osaka-us-open-face-mask-spt-intl/index.html

She was named one of the

Sports Illustrated sportspersons of the year

in 2020, for her participation

in the protests.

I think that when Jesus asks

the disciples “who do people say that I am?”

he is also asking them

who they are. This is implied

in his direct question:

“Who do you say that I am?”

The question that surrounds

that wonderful question is

“Who are you?” “Who are you

in all this?” “How are you

going to respond?”

“How are you going to show up?”

“How are you going to enter the world?”

And as the poet David Whyte so

brilliantly says, it’s not a matter of

the several steps down the road.

It’s the next step. It’s the next

step that is there for you to take.

Naomi Osaka had to remember

who she is, how she is

going to enter the world,

both to play, and to lead

as a young multi-ethnic woman

in a world full of opportunity and pain.

When Jesus asks

“Who do you say that I am?”

he is asking, what’s the next

step you’re going to take?

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Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Move Like Rahab

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Move like Rahab

July 18, 2021

For Beloved Community and Mountain Community Mennonite Churches

©Vernon K. Rempel, 2021

Bible reading:

Joshua 2:1-6

Then Joshua son of Nun sent two men secretly from Shettem as spies, saying, ‘Go, view the land, especially Jericho.’ So they went, and entered the house of a prostitute whose name was Rahab, and spent the night there. The king of Jericho was told, ‘Some Israelites have come here tonight to search out the land.’ Then the king of Jericho sent orders to Rahab, ‘Bring out the men who have come to you, who entered your house, for they have come only to search out the whole land.’ But the woman took the two men and hid them. Then she said, ‘True, the men came to me, but I did not know where they came from. And when it was time to close the gate at dark, the men went out. Where the men went I do not know. Pursue them quickly, for you can overtake them.’ She had, however, brought them up to the roof and hidden them with the stalks of flax that she had laid out on the roof.

Isaiah 30:7

For Egypt’s help is worthless and empty,

   therefore I have called her,

   ‘Rahab who sits still.’

Run trailer for Ma Rainey….

Rahab and Ma Rainey

In our movie for this week

Ma Rainey moves.

She’s an agent of change,

and agent of art,

a creator, a mover!

We’re not going to talk

about the title or what all

Ma Rainey’s going to show us.

That’s her song and her pun.

But it shows us the sauce

and the attitude that she

brought into a world which

both loved her and feared her,

in the 1920s, loved and feared

her dark-skinned body and

her presence and her music.

Things happen when she’s around,

not always smoothly,

not always easy and certainly

not what others always want.

But amazement and wonder happen,

the music is just too glorious.

It’s the blues that is striking the earth

like lightening. As you watch her

audiences in the movie, the music

is clearly like food for the soul.

Someone once said,

maybe it was Walter Brueggemann,

that the Bible likes people who move.

You don’t have to be nice:

Moses, Miriam, Deborah, Amos,

did not eat their jello

and mind their manners.

Even young Mary,

the mother of Jesus,

unleashed a powerful

song of liberation

upon learning of her destiny.

Not nice; but they move.

Rahab is a woman who moves.

And she was not nice,

or polite or easy to understand.

She is in the town of Jericho,

in the red light district, as it were.

So she’s probably carrying some

trauma, she may well not be

the toast of the town at

the mayor’s annual ball.

She lives on the edge of town.

Her home was part of the wall

of the city (this was the wall

that later came tumbling down –

the battle of Jericho).

Now these spies arrive

and need her help.

She gives her help but,

if you read on in the story,

she makes sure she has God’s blessing.

Then she hides them under

flax bundles on her roof.

When she asks if they need

anything else, they say,

No, thank-you, “just the flax ma’am.” (Dragnet)

Their lives are saved.

And Rahab is one of the five women

in the genealogy of Jesus

in the gospel of Matthew (Matthew 1:6)

where she is listed as the

great-great-grandmother of King David.

There’s a great blues song about moving.

Sing the song – “You got to move.”

Rahab moved.

She is definitely not

“Rahab sitting still.”

I never knew this until

I did research for this sermon:

“Rahab sitting still” is what

Isaiah calls Egypt, who he says

is no good help to Israel.

Don’t go after Egypt,

they’re like “Rahab sitting still.”

The Bible likes people who move.

Not like Cain, of course.

Not like the people building

the proud tower of Babel.

But definitely like Ezekiel and Elisha,

and Hannah and Elizabeth

and of course Paul, who,

while moving down the road to

Damascus, gets hit by the light.

The blues

In our movie,

the blues hits the town,

the world, like lightening,

like the light. It is electric,

it makes you want to move.

The blues makes you

want to be Biblical, perhaps?

The Bible likes people who move.

The blues helps you want to move.

There are two bits of foreshadowing in the movie

that just give you the shivers:

One is the yellow wingtips

that the young trumpet-player buys.

The other is the music he composes

and which he keeps pointing out

he is going to record with

Sturdyvant – the man who

owns the recording studio.

I felt the atmosphere shift

immediately in both cases.

They were little shock-waves

of decision and assumption and hope

that are soon to become

life-destroying shock-waves.

Ma Rainey has come on the

southern music scene like

sauce on ham.

The movie shows segregated audiences

moved and moving to the music.

Now she and her band

come north to record in Chicago.

She’s famous and a bit of a star.

The police try to give her trouble

but her recording manager

smooths it over.

But you feel the tension

crackling in the air.

The blues is coming around,

but the heat and humidity

of prejudice and power weigh heavily.

I won’t tell you what happens

with the yellow wingtip shoes.

I’ll just say that the piano-player

has the sweetest old face

I’ve ever seen. I loved his face.

The wingtip shoes get on a

collision course with that face.

I will tell you that the songs

that the trumpet player

believes he’s going to record

are basically stolen from him.

That echoes down into

all the stealing that has gone on

and goes on. Breaking treaties,

locking up bodies and using those bodies

to harvest cotton,

taking away a path to citizenship

for Chinese people who

built the first railroads.

Stealing the fruits of labor,

stealing the means of livelihood,

stealing the heart of creativity.

In our movie, the stealing is individual,

but it feels so large,

the betrayal that you fear

is coming, does come.

The songs are bought

for a small sum rather than

being cued up for a recording contract.

It is disrespect. It is betrayal.

It is stealing the fruit of labor,

of creativity. Layered upon

other more horrific memories

of indignity, violence, and disrespect,

the results of this stealing are horrifying.

Later on, a smooth all-light-skinned

band of smooth men

is recording one of the songs,

the stolen labor of the trumpet player.

But Ma Rainey keeps on moving,

keeps on opening the path

through the red sea of

old American culture all around her.

She has something new,

something that frees us and

and helps us really feel something.

Perhaps you know the saying:

“Beer is a sign that God loves us

and wants us to be happy.”

My version of that is

“The blues are a sign that God loves us

and wants us to feel real things.”

God wants us to feel.

God wants us to move.

God wants us to move like

Rahab, the ancestor of Jesus,

one who helped make it all possible

by the way she moved.

Ma Rainey made it all possible too,

became one of the ancestors

of the blues and rock and roll

and soul and hip hop

and even folk and country stylings,

part of the great stream

of this strange gift

we call the blues.

May we also move

whenever it is our time

to move. The Bible

likes those who move.

Play “You got to move.”

Addendum (not preached)

The blues rang a bell

in the infrastructure of my soul.

Not when I was a teenager.

When I was 7, in 2nd grade.

My mother taught me how

to play piano properly.

My father played

Saints go marchin’ in

without music.

That caught my attention

both for the no-sheet-music

but also for the sound.

He played a very simple version,

but there was something

in it that told my soul

this is your heart,

this is your song.

My mother used to also

sing choruses in the kitchen,

and that’s also the blues,

in another form.

There are light-skinned blues players

like Eric Clapton, Joe Bonamassa,

Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show,

not to mention the Rolling Stones.

And more dark-skinned blues players

like Louis Armstrong, Trombone Shorty

(age 35, began playing trombone at age 4),

Miles Davis, Robert Johnson,

Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, Otis Redding.

But those are all men.

The women have tended to sing.

The devastating Billie Holiday,

Ethel Waters, Aretha Franklin,

Diana Ross, the heart-breaking Eva Cassidy,

and the one I didn’t know about

until now – Ma Rainey.

Where did the blues come from?

Tributaries in the rural south

where people with no formal

music education had a lot

to say with music.

It is a feeling in the gut

that things are both not at all right

and things are just right.

To say it and play it

is just right, if there’s nothing else.

It is the song of the lonely heart,

the broken heart, and also

the heart that jumps for the other,

the heart leaping toward

the fires of human connection.

Blues moves like the soul

and like a machine,

a heartbeat that sounds

like only this place and like infinity.

Blues is the music of

the disenfranchised

welling up with the waters

that rise in the desert

and now trees and flowers

grow and beasts are fed.

Blues is old African beats

and gospel turns

and a band in the streets

that got lost far from France.

Blues will have you

if you’ll have it,

it can carry a load

when nothing can,

like prayer, it is what you do

when nothing else will do.

There is an anti-blues radiation.

When there is prejudice

in the air, and it is

enacted by people

who can act because

they have a measure of power,

then this radiation

can burn away at

someone’s strength,

making them into something smaller

than God intended,

making them subservient.

Men to dominant men,

women to men,

darker skinned people

to lighter skinned.

It is a distortion created by

systems that rely on dominance

rather than love in order to exist.

And it is devastating.

Black and white is a lie,

yet within this lie

women with darker skin color

die in child-birth at a much

higher rate than lighter-skinned women.

There is no biological reason apparent.

It seems to be the result of cumulative

stress from having darker skin

within the lie of black and white.

And the lie of female and male.

Vaginas and penises are one thing.

Making body forms into

overly narrow social constructions

and destinies is quite another.

Something in the air resists

“be whoever you want to be.”

That’s not controlled enough

for the gods of the air.

There has to be, in the

minds of the small gods,

a tighter pattern, a conformity,

like L’Engle’s “It”,

something that compresses,

and arranges until all

diversity is scrubbed out.

A good note:

“What I think the political correctness debate is about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.”

—Toni Morrison

The definers and the defined.

Walter Brueggemann says that the

royal theology wants us to be numb,

wants us to stay numb

within fixed definitions.

There’s always a force in the air,

in the community, that wants us to

just sit still, be quiet, and deal with it.

But not everything is okay.

And some things are wonderful.

We want to cry and we want to laugh.

But those always mean change.

And change is not always easy

for any of us to sign up for.

That’s the blues.

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Minari

Minari: You shall love the alien

July 11, 2021

For Beloved Community and Mountain Community Mennonite Churches

©Vernon K. Rempel, 2021

Bible reading:

Leviticus 19:33-34

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.

I Peter 2:10

Once you were not a people,

   but now you are God’s people;

once you had not received mercy,

   but now you have received mercy.

At the beginning of the movie Minari,

spelled “M-i-n-a-r-i,”

we are riding in a car

with an Asian family

past fields of baled hay,

The car is following

an old moving truck.

They turn onto a gravel road.

There are cows, scattered trees, barns.

Now the trees are thick.

Now they emerge from

the belt of trees,

and the lane has narrowed.

It is all green, leaves, grass,

not so much beautiful as remote.

Now the camera reveals to us

a large trailer home,

an elongated beige rectangle,

amid the uninteresting greenery.

It rests there like an alien craft

on a lonely planet.

It is not attractive.

It may be usable.

We don’t know yet.

There are no steps up to

the door of the trailer,

which is raised several feet

above the ground because

of the wheels nesting underneath.

The family gets out of the car,

the father gets out of the truck

which has been leading them.

The children are fascinated by the wheels.

But the mother asks the question

which we surely all must

have in mind, seeing this little journey:

“What is this place?”

The father answers,

with what feels like devastating brevity,

“Our new home.”

Watching this movie

in the wake of our pandemic year,

one can’t tell if what awaits

the family is boredom or terror.

Is it just an old trailer

in a rural field?

Will Asian people be welcome?

Is this a movie about farming,

racism, or something else altogether?

They are aliens in a strange land,

to echo the Biblical language.

In our reading from Leviticus,

the writers of this book –

priests writing in the voice of God –

make clear that God intends

for the people to welcome the alien.

The people also were aliens in Egypt.

They know, if they remember,

the experience of coming

into a land that had not been theirs.

The reading from I Peter echoes

this beautifully for its context,

which is a mixing of cultures

in a new church.

“Once you were not a people,

   but now you are God’s people.”

What will our Asian family,

arriving at the beige trailer

in what we learn is rural Arkansas,

experience.

Will there be a welcome?

What will it mean for them

to be “God’s people”

in a place where they had not been a people?

I want to explore different parts

of their story from the point of view

of each of the main characters.

The girl

I’ll begin with the girl.

The story is not written

from her memories.

The story is a from the memoir

of the boy.

So her role is somewhat

to be the “other” in the story,

the other sibling,

the other gender child,

the older sibling in whose

first-child presence

the boy grows and forms.

She is somewhat protective

of the boy, who we quickly learn

has a medical condition.

She is the one who will precede

the boy into second generation

American adulthood.

Their parents are from Korea.

They are to be from the United States.

She teeters on the early edge of adolescence.

Her womanhood will arise now

in this trailer, on this farm,

in Arkansas of the United States.

What will that womanhood be?

We pray she will be strong

and that her world will

receive her gifts, which for now

are mysterious and new.

The boy

Now the boy.

The story is written from his perspective

as a young child in a new

and strange place.

It is based on the memoir

by writer and director

Lee Isaac Chung.

We soon learn that the boy

is told not to run.

His mother regularly

listens to his heart.

He is a young boy

deep in rural Arkansas,

living with a serious heart defect.

But since it is written from his perspective,

we experience the world spilling

into his experience:

the odd house with wheels,

the enormous grass field

where he wants to run but his

vigilant mother warns him not to,

the water-well that his father digs by hand,

the line of trees forming a goal

toward which he wants to go,

if not running, then insistent with curiosity.

The father

The father is a young Korean man.

As the family returns from shopping

in town he looks up

and remarks:

“That’s strange. The sky is green.”

Anyone who has lived in areas

of dangerous thunderstorms

knows green is a danger color.

One explanation is that powerful thunderstorms

often form late in the afternoon,

when the low-angle light gives the sky

a faint reddish cast.

But the air under a 12-mile-high thunderhead

is deep blue. Scattering red light

onto blue apparently can produce green.

Have any of us seen this sickly green

storm sky?

Now the family in their strange trailer

feels the full force of wind and rain.

The TV is tracking a tornado.

Then the electricity goes off.

The father wants to farm on the land.

It is good soil, but farming is not easy,

let alone for a stranger in a strange land.

As with the thunderstorm,

risk and uncertainty crackle in the air.

The mother

The mother.

You may recall that the mother,

upon seeing their beige trailer

and lonely field asks,

“What is this place?”

The look on her face is a mix

of puzzlement, disbelief, that

quickly spirals down

to disgust.

As the storm assails the trailer,

she and the father get into a

towering cloud of an argument.

This was nothing like she expected.

One wonders what he told her

before they made this move.

This breach in their relationship

widens and widens.

She is concerned for the boy

and his heart.

They are far from medical facilities.

She thought they were going

to work in a chicken factory.

They will, but the father’s

great plan, apparently not well-explained to her,

is to farm the land.

The grandmother

The grandmother.

The young couple decide to

bring her mother from Korea

to look after the children.

The boy must now share a room

with his grandmother.

He is very angry.

He lashes out, with age 7 fury,

“Grandma, you’re not a real grandma.

They bake cookies.

They don’t swear.

They don’t wear men’s underwear.

But she is the one who takes

David over to forbidden woods,

too far for him to go.

The sister frets protectively.

But the grandma just walks on.

Soon she finds a shallow stream,

and declares it to be perfect for growing minari.

Minari is a water celery.

It is popularly eaten in South Korea,

and is a peppery, turf-like, bitter plant.

She takes her grandson with

his heart defect to a place where

these plants will grow.

And they do.

And so does he.

But you will have to watch

the movie to see what happens.

It is not a plain path.

It is a storm path.

But the minari grows and grows.

The neighbor

Finally, the neighbor.

He is a true eccentric.

They meet when he delivers the used tractor

that the father has purchased.

But he quickly talks himself

into a job helping the new family.

He says,

“You know it’s funny…;

the minute I saw you,

I knew we were going to be friends.”

And at the conclusion of the conversation

he makes a strange request:

“Can I pray?”

And without waiting, he proceeds to pray

a prayer of gratitude for the family.

And then he starts to speak in tongues.

And then he ends with a glorious

string of five “yeses”:

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

I thought of the voice of God

at creation saying,

It was good, it was good, it was good,

over and over.

This strange man is a blessing.

He is the stranger welcoming the stranger,

Much later, he is sitting down

to eat with the family

in their trailer.

The mother says,

“You are our first guest here.”

He eagerly replies, “I’m honored.”

After dinner he offers a water-blessing

for the lintels and doors of the home.

He has said “yes” to them

but more than that to the life

God, in his view,

has for all of them.

You may watch to see how

they find their way to that “yes.”

The minari is a sign,

but a living sign that nourishes,

like grain for bread at the table.

Our Bible readings shimmer

with the insights that make this “yes” possible:

“…you shall love the alien as yourself.”

“Once you were not a people,

   but now you are God’s people….”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” Amen

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