The Archbishop of Canterbury preached today at the Holy Eucharist to celebrate 150 years of Nippon Sei Ko Kai, the Anglican Church in Japan. The service took place in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Mary, Tokyo.

The Anglican mission to Japan had it beginnings in the ministry of several giant figures. Foremost among these was Bishop Channing Williams, whose arrival here 150 years ago we celebrate today. But I want to pay tribute also to another of those great servants of God who shaped the character and direction — another bishop, from a famous clerical family in England, Edward Bickersteth. His dedication, his prayerfulness and his pastoral gentleness come through very clearly in the book that his brother wrote in his memory. And among the many vivid recollections contained in this book, one that stands out is a picture recorded by a visiting English clergyman, who describes Bishop Bickersteth taking a confirmation in a room in a large private house in Nagoya. What struck the visitor was simply that the bishop took off his shoes to confirm — a mark of his ready sensitivity to the customs of the country.

But this little picture is, I think, more than just a record of good social manners.  We could say that in many contexts the Christian mission arrived not only wearing heavy shoes but quite ready to tread on as many feet as possible. Perhaps mission is truly effective only when it comes with bare feet. Bare feet are often in Christian history a mark of poverty: we might think of the reforms of the Franciscan and Carmelite orders where the sign of a renewed commitment to simplicity of life has been a rule of going barefoot, or at least wearing only sandals. They are a mark also of being ready for discomfort or injury; and, as in the Bible, walking barefoot on your journey means that you will need someone to wash your feet for you at the journey’s end. But most of all in the Biblical world, to take off your shoes indicates that you are on holy ground: when Moses meets the Lord at the Burning Bush, he is told to take off his shoes, because the soil on which he stands is holy.

What does all this suggest about the marks of mission? Mission is effective when it is simple; when it comes without a heavy protective wrapping of someone else’s culture, someone else’s politics and power. European mission to Japan always had a complicated relationship to politics and power, to trade and money. The terrible seventeenth century persecutions that nearly destroyed Christian witness in Japan for generations arose partly from fears related to foreign ambitions; and the rivalries between different colonial powers, Dutch and Portuguese, did a great deal to put the authenticity of Christian mission in danger. The opening up of the country to Christian mission again in the nineteenth century was bound up with the opening of Japan to foreign trade and foreign cultural influence. And sometimes Japanese Christians were so eager to throw away the heavy shoes of foreign culture that they were ready for a while to put their feet into the new shoes of national ambition and patriotic aggression — just like the European Christians themselves.

Simplicity means walking lightly on the soil — not imposing foreign expression of faith, and not imagining either that faith must be tied inseparably to whatever the nation finds useful or acceptable at any one moment. The courage in recent decades of the Anglican Church in Japan in its readiness to express public grief and penitence over past errors and to seek reconciliation with victims has been an inspiration to so many; I recall with great emotion the liturgy at the 1998 Lambeth Conference at which the representatives of this church shared this spirit of repentance and generosity — and did so on the 6th of August, a day when others might well feel they needed to approach the Japanese people with repentance, in search of reconciliation.

Reconciliation comes when we learn to walk lightly, to let go of both the pride that cannot admit sins and errors and of the bitterness that cannot let go of past injury. This church has shown great grace in its ability to walk lightly in this way; and such freedom is a central aspect of the mission that it can exercise in this society and more widely. To walk lightly is also to understand that we do not have to depend for our value and meaning on achievement, past or present, but are welcome guests on the earth, held in the hands of a loving creator and redeemer. We do not have to struggle without ceasing, so as to keep ourselves safe and successful, since God supports us and promises his unfailing mercy, whatever befalls.

And this means that mission involves the readiness to be hurt by the stones in the soil, by all the ways in which reality fails to turn out as we might like it to; and to let our own skin and flesh be marked by the earth we walk on. Christ himself walks lightly on the earth, yet his feet are stained and bruised by the obstacles along the human journey — and at last they are wounded by the nails of rejection. When he is raised from the dead, his bare feet still show the marks of this journey into danger and suffering. If we walk with him, we shall seek to share his freedom, his light step on the earth, but we cannot expect to escape the bruises and the wounds.

Mission is most truly itself when it walks along the same road as those who are suffering in body or spirit. Only then does it walk the way of Christ. And once again, the Anglican Church here has shown a great readiness to stand with and walk with those who are forgotten or despised, the poor in city and country, women who have suffered violence, children and migrants. Walking in this way will not guarantee success or safety, but it will be a true fellowship with Jesus; without that true fellowship with him, there will be no true reaching out in love to others, and without reaching out to others there is no fellowship with him.

So this leads us into the third set of ideas that are associated with going barefoot — taking off your shoes because the ground is holy. Bishop Bickersteth, taking off his shoes so as to be at home in a traditional Japanese household, was doing something apparently very simple. But as a foreigner adapting to the custom of the country, he was also recognising that the home itself is a holy place, that another person’s welcome is a sign of God’s presence — and that a missionary needs to know that, wherever he or she goes, God has gone before and made the place holy. It is not that this or that country or culture is in itself holy in a way that no other is. But where God leads us in mission, he leads us into the holy space of human lives that he longs to touch and heal.

It has taken us a long time to learn this, but we do not walk into a new context as if we were taking God there for the first time. He always walks ahead of us; and true mission looks for the signs of where he has been and what he has done to prepare the way. Mission involves listening as well as speaking, listening before we speak, so that we can give proper reverence to the God who has made a path for us. Mission does not simply say a complete ‘no’ to what is in front of us, so that the ground can be cleared for God to come along behind us. It looks and listens for God and approaches those God wants us to encounter with the deepest respect and gratitude, so that we have a truthful idea of what the questions are that people are asking and what the needs are that they want to express. Mission means reverence for people.

So after one hundred and fifty years of Anglican presence in Japan, we are asked today, as we give joyful thanks for this heritage, to think about how we now approach this nation, this society, with the good news.

Simplicity comes first. We do not proclaim ourselves, says St Paul, we don’t offer ourselves as the answer to everyone’s questions. We bring the knowledge of the great gifts God has given in his promise of reconciliation and renewal, and we bring our own struggles to live in the atmosphere of reconciliation and renewal — pointing always to God as the one who begins the whole story and brings it to its full realisation. We learn to walk lightly and to travel light, grateful for the gifts of human culture but not making them an absolute.

Risk and solidarity come next. We don’t seek to protect ourselves, to do no more than keep the little circle of the Christian family warm and secure. We walk along the roads of human suffering, accompanying the lost and anxious and oppressed in the name of Jesus.

And reverence comes third. We approach our neighbours not with arrogance and impatience but with a readiness to learn and a willingness to rejoice in the rich texture of their human lives, individual and cultural. We look and listen for God in all that lies before us.

If we can continue in this ‘barefoot’ mission, we shall be opening ourselves up to the simplicity of Jesus himself and so to the transforming grace and beauty of his own mission. God has blessed Christians in Japan, not least Anglican Christians, with great courage, great endurance and great willingness to ‘walk lightly’. May God walk with us and speak through us as we seek to present to his beloved children in this country the possibilities of freedom and peace and hope, of meaningful and reconciled life, which the Good News of Jesus Christ offers to all.

The Road goes ever on and on 
Down from the door where it began. 
Now far ahead the Road has gone, 
And I must follow, if I can, 
Pursuing it with eager feet, 
Until it joins some larger way 
Where many paths and errands meet. 
And whither then? I cannot say.

— Bilbo in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings

It’s on DVD now, the 8mm home movie clip of my sister Vicki and me on Christmas Day in Okinawa in 1963. We are on the porch in front of our house, the door wrapped like a gift in silver foil, a big red ribbon on it cruciform and tied up in a bow. I am wearing my new holster and my six-shooters, my leather vest and cowboy hat, and she’s decked out in her new white dress and her new Mary Janes. Her hands adorned by her new white gloves she’s slapping me about the face and I’ve got my guns in my hands applying the butt-ends of those pistols to the top of her head which is coiffed appropriately for the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Then the silver door opens. And there is our mother in her cat eye glasses, lipstick and Christmas dress. She bends over and, pointing to the camera, says something to us — this was 8 millimeter film so there’s no audio. It’s evident she’s saying that Daddy is capturing all this on film, for we look both of us in the direction of the camera and quick as Jesse James I put my pistols in their holsters the way the gunslingers do, Vicki adjusts her dress while our mother fixes her hair, and the two of us put our arms about each other just so and walk arms around each other down the sidewalk to the car, the picture of two loving, happy, camera-fearing children.

What were we fighting about? We had come to blows over my sister’s anger at my having lost the key to her brand new roller skates. So we were not fighting over nothing.

Ten years later, a door opened to the Chapel of the post where we lived, White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. It was held open by the invitation of a friend, and under the auspices of the chaplain at the time, an Episcopal priest. The girl who went through it is not the same girl who came out. Vicki started to recognize that her life was lived under a beneficent eye, and not just the eye of her father looking through a camera. She began to live Coram Deo, as the monks use to say, before the face of God.

Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri home where he’s living this summer in Yokohama. [Follow his blog.] Behind that video chat there’s a story to tell.

My Japanese grandfather lived in New York City in the twenties. When I was at Saint Bartholomew’s in New York, I used to look out the window of my study onto Park Avenue and through a gimlet eye imagine my ojiisan standing there on the corner of Park and Fiftieth. Chances are good that he came into Saint Bart’s. It would have been one of the most physically imposing buildings on the Avenue back then. And he was a religious man. Later in life, he taught Bible studies in Yokohama.

He was a bespectacled and bookish linguist and something of an eccentric. Every morning he would pick up his violin at precisely seven o’clock, play it for fifteen minutes, not a minute more nor a minute less, and put it down whereupon my grandmother would hand him the lunch she’d made for him and send him out the door. He kept an English dictionary in the breast pocket of his coat, and every day on the train to work he would take the dictionary out of his pocket and read it. He was already fluent in English; he liked words is all. When my mother Akiko speaks to my children about her father, she always tells them, “Your father is just like him.”

His name was Yoshiharu Tamaoki. Born in Tokyo, he came to America to study first at Berkeley and then in the City of New York, a city he would always love. That doesn’t surprise me. New York, to those who love it, is like malaria. If it gets in your blood it stays there the rest of your life.

He lived in New York for more than five years. He never would have left it, my mother says, except for a telegram that came one day from Japan.  MOTHER DYING. STOP. MUST COME HOME. STOP. Where he lived in the city, the life he left, what ship he boarded: we don’t know any of these things. His papers about these years were lost in the war. But that message — words — changed his life. He dropped what he was doing, gathered a few things, not least himself, and exchanged virtually everything he had for passage home.

What he discovered when he got there was that his mother was fine. The telegram was a ruse made up by the family. They figured it was the only way sure to bring him home. Unless loneliness for her son can be counted as illness, his mother hadn’t been sick at all.

Yoshiharu didn’t return to America. He settled down. He married Kura, my grandmother, a country girl from Nagano. They began a family. Nobumasa. Kimiko. Akiko. Yoshiko. Eichi.

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States of America. My mother remembers how that news rushed to her house. When the story broke neighbors and colleagues of my grandfather descended on the Tamaoki home because everyone who knew him wanted to know what Yoshiharu-san thought. “He was reading the newspaper. He looked up from his newspaper and he said to them, ‘We will never win this war,’” my mother remembers. “There was a lot of excitement in the room, everybody was excited but not my father. He was so serious,” she says. Some thought he was being a pessimist. “No. I’ve lived in America. I’ve seen America. I know America. If you could know what I know, you would understand. We will never win this war.”

As he pointed out to me the other day, Billy Shand and my mother have something in common. Each of them has had an ancestral home destroyed by the United States government. Billy’s great great grandfather, The Rev. Peter Johnson Shand, was the rector of Trinity Episcopal Church, Columbia, South Carolina from 1833 to 1886. When Sherman burned Columbia in 1865, Trinity Church was spared but the rectory was burned to the ground. Eighty years later, Yokohama was made a moonscape by a high-altitude B-29 bombing on May 29, 1945. The Tamaoki family had already evacuated to the country. Yoshiharu had stayed behind. When he woke up on the 29th he felt sick. He didn’t have to go to work that day. But he went anyway. A man of discipline and routine, I imagine what happened. He picked up his violin at 7 o’clock, played it for fifteen minutes, set it down and thought, “I might as well go to work.” That’s where he was when the daylight bombs started falling on Yokohama.

When the bombing was over, he patted his chest to make sure he was all there. He still had his life and his dictionary. It took him days to find his house, not an easy thing to find when all the landmarks are gone. And finally when he did find it he found that all that was left of it was a pile of rubble in the middle of which was a bomb. It hadn’t exploded but it brought the house down.

So as I said, Gabriel ‘skyped’ us this morning from the Meiri home in Yokohama. He’s living with the Kazuaki and Tomoyo Meiri family while he continues Japanese language studies at the IUC. Tomoyo’s mother is my Aunt Kimiko.

In the spring of 2006, I traveled with my parents to Japan in celebration of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. My sister Vicki arrived at Tokyo’s Narita Airport, disembarking her plane even as I boarded mine for my flight returning to Potomac. She would be in Japan, with her son Kyle and daughter Naomi, for about 10 days.

After she got back to her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, she sent this email letter. She writes of the walk they took with my mother to a park in Ninomiya where our Aunt Kimiko lives, a beautiful walk I took with my parents when I was there with them. Ninomiya is on Japan’s east coast at the middle of the country. The park is at the top of a great bluff overlooking the Pacific. As if that sight weren’t magnificent enough to take in, you can turn inland, face west, and, on a clear day, “enjoy your eyes” (as the Japanese say) on the breathtaking sight of Fuji-san. This is a story about my Okasan. And it is a story about loving God and our neighbor.

My sister’s letter:

Mom, Naomi and I took a great walk on a beautiful day up the steep hillside in Ninomiya. Kimiko had shown us a shortcut that took us through a beautiful nature trail, around orchards, up nature steps and through bamboo fields to get to the site of the old castle in Ninomiya, the one that overlooks the bay and is surrounded by cherry blossoms and flowers. As I sat under a tree inhaling the view, I left Naomi to take photos and rest on the uppermost area catching the sights and sunshine.

I began to wonder what became of Mom after several minutes had passed. I walked back up to the spot and saw her talking intimately with a young man whom I had seen sitting on a bench rather pensively when we had first arrived. When I looked at Naomi quizzically, she said, “I think she’s saving that boy’s life.” We left Mom to her mission and she came over to us later in the field. She was troubled that the boy seemed despondent, staring without moving. She had heard that if someone is troubled and perhaps suicidal, it can take the encouraging words of anyone to bring them back to their senses.

In the truest form of Mom’s bold nature, she walked over, returning to him, and asked him if he was in some kind of trouble. He answered that yes, he was beginning his first day of university the next day and was deeply distressed about his “fashion” and this phase of his life. Mom spoke with him shared the gospel message, prayed with him, encouraged him about God’s love for him. Then, she left him to continue to ponder, and she came back to us.

A few minutes later, she walked back over for a time. We were nearby and she introduced us to him. We shook his hand and said hello, not knowing all that had transpired.

Later, she told us that she had forgotten to pray the sinner’s prayer with him and went back to ask if he would like to repeat that prayer after her. He told her that he would. So, on a beautiful hilltop on the site of an ancient castle overlooking the Pacific Ocean, our mother prayed with an 18 year old young man to receive Christ as his savior. We need to remember to pray for him, as well as all of our Tamaoki family.

As amazing as this story is, it amazed me also to learn that my daughter captured a beautiful photo of Mom praying with this boy with her hand around his back. I will try to send the photo, but will likely ask Naomi to do it for me. Of all the Japan photos, that is the one Kyle said he definitely wants a copy of. And so, I’m sure, will you all. He said, “That shows the real Grandma.”