The following is a sermon preached for the Iowa Preachers Project. In partnership with Mockingbird Ministries and with funding from the Compelling Preaching Initiative of the Lilly Endowment Inc., the Iowa Preachers Project focuses on building the body of Christ and on honing preachers’ skills in delivering compelling proclamation that brings the word of God to their congregations and the world beyond.
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When my husband, Andrew, and I moved with our son Zeke in 2018 to Japan to serve as missionaries, I did not want to be pastor again.
I had felt this way for more than a decade, after a very unhappy first call that lasted less than two years. We’d applied for Andrew’s job, anyway, for him to be a church history professor at Japan Lutheran College and Seminary. My job as pastor to the English Ministry of Tokyo Lutheran Church got tacked on last minute, a kind of bureaucratic bait and switch, because what ordained missionary accompanying her spouse was really gonna refuse to serve a poor little congregation that otherwise had no shot at hearing the gospel preached in English?
Even so, with that being my official call, I knew what my first job on arrival in Japan was: learn the language. I am heir of the Reformation, after all. “Vernacular” was one of my first long weird words because it mattered so much: everybody should and must have the Word of God in their own language.
Besides, the majority of the members of Tokyo Lutheran Church were Japanese-speaking Japanese people; my senior pastor was Japanese; and, for that matter, my convenience store- and post office-clerks, the smartly suited railway staff and the salarymen falling asleep on the train, and nearly every other human being I might meet and want to talk to, not least of all about Jesus, were all Japanese.
Obvious first task: learn Japanese.
Now let me warn you right now that this is not going to be an assimilation and contextualization success story. This story does not culminate with me learning Japanese. This particular story sputters to a stop when I realize that arigatou gozaimasu — “thank you” — covers 90% of the situations I find myself in, and therefore, two and a half years and fifty textbook lessons into it, trembling on the cusp of comprehension at long last, I give up.
Or rather, I acknowledge the indisputable fact that I have already given up.
Indulge me for a moment in blatant self-justification.
Let’s set aside the fact that the grammar of Japanese is so different from English that the active/passive distinction crucial to English verbs is baffling to them; and, in turn, the Japanese ability to speak without nouns, vaguely attributing action but not to any particular agent, is baffling to me.
Let’s set aside the fact that the syntax of Japanese is so different that an ordinary sentence will often unfold in the exact opposite word order from English.
Let’s set aside the fact that, beyond grammar and syntax, the culture of Japan is so different from ours that, even though Google Translate could give you a perfectly accurate rendering of what you want to say in Japanese, no Japanese person would ever, ever say that.
Let’s zero in, instead, on the written language. Written Japanese is a blend of three completely different writing systems — and that’s if you don’t count their use of the Roman alphabet as a fourth.
First there’s kanji, which are the pictographic characters borrowed from Chinese. They are so numerous and complex that even native Japanese schoolchildren are only expected to master 2,000 of them by the time they finish high school. Each kanji is itself a combination of component parts, which may not have any necessary relationship to the word’s meaning, so you can’t guess what each one means; you have to learn it by brute force. On top of that, each kanji has at least two ways of being pronounced, its Chinese original and its Japanese counterpart, so you have to be taught which way to say it in any given context.
The second writing system is hiragana: a curvy syllabary (not an alphabet) for rendering native Japanese words phonetically. The aforementioned kanji are so unpredictable that a tiny version of hiragana, called furigana, is often perched on top of the kanji so Japanese readers know how to pronounce them correctly. Books for small children are usually printed in hiragana only. You might wonder why Japan doesn’t just switch over to hiragana entirely. The reason is that the one and only easy thing about Japanese is its pronunciation, because it has an extremely limited set of sounds; but that also means it has an extremely large number of homophones. They still need the kanji to interpret the meaning of identically sounding words.
The third writing system is katakana, a whole separate syllabary. Unlike the curvy strokes of hiragana, katakana is spiky, like cuneiform: both look like they were designed for reeds dragged across wet clay. Katakana is used for species names, for the equivalent of italics, and above all for foreign loan words, like my personal favorite, doraibusuru — “drive-through.”
That might not seem like much, until you circle back to the need for a vernacular Bible. From place names like Sinai and Golgotha, to personal names like Moses and Jesus, to words so loved in their original form that they are untranslatable, like amen and alleluia, on every single page of every single Japanese Bible marches a whole host of katakana, that is, visually obvious foreign words.
Sheerly on account of the writing system, every page of a Japanese Bible shrieks at the reader: “This is a foreign religion, brought here by foreigners, meant for foreigners. It is not ours. It is not for us.” In a place that is insular in geography and culture alike, the vernacular is doomed from the start.
And that is one of many reasons why Japan remains the all-time greatest puzzler for Christian missions: no place has seen more personnel, money, time, or creativity devoted to it with visible less result.
Given this immense complexity of the Japanese language, what struck me most while settling into my new life in Tokyo was not the never-ending phalanx of high-rises, not the tacky flashing neon, not the sprawl that stretches from mountains to coastline. It was that Tokyo talks. Constantly!
Every surface is trying to talk to you. There is hardly an uninscribed spot anywhere in that city of 38 million. Warning signs, government notices, recorded messages speaking from shop shelves, advertisements that are not simple bright images as we prefer but dense paragraphs bristling with text: words, words, everywhere.
Which puts the foreigner — in my case, a triple foreigner; foreign in ethnicity, foreign in citizenship, foreign in religion — in a strange position. The city is screaming for my attention, desperate to break through my barriers, for its message to reach me.
But I have no faculty of reception.
I receive none of it.
The problem is mine, obviously. My job is clear: learn the language. Learn the damn language! Actually, that’s the conclusion the early Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier came to: the Japanese language, he said, is a product of the devil invented expressly to frustrate the transmission of the gospel. When I first got to Japan, loyal Lutheran that I am, I figured this was culturally insensitive Catholic colonialism as its worst. A couple years into I thought, Man, those Jesuits sure got some spiritual insight.
But Francis did learn the language — and I did not — and that’s the point: I knew what I needed to do, and I did not do it. In some powerful way that I still can’t quite explain or understand, I could not do it.
There were mitigating factors, of course: loneliness and isolation, a bigger cultural gap than I expected, covid, closed borders, and the sheer difficulty of Japanese: so many valid excuses. Except that my husband, despite being a fellow Lutheran and definitely not a Jesuit, learned the damn language anyway: living proof in my own home that it was possible.
But I could. Not. Do it. This did not fit my self-image.
I am competent. I work hard. I am especially competent and hardworking in my God-given field of theology and ministry and languages. And yet, after I had been sent by God to Japan as a missionary, all of these long and gratefully cultivated gifts ran aground, crashed, collapsed, and drowned in the tsunami of my utter inability to talk myself into doing my daily homework.
That’s right. I didn’t even get the glory of a spectacular crash! All that happened was that I could not bring myself to open my textbook and copy out the next sentence. Not one day, not the next, not the one after, until finally a month into it, I owned up to my language coach and then to my husband, who was rapidly acquiring the lingo and even teaching master’s level seminars in it, for heaven’s sake.
I was done. The whole world of Japan was closed off to me because I could not bring myself even to want to hear it, much less speak it. When Paul wrote that he had become all things to all people, I doubt he meant it the way I experienced it: I was as closed off to Japan as Japan was closed off to Christ.
I know you’re still waiting for the twist, some linguistic miracle akin to the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. Alas, I have scoured the scriptures, and that appears to have been a one-off for a very special occasion; like the resurrection itself, Pentecost is not a miracle to be repeated until the end times.
What happened instead is that the Lord took due notice of his lowly servant, slow of speech — at least where Japanese was concerned — and said, “Who gives speech to mortals, you or I?”
And then he opened my eyes, rather than my lips. And I saw the many bilingual members of my congregation eager to serve, who had succeeded willingly where I had failed even to will willingly. I saw the Japanese who made a point of worshiping in English. I saw fellow foreigners who’d actually acquired fluency.
The Lord God said: this is what my dumbstruck missionary needs; interpret for her! And interpret they did. With good courage and happy hearts. They undertook a major bilingual evangelistic project while I stood by and watched.
After that, reflecting on how few English-speaking preachers were around, I thought to ask: Do any of you want to try preaching, too, for when I go on vacation or furlough or something? Many volunteered. Some found once was enough. But others found a vocation in lay preaching and continued to grow in that calling and so supply the congregation’s need.
By then the Lord was really on a roll working around all my blockages and failures. Here’s another admission: I have no idea how to evangelize. I didn’t back home, so how much less in a country, culture, and language that I couldn’t bring myself even to want proficiency in. But that’s OK, because Jesus once again ignored my incapacity, or possibly (I was beginning to suspect) incapacitated me in order to get around me, and starting flinging people through our church doors.
An Estonian woman who was born right before the fall of communism (and so wasn’t brought to baptism in infancy by her parents), who moved to England for university, married a Japanese guy, and moved again to Tokyo before tumbling unexpectedly into faith and showing up two weeks before Easter pleading for baptism. Except for the Ethiopian eunuch, that was the world’s fastest catechumenate! And after her baptism, she never stopped beaming. Eventually I baptized her little boy, too, because he wouldn’t stop bugging his startled parents for the right to belong to Jesus, too.
Then there was the Canadian who’d moved to Japan to play drums for a death metal band, until one day the darkness couldn’t conceal itself anymore. Once he saw the truth of it, he rushed straight into the arms of Jesus his Lord, bringing his little children for baptism and telling everyone who’d listen about the One who has power over the darkness.
And then the Chinese. Streams of Chinese, already believers in China, tactically waiting to get out, showing up at Tokyo Lutheran either their first or second Sunday in Japan, announcing that they required baptism, and could I please tell them what to do?
Whether Estonian or Canadian or Chinese or even, on the rare and precious occasion, a Japanese in Japan, nearly all of them said the same: “I was walking along, minding my own business when God said to me, Read the Bible and go to church. So here I am. What now?” And before long, I was saying to whoever would listen that Jesus has finally realized that missions in Japan don’t work, so he’s started doing it himself.
And that is the point at which I became useful. I had been sent to them, but they also had been sent to me. By the time I realized how precious and miraculous the meeting between us was, I’d learned beyond all doubt that what they needed was the word of the Lord, plain and simple.
Then my lips were opened and I spoke, not in Japanese to be sure, but in that odd, truncated, simplified English you learn to use with non-native speakers. There was no guff or distraction or commentary or advice, and heaven help me, never an anecdote as long as this one!
There was just: Jesus Christ, son of Israel, was killed on the cross, but God his Father raised him on the third day.
And: You have been baptized into this Christ, and received his Holy Spirit, so you no longer live in the kingdom of darkness but in the kingdom of light.
And: All of your sins have been forgiven.
And: This is the body and blood of Christ, given and shed for you.
They heard, and they believed. And so did I. One time, I was talking a Chinese convert through the Creed and heard myself describing the ascension, and I started to wonder what kind of friggin’ lunatic I must be to buy into something like that. I ran out of words, embarrassed.
He said into my silence, “It’s wonderful.”
It is.
That gigantic chattering city goes on chattering, sometimes an analogy of God’s relentless communicativeness at our closed-off-ness and sometimes the foremost obstacle to God’s communicativeness. There are still plugged ears and silenced tongues, as many among Christians and pastors as unbelievers and outsiders. There are still lost opportunities and sorrowful failures.
I can’t explain why Japan doesn’t hear. I can’t explain why I couldn’t speak. What I do know is that God sears unclean lips and makes them fit to speak his words on his behalf. My lips; your lips; for his purposes, not ours; with and around and in spite of and sometimes even because of our failures.
You might have become acquainted with Romans 10 as the charter of your calling as pastor and preacher. It probably meant a lot to you, gave you the confidence and boldness you needed to go through with it. But also, what pressure. How will they hear without someone to proclaim to them? Namely, you?
But let me proclaim some good news to you proclaimers: Romans 10 is not about you and your ability to live up to your calling. Romans 10 is the assurance that the Lord Jesus will have preachers, and he will make them happen, whatever it takes.
If that means speaking out of Balaam’s ass, or out of the sky, or at Shibuya Crossing, or in a prison cell, he will have preachers.
By all means, give him the best you’ve got. But also give him your failures, your embarrassments, your character flaws, your vain pride, and your pitiful excuses. He will use them, too, to get his preaching done. He will raise up others to preach whatever you have failed to say.
Preaching will happen. With you. Because of you. Even in spite of you.
What a relief. Amen.
