Let Your Hearts Not Be Troubled

Jan 17, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Philip Turner

 "It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of God."  (Lamentations 3:26)

"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more."  (Rev. 21: 4)

"Let your heart not be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me."  (John 14:1)

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.
 
We have come together to pay tribute to The Rev. Dr. Frank Eiji Sugeno, to mourn his death, to give thanks for his life, and to commend him to the care and mercy of God.  It may well be the case that Frank would be made more than a little uncomfortable about our gathering.  He never courted the attention of others, he always sought to deflect it when it came his way. To be sure, Frank would want us to pray and give thanks to God, but not to dwell over much on him.  But today he will have to put up with our attention if for no other reason than we need to say by some public display how important he has been in our lives.  When asked by the Seminary of the South West for a comment on Frank's life, I had no trouble knowing what to say.  "Frank Sugeno was a healing presence in the lives of more people than we will every know."

Because I am one of the many who knew this presence, and because in the deepest sense of the word he was my friend I have thought much about his life in the last few days.  I have asked myself what gave his life its peculiar qualities and this thought came to me again and again.  His ability to understand and value the peculiarities of each of our lives is in part due to the peculiarity of his own.  Born to an immigrant couple from Japan, stripped of family property and interned along with thousands of other Japanese Americans during the Second World War, yet drafted into its armed forces. His time in the army not only interrupted his education, it also led to a case of tuberculosis, a disease that left his lungs weak and no doubt shorted his life.

Experiences such as these would leave most of us bitter, but when Frank spoke of those years it always seemed to me that he was describing a blessing and not a curse.  During his time in the camp, he met Joe Kitigawa who after ministering in the camps became Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School.  Joe had a magnetic influence on all of us who knew him, but particularly on Frank.  Because of Joe's influence, Frank became a Christian and later was ordained as an Episcopal Priest.  He went on to teach here at the Virginia Seminary, to serve as a curate at St. Albans Parish where he met and married Ruth, and then he dragged her away to the wilds of Texas to teach for 30 years at the Seminary of the South West.  From there in the strange expanse of the South West Frank went on to a life of unusual accomplishments.  He would find it embarrassing for me to rehearse them all, so I will not.

I will say, however, that in this far away from home place, Frank taught all who knew him that, as Lamentations says, "It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord."  I am not sure how Frank learned this very un-American but thoroughly Christian characteristic.  Those who wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord are rare birds in our activist and extroverted culture.  But Frank knew in his bones that life can not be grabbed--that in respect to the important things we can not take God's kingdom by force but we must wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

It is because he knew the truth of Jeremiah's wisdom that I have come to think of Frank as a saint.  I do not mean one of those anorexic, pale and gaunt figures that are supposed to inspire us but in fact make us draw back. I do not mean a person who does some great and holy deed.  I do not mean a person of rigorous spiritual discipline who brings us news of mystical ecstasies. I do not mean a champion of justice for the downtrodden.  I just mean a person of flesh and blood like us who knew and lived something we all need to learn, namely, that it is good that we should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Yes, I think of Frank as a saint, but that in my mind in no way turns him into an abstraction-some generalized sort of person, a holy man without qualities.  For each of us he was first and foremost Frank.  I will not speculate about what being Frank meant to his family-to Ruth, and David, and Kimi, and Mark.  There is a circle of privacy that should be drawn about all families so that they can be what they are apart from prying eyes.  I will say, however, that many of us were fortunate to spend hours under their roof where we enjoyed easy hospitality, many laughs, serious conversation, and the shear blessing of good and constant friends.  And there we did catch a glimpse of the love Frank had for his wife and of the appreciation he had for the unique qualities of each of his children.  Frank was always content to allow them to be who they would be.

And we all knew that he had the same sort of appreciation for the unique qualities he saw in each of us.  He knew how to let us be who we would be.  He knew, in his relations with us, that it was a good thing that he and we should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.  And because he waited with us, he became a healing presence in the lives of more people than we will even know. His students knew this about him.  His colleagues knew this about him.  They knew that he had no desire to force them into a mould.  He only wanted them to wait patiently for the Lord so that He might use them for his purposes rather than their own.

These have been my reflections, but they have raised a further question.  How did Frank, a man of flesh and blood, come by this saintly quality?  In part he came by it through a personal history that was a living testimony to what happens when one waits quietly for the salvation of the Lord.  But biography cannot explain all there is to say about Frank's view of life and his saintly quality.  His conversion gave him a way of looking at the world that many of us never learn.  Frank was not want to say a lot about his own theological beliefs.  He was always more interested in what others had to say.  But he did say to me on more than one occasion that William Temple's idea of a sacramental universe formed the core of his convictions.  For Frank, if we could see it, the world was transparent to a dimension beyond its own circumference.  For Frank, the stuff of life could carry the presence of God and so take on meanings beyond our normal understanding.  If you will, for Frank, eternity was not to be measured by time.  Rather time was to be measured by eternity.

And I suspect that in part it is this vision that led him to choose the reading from Revelation that Nancy Long just read.  In John's vision eternity measures time. He sees a new heaven and a new earth.  He would have us see our heavens and our earth through his vision of a new heaven and a new earth.  He would have us understand that no matter what we face, the true state of our lives is that God himself will be with us, and he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying any more, for the former things have passed away.  That is true right now if you can see it.

If time is measured by eternity, if a new heaven and earth shine though the stuff of the old, if the stuff of our lives can become transparent to the purposes and presence of God as they did for a man who spent his teenage years in a concentration camp, then one can indeed wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.  And Frank could do that!  And because he could do that, he could help us do the same.  He could help us give up our attempts to take life by force and wait quietly for the good God has in store for us.

But Frank is gone from us now.  What shall we say when we lose such a man from among us?  For his family and friends it is as if a huge hole has opened in the universe.  The hole marks the place once occupied by Frank Sugeno.  This is a hole no one can fill, and the loss of such a man brings a level of pain that lies near the limits of endurance.  Frank understood pain and the limits beyond which it is unendurable.  That is why, I believe, he chose the passage his son David read to us from the Gospel of John.  Knowing that we would stand before the hole created by his death, the man who knew how wise it was to wait quietly for the Lord and who saw time from the view of eternity, pointed us to Christ's words of comfort.  "Let your hearts not be troubled; believe in God, believe in me."  John reminds us here that Christ himself has passed through the hole death brings, and that he has gone to the Father so that we might also go there. He reminds us to look at time from eternity.  He reminds us that Frank will be raised up as will we.  He reminds us that not one hair of Frank's head will be lost.  He reminds us that Frank's healing presence and the love he gave each of us are kept by God and will be given back to him in a new life that is blessed and radiant and, as in this one, full of the presence of God.

                                                Amen.

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