The Work Goes On

Communion Meditation on the Stewardship of our Lives

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

—from Rev. 21:6

Sadako Sasaki was a two year old girl living about a mile from ground zero when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. She had symptoms of radiation sickness most of her life, and was diagnosed with leukemia in August of 1955. During one of her many long stays in the hospital, her best friend visited her, cut a piece of gold paper, and folded it into a bird. She then reminded Sadako of the Japanese legend that the person who folds a thousand origami cranes will have a wish granted—usually a wish for healing. And so Sadako began folding paper cranes. She had a great deal of free time, but not much paper, and so the going was very slow. She used every scrap of paper she could get her hands on and folded hundreds of cranes. But by October 1955, Sadako had folded only 644 cranes when she finally succumbed to her illness and died.* This wasn't the end of her story, however; her friends took up the task of folding her origami cranes and transformed her wish from one for healing to one for peace. And so it is that paper cranes have since that time come to represent a kind of prayer that the unfinished work of peacemaking might be continued from one generation to the next.

Regardless of our nationality, when Christians hear the story of Sadako and her friends, it is difficult to separate people according to their religion, imagining that God hears the prayers of people who belong to our faith, while ignoring the prayers of others. Sickness and death are as much a reality for Christians as they are for non-Christians, and many of us like to believe that, in Christ, death was transformed for all God’s creation, not just for a chosen few. Our task as the living is to continue the transformational work of those who have gone before, joining together with God in the work of creation and re-creation, that this world might be a better place: a place more able to identify with the Christ who taught that God loved all people and who himself loved unconditionally, who refused to condemn others or react in violence in order to defend himself, who forgave his enemies, and who died knowing that his death would plant the seed of a new and beloved community.

We are that community… or at least part of it. We did not invent the church; that was of God’s doing and Christ’s planting. We didn’t even invent this congregation; that was the work of saints of a hundred or more years ago. And yet we cannot separate ourselves from those who have gone before, for the work that we do here is simply a continuation of the work that has always been going on here and in other faith communities throughout the world and throughout the ages. The question is, Are we continuing the work that was started, or are we simply enjoying the fruits of others’ labor? Are we productive members of God’s family, or is it our desire to simply live off our inheritance?

This is not an easy question to answer. There is a great deal still going on here, and this congregation is a living, thriving part of the church catholic. But there are times when I wonder how good our stewardship is of the unfinished work that has been left in our hands. Each of us has an individual goal to work toward. But there are times when the less interesting but even more necessary jobs are left vacant while the rest of us pursue our own interests. Are we good stewards of the lives of the saints? In many ways, the answer is Yes. But in some critical ways, the answer is No. When we look at the finances of a church which has higher membership and attendance than it did in the past; when the nominating committee has difficulty filling the slots that they have to fill to keep the church going for the next generation; when we go years without a confirmation class, then I cannot honestly say that our church has taken up the work left to it in the most faithful way possible.

As we look at the front of the church today, we are reminded of Sadako and her unfinished work. Let the cranes that some of our church’s faithful women folded remind us that each of our prayers for peace is but a continuation of the prayers of the saints; that every act of justice is a continuation of the work of God’s people for a better world; that every dollar given is part of the treasury of those who have gone before; that every job we do here is part of the work of the body of Christ: a body which knows neither beginning nor ending, but which exists in all time and in all places and knits the fabric of our world together. Amen.

—©2009 Sam L. Greening, Jr.

Eleanor Coerr, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (Penguin, 1977); an exhibit at the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Museum states that she completed the 1000 cranes, but that her friends continued folding after her death.