Don’t worry, the T-shirt is in the hamper.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
First off, my new favorite Japanese beer: Yebisu \u00ef\u00bc\u0153\u00e3\u201a\u00b6\u00e3\u0192\u00bb\u00e3\u0192\u2013\u00e3\u0192\u00a9\u00e3\u0192\u0192\u00e3\u201a\u00af\u00ef\u00bc\u017e<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, in Latin transcript, “za burakku.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Now for something more important.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n I went to the Honda chapel church service today.\u00c2\u00a0 Getting there from where I’m staying means about 100 minutes of reading time on the train.\u00c2\u00a0 I finished John Stackhouse’s “Finally Feminist” and found that he spoke my language and could help me with my textual reservations regarding egalitarianism without simply dismissing or ignoring the text.\u00c2\u00a0 For those completely lost, this concerns the tension between gender issues and the Bible.\u00c2\u00a0 I prefer an egalitarian position (i.e. women and men have the same rights and status in church and family), perhaps not always out of unselfish motives, but hesitated to take it because I found no way to honestly bring that position and what I read in the Bible into congruence.\u00c2\u00a0 Stackhouse does this without bending and stretching the text or taking exegetical liberties that would backfire later, as far as I can tell.\u00c2\u00a0 In other words, today I could intellectually arrive at the point where I can endorse women in church leadership.\u00c2\u00a0 The question is, what now?\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n Well, first, hooray for my pastor-in-training sister!\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n A lot of the missionaries that usually come to Honda were on furlough, but many Japanese friends were there.\u00c2\u00a0 I was surprised that most of the children stayed in the service this time, which I didn’t remember from earlier services.\u00c2\u00a0 They drew in a book and whispered together during the sermon, but I doubt that bothered anyone.\u00c2\u00a0 During the songs they stood on their chairs to see the overhead projection, which certainly helped them sing better than a hymnal would have (although, to my relief, like me they struggled to read some of the kanji).\u00c2\u00a0 I guess learning hymns by heart would be even better…\u00c2\u00a0 One song the congregation apparently sang for the first time is one that we’ve sung before and that I always remember for its Swedish origin and thus the fun name of the tune, “Blott en dag<\/a>.”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n The sermon used the text from Matthew 1:1-16, the genealogy of Jesus.\u00c2\u00a0 This must have been the first Bible passage in Japanese I pretty much completely understood.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, the Katakana names of the patriarchs elicited a smile from me, especially “Aburahamu,” which can be split into the Japanese words “abura” (oil) and “hamu” (ham).\u00c2\u00a0 I learned a few Japanese words on the way, because I’d brought my electronic dictionary, and I think I caught the drift of the sermon, but otherwise I struggled.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n For lunch, I joined the youth group.\u00c2\u00a0 We went out and bought food from the grocery store and ate in the church, after which we sang some songs with a few short-term missionaries who had just arrived.\u00c2\u00a0 For that reason, we sang mostly songs to which we had the lyrics in both languages.\u00c2\u00a0 The young Americans were great sports despite their jetlag, and taught the Japanese crowd “round-the-world” ping-pong.\u00c2\u00a0 We played a few rounds, and I even got into the finals once, but couldn’t grasp the principle of spinning around my axis between each hit – I have this compulsion to follow the ball I just hit with my eyes, so I’m left with no time to spin.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n I started into a new book on the way home and ate at the “French” bakery for dinner.\u00c2\u00a0 The dorm ladies take a break every Sunday.\u00c2\u00a0 On the upside, I now have some bread for lunch tomorrow.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Don’t worry, the T-shirt is in the hamper.\u00c2\u00a0 First off, my new favorite Japanese beer: Yebisu \u00ef\u00bc\u0153\u00e3\u201a\u00b6\u00e3\u0192\u00bb\u00e3\u0192\u2013\u00e3\u0192\u00a9\u00e3\u0192\u0192\u00e3\u201a\u00af\u00ef\u00bc\u017e.\u00c2\u00a0 Or, in Latin transcript, “za burakku.”\u00c2\u00a0 Now for something more important.\u00c2\u00a0 I went to the Honda chapel church service today.\u00c2\u00a0 Getting there from where I’m staying means about 100 minutes of reading time on the train.\u00c2\u00a0 I finished John Stackhouse’s “Finally Feminist” and found that he spoke my language and could help me with my textual reservations regarding egalitarianism without simply dismissing or ignoring the text.\u00c2\u00a0 For those completely lost, this concerns the tension between gender issues and the Bible.\u00c2\u00a0 I prefer an egalitarian position (i.e. women and men have the same rights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}