God’s Household

It was a beautiful morning, not a cloud in the blue sky, their father had gone to work, and they were home with their mother and grandmother. Their grandmother called them in, “it’s time for breakfast.” They never heard an airplane or an air raid warning. Just as they sat down on the tatami mats near the kitchen of their modest, two-story home and started to eat “the blast came in, they were pushed to the wall. Masahiro was four, “I was underneath the table covered by the tatami mats,” he says.

His mother and grandmother were also still inside and appeared to be unhurt but Sadako, his 2 year old sister, was missing. She’d been “blown outside the house,” and was “sitting on a box in the yard.” Her clothes were burned and torn. She was dazed but not injured. “No one understood how she ended up there,” he said.

They didn’t know what had happened. The blue sky had turned a very dark and forbidding gray and it was suddenly quite hot. Their mother and grandmother decided to leave the house and take the children to a nearby river. The bridge there might provide cover from another blast. Along the way they saw the smoke from the many fires that were now burning throughout a city that had been turned into a charred landscape. But it was the human toll that seared in their memories.

Their grandmother decided to go to back up to the house. The children never saw her again but a few days later their father found her body in the well in front of their home. Obviously, she had wanted water badly.
A heavy, thick rain started to fall and cover them while they waited by the river not knowing where to go or what to do. After being there for about five hours their mother with her son and daughter saw a friend coming down the river in a boat. He pulled over and they had to decide if they should wait for their grandmother to return. They climbed aboard. It was a miracle.

They sailed for about four hours and finally found a community shelter. Their father eventually found them and the family was reunited. It would take years for things to begin to return to normal.

Ten years later, at 12 years old, Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia as a result of the Atomic Bomb that fell on Hiroshima, that clear blue skied morning, August 6, 1945. She died less than a year later.
During that year, her father told her the Japanese legend of the paper cranes. The legend says that if you fold 1,000 paper cranes, you will be granted a wish. Sadako began folding. Paper was expensive, so she used any scrap of paper – from wrapping paper on candy to the wrapping on her medicines. Her brother says, “She was such a cheerful little girl that lit up the room when she was around. . . . It tore us apart that she had to go through so much suffering — not only did she have to bear the physical pain and the emotional strain of being sick, our family’s financial situation prevented her from getting enough medication, but this 12-year-old girl held all of her troubles inside her heart and endured the pain. I think folding the cranes helped distract her mind from the sadness, the suffering and the pain. . . . Those cranes are not just any paper cranes — they are filled with Sadako’s emotions.”

Before her death, she folded more than 1,000 cranes. Her wish was for healing. Because of her, paper cranes have come to symbolize peace. In 2007 her family, led by her brother and his son (her nephew), began donating her cranes around the world to places in need of healing.

The first was donated to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. In attendance was Clifton Truman Daniel, the grandson of U.S. President Harry S. Truman, who ordered the 1945 atomic bombings. At the ceremony, her nephew was carrying the last crane Sadako ever folded in a box, and he placed it in President Truman’s grandson’s hand and asked him if he would help them send a message of peace. Then together, they celebrated the gift of another paper crane to the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.

I saw that crane this summer, tiny, no bigger than my pinkie nail, gold…a caramel candy wrapper.

So easy to throw away, yet so precious. So easy to overlook, yet so vital. Healing comes with peace.

As they dedicated the tiny gold crane, Sadako’s nephew said to Truman’s grandson, “We have both been wounded and have suffered painfully. We don’t want the children of the future to go through the same experience.”
Over and over again throughout history we have joined the psalmist in wondering whether God can spread a table in the wilderness. (Psalm 78:19) As Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, he told of one of the priceless gifts of Christ, new unity in Christ.

Paul writes that Jesus is our peace and has destroyed the barriers that divide us; he has broken down the wall of hostility. He has made us one body, and reconciled both to God through the cross. The word that Paul uses for reconciled is apokatallassein. It is the word used when two friends who have been estranged are brought together. The work of Jesus is to show all – ALL – that they are invited to the Table together.
Thanks be to God, who spreads his Table for us all.

As you receive Communion today, I invite you to take a paper crane, to be for you a symbol of peace and unity. With whom are you estranged? God, family, friend? May God bring you together to be reconciled. The reality is that throughout the world, divisions abound. On this World Communion Sunday, let us pray for peace and commit ourselves to working for justice and reconciliation that bring peace.