kobeintern

During my first week in Kobe, I offered to start a Bible Study – a discussion group that they said they used to have before COVID-19 pandemic. They have been thinking about restarting one, but wasn’t sure how to restart one. So I suggested that I can give a bird’s eye view of the entire Bible and perhaps we can start there.

I prepared the material mostly in Japanese. Some words like “Pastoral Letters” or “Catholic Letters,” or “Prophetic Books” in Japanese were unknown to me, but thanks to advancement in technology, with the answers gathered by A.I., I was able to find out exactly how to translate them, and the finished material was accepted readily.

I tried to group the Old Testament books both according to Hebrew Bible grouping as well as the Roman Catholic grouping – the traditional Christian grouping. For the New Testament, the four groupings of the Gospel/Acts; Pauline Letters; Other Letters; and Revelation.

Today was in fact the day of the Bible Study, at 2:00 pm! Even though I started working on them over a week ago, there were still incomplete sections in the material I prepared, and that was my entire morning – going through the material to make sure everything I wanted to say were there. About six or seven parishioners joined the study!

The study took a little more than an hour, but everyone seemed to enjoy understanding how the Sacred Book is constructed. My thought behind it was, that once they know what is contained in which book and what are the challenges of reading a book such as “Numbers,” then maybe they will have a better chance of making sense out of such a collection of many books (66 books in all as is standardly known in Christian world) as the Bible.

There were enough interest to keep this going, and so in July we will be having, hopefully a weekly Bible Study until my internship is over. Then Fr. Seyama can keep the momentum going. For my next engagement I was requested by an attendee to explain about Jesus’ genealogies in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Oh boy, but I will take that challenge!

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In the evening, Deacon Miyata and I went to a local authentic Thai food. I saw the store in earlier stroll to the supermarket and I asked him if it was any good. He told me he goes to it occasionally and likes the owner who is a former Japanese pop star. The food was delicious and tasted authentic, er, of course I only know American version of Thai cuisine, but this was very much on the par!

This was the only night Deacon Miyata and I had remaining to eat out because tomorrow begins four days in Okinawa, and as soon as I return to Kobe, I am off to Kyoto, where I will stay at Williams Seminary for almost two weeks, and Deacon Miyata has to pack up to relocate to Saint John’s in Suma, the church I went to hear the Gospel singer, and the church that just celebrated its 100th Anniversary.