I began wearing eyeglasses when I was six years old. I immediately recognized their value. With my glasses I could read the chalk board at school. With the exception of a few years of experimenting with contact lenses, I’ve worn glasses ever since. Just before my sixteenth birthday, I took my first flight physical. Passing the physical combined with turning sixteen to allow me to fly solo in an airplane without an instructor. It was a big goal of my life at the time. My flight physical came with a restriction. It required me to carry a spare pair of glasses whenever I flew as pilot in command. Having a spare pair of glasses was a great step forward for me.

For those ten years, and likely for several years before I got my first pair of glasses, I got used to periods of being out of focus. I have no record of how many pairs of glasses I broke or lost in that period of time, but it was a lot. Once I fell in the river and lost a pair of glasses. By that time I was required to participate in the cost of replacement. I offered a reward of a new fishing pole to anyone who could find the lost glasses in the river. My brothers and our friends spent weeks trying to recover the glasses. I looked again and again as well with no luck. The glasses were found nearly a year later when the river level dropped. They had become wedged between two rocks where the motion of the river so deeply scratched the lenses that they were unusable.

In those days it took about a week to obtain a replacement pair of glasses. We’d call the optometrist’s shop and tell them what we needed and then we would have to wait. When they came in we had to travel 80 miles one way to have them fitted. Even though that was decades ago, I still know what it means to be out of focus. If I ever were to forget, all I have to do is to open my eyes and look around the room before I rise from bed and take up my glasses from their nighttime resting place.

As a result I knew exactly what he meant when a close friend wrote me a note about a worship service that I led in our campus ministry program as an undergraduate student. He used the metaphor of being out of focus for what he experienced as a service that was disjointed and the various elements didn’t quite flow together. He was a stage performer who was locally famous and who sometimes performed on stage without his glasses. I was able to receive his criticism and use it to improve my skill at worship planning. I’ve never forgotten his words and gentle feedback.

That was 50 years ago. I’ve planned a lot of worship services since then. And I’ve attended a lot more. And I have avoided using his metaphor to describe worship planned and led by others while I have personally used it to evaluate my own work.

However, “out of focus” is the image that lingers in my mind after worshipping yesterday at our church. It was the day of an important celebration. Our congregation was celebrating 25 years of being open and affirming. The pioneering decision for the entire congregation to enter into a covenant promising to be open and affirming of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folks has been a very important part of our story. It has shaped who we are as a congregation. It has inspired other congregations to follow. It has helped us to more fully live out the meaning of the Gospel.

Our celebration, however, was for me a bit out of focus. I’ll refrain from open criticism. However, I will mention one thing. Members of the congregation had folded thousands of origami cranes. The worship and arts committee had strung many of them together to make beautiful strings of cranes to adorn the front of the sanctuary. The effect was truly stunning. In addition each worshiper was given a short train of three paper cranes. Written on the wings of the three cranes were the words from the United Church of Christ’s Still Speaking campaign: “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” At one point in the service the bulletin declared we would have a ritual of welcome for all. It wasn’t much of a ritual. Mostly it was an announcement that we were to take the cranes home as a reminder. At no point was there any mention of the importance of orizuru (origami cranes) in Japanese culture. The crane symbolizes peace, love, hope, and healing. They are closely associated with the story of Sadako Sasaki, who suffered from leukemia from radiation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. According to the book by Eleanor Coerr, she managed to fold only 644 cranes before she became too weak to fold any more, and died in her sleep on the morning of October 25, 1955. In Coerr’s story family and friends helped finish her dream by folding the rest of the cranes which were buried with Sadako. The book may not be entirely accurate. According to her older brother Masahiro, Sadako not only exceeded 644 cranes, but she died having folded 1,450 paper cranes. When we visited Hiroshima we saw some of the cranes Sadako folded. They were very tiny, folded from the wrappers of the pills she was given to help ease her symptoms. The Children’s Peace Monument near ground zero in Hiroshima features the display of thousands and thousands of paper cranes folded all around the world and sent to the Japanese people as a memorial and a promise that never again will humans use atomic weapons.

To appropriate a powerful symbol without even mentioning its cultural source left sadness in my spirit. Our congregation is not only an open and affirming congregation. We are also a just peace congregation. Our celebration was just five days from the 69th anniversary of Sadako’s death. August 6 is atomic bomb remembrance day, also known as Hiroshima Day, but no mention of that event has occurred in our church since I’ve been a member.

Origami cranes are a beautiful and powerful symbol. Using them in worship without reference to the source from which they were appropriated is simply out of focus. Coming back into focus will require more than just cleaning my glasses.