The same orange

This is the ending of the sermon I preached on Sunday:

A young HK writer was buying oranges in a market.

The shop owner had just opened a carton of oranges.

The writer was quite pleased to be the first to choose among the luscious, round and shiny oranges.

Then a bald man came standing next to him, obviously sharing his thought.

This man proved to be the more aggressive one in picking good oranges.

Very soon, he had got most of the good oranges.

The young writer could only get 3 passably good ones.

After grudgingly paying for the fruit,

the young writer paused a moment,

“Wait. That man looked familiar.”

It turned out that his “competitor”

was his friend’s father who had just recovered from cancer.

The baldness was due to chemo.

The young writer learned a lesson:

It only takes an orange to rob you of your sense of human fellowship and kindness. Yes, sometimes it takes only something

as trivial as an orange to blind us of the reality of God’s reconciliation.

If this story were a segment in a TV drama,

it definitely would not win our applause.

But when we realize that there is reconciliation even in such a small unimportant incident,

that no relationship is too trivial that God doesn’t reconcile,

then maybe we will applaud

not because the bad guys are punished and the good guys rewarded,

but because, one has chosen to come and live among us, even though it is unreasonable to do so.  Amen.

The theme of the sermon was reconciliation, the text was Luke 16: 19-31.

A very well received sermon.

On the same night, I got a text message from a friend who told me she had me in her mind while peeling an orange in a silent retreat. She wanted to send me an SMS then, but didn't because she didn't want to break the retreat rules.

The orange reminded me of her because she used to peel oranges for me when we went retreat together. I didn't do that because the orange juice stung my skin.

So while it takes only an orange to rob us of our sense of human kindness, it also takes only an orange to remind us the beauty of friendship.

Why not eat an orange now?