Tenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 17, 2025

Hidden in Plain Sight

Matt Helms
Associate Pastor

Ezekiel 17:22–24
Luke 13:18–30

The year was 1939, and Chiune Sugihara had just been given the greatest opportunity of his career. For over a decade and a half, he had worked in the Japanese Empire’s Foreign Office — assisting as a lower-level diplomat in Russia, China, Finland — and now at the age of thirty-nine, he had been named as the Foreign Office’s Vice Consul to Lithuania. The posting was a great chance to advance up the diplomatic ranks — albeit a fraught one, given that Germany had invaded Poland, Lithuania’s neighbor, just two months prior. And so in November 1939, Chiune; his wife, Yukiko; and their four sons — including their newborn — moved to Lithuania’s temporary capital of Kaunas.

Although he had a variety of responsibilities, one of the primary aspects of his role was keeping the Japanese government informed about troop movements in and out of the city. Lithuania was now the only country in between Germany and the Soviet Union, so there was a justified fear within the city about an invasion or becoming caught in the crossfire of these two larger powers. Kaunas was also now home to a massive refugee population that had fled from Poland when it had been invaded, and most of these refugees, particularly Polish Jews, did not have documentation to travel in either Germany or the Soviet Union, which meant that they were stuck.

This tense situation reached a breaking point in the summer of 1940, when the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania and the other Baltic states, informing all foreign offices that they would be shut down by the end of August and all foreign diplomats would be sent home, which meant any refugees living in Kaunas would have absolutely no option for escape in just a few months’ time. So in the days after this announcement, a little over a month before he would be sent home, Sugihara was visited by a Jewish delegation with a request for a handful of immigration or transit visas — anything that could help them escape without being arrested as they fled east. 

Sugihara promised to inquire about this matter and passed the request along to the Foreign Ministry Office in Tokyo. Over a week later, he received a reply that his request was denied. Recognizing the danger that these refugees were in, he began to explore other visa options, only to be denied by his government again. Yukiko, his wife, reflected many years later, “My husband sent another telegram for the third time. The answer was the same answer: do not issue visas. We did not know what to do — I could see the refugees from my window. It was so hard for me to watch; they were so miserable. We could not sleep at night. … But I had a baby, we had three young children. If my husband issued the visas contrary to the Foreign Office, when we returned to Japan my husband would for sure lose his job. We kept thinking and thinking about what to do.”

“Lord, will only a few be saved?” Jesus is asked while he is on his way to Jerusalem. It was a question about a different type of salvation from the one people were hoping for in Lithuania in 1940, but the urgency behind it was the same. In a world that seemed to be in chaos, people were struggling to understand where they fit into it all and what they were supposed to do. Jesus doesn’t answer the question directly but instead responds with a challenging encouragement: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.” It’s a response that, on its face, seems to suggest that we must earn our relationship with God, until Jesus shockingly describes Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Israel’s prophets thrown out as well. In short, everyone will fall short, but that does not mean we are meant to despair. Instead, Jesus tells us, by striving to enter through the narrow door — by doing the best we can to live a life defined by faith and love — people will one day come from east and west, north and south, to eat at the expansive table found in the kingdom of God. 

This passage appears in Matthew’s Gospel as well — as part of the Sermon on the Mount — and there this connection to living a faithful life is made even more explicit. Right before telling the gathered crowd to enter the narrow door, Jesus tells them this: “In everything, do unto others as you would have them do unto you; for this is the law and the prophets.” Following what became known as the Golden Rule is all that easy, and it’s all that hard. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the narrow door we are striving for, the road less taken. That is the foundation on which we begin to build what it means to live a faithful life.

It's easy to scoff at that as a solution. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like my actions don’t seem to make the slightest bit of difference sometimes, or that they are just a drop in the bucket. It’s easy to resign ourselves to the way things are or to throw up our hands and think what we say or give or do does not matter, but to that attitude Jesus offers a few curious, short parables. “To what should I compare the kingdom of God?” Jesus asks. “It is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in the garden; it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches. It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” 

Jesus’ descriptions of God’s kingdom are complex and varied throughout the Gospels, but in these simple metaphors he is sharing a powerful truth. Mustard seeds and yeast are smaller than a sesame seed, and yet both have the ability to transform what is around them in powerful and lasting ways. A single mustard seed will increase in size over 3,000-fold as it grows into a plant over 10 feet tall. Yeast is less than 1 percent of a dough’s overall weight, and yet it makes the entire loaf rise. There are times when the kingdom of God feels absent in the world around us, and yet every act of love has the potential to remake the world, even if it is hidden in plain sight at first. We do unto others as we would have them do unto us, because we trust that every time we do, God’s kingdom is given another opportunity to flourish. It’s all that easy, and it’s all that hard. 

As Chiune and Yukiko wrestled with what to do about these refugees seeking their help obtaining travel visas, there were plenty of reasons for them to hold back. The Sugiharas had been on the job for less than eight months, and openly defying the foreign ministry’s orders would derail or even end Chiune’s career. They had four young children and already no home to return to when they would be sent back to Japan in just over a month. And at the end of the day, they would just be following orders. They didn’t know the people asking them for help, and issuing these visas seemed like no more than a drop in the bucket given everything that was going on in the world. And yet that’s the funny thing about mustard seeds — given the opportunity, they grow far beyond our wildest imaginations of them. 

When asked several decades later about his ultimate decision to start issuing visas anyway, a decision which may have been grounded in his Orthodox Christian faith, Chiune reflected, “You want to know about my motivation? The people in Tokyo were not united. I felt it silly to deal with them. I knew that somebody would surely complain about me in the future. But I myself thought this would be the right thing to do. There’s nothing wrong with saving many people’s lives. The spirit of humanity, philanthropy, neighborly friendship … with this spirit, I ventured to do what I did.”

In a typical month, the Japanese embassy in Lithuania would issue around fifty travel visas. From July 18 to August 28 of 1940, a forty-day time period, Chiune Sugihara is believed to have handwritten and stamped over 2,100 visas before he and his family were called back to Japan. The total number of Polish Jews and others whom he helped escape in those forty days is impossible to verify, but because these visas could be used by entire families, it has been estimated that this simple act of defiance, one born out of love, may have helped as many as 6,000 people escape before the Germans would invade Lithuania less than a year later.

Sugihara would later say that he remembered thinking that his government probably didn't realize how many visas he actually issued. He was shifted around a few more times during the war, but shortly after the war had ended, he was permanently dismissed because of “that incident in Lithuania.” For the next few decades, his story was almost completely unknown. He worked low-level jobs before eventually becoming a trade representative in the Soviet Union, never working in the Foreign Office again. But in 1968, a man from the Israeli government named Yeshua Nishri tracked him down, revealing himself to be one of the children whom Sugihara had helped escape almost three decades ago and having the opportunity to thank him for saving his family. Sugihara has since been posthumously honored in Japan, and his willingness to do what was right, even at the expense of the ways it would affect him and his family, is both remarkable and inspiring. 

Most of us likely won’t have the opportunity to help people at the scale and scope of what Sugihara was able to do with nothing more than a pen and a stamp, but that does not mean that we do not already have ample opportunities to find places in our lives to strive for the narrow door, to pursue the path less traveled, in which we genuinely “do unto others as we would have them do unto us” and place the needs of others before our own. There are so many people and places in our world today that are hurting, so many things that feel broken, that it’s hard to know where to begin. But that’s the funny thing about mustard seeds: the smallest act of love, one so small we may not even see it, can grow and grow until it helps the kingdom of God be more fully realized here among us.

It’s the mustard seed of tutoring a child through Chicago Lights, helping them not only build academic skills but helping them know they have another person who is there for them. It’s the seed of serving as a youth volunteer in Confirmation, helping kids explore what it means to claim as their own the faith they grew up in, all while sharing your own faith story with them. It’s the seed of serving at Coffee Hour with a warm welcome and a smile, helping someone who may not feel at home in churches feel just a little more comfortable here. These small things may not feel like much in the moment, but I have seen firsthand the impact that they can have in someone else’s life. 

What is the kingdom of God like? The kingdom of God is love put into practice, sometimes in ways that are so small as to be hidden in plain sight, but that always carries the potential to remake lives, remake communities, and perhaps, someday, to remake our world in the way God ultimately envisions for us. Every act of love, every generous gift, every kind word is a mustard seed that carries the potential to transform what is around it, even when it might come at a cost to us. 

“Strive to enter through the narrow door,” Jesus tells us, and so we try our best to follow in his footsteps, remembering all those who have helped make God’s love better manifest in this world and praying that we can do our part to do the same. Even if loving our neighbor comes at a cost, that cost is always a price worth paying — so let us strive to bring that love into being, one mustard seed at a time. Amen.

Sermon © Fourth Presbyterian Church