The Mission of Tribal Messiahs True Father at the Inaugural Assembly of the Korean Headquarters of the Interreligious and International Peace Council on October 15, 2003, at the Little Angels Performing Arts Center in Seoul. It appears in Pyeong Hwa Gyeong Book 9, Speech 17, beginning on page 1428.  

Ladies and gentlemen, beginning some ten years ago, I have been guiding all blessed families to become tribal messiahs. This means they have to become the new ancestors of their tribes. All your ancestors throughout history have nurtured the hope and earnest desire to see such families. True Parents, who have won all the victories as the messiah of all humankind, bequeath to you their foundation, and on this foundation, you need to become messiahs on the tribal level.

Related as branches to the trunk

Families that have received the blessing from us and have joined the ranks of blessed families now need to become leaders that guide the world and saviors that save humanity as tribal messiahs. You need to become devoted children and patriots who erase God’s grief. God has been waiting for this time for tens of thousands of years. You will work in all countries of the world as the vanguard. You will expand the realm of victory gained by True Parents, who have been victorious over Satan’s vicious opposition and persecution. The True Parents have now bequeathed everything to you. You will liberate the world and establish it anew in front of Heaven.

In relation to the messiah of all humanity, a tribal messiah is like a branch growing from the main trunk. After leaves sprout and blossoms emerge, fruit will ripen on these branch messiahs. That fruit will possess a hundred percent of the value of the original messiah. You will advance into the realm of protection, where good spirits can guard you.

Ladies and gentlemen, humanity is in the position to recover its homeland. Those who take a short trip can return to their homeland, but those who have lost their homeland cannot return so easily. At the moment history began, we lost our homeland. We were expelled and have lived as nomads. We have not been in a position to return, and we have not even known the way back. We have lived as wanderers without a homeland, roaming aimlessly for thousands of years.

In the same way, all people became lonely orphans because of the Fall, committed by the first ancestors. We live in the pitiful position of people who have lost their homeland. God, the owner of our homeland, solemnly waits for our return, even though until now we have lived without even the desire to return. We have become such a shameful sight that we dare not even lift our heads in front of heaven or earth. During the course of the world’s population increasing to more than six billion, people have experienced so much misery in life that they are unable to discern night from day. When God sees the distress of his children, his heart must be in so much pain that he can barely speak. When a child meets with tragedy, no one feels more sorrow and pain than its parents. God created us as his children.

What, then, is God’s heartfelt desire? It is to liberate his children by any means possible, so that we can find our way back to our homeland. Religion is God’s strategy to open this way. Through religious movements, he laid a foundation for people to get together and return to the homeland, to the place where we transcend our environments, languages, cultures, ethnic backgrounds, ideologies, systems and philosophies. He always sees the situations in which each of you lives. He waits anxiously for the day you can return to your homeland. You must understand that God is the vertical True Parent that has conducted his providence in ways that accommodated the culture of each historical period.

He never did this because he preferred any particular religious body or country. It was a manifestation of God’s true love for the sake of your liberation. Building a bridge that would allow you to return to your homeland in freedom has taken effort. So please remember that you each represent your family and also your country and all of humanity. You also represent all your ancestors in the spirit world and all the descendants who will be born in the future. We have to achieve this precious, liberated state and fulfill our responsibilities before Heaven and our human family.

The kingdom takes root

We have deep longing for our homeland because that is the place where love is shared with others. The love of one’s mother and father, of one’s older brother and sister and one’s younger siblings, the love of one’s wife and children and of one’s relatives can be found in every corner of our homeland. Here, all these relationships and bonds are connected by altruistic love; we want to embrace them all at once. The traveler who yearns for his homeland longs to return home as a proud, liberated person, so that he can embrace the mountains, rivers, grass and trees, give love to his family and relatives, and sing joyous songs. Since being vanquished and expelled from our homeland and having lost the connection of heart rooted there, we have been unable to return and have instead been doomed to wander a lonely path through eternity until finally arriving in hell. Now, though, we can be liberated. The path to the homeland, lying deep within our memories and appearing in our dreams, has been cleared. This is surely the day of the greatest blessing for humanity. You are going to recover the homeland lost by Adam and Eve.

When you go to your homeland, you do so in the position of the perfected Adam, the perfected Jesus and the representative of the returning Lord. God will reside in your family. The four generations of grandparents, parents, children and their children will live together in harmony. The grandparents must be attended as the ancestral root. They are the living root of history and the root of the heavenly kingdom that extends into the family. This is a family where the kingdom of God on earth has taken root. The root of the kingship that will continue forever also will be firmly established in such a family. The grandparents, parents and children represent the roots of the past, present and future, respectively. The root of the past represents the spirit world. The root of the present is a palace representing the present world, and the root of the future is the children living as princes and princesses in a palace of peace representing the two worlds, the spirit world and physical world.

The mission of the tribal messiah is to establish the families of Cheon Il Guk, where four generations—grandparents, parents, children and the children’s children—live as one family attending the eternal God. This is also God’s heartfelt desire. The mission is to establish families that God, were he to go to another land, would long to return to. It is to raise families that God can feel comfortable visiting anytime, just as a parent would visit the home of a child. That is a life of service to God. In such a family, God becomes, vertically, the subject partner of the conscience. Your own mind will follow this vertical subject partner and bring your body to unite, as you yourself become a vertical subject partner.

In this situation, parental love, conjugal love, children’s love and sibling love; that is, the four great realms of love, or four great realms of heart, will be completed. This is how a family must be in order to exist eternally through continuous spherical movement that connects up and down, front and back, and left and right as one. Ladies and gentlemen, why is it necessary to marry? We marry to attain the position of an owner. If each spouse is to take the position of the correspondent partner’s owner, the spouse has to practice love that is for the sake of that partner. People marry to obtain this position of ownership. For what purpose, then, do we want to obtain the position of owner? It is because from that position we can occupy God.

God is our subject in three great partnerships. As the owner of the cosmos, he is the true love teacher, true love owner and true love parent. These are the three great subject–object partnerships. All these teachings and truths will be realized in the life of true families. When these are expanded, societies, nations and even the world and cosmos can change into the peace kingdom.

The tribal messiah who returns to his or her homeland must have a determined and unwavering demeanor. There can be no complaining. It is our destiny to go this way, even if it brings us to weep bitterly. Those who understand the circumstances of the Heavenly Father, who has waited for his lost children throughout millennia with a grief-filled heart, cannot travel this path without shedding tears. Fill your steps with hope, as you go out to plant seeds of love. Once these seeds of true love are planted, no one will be able to steal them. They are the seeds of the heart of true love. The families and countries where these seeds sprout will remain forever in God’s possession. Those families will become distinguished families of heaven, producing God’s representatives, generation after generation. Those countries will become great nations under Heaven.

This has been edited for True Peace magazine.