Sermon: "The Bright Morning Star" (May 12, 2013 by the time of mid-term evaluation of my internship)

Sermon: “The Bright Morning Star”

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21.

Last Wednesday I received an email. There wasn’t anything particularly special about it; it was just a plain, regular, normal message from Naramata Centre. But one quote in the e-mail caught my attention - it moved me to recollect and reflect on my year-long experience working as an intern minister in this congregation.

The quote in the email went, “If there were no changes, there would be no butterflies.” 

The year that has passed since last May has been a time of great change for me. This immersion in ministry has transformed me, deconstructed and reconstructed me, let me get lost on the way and found. The greatest lesson which took nearly one year to learn was neither a grandiose conclusion nor a flash of enlightenment; it was a reminder that it is okay to be just as I am, Ha Na, the same as you have been created to be as you are. Sing your own songs. Pray your own prayers. Tell your own stories, your own childhood stories and wonders, to the children. It is alright to give you. Stories don’t come from nowhere; they bubble up within you, from you, from the bottom, the well of experience and inspiration. The greatest change which a butterfly undergoes is to be who she really is.

This is a story my mom told me many times; when I was young, a toddler like my younger son or even younger, I loved to try on other people’s shoes. It’s not a metaphor - literally, I loved to take someone else’s shoes, put them on, open the front door, and walk out. My mom told me that on my first birthday, friends and extended family crowded and filled my parent’s small apartment on the second floor of my uncle’s house. I was the happiest girl in the whole world, surrounded and hugged by people. Then I was gone. She searched for me everywhere, then found me the outside, walking down the stairs, wearing my dad’s giant size 13 sneakers.  

I have a great anxiety inside. It’s like hearing an inner voice which tells me that I shouldn’t be me. I should be someone else, better than me in all ways, if I want to be loved by others. In my lifetime, for some reason, I was deprived of the most crucial message that you are loved just as you are. Maybe I am truly am a child of the 21st century, and the philosophy which drives people to be someone else in order to be a winner. Or this voice may just be natural, woven into my DNA. There is a theory that explains how DNA combines into our individual genetic pattern creating a certain personality. It’s well-known that the desire or anxiety to be different, to be other, is something that many people experience – speaking from the socio-psychological point of view, it may be a useful trait people need to express in order to be accepted to a peer group or into society. All in all, these things answer quite well why my young self, the happy one-year-old birthday girl, put on my dad’s giant shoes and took an adventure of my own.

When I first embarked on my internship journey here with this congregation last November, Fran was invited to join the first meeting of the internship supervision team and was asked to share any wisdom she possessed about this exciting and challenging journey. She shared with us a bit of her own experience in her internship in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and made a very memorable comment which we often reminded ourselves of later. She said, “The internship will be one of the most crucible times for you.” That word - ‘crucible’ – made a real impression, and indeed it foresaw what was ahead: refinement! Not to make the original material into something other than what it is, but to concentrate and make the material reveal the purest form of itself.

The greatest privilege I have been blessed with was the greatest challenge, too, in the first year of my internship; I truly have felt greatly honoured to live with this congregation – it has been a sheer blessing, an utter joy. And at the same time, living with a congregation whose minister was dying was a great challenge, an unimaginable journey. While I truly honoured and loved Fran, it has not been easy to live under her shadow. There were tears. There was bitterness. One time I talked with my education supervisor about my feelings of bitterness. I told him that it may have a long history, tracing back to high school days, or even elementary school. He asked me, “Where do you feel the bitterness? What is the colour?” I said, “In here.” (near my heart) and pointed at a small brown sugar shaker on the table – we meet at the Serious Coffee at Cowichan Mall. And we are sometimes serious!

However, the bitterness, a bit of the brown sugar bitterness, is nothing, compared to the grace and gratitude awakened by the love I have exchanged with people, and with Fran, on the Tuesday at her house during Holy Week. I entered the living room, and saw Fran lying in the white warm sunshine that flooded through the window. I looked her in the eyes; her eyes were clear, lucid, calm, large... as she had weaned so much. And there was grace. She welcomed me unconditionally. She expressed her happiness at my visit. I saw the love and the acceptance through those little gestures she made – smile, nodding, hands which beckon to the visitor, “Come close.”

I burst into tears. Over regrets and mixed emotions, genuine gratitude and love poured forth from my mouth. Those immediate and true feelings led my lips to open and speak my grateful truth. You see, I had not ever done this before; saying a farewell and thank-you, with love, looking in the other person's eyes. I told Fran how much I had learned from her, how I had studied all of her worship transcripts whenever I got them, and that I admired her and her achievements. I don't know whether my words made any sense to her. But she responded, "Interesting!" as if it  really were interesting.

This was our last time of reunion, the last meeting of all our meetings, the last chance to truly recognize each other as we were.

I was simply myself with Fran, and that was sufficient.

In today’s reading in the book of Revelation, Jesus says “Come. Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the root and the leaf.

I am the bright morning star.”

Jesus says “I am the bright morning star.” A solitary star in the morning. Jesus brings us to morning. But why morning? In the morning, we begin our day. We paint the first stroke of the day. We take the first step of the pilgrimage of faith for each day. Resurrection is announced in the early morning. We discern the bright morning star in the distance somewhere, both hidden and revealing, in the breaking-dawn sky of glorious colours. In the early morning, every time we wake up, we find that it is our self who wakes up, the complete gift from God, the complete wholeness, the bearer of the morning star’s light, not someone else.

When it seems that the path ahead is only thinning out and we feel that we can’t continue down such an attenuated, hardly-visible trail, the only way we can make it through, the only change we need to make, is to be lighter – by allowing ourselves to be simply, lightly, gently us, ourselves.  We let go or take off anything unnecessary to become ourselves, to be truly who we are, then we enfold ourselves in a cocoon – the thin place.

If there were not the night and the following morning, in which the Sun chases away the past and the morning star casts a renewed hope, there wouldn’t be the effort and joy of learning to be oneself, the greatest gift God has given to us as we are. Jesus teaches us that in the beginning is the end, in the root is the leaf. We are complete in ourselves to be bearers of the brilliant light, the light of the morning star, the newness in Christ, because this is how God has created us to be.

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