photo credit: Jay McDaniel
Friends,
How are you, so far, singing our familiar hymns in unfamiliar languages?
So far, so good?
Are you overwhelmed?
What has it been like to move your lips in strange and different ways?
I think I should ask the question to the choir, this morning, as they sang a beautiful music mix of the Arirahng and Amazing Grace, for us. They were pretty good with singing Arirahng, the whole verse, completely in Korean. Pretty cool, eh?
(One of my Korean friends told me, “When you can do the ‘eh’ thing, the little question tag, well, you’re speaking ‘Canadian.’)
I ask you, this morning, what happens when we sing well-known songs in different languages. What was your first emotional, spiritual response to this invitation? As we have accepted this invitation, and as we sing together in diverse languages, what new kind of atmosphere and earth are we creating?
I have given some thought to those questions, myself.
The first word that came to mind was Love. If we don’t have love in our hearts, why would we bother to sing a new song? Those questions lead to bigger questions: why do we worship? What is the heart of worship that makes us gather and praise, (convivially, or for life togetherness)?
Again, I think of love: the love that lures, is persuasive but not coercive, a love that “amorously” calls us all to know that we are beloved, deeply loved. We affirm that we are all God’s Beloveds, without divide, without any precondition placed upon receiving that love. We are called to have a sense of inseparability with our God, with ourselves, with one another and the ‘other’. We are invited to reflect on our common humanity; that includes everyone who calls our earth home.
I took this picture at my son’s daycare, a few weeks ago. At around 5 pm, I was feeling quite anxious and was thinking of what to do next, after a busy, flustering sort of day at work, and while I was waiting a day care staff person opened the door for me. I was quite focused on my individual self, focusing inward. I was lost in thought and disconnected from the environment that surrounded me, thinking only of my day, of myself. Then I looked up and saw this cloud moving. The dense, dark evening cloud was moving above me, silent and fast. Looking at that gigantic mass of cloud rolling wordlessly through the sky made me enter a spiritual state of relief. I sensed that ‘I was where I should be.’ Reflecting back on the moment, I was invited to be ‘entangled’ again with the place where I was, not back to where my thoughts kept trying to drag me. I was refreshingly entangled with human and nonhuman beings that existed in that particular moment, that particular place, completely and beautifully. In the dense movement of the cloud, under the cover of ‘infinity’, I felt a sense of the blessed completeness of ‘finitude’. I have my own ‘end’, not only in a temporal sense, but in a spatial sense, like the membrane of a cell. Each cell has an outer membrane, allowing the cell to interact with its environment without being destroyed by it. At the daycare, cloud overhead, I wondered what I am going to do with my ‘finite’ness. I was lured by the environment around me to interact with, make an engagement with, make an entanglement with the other ‘finite’ beings, in a subtle cloud and embrace of ‘relationships.’
Relationship is a tricky word in English. We can think of relationships in a workplace with our co-workers. Or the relationship we have with our friends, relationships we have with our family members, or the relationship a couple builds between themselves as they begin to know each other more deeply, every day. The church also uses the word ‘relationship’, especially when we describe who we are to God and how God relates to us. We confess that we know God in relationship. God searches us and knows us in relationship. Have you wondered, then, what defines and characterizes relationship? Can we apply what defines a ‘good’ relationship in a workplace to illustrate what defines and what is at the heart of our relationship with God? What is the primary quality, the profound emotion that is entailed in our relationship with God? Is the love of God different from all others, or does it share some aspects of the love we have for our brothers and sisters in Christ? I wonder whether the primary quality, the profound foundation of love and of relationship would be really changed depending on the source.
Love possesses its own unique density, opacity, colour, beauty, an intensity which can cause real pain. Love ushers us over a threshold which changes, transforms and renews us, our self-identity and our understanding of the Other. Is the essential nature of love ever changed or altered according to context? Think of the two statements I’ve just made - you could apply them to the effect of both human love and God’s love. As followers and friends of Jesus, we hold our great commandments as our foundation of faith: You shall love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbour as you love yourself.
Becoming intercultural is one way to affirm the quality of love that we are called to embody as the great commandments tell us: The call to love that has the human ‘desire’ for one another and for God as the ground of our being. How can we not sing that love as we gather to become the ‘church of Jesus’? Think of how Jesus models ‘embodying' love. The essential element of love ushers us to have a sense of commitment to each other, a sense of ‘covenant’ we have with one another. The church of Jesus is the community of Eucharist, of Communion. The community that breaks the body of Christ is the ‘body’ of Christ, as friends, brethren, sisters, as a community of equals, a community of beloveds. We embody, we incarnate, the love of Jesus. Why wouldn’t we dream that the church be the place for a feast of love that celebrates the embodiment of love?
In today’s Gospel reading, the mother-in-law of Simon, one of Jesus’ disciples, is in bed with a fever. Jesus is asked to go and see her. Imagine that you are in the stifling sickroom. Jesus opens the door and enters the room where Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed. What relationship does Jesus have with her? And what relationship does this woman have with him? Other people who asked Jesus to come and see her are invited to stay around the two of them. They looked at the two, the woman and Jesus, anxious and curious about what Jesus is going to do. What do they expect to happen? Our Bible says that “Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up.” (... remind the congregation of the analogy of 'mano-po': the filipino's way of greeting) What has just happened between these two ‘finite’ beings at this moment? Is Jesus’ hand extended just for curing? The society where Jesus lived was patriarchal and hierarchical. The mother-in-law of Simon may have been a matriarch in Simon’s family and thus due some respect, but she was still a woman. She was probably less educated than Jesus. I wonder what love was shown, embodied, entangled, and shared when both Jesus and this woman took an active part in creating this event of healing (...)
Back to the question: why are we having this intercultural music service? Why do we sing songs in different languages? What kind of new atmosphere are we creating?
What do you think?
For me, I have no answer but this: we merge the familiar and the strange because we are invited to respond to the call of God. God is pitching woo at us, enticing us to enter where the quality of love reveals, at its heart:
the beloved uncertainty
the tender curiosity
the strange wonder
We also sing because we are called to love God and love one another, with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, with all our mind. We sing the songs that our brothers and sisters in Christ in the world sing to praise, to march, to remember, to mourn, to lament.
In Christian history, and in Canadian history, we lament and reflect on the way that the church has helped to create racial divides and racist culture. The church was muddily and tragically entangled with the history of slavery and colonialism. The church has taken on the role of the oppressor to many indigenous communities in the world, including in Canada. The church is still a place of trauma for many, preventing it from being perceived as the place for love, reconciliation, and renewed hope we wish it to be.
Singing may not be an answer for all of these hurts.
Love may not be all we need, all the time.
However, the intent for love is that it can be the mustard seed we scatter for hope.
Love is a great call that challenges us to dream to reach ‘the impossible.’
Love one another unconditionally. Forgive one another unconditionally.
I love the following words from Nicholas of Cusa; let’s take a moment to ponder them as Steven plays music for us.
“And the more that cloud of impossibility is recognized as obscure and impossible,
The more truly the necessity shines forth.”
~ Nicholas of Cusa, De Visione Dei
photo credit: Jay McDaniel
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