Sermon: Touching and Holding in Our Hands Each Other's Blazing Sun (at the MNWO Conference, 2015)

My Message I offered at Celebration of Ministries Service of the Annual Meeting of the Conference of Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario (May 31, 2015)

Sermon
I guess by this time, you’ve got some idea about what kind of relationship Min-Goo and I have. As you may have well assumed, we are a couple, a quite loving couple, married in 2004. Our first son was born in 2006 in Korea. Since we moved to Canada, in 2007, we’ve shared an eight-year journey of studying, being ordained and working within the United Church of Canada. Our first two years of marriage, before we left Korea, started with life within a Korean church where Min Goo served as an assistant minister. During those two years, I was expected to play the role of the good, supportive wife of an ordained husband. I was reduced to being a silent angel, not telling anybody what I really thought or felt. I had become like the Moon which can only shine through reflected light. To be a good wife, I kept my inner Sun from blazing. The 8 years since I moved to Canada have been a journey to find my own Sun inside, and let it out to reveal its brilliance.

My painful experience with the Korean church patriarchy and the following journey to be the Sun again have given me two wonderful gifts: to understand what it is like to live under an oppressive structure that keeps individuals from living their true identity, and to temper my heart to see the thousands of Suns blazing within thousands of different people, both in this room and in the world.

Last May, I was ordained in the BC Conference with the Provisional Call to serve the United Church in Meadowood, Winnipeg. In the following month, my family moved to the prairies. The first day, when I found myself in the blazing summer sun that warmed the land with an immense amount of light, my inner voice spoke to me, saying “This Land and the Creator God have called you here.”

Since then, I have sensed a strong unity between this land and its peoples - and myself. I see now that committing to a place fully is a beautiful and spiritually strong practice. It lets us turn our vision and hearts toward each other, to make a strong heartbeat together, to follow the wisdom of the land - teachings of unity and harmony. The undividedness of the land helps us see the equally undivided call to make relationships with each other.

Of course, different people may have a different sense of place. In my congregation, which is located in a suburban neighbourhood, what I heard most often in the past winter was people sharing joy or even congratulating those who could escape from this land during the winter, fleeing to warmer places. It’s not surprising; in the first couple of months after we moved, my family were asked over and over, “Why on earth have you come to Winnipeg? Know that you pay for what you get.” In the meantime, I was always inspired whenever aboriginal people spoke affirmingly that we are welcome to “Treaty One: the ‘beautiful territory’ we share.” What a contrast!

When your life and identity is deeply rooted and shaped by what the land means and what it gives to us and shares with us, when you, your family’s, and your community’s pain has been generated and perpetuated by the traumatizing consequences of stolen land, your life with the land makes a different kind of statement about the land where your life-blood line flows. Your aching heart and love for your land will never allow you to turn away from the sufferings of your peoples and of the others who live equally with the land. You will be committed to revealing the blazing Suns in the horizons of people’s hopes; you will be committed to tackling the societal issues of racialized poverty and environmental racism, the issues of the toxic drinking waters of isolated first nation communities like Shoal Lake 40 and the persistent call for a national inquiry into the murdered and missing First nation women and girls and two spirited people.

These hopes also make me express my concerns for my dearest United Churches in our city and in other places. My deepest concerns for our churches come from my observation of our local congregations: how do our worship and congregational life in general, priorities and practices, governance and structure maintain or contribute to perpetuating the consequences of colonization and racialization? That’s a big question, and one that’s hard to face; let me break it down a bit.

Each local congregation seems to be getting more anxious for its own survival.  We seem to be getting more insular - like interlocking our fingers together very tight (gesture), concerned only with what we can see inside those locked fingers. Threatened by changes in society, by changes in church structure, we become self-centered, self-protective. We don’t easily open our minds and hearts, our boundaries and budgets to think and act in the places outside of our immediate radar of interest and benefit. We assign a budget from our finances to support inner-city community ministries and we send our volunteers and money. However, we rarely make ‘relationships’ with those we are commanded to serve and to be partnered with - those who have fallen through the cracks or been forced to live in poverty. We can’t truly say we believe in committing to eliminating poverty unless we truly commit ourselves, personally as well as institutionally.

We put the word Justice in our prayers every Sunday, and sing it in our hymns so often, but do we gather to set a date for starting social justice missions within our own congregation? We become numb to social justice issues, or decide to just be ‘neutral’ about them, acting on feelings of conflict, guilt or uncertainty. Or we love too dearly the privileges that have made us so comfortable. It almost seems that we are determined to look only at our small communities, our concerns, our wishes, our ‘busy-work’ agendas, without asking what God truly requires of us. (Micah 6:8)

I wonder why being obedient to the authentic teachings of the Jesus of justice, mercy, and openness to the outcasts hardly ever makes its way to the agendas or minutes of our board or Council meetings? Rather, we give ourselves permission to think or say, “It’s o.k. to think of ourselves first. We have so many things on our plates right now - we need to prioritize what we can do first.” We put our best thinking into how to attract more people from the outside community and incorporate them into church life and church work, but we are very quiet about the command to assist God in working to restore wholeness to the messy consequences (or, borrowing a word from Dr. Cornel West, “catastrophes”) of colonization: racism, poverty, violence, hopelessness, justice postponed and ignored. We hardly move our rocks to respond to the outcries of our own people in this land, in our city, even now when their patience has reached its limits.

With our desperate need to be secure in our own comfort zones, these voices never come through to our worship, fellowship, Christian education, Council or Board, without being filtered, diluted, muted, edited! We see them and hear them in newspaper articles, social media, Minutes for Mission, but we rarely get to meet these people who have such a desperate need to make their voices heard. What would happen if we were to listen to them, and be partnered with them to effect a change!

It amazes me how profoundly we are disconnected from the heartbeats of God and the Blazing Suns of the people in our own time and city and province! We have gathered in this service, this morning, to recognize and celebrate the ministries of our church - shouldn’t we ask why the ministries and missions of our own local congregations have been so complacent about the status quo, no matter the church’s size and finances? Can we do more than maintain the problems and poverty - to turn the “principalities and powers” that control them upside down? Can we ask each other to challenge our lifestyles and behaviours as individuals and as a community? Will you ask your ministers and leaders to change and shift the priorities of ministry, from focusing on our own needs to serving the needs of others? Why are our ministry and church life so self-centered and unchallenging? We need to challenge each other and our own congregations to say that these self-serving church priorities - attendance, building, cash - are not okay. My wish for us all, this morning, is to dream that our local congregations can be better than just being a "middle-class" church which mainly serves the spiritual and social needs of the White, middle-class majority.

My dear friends in Christ, what should be changed? What should be changed if we really want to see the realization of our commitment to Treaty One? How should we share this beautiful territory in a way that reveals God as the blazing Sun within and among all the peoples in it? Why have we, ministers, become so quiet and never risked, never challenged our congregations to advance the Kingdom of God in the lives of the poor, starting first within our neighbourhoods, city and province? What are our excuses?

What my experience of ministry in Winnipeg has taught me is that we will only achieve the ‘appearance’ of reconciliation, if we don’t really battle with the troubles and hard issues, the day-to-day struggles of many First Nation individuals and communities. So I repeat the first question I asked earlier; How do our worship and congregational life, priorities and practice, governance and structure maintain or contribute to perpetuating the consequences of colonization and racialization? Does our current church culture continue to marginalize God’s actions and aching heart for the oppressed? What we prioritize decides what we marginalize.

In today’s reading we hear, “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” When we cry, “Abba! Father!”, this assures us that becoming adopted as a daughter, a son, a child of God means we will not fall back into fear. Being an adopted child of God means we all are equally challenged and invited to discover the compelling beauty and strength in each other’s humanness, and let this discovery make us fearless, touching and holding in our hands each other’s bright and blazing, fierce and fiery Sun.