Sermon: On Watt’s Street
Exodus 32:1-14
Introduction to the story
In today’s story from Exodus, Moses was away from his people for a very long time - forty days and forty nights. The people had no idea that Moses was in God’s presence and was receiving further instructions from God. They feared that something had happened to God’s spokesman and covenant mediator - the man who had led them out of Egypt. The people felt very vulnerable without Moses, so they built a ‘golden calf’ to worship; after all, Moses has disappeared, or even worse, he’s abandoned them – any protection is better than none. As we engage with the story and the reflection, I would like us to ponder how we seek God’s presence in a situation of deeply-felt absence.
Message
Last Tuesday morning, I was driving to church from my home in St Vital. My phone GPS has well-taught me to take Archibald Street, then, after Nairn Avenue, Watt Street. That’s my normal route for the morning before I get to Kimberley Avenue and Golspie Street, and here we are! (I think that’s the best route I have found so far for the morning commute - if you have alternative suggestions, you can tell me later.) Rather than taking the highway, I like to drive through those residential and industrial areas, where people live or people are busy. I trust that no matter what different life circumstances each of us may have, we all work hard within our life contexts and different capacities, to live well, to live decently, to live with purpose and meaning. Driving down Archibald St or Watt St in the mornings often gives me that feeling; I recognize my desire to commit to the ministry that God’s mission is with our neighbours, therefore with us. We are not complete without these diverse people for whom the “sojourning” of life is really lived day by day, here and now, working hard to meet the needs of today. I imagine that this context of our lives and ministry is relevant to reflect the story of Moses and Israel, Aaron and the golden calf.
First, the golden calf. We often want a golden calf- we believe that we need a golden calf. We want some ‘sign’ of the presence of meaning, purpose and direction in our lives, and there’s nothing wrong with that desire. Because ultimately, at a deeper level, we all want to get close to what helps us feel the presence of something bigger than us, outside of us, especially when we are amidst a time of deeply-felt absence.
I remember going through a very anxious time in 2004: I was just-married, felt lost in the direction of my future goals, and Min Goo and I lived in a makeshift roof-top house on the top of the four-story church building where he worked, which was a challenge on top of the struggle of finding myself in the role of a minister’s wife in the deeply patriarchal culture of Korean churches. To make things worse, the church was located next to a very wide highway that was on a hill. Whenever the heavy trucks and buses ran on the highway, the vibration and noise threatened my health - or at least I felt that way. As a result I became anxious – a young woman, isolated from her former life, living with constant noise in a rickety house on top of a church that was trying to form her into a smiling, silent angel… Things were bad. But one afternoon, when the anxiety was most intense, then I remembered the rosary my mom gave me as a wedding gift, bidding blessings and asking me to keep it close. And I held it, not because I believed that God was within this object, but because of the power of my mother’s love, and so of God’s love, who gave it as a sign of love, security and prayer. As long as I honour the meanings behind the rosary in my hands, it is no longer “fetishized”, but a gift.
Let’s go back to thinking about the golden calf. Queer theologians like to invite us to think through things differently, and I really like their approach. Some of them say, looking at the rebellion of the people from a gay perspective, perhaps we can see more in them than just the negative depiction of a whining, ungrateful, faithless people. For example, we could see these people with Aaron, rebelling against the authority of Moses, actually providing a model of the critical role dissent plays in a community. Because the people are not unquestioningly following Moses, they prove themselves to be people who are thinking for themselves! They are willing to go against a powerful leader, and question his ideas and commands!
In this sense, I hope that we can see the golden calf in a new light. What it symbolizes is not the abomination of a human act of worshipping or honouring objects or animals, “created beings”. Once we understand the spirituality of other religions, their ways of life, we learn that we shouldn’t judge or invalidate their beautiful ways to honour the sacred and “animated, proud and productive” power in all things. What we are invited to learn from today’s story is a critique of our behaviour - how we find and seek God and God’s presence when all we can feel is God’s absence. We are invited to ask, in those times of absence, are we looking for a way to create new realities, new possibilities, or are we finding ourselves choosing the more visible expression and reality of the more familiar, comfortable, order?
We ultimately seek God’s presence because it is energizing. God’s presence is not constrained by the here and now. We might be able to say more boldly, “God’s presence is never constrained by the tyranny of the present,” the realities of oppression, violence, patriarchy, hierarchy, war, heteronormativity, the neo-liberalism of the capitalist world, … Any false reality that tell us “There is no future but the here and now of our everyday life.” God’s presence means not just the present time stretching out into the future, but the future stretching back, critiquing the present of what is, casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be. God’s presence must be linked to hope.
The prophetic task of Moses, therefore ours, is then declaring, believing and living that God’s future time, the Kingdom of God, lives in our action to challenge the dominance of the present time (of fear and anxiety) with the promise of energizing hope and possibility. Something is about to be given! The future will be a gift! Egypt was without energy, because it did not believe anything was promised or about to be given. Egypt, like every imperial and eternal now, believed everything was already given, contained, possessed – the present is composed of facts, hard facts which we cannot change.
I believe our task as a prophetic community is to do our work, engage with conversations, finding and showing what we can do together to make a difference. We can speak of our hope for God’s and our future time and share it with our neighbours who, like us, work hard to meet the needs of today, and at the same time, want more. Want to make a positive impact on the lives of ourselves and others, want to dream what is possible, what can be, what will be, want more than what the present offers.
These days I have a one-and-a-half hour round-trip commute solely devoted to coming to church and then going back home, picking up the kids enroute. And I happily do it, because I come here to make hope, knowing that I will find that gift - hope - here, for myself and for you and for others.
Then, on the way here, last Tuesday morning, I had this sudden, mystical illusion or illumination… probably in the junction of Archibald St and Watt St. The whole world looked to me like water, endless water, flowing and rolling all around me. When God gives us a vision, it is supposed to be astonishing and fresh to the one who sees it or receives it. What this vision showed me was that I used to think that some of the life realities I experience and go through are “hard”. By “hard” I mean, not “difficult” even though they are difficulties, but (knocking the wood of the pulpit), solid, heavy, having their own own existence, fixed, unchanging. Like quantifiable, “hard facts”.
I have not undergone any real, significant economic status challenges. I have lived a fairly comfortable (with some exceptions) middle-class life both in Korea and Canada. Yet, I have known the formidable, tedious presence of every-day ongoing racism and sexism, because they go together and they are ever-present, and I so much detested them. I also agonized a lot on defining who I am - my identity -, what my role is, and how to start and build mutually embracing, equal friendships with white colleagues, white students... in the “White world”. These were my hard realities, hard facts – my past, and, to some extent, my present. It would be easy to believe that these difficulties could be with me – forever.
But - the experience of envisioning the whole world rolling like water suddenly invited me to see a new horizon of God’s future time. Specifically, God’s future time for me. In this vision the hard realities that I believed were hard are not so “hard”, because in between each and every hard reality, there’s “Teum” “Sai”, (in Korean; unfilled space, gap) and I see the rest of the world flows with it, through it, between all places.
Then I realized that rather than feeling stifled or constrained by the weight and the close-ness of the hard realities, I can be in these unfilled, flexible, open, in-between spaces, and in these creative, fluid places, I can be playful, creative, prophetic, a day-dreamer, widening the gap, so that more positive, fun, exciting possibilities flow, like water, endless water, rolling down to the streets.
Some people call this kind of creativity, “queering”. Queering as future time versus straight as present time.
Today’s story again calls us to the prophetic task of creative imagining: where and how we find God’s future time and presence in the midst of our present time. We look for the future as a gift, energizing hope, opening creation. When the facts of today are hard, we build a reminder, even a golden calf, of God’s, and our future. Where are we? What will be? What can be? The future speaks to our present, pulling us out of what is to what can be.
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