Sermon: Choose Life, Create Life!
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Introduction:
(Begin with the video that plays Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star 12 Variations Piano)
Today’s sermon continues on from last week’s reflections on creating life after destruction. Be the Light in the world with all that we are - our humanity, emotions and individuality. This week’s message is not just a repetition, although the value of repetition in cycles and movements that spiral and return can open a new spiritual perspective to us. Today’s message is more like piano variations. That’s why I played 12 Variations of Mozart’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star for you. I have played those variations before. My teacher taught me to play them when I was young, and as a child pianist I didn’t find the variations exciting, but I do now.
Sermon:
There are certain events that change our lives permanently; we cannot go back and undo them; we can only move forward with our altered lives. When those times and events happen, we often evolve to learn the way to find ourselves, again. We learn how to empower ourselves and others who have been affected, and support them. We learn how to be resilient, to reconstruct our lives and establish new norms that open fresh possibilities for tomorrow. Last week, I shared with you two writings from Jeanette Armstrong and Richard Wagamese: The Bluejay’s laughing about humans who do not know the Sun has risen and it is a new day, and Wagamese’s praising the Infinite Quality of Light, “more colour and more light to come.” These are songs of hope and faith for those whose individual and community life has been turned upside down violently and permanently to arise and be radiant again - it is possible; it is a call.
People call such earthshaking events trauma and its forms are many. But trauma is not just about what happened, what the event’s story was, but how it has been experienced: It is life experience, deeply psychological, fatally historical, often passed on in the form of intergenerational experience of trauma. Trauma is structural. It is the wounded state of mind of the downtrodden, the violated peoples, therefore, it is also the wounded heart of the Creator who chooses to be not omni-potent but fully present to the hurt as the God of Compassion, who weeps, opening himself, embracing vulnerability. In this sense God is not a weak version of the human experience, but shows the model of how to be an enlightened Being with an empathic aching heart of love, action and listening. And yet such a Mothering God, such a Fathering God is hidden in the world… because we humans are always chasing after the signs of power; we yearn for a conquering, sky-filling God.
Last week, I introduced to you what the writer Alicia Elliott says in the Foreword to This Place, 150 years Retold. “As Indigenous people, we all live in a post-apocalyptic world. The world as we knew it ended the moment colonialism started to creep across these lands. But we have continued to tell our stories; we have continued to adapt. Despite everything, we have survived.” These stories are owned by the survivors of trauma, in contrast to the history written by the victors. Every Indigenous person’s story is, in a way, a tale of overcoming apocalypse.
I am sharing this witness before we move into today’s Bible reading because today’s reading is tricky. We all know that in the Bible, in the Gospel stories, there are many covenant stories to create life, advocate life, to affirm life. The Bible has been the true good news for those who seek self-determination. It gives them the strength and the moral imperative to rise up, and stand up for themselves. It is the story of the underdog, and therefore, today’s reading can be read in quite opposite ways if we do not take special care, because today’s reading is written by the victors, the conquerors - the Hebrews.
One of the contradictions we face in history and in our lives is that the same identity can mean different things depending on the times and the social context. We can be both oppressed and privileged by the same identity. The Hebrew people who escaped enslavement in Egypt and passed 40 years of exile wandering in the desert, almost to the point of a starved and uncomfortable death, the people who had endured devastation, clinging to just one hope, one promise – that they would enter the promised land – our sympathy is entirely with them. In today’s reading, the author declares that “If you obey the commandments of the Creator and walk in his ways, and observes his commandments, decrees and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.”
To possess.
Wait - what?
What does that mean?
Before this word, we should pause… to read the words not from the viewpoint of the victors, but from the perspective of those who have lost and who feel the full force of the destruction of their lands and the violation of their homes.
Slightly before this chapter, in Deuteronomy, chapter 7, the author declares, “When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you - the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canannites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you - and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.”
To sum up, get that land, bear no regrets. It’s all legitimate, no matter what, because God has declared you can – you must, in God’s name, enter and possess. No mercy – no reflecting that the opposite of possessing is the other’s experience of being dispossessed. Their disruption. Their displacement. Their destruction.
However, there’s hope. In so many places, our Bible clearly tells us that even in the devastation of wartime, humans create life. Those who have been displaced, disconnected, discounted, who have found themselves on the other side of God the Victor’s sanctity and sanctuary indeed rise and stand up to sing and praise and illuminate the God, the Ultimate Guardian of the human spirit of recreation, reinvention, resistance, reconstruction and resilience and of the Bluejay’s laughter. “Wake up! Wake up! All shadows are gone. There’s daylight even in the swamps!”
There is hope and the future's daybreak even in imprisonment for those who have been thrown down because of their prophecy!
Last weekend, at a retreat called Renewing the Peace Treaty with the Earth, I ran into a familiar storyteller, Bob Haverluck. He said something like this: Do you know where most of the most beautiful descriptions, praise and illustration of the new heaven and earth have been written in the Bible? While those voices were, in human eyes, trapped in the situation of “captivity”. In the victor’s eyes, they are confined. In the Liberator’s eyes, the Creator’s eyes, they are free. Always, prophets in the Bible are found in one of three situations - “on the way to captivity, or in captivity, or just getting out of captivity”.
Even while imprisoned, the prophets still create life. Still write blessings. Still infuse imagination, which is a power no weapon can kill. Then, the people of the Holy, Aching Liberator, use anything that is available to them, pens and letters, stories and songs, to tell others just what God has also declared in today’s reading, in the crossroads of “Life and death, blessings and curses,” always, choose life, and just like every blade of grass to which angels say, “grow, grow, grow, “create life, O People of History. Amen.
Hymn:
All people are also the stardust whose destiny is to shine.
Let me introduce to you a beautiful hymn about Grandmother God.
Grandmother God, grandmother God.
Younger than a youth,
older than the stars,
passionate for truth,
breaking prison bars,
comforting the sad,
wise from ancient days,
Grandmother God, gladdened by our praise.
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