Reflection: The songs for an escape community
(Deuteronomy 34:1-12)
It was the summer in 2013. My family was visiting my parents in Korea. Thanks to their care, my partner and I were able to attend the celebration service for the 60th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea. I was waiting to see who the preacher of the day would be and saw an old man, relying on his cane and also being helped by a youth walking up to the pulpit – he was a 90 year old, shrunken and frail person. Everyone became very quiet. Then, in a second, he preached like thunder. He was Rev. Dong Hwan Moon, the younger brother of Rev. Ik Hwan Moon who was the protagonist, prophet and poet that led the spirit of the Korean democratic movement in the 70’s to 90’s. One of his poems is included in our hymn book, Voices United, in the form of a hymn, “With the Wings of Our Mind” (VU 698). The title of Rev. Moon’s sermon at the celebration service was “The Escape to the Garden of Eden”. I later learned that he wrote a book “The Tower of Babel and Wanderers” in the same theme in his last year. Rev. Moon lashed out against the evils being done in the name of the neo-liberalism that unleashes the tyranny of free trade and free markets. He said it was our Tower of Babel. This Tower of Babel tells us that possessing more equals more happiness, so, produce more and consume more. Still, even in our era of more advanced social perspectives on equity and equality and the dignity of people’s lives and human rights, materially advanced nations constantly ignore the local and indigenous people’s deeply aching cries and concerns about water and air pollution, global warming and social economic disparities and disasters in order to create more tax revenue and make the wealthy even wealthier. Here in Canada, we still pump bituminous crude oil from tar sands, invest in fossil fuels for Canadian pension plans, and favour the megafishery corporation over the rights of treaties.
In his sermon, Rev. Moon said only when we experience and realize evil as an evil would we dream to escape from the evil. In the Bible, the first five books of Torah, called the Pentateuch, begins with Genesis and ends in Deuteronomy, with the chapter we just read being the last and which records the death of Moses in Moab. The Bible says that God forbade him to enter the promised land. Between Moab where Moses was buried and his death was mourned, and Canaan, the promised land, was the last geographical border, the river of Jordan, laid out before the people Moses was leading, “the escape community” (Rev. Moon-Dong Hwan.) Just like this group of people had to find the right timing to cross the Red Sea by walking on the dryland when the water of the Sea was divided into two walls on left and right in Exodus, in Deuteronomy, the whole community was about to enter the land of Canaan. Canaan was the land that God showed in the vision of countless stars over the endless wild landscape to Abraham, the first ancestor of the Hebrew people. I wondered what all of this possibly can mean to us?
It is interesting to note that every year the Jewish community reads the first five books of Torah, starting with Genesis, “In the beginning”, and ending with the story of Moses’ death in the last book. It is as if this is the eternal cycle of our human story… or condition…, from escape to the garden of Eden. It is as if the original place God intends us to live is in the garden, Eden, in the peaceable realm where flowers bloom and fruits ripen but human greed does not. In Genesis, God creates the world and God’s desire for us is that we be the peaceful dwellers who enjoy the flourishing of life in the garden. Then, nevertheless, human greed sprouts and begets hatred, killing, murder, the building of the babel tower, the selling of a brother to the empire as a slave. In Egypt, aristocracy exploited human manual labour forcing it to maintain the system of the powerful based on social class. In the ancient Mesopotamian Near East, those who were not residents in the inside of city countries, those wanderers and nomadics who did not settle in one region were called Habiru. Perhaps it meant savages, or ‘the uncivilized’, or ‘those who have no rights’, referring to those who were unregistered and who were of lower class. The Habriu were rebels, outlaws, raiders, mercenaries, servants, slaves, migrant labourers. Also, any disorganized peasant groups and artisans were treated as habiru. Ancient inscriptions show that not all habiru were Hebrews, but any Hebrew at the time who were forced labourers in Egypt were called habirus. That was their social rank and how they were treated in the ancient Near East world. However, Hebrews were distinct from other ethnicities. They preserved the belief in their God. They passed on their faith that they had a special relationship with God which originated with their first known ancestors-- Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Leah, Rachael. When Moses discovered and reclaimed his own heritage as a Hebrew, when he started to learn about the God of the Hebrew people and when he encountered this unnameable deity in the form of the burning bush who told him, “I am who I am” (YWHW), his spiritual strength grew and his wisdom and prophecy spurred him onto the new path – empowering others to rethink the whole paradigm of their life based on the faith of their ancestors. Thanks to him, the new, really new and unprecedented hope for freedom, dignity and liberation was impressed in the hearts of the Hebrews. Very slowly, not only while these people were enslaved in Egypt, but through the next 40 years of making their way to the land that was promised to Abraham, Hebrew people learned to believe leaving Egypt is the right thing to do, as the hard-earned truth. The journey to realize this belief was very difficult and was prolonged with lots of rerouting as they looked for water, and were guided by only manna and the pillars of cloud and fire. And that was it. Moses was the pillar who led the escape community from the empire. His task, vision and teaching were to liberate his people from the enslavement mentality.
The leadership of his young successor, Joshua, had a different paradigm. Right after Moses’ death in Moab, with the new and young leadership of Joshua, the Bible reports the Israelite’s first conquest project, the destruction of the city of Jericho. To note, the obvious reason the Hebrew people took so long to reach the land of Canaan – which took nearly 40 years -- is that they took the roundabout path that goes around the coast under the Sinai Peninsula, rather than making the straight line to Canaan passing Philistine above the Peninsula. The escape community made 15 lengthy stops before they reached the River Jordan. The Bible says that going roundabout was to avoid war. “When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead them by way of the Philistines, although it was nearer; for God said, ‘The people may have a change of heart when they see war, and return to Egypt.’ So God led the people roundabout, by way of the wilderness at the Sea of Reeds” (Exodus 13:17-18). Moses’ campaign was different from that of Joshua; It was the campaign of liberating the community because leaving Egypt, leaving the empire, was the right thing to do. It was to say evil as an evil and to follow God from the system that would ultimately wrong and harm them. By the way, according to my contemporary road trip companion, GPS, it would take about an 8 day walk, non-stop and without sleep. Therefore, just a week-long walk, compared to 40 years. Moses’ leadership was focused on constructing an escape community. That endeavour needed significant time and the work of multiple generations which was very different from just fleeing or fighting. A people of faith was being formed and reshaped in God’s ethical and religious commandments and convent. Moses completed his task and left his legacy to the generations that followed.
I still cherish the thunder words I listened to at the 60th anniversary celebration of the birth of the Korean Presbyterian church which is one of the few liberal denominations in Korea and which used to be the leading voice for the Korean democratic movement. Now their voices seem to have lost influence, because few in the denomination continue to think about what the evils are now and who are presently the national and global Pharaohs. Rev. Ik-Hwan Moon sang the vision “With the wings of our song on the wind flying/ to the dreary desolate earth our love sending/ let the vision of light open wide our hearts/ ‘till the songs of our hope freedom ringing.” His younger brother, Rev. Dong Hwan Moon wrote about our need to escape following the vision of the renewed earth with the culture of “life”. God still speaks to us, the wanderers from the Tower of Babel. What are our escape songs? How can we truly be an escape community to inspire and influence as well as to be inspired and influenced by today’s prophets?
Reflective Music: What Does the Lord
Require of You?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XonFoO_gWM
Hymn:
VU 701 What Does the Lord
Require of You? (The Micah Song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bnn_pnqaMo
%5EJ%202023.jpg)
