Sermon: BREAK! ... It's a Pentecost Sermon (Isaiah 65:17-19, 21-23), for Pacific Mountain Regional Council, June 3, 2023

Sermon Title: BREAK! … It’s a Pentecost Sermon 

Scripture: Isaiah 65:17-19, 21-23

In the voice of the prophet Isaiah, God declares,

 

“My people will build houses and live in them, plant vineyards and eat their fruit. 

They will not build for others to live in, or plant for others to eat.” 

 

When you hear these verses, this declaration is not really about building a house.  These people are in captivity. They have built houses for their landlords, their masters, their colonizers in Babylon. So, they have been building houses. 

 

I’ll say it again: the declaration we hear today is not about building a house. 

It is about owning. 

 

Owning your life. 

Owning your voice. 

Owning your body. 

Owning your labour. 

Owning your language. 

 

Own your United Church story. 

Own your BC Conference story. 

Own your Pacific Mountain Regional Council Story. 

Own your congregational ministry story. 

 

Own God’s dwelling in you, in the moment of the difficult, challenging, creative “ruptures” you’ve experienced in life and ministry. 

 

You may think of rupture as a word associated with trauma, or an intolerable amount of damage, but “rupture”, by definition, means “breaking away from the established pattern. A break from social, cultural or historical norms or conventions; a significant turning point; a moment of crisis, signaling the necessity for change or transformation.” 

 

Isaiah’s declaration to build a house is not for the landowners; it’s for those whose ancestors have been enslaved. It’s for those who, for generations, have seen their lives, their community and their children be robbed of autonomy and forced into a system which is not their own. 

 

Isaiah’s message is for those who have lived and survived, resurging from the colonial apocalypse and its intergenerational impact. Isaiah’s housebuilding is for those whose ancestors paid a head tax in order to build the Pacific Railway. It is for those whose ancestors’ homes were stolen while they were imprisoned in internment camps. 

 

I hope to see the sacred verb build be reserved for the communities which resurge, reconnect and reclaim a reconciliation that includes reparation.

 

In Isaiah, another verse that shines forth is “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth”; I believe it should mean for us that “God is about to create a new context.” It is a call for us “to be radically contextualized” in the new heavens and a new earth where God finds new work and renewed rest. In other words, we need to be radically contextualized in “our own new context” that must create a rupture in the middle of our endeavours, regardless of whatever we are going to do.

 

God’s declaration, “My people will build houses and live in them, plant vineyards and eat their fruit” is written for those whose lives have been disrupted by oppression. If we flip it, creating a rupture for the hearers who are in the position of being able to use their power and privilege without any hindrance, God’s Word is reversed in the statement of prohibitions: 

 

Do not build on stolen land 

Do not build on stolen labour 

Do not build on the mastery of English

Do not build on white culture 

Do not build on White Supremacy 

Do not build on the patriarchy

Do not build on the false concept that Canada or The United Church has overcome the patriarchy,

Do not build on “We are not perfect, but we are still better”

Do not build on White male privilege 

Do not build on White female privilege 

Do not build on non-White male privilege

Do not build on Gender binary and cisgender privilege

Do not build on able-bodied privilege

Do not build on Neo-liberalism 

Do not build on the 1% hard-working CEOs 

Do not build on praising the 1% hard-working CEOs

Do not build on “What is mine is mine” 

Do not build on “It’s my property; it belongs to me and I can use it however I please” 

                    (including church property)

Do not build on taking advantage of the grace of Mother earth 

 

When I was young, growing up in Korea, the August summer sky was high and blue. When I climbed a gentle hill, looking at the pillowy clouds in the blue sky, with the ice cream cone in my hand echoing the cumulus shapes up above, that was enough to cool the sweat on my forehead. That is gone now. Children in Korea in 2023 do not know that feeling. Sometimes you cannot go outside without wearing a proper mask, not because of Covid, but because of the danger of fine dust in the air. Sometimes you cannot see the sun for weeks in August, covered and choked behind the grey sky. Not to mention, it is too hot and too humid, due to climate change. One summer, a very popular ocean beach was closed because the sand was dangerously hot! On every small corner, builders build high-rise buildings endlessly, covering everything in asphalt, roads, shopping malls…  I take an issue with praising building… 

 

When we use the sacred word, “build”, let us allow a moment of rupture; let us embrace the radical context of new heavens and a new earth, in the era of climate justice.

 

For another moment of rupture, I would like to invite you to be radically contextualized in my lived experience, owning my BC Conference story. It happened at a lunch table in the BC Conference office building, around 2012. I was there for an interview as a candidate for ministry, and at the lunch table, someone, a well-known and respected minister, was sitting alone. And they saw me, and I saw them. And in that split second, when I was anxious but ready to say hi, the eyes which stared at me quickly turned down to whatever they were doing, with no expression on their face, as if telling me, ‘I am not seeing you. I am not interested in you. You are not enough for me to recognize. I am waiting for someone else, and it was not you. I am too occupied with whatever I am doing. I am busy, distracted, I find no reason to acknowledge your presence and say hi to you…

I was there to join the ministry, after years of study and effort… I felt unwelcome. 

 

There are four wildfires in my lived experience which burned me, and I came out of them, eventually, as who I am. But, as they are fires, their flames were blazing enough to scorch my spirit, to cause me to groan and mourn and rage, in the United Church of Canada! It is hard to build a home – it is hard to build anything, when you are engulfed in flames.

 

The four flames that have burned me deep are gender, race, culture, and language. I am not alone in feeling these refining fires.

 

What happens when gender and race intersect? It is quite simple. For me, it’s MisogynAsian. (I coined that term.) Say, Misogyny. Say, Asian. Now, put together the two. Misogyn~Asian. Racism and misogyny come at me together. Not only that - since I am married, all of racism and sexism, and heteronormative cisgender-centred patriarchal assumptions and biases hinder me. Then, language is the fuel that makes everything above so much worse. Accents or broken English… That immediately creates the stereotype of an Asian immigrant woman, and such stereotyping affects the way you’re treated. 

 

Then, a month ago, I had this exhilarating, unprecedented, deeply personal Pentecost experience. It created a liberating rupture, breaking the tight chains of the four refining fires: gender, race, culture, language. I was at the Transgender History Moving Forward Conference at UVic, centering Transgender people’s voices and presence. Through the presenters’ voices, I felt belonging in this diverise community, and suddenly started to speak my mind and own my story, delivering them in a super-fluent BROKEN ENGLISH, in Pentecostal style. I let go of the fear of losing the mastery of language. I abandoned the apprehension of whether the others are getting what I try to mean in English. My English was broken; my grammar was disorganized, but I did not care. I kept "talking like a baptist”! In the moment of the Mystery of Broken English, I came alive from the Language Burn and resurrected in the Holy Spirit, Born Again in Brokenness. What a rupture! WE need to allow many more rupture moments to happen in all the spaces we build to create a community. In the Bible’s Pentecost story, even though God may be one, Christ may be one, the Holy Spirit allowed themselves to be BROKEN into one hundred, one thousand, one million different pieces, … one million different tongues. Intercultural Pentecost is born in ruptures, born in brokenness, not in building to maintain the status quo. Therefore,

 

For those who have been broken by hierarchy (of whatever that is in your own context), climb your new heavens and a new earth, and praise! 

Your brokenness is sacred. Praise! 

The rupture that creates a new possibility is your crown. Praise!

 

Let us honour the million and billion broken Spirit pieces in the world, and celebrate their resurrection.

 

So, Pacific Mountain people, 

BREAK, rather than Build, 

BUILD only when it is about empowering yourself and others to own stories of brokenness. 

PLANT the new imagination, instead of building buildings in the lands and places that are NOT our own. 

Plant re-imagination. 

Plant the seed of reparation. 

Plant the rupture from capitalism to allow for “experimenting with rest”, 

not patterning ourselves after hardworking CEOs. 

Then, PRAISE, in the radically contextualized new heavens and new earth.

 

For those of us who continue to learn how to own our stories, 

Do not build a house for others to dwell and live. 

Plant the vineyard for yourself and eat the fruit for your own body. 

Praise, rest, hope, resurrect, in the blessings and the spirit of brokenness, the spirit of the Broken master’s logic, the Pentecost of the Broken master’s language. 

 

Benediction: 

So, Break. Build. 

Plant and Praise, 

Rupture and Rest,

let’s do all of these. 

(Using the words from Richard Wagamese' Embers)

You can’t test your courage timidly. You have to run through the fire, arms waving, legs pumping and heart beating wildly with your efforts to build a house for you to dwell and live and plant the vineyard for yourself and eat the fruit for your own body. Then, let us shine most brightly in community, bound together forever by a shared courage, a family forged in the heat of earnest struggle.