Sermon title: What Do We Commemorate?
Scripture: Exodus 3:1-12
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| A large cross is wheeled in ahead of the public memorial service for right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21, 2025.PATRICK T. FALLON/GETTY IMAGES |
This Sunday, I want to start with a question: What do we commemorate?
We are currently standing between two events. Charlie Kirk, an American right-wing activist, was, with great fanfare, laid to rest in the U.S last weekend. Our National Day of Truth and Reconciliation is two days away. And on this last Sunday where we hear the story of Moses and the burning bush, his calling, so deeply tied to the Hebrew people’s Exodus, we’re also standing on holy ground.
I’ve been struck by the outpouring of empathy for someone who publicly refused to see the humanity in others. For many, Charlie Kirk was someone who gave language and legitimacy to their quiet prejudices. When he said aloud what others kept hidden, he gave a voice to their grievances and their desires.
And so, as we ask this question, What do we commemorate? I want us to pause and reflect on Charlie Kirk’s funeral. Up until this point, I had no idea who he was, what he was doing, or how he was influencing such a large number of college students across the U.S. Then came the assassination, and everything that followed: those who had been inspired by him, those who only learned about him after his death, his organization, Turning Point USA, the scale of his influence. The numbers grew, the mourning and the anger intensified, and events kept unfolding. Personally, it was shocking, astonishing even, a continuous stream of realities and reactions that left me speechless.
It didn’t feel like the burning bush or the holy ground I talked about last week — those moments that invite us deeper into reality. It felt instead like a disruption of reality, a pressing sense that I had to understand: What is happening? What does what we are seeing and hearing really mean?
The funeral was broadcast nationally. The President was there, the Vice President, cabinet members, top political leaders—all present. And it wasn’t just a family grieving their personal loss. It became a public spectacle, a liturgy of power. What unfolded wasn’t really about honouring one man’s life. It was about rebranding his ideology, wrapping it in the language of national sainthood. Here was a man known for defending “free speech,” when in truth, much of what he promoted and protected was hate speech. And yet, his funeral became a platform for religious extremism and nationalist rhetoric—white supremacy and false Christianity normalized, even celebrated. And then at the end, the command went out: “Go to church.”
So why am I bringing Charlie Kirk, and especially his funeral, into this conversation, here, at a Canadian church lectern? Why am I asking with you: What do we commemorate? After all, this didn’t happen in Canada. And we are clearly different from those kinds of “churches.”
Before we move on, this is what I know and have learned: the name Charlie Kirk, sanctified and lifted up as a martyr, is claimed by the right wing to represent the true Christian Gospel and the desire of young people. But if you really put a magnifier on what they are saying, it is all about hatred and exclusion—anti-immigration, debates built on lies that don’t match evidence or history, racism, misogyny, opposition to LGBTQ people. And this has fueled the gathering of far-right movements across the world, given them inspiration, given them permission, even—including here in Canada and in Korea. It seeks to revert the hard-won progress of democracy, and even after Donald Trump is gone, it will burn like embers of a wildfire, ready to leap into conflagration again.
When moments of personal grief or national crisis are turned into public spectacles, mourning itself shifts. It stops being genuine and instead becomes a ritual that legitimizes violence, white supremacy, or religious nationalism. And that’s why commemoration is never neutral. It forces us to ask: what do we commemorate? These spectacles show us how nations use commemoration to tell a story about who is “chosen” and what their national destiny is supposed to be.
The story we read today—Exodus—it’s not a history book. It’s not a record of when or how Moses led the Hebrew people out. It was written much later, during the Babylonian exile, about 600 years after the time the Exodus was thought to have happened, when the Israelites were living far from home. And here’s the thing: scholars still debate whether the Exodus was ever one single historical event at all. But what most agree on is this—it works as Israel’s collective memory. It’s how they remembered who they were. It’s how they told the stories of their ancestors, stories passed down through generations, to shape their identity and their hope.
The Exodus is woven into the Pentateuch as a kind of re-telling, a re-enactment of Israel’s longing for liberation while they were in exile. Exodus commemorates collective memory. It’s about yearning for change. It’s about yearning for possibility. It’s not only about reflecting back on the remembered past; it’s about shaping identity and future - even our future here in the 21st century.
We need to ask: what does today’s story commemorate? What were the Hebrew people trying to remember and pass down to their children while they longed for home? Along with the Hebrew people and Moses, what do we commemorate? As Christians, as followers of Jesus who himself was Jewish, we are called to remember the story of the Hebrew people’s ancestors’ enslavement and their struggles, and the truth that slavery was not only escaped but overcome. And through this story, together with the Jewish people, we also commemorate how exile was turned into return, and how powerlessness was turned into purpose. Together, we commemorate that the Torah, at its very core, is about this: “Proclaiming liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.”
At the same time, it is critically important to commemorate the story—or to “radically revisit” what’s remembered and told in the story—with clarity-seeking in mind. Here’s one example of why asking What do we commemorate? matters so much when we read the Bible. In Exodus 3, verses 7–8, God says:
“I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.”
This verse is right at the centre of the Exodus story. It’s remembered as God’s promise. But if we commemorate this verse by emphasizing or interpreting it as a license for conquest, especially military conquest, we have to stop and ask: What are we, together with the Jewish people, commemorating in this story? Are we, without realizing it, giving permission for conquest, for colonial settlements, because the scripture seems to allow such a possibility? As Shadia Qubti reminded us months ago, do we risk blessing some people to create the suffering of others, justifying it as if God had ordained violence and conquest?
Soon, on October 1st, Jewish people will step into Rosh Hashanah, the new year, as a joyful commemoration, entering the year 5786. Rabbi Sandra Lawson says Rosh Hashanah is a time to commemorate sweetness and celebration—apples dipped in honey, the round challah reminding us of the cycle of the year and the joy of community. And she also puts this in emphasis: it’s about clarity as well. The liturgy during Rosh Hashanah tells us that all of creation is judged, not with finality, but with possibility. And so the big questions hang in the air: Who will rise? Who will fall? Who will live in freedom and dignity, and who will be stripped of their humanity?
When we think about how we commemorate, we see it’s not only about grief or even about celebrating a life. We also need clarity. Our traditions give us tools for this: not weapons, but tools. In Torah, it’s Teshuva: the courage to turn, to change direction when we see injustice. It’s the collective moral courage to admit when we’ve been complicit in systems of oppression and to actively work for repair.
It’s Tzedek: the relentless pursuit of justice. Not just “giving back” or “helping the less fortunate,” but building a world where justice flows like water, where everyone has what they need to thrive.
And it’s Chesed: the fierce love that refuses to abandon the vulnerable.
James K.A. Smith, in Desiring the Kingdom, reminds us that human beings are not just “thinking things,” as if we were brains on a stick. We are, first and foremost, loving creatures. In the end, it’s not mainly what we know in our heads that shapes our lives, but what we love and what we desire. And here’s the key: it’s our repeated practices, our daily habits, our shared rituals, what Smith calls “cultural liturgies”, that train and aim our loves and desires.
Smith gives us a lens to see that commemoration isn’t neutral remembering. It is formative ritual. It directs our loves. A state funeral that morphs into a televised spectacle of “religious/Christian nationalism” isn’t merely problematic speech. It is a powerful (dangerously powerful) liturgy. It shapes people’s minds, hearts, habits, and orientation, recalibrating desire – love and longing - toward empire and supremacy, sanctifying violence, and normalizing exclusion. That ceremony teaches people what they are sanctioned to love, and who or what they are commanded to mourn—or not to mourn.
That is why it is so critical, in our daily lives, in our cultural liturgies, in our church liturgies, and wherever we gather, that we ask: What do we commemorate? What are these rituals training us to desire, to love? What do we commemorate through and on the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation? Much will be shared on September 30th at the vigil at BVU, but thoughtful liturgies, rituals, gatherings, Sunday worship, and commemorations help us re-aim our loves toward truth, justice, right remembering, God who is righteous to all peoples, and our neighbours, especially the most vulnerable and excluded.
So the question, “What do we commemorate?” leads us further: What do our commemorations make us love? They must train us to desire chesed: that fierce love which refuses to abandon the vulnerable. Rosh Hashanah—a time of sweetness, new beginning, and clarity—reminds us that what we allow or encourage to catechize our hearts truly matters.
Commemoration shapes us, like hands on clay. Our rituals don’t just remember the past; they make us a common people by shaping what we love, who we belong to, and which future we are willing to suffer for.
In the wake of all this, I want to introduce you to the poet Wilder S. Simpson and his collection Even Mighty Spines Quiver. We learn again and again from the Bible that even in the story of the great exodus, escape, and overcoming, it is not about commemorating someone like Kirk: a liturgy of power that says, “Be strong, like the hero we commemorate.” Instead, it is about Moses, the prophet. As Simpson shows through his poetry: “Stand trembling honestly. In the trembling, meet yourself, meet God.” Commemoration must not be a spectacle, but the creation of time and space that encourages us to re-aim ourselves—our loves—toward empathy, vulnerability, heartbrokenness, deep listening to society’s call, to God’s call, and to human dignity.
One day, skiing fast down a mountain, Simpson crashed and sustained a concussion. Standing at the edge of the land, looking out at the sea, he said he “Was forced into his mind, where he confronted—with turmoil and love—the parts of himself he had long buried. What began as fearful resistance evolved into curiosity and compassion.” And in the trembling, in the sea’s golden waves and lavender-blue shimmer, he sought to meet God.
This is one example of how to counteract the ritual of power, the commemoration of a state spectacle, even one held in a stadium. We can commemorate each moment, even in our daily lives: resistance that seems futile until it isn’t, like Moses, the midwives, like Esther. And when we gather for worship, in nature, or in all of the holy grounds that exist as God’s temples, we can do so as Simpson instructs us to read his book: by letting it live. Letting it swim and breathe and sunbathe, letting the words visit the spaces that created them. Take God’s words, the poet’s words, your own words to nature, to the heartbroken, to the places where those words first arose. The Bible stories and verses are the same. The Word of God must be carried and must visit where God’s words come from: to God’s dwelling place—all places that are holy ground—and to God’s people, especially the heartbroken, the ones who cry out.
The Bible, the container of the sacred, which includes today’s Exodus story, Moses’ calling, the quivering spine, the burning bush before God—all of these words must visit and be carried back to where they come from: God’s people. They bring us an invitation to commemorate with right remembering and clarity. Not commemoration as weapon, not as state spectacle, not as empty apology spoken only in words, but re-aiming us for heartfelt and empathetic action.
So let us commemorate together, as a ritual that reshapes our love, as God’s provision for empathy and vulnerability. Let us pray and hope in commemoration that the aching minds of God’s people might know that here, with us, is a safe space to feel human. (See the words of Wilder Simpson in the image from his Instagram @wilder_writer).
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| from @wilder_writer (Instagram), with permission |
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