Sermon: To The Ends of the Earth (July 28, 2013)

Luke 11:1-13

Sermon: To the Ends of the Earth

This past week has been a difficult one; I've been worried, I’ve been distracted, but I did not lose my focus entirely. Through the week, I was holding a book wherever I went, wherever I was, carrying it with me in the car, reading it on the bed and in the waiting room of a physiotherapist’s office, just reading it, hoping that it could help untangle the message that we need to hear from this week’s scripture readings. The Tower of Babel and Wanderers, written by an excellent Korean theologian, Rev. Dong Hwan Moon, kept my spirit alive and enlightened through the week. Rev. Ik Hwan Moon, who wrote the hymn "With the Wings of Our Mind"(VU 698) that we sang last Sunday, the protagonist, prophet and poet of the Korean democratic movement, is his older brother. I met the younger Rev. Moon, the author of The Tower of Babel and Wanderers, for the first time at the celebration service for the 60^th anniversary of the Presbyterian Church in the Republic of Korea. Min Goo and I attended the service during our holiday in Korea last month.

I saw this old man walking up to the pulpit, relying on his cane and also being helped by a youth - this 90 year old, shrunken and frail person - then he preached like thunder! The title of his sermon was “The Escape to the Garden of Eden”. He 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 is our Tower of Babel. This Tower of Babel tells us that ‘possessing more’ equals more happiness, so “produce more and consume more.” Rev. Dong Hwan Moon lived through severe trials of his own while he worked to free Korea from autocratic military rule, including two times of imprisonment. His sermon said that he now realizes that the point of his life’s work was not only Korea’s urgent need of democratization but also to fight the evils of the industrial culture of our world. It opens the way for military dictatorships of many countries to rob the power of their own people in order to make their countries join the ranks of advanced nations. It opens the way for advanced nations to ignore valid concerns about water and air pollution in order to create more tax revenue and make the wealthy even wealthier.

Here in Canada, more and more of us realize that it doesn’t make sense to pump bituminous crude oil from tar sands, transport it through elevated pipelines, and then ship it overseas, risking disastrous spills. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternative reports, “71 percent of all tar sands production is owned by non-Canadian shareholders, and over half of all oil and gas operating revenue in Canada goes to foreign entities. The industry provides jobs for a mere 0.8 percent of the Canadian workforce.” I believe that we need to take time out to ask what all of this may mean. We’re told that the Tar Sands make this country wealthy, but the truth is that much of the wealth goes elsewhere, while the environmental degradation stays with us.

Individual human greed has limits; transnational corporate greed, the need to generate ‘capital’ at all costs, has no boundaries. One third of the people on earth live on three dollars a day or less. It’s hard to imagine this poverty - its existence - in depth. (...) Extreme poverty lies far behind us; it exists and manifests its ugly shape only in the sepia-tone pictures of old-time Europe or North America, or in the Third World. But as a ‘resident alien’, if I borrow the term from the biblical account, or as a ‘wanderer’ if I use the term with which the Rev. Moon identifies many like himself, or (I think I may correctly say) as an ‘outsider’ living in this country, I have begun to see and feel and experience the poverty in spirit existing in Canada. This realization runs deep, especially when my family finds we don't have anywhere to go for any meaningful relationship – which is, I find, a basic necessity for human life and happiness and well-being - especially in the evening or on holidays. Then almost the only option left for us is "shopping." We often say jokingly that almost the only welcoming place for us is, regretfully, Wal-Mart; Yes! Wal-Mart! Wal-Mart welcomes us! 

I go, seeking diversion, and I am horrified by its oppressive, cold reality which does not show any nationality, any human face, any of life's heat and uniqueness. There, we consume what we have not produced from our land. We consume products made by unknown masses whose paltry wages insure that they will never be able to buy the shiny things they have made. As an outsider, I am identified and identify myself as a mere consumer waiting in line with other consumers, to pay. It is a cold, lonely feeling like being cooled by industrial-sized air conditioners, in the temperature-controlled Wal-Mart building. This is poverty in spirit which causes people to feel smaller, undersized and powerless before the power of money.

Rev. Dong Hwan Moon says only when we experience and realize evil as an evil would we dream to escape from the evil. Only when we realize that we are lost, will we seek and knock and open a new way of being, a new way of hoping, a new way to create and to be re-created by the Creator God whose wish for us, the original place God intends for us to be in all the world, is the garden, Eden. In Judaic/Christian faith, the first community God intended for us was the escape community; God called out to Moses and his small group of "wanderers", those resident aliens in the empire of Egypt, the transnational labourers of that time, the Hebrews - and released them from the forced labour and the oppressive system of Egypt.

The prophets in the Bible repeatedly cry out in lamentation as they retell and remind the people of God that God intends for us to live in a world where justice and fairness rule and peace blossoms. Any Tower of Babel which exists for the sake of its own benefit, profit and power is against God’s will.

If a church stands only for its own, if its interest is only in growth, if it is silent about the wrongdoings of society, it is in itself a tower of Babel, no matter its size. I hope, I believe that we don’t want to be a small Babel. A church needs to speak and act. It needs to go and walk the Gospel’s path to the ends of the earth; not to convert people, but to be converted, to experience a true conversion in our hearts from the people who are at the edges and ends of the earth, struggling with the evils they experiences in their lives, now, and there, and also here – around us, near us, and even among us. I hope we can remember and embrace all those who experience poverty materially, in spirit,or in any aspect of our life. I can't forget the determined voice and the anxious face of Rev. Dong Hwan Moon when he said in his sermon, "God aches. What's important is that God aches. If we are not aching, we are not the disciples of Jesus."

May we "ask, seek, and knock"(Luke 11) to open the garden of God's aching soul and to embrace it in our hearts.