Sermon: A Journey with No Fixed End
Psalm 139, Luke 14:25-34
I have two special days this month: my birthday on September 7th, which ended 11 hours and 15-or-so minutes ago, and our upcoming covenanting service celebrating my internship journey with you here at Chemainus United Church, next Sunday.
Last night, by the light of tea candles, I celebrated with my family how I am fearfully and wonderfully made (as sung in today’s Psalm): it is amazing that I now see and can say confidently, yes, I am. This assurance is a favourite scripture passage which touches people deeply, but it does not always strike us as an immediate truth to which we may respond as soon as we hear it, nodding our head and saying, “Yes, we are fearfully and wonderfully made, truly we all are.” We all live with experiencing our ordinary bodies which are aging, graying, sometimes limping, sometimes aching. It’s not like crooning the same assurance to a newborn baby while we lovingly embrace her in our arms. This positive assertion of our intricacy, the marvel of ourselves, delivers a stunning surprise and persuades us to look inward to the original beginning of all our lives – God’s hands knitting together bone and muscle and tendon in the most secret and mysterious place from our first cell division.
This assurance is not only stunningly beautiful but also powerful. It overturns the way we may perceive ourselves. We know our faults and failings have hurt others, and even ourselves. We know some of our obsessive, harmful thoughts – which repeatedly return and tear at us and our loved ones. We try to improve ourselves to be better in a thousand different ways, thinking that we are not yet, may never be, good enough. We may not be sure that we have power and strength enough within us to make a difference in our lives or in others’. The importance of our ego is either over-exaggerated or de-emphasized. We all are in the process of becoming who we truly are, but not all of us achieve that goal. Some of us experience denial of their true selves by our society; they are not allowed roots and wings - they are denied growth, they aren’t permitted to fly.
Many women, especially, have not been given the message and assurance they need to hear from the parenting they receive or from society – which is, “be strong.” Do not yield. Do not surrender. Be true to you. Be true to your faith. Make your voice heard. Don’t give up pride and self-determination. For women, especially those whose voices and feelings and hopes have been repressed in their society, pride is not really what they should give up – Pride of self, of one’s own being, is not a sin -. It is what a woman needs to learn and embrace through her life.
In the covenanting service, I would like to celebrate this very pride which I am learning to embody and the confidence I am learning to practice, in accordance with my conscience and spirit. God has made me wonderfully and fearfully. God has examined me and knows me. This is what I would like to celebrate with exuberance of heart and joy in the covenanting service of celebrating my internship journey here – because if I sum up the eventual learning goal of my internship, it would be learning perseverance as I am journeying to find how to sing my faith in a way that is true to myself – through study, using intellect and learning from the conversations I have with you and others.
I dream of a table of dialogue rather than a one-way monologue at the pulpit.
I dream of a circle of sheltering love where we care for one another.
I dream of a tree which only helps our children climb up and see what we have never seen before.
I dream of a journey which has no fixed end but opens itself to unknown possibilities.
One of my thoughts that I have assured myself with over and over is that:
This is not the destination of my journey
This is not the destination of our mutual journey
In this journey, God is our cohort.
God is not sitting on the top of a mountain, looking down.
God climbs with us, up a tree which is living and reaching out and growing.
All my life, I have loved September; a natural emotion, as I was born in this glorious early opening of the fall. It is a month of creation and fulfillment. I am so happy that the very celebratory occasion of the covenanting service may add more joy in this favoured month for me and, hopefully, for you. This is a milestone, not only in my internship journey, but in my life journey. My facial expression may seem shy, but my heart is pounding with joy and gratitude for you who have shared your faith with me with such sincerity and encouragement.
I come from a patriarchal church culture in Korea where ordination and the right to preach from the pulpit, the right to shine, is still a high wall for a woman to climb up. Thanks to you and your acceptance of me as I am, I have taken the step to cross over that high threshold. I don’t know when I will return to Korea, but if I do so in the next 10 years, I hope you will be proud that you have nurtured me in this church, given me a precious opportunity to mature and proceed with what I believe and what I hope. I really believe that you have helped God to plant and grow one more mustard seed to change the barren, repressive, unjust and corrupted culture of the Korean church and the nation. I am your mission.
Knowing what I left, knowing what I may return to, I can’t afford to be tolerant at any cost of the bigotry of my home country. (...tolerance at the cost of standards...) Let me learn perseverance, to persist in doing what I believe is right. It is quite an amazing thing to learn how to proceed and move on with perseverance, no matter what, for the faith that I believe is right and good. I look at you, my patient teachers, and thank you for all the lessons you have shown me, all the examples of your mature faith, carrying God in you.
Valerie Saiving says, “A woman can surrender too much of herself, so that nothing remains of her uniqueness. She can become a mere nothing, almost a zero, without value for herself, for her fellow human beings or perhaps for God. For the temptations for a woman as woman are not the same temptations as those for a man as man.”
Let us dream dreams (Joel 2:28) which sometimes make us feel uncomfortable. Let us see visions which sometimes make the ground where we stand unsettled and unstable. Let us not be silent about our society and our world and our complacencies if they are misdirected. Let us not domesticate God’s greater love just to fit to the unit of family and small neighbourhood and to our immediate concerns. Rather, let us extend wider our Christian concerns of love to embrace the greater circle of the human family and the earth which suffers from our aggressive civilizations.
Let us be vocal about the God who sings and sings through the narrowed streams and deep valleys to water the barren, human-wasted world, so that we who are caught up with the strife of our aggressive world may find new ways and possibilities to bring peace and justice to fruition. Let us not be silent when we should speak out, let us not tolerate the intolerable, let us all know and sing that we are, equally, fearfully and wonderfully made, complicated and fully human, celebrating our faith, our world, and our God.
Evaluation from the congregation
"It should be taped."
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