Grasp and Release

Exodus 3:7-14; Philippians 2:1-11

A couple of months ago some of us attended Saturday workshops at the Six

Nations native reserve close to Brantford. As we entered in a small way into the story of

First Nations people we felt that we wanted to take time on a Sunday morning to further

reflect on the European encounter of the original inhabitants of our country. This

relationship was ultimately marked by European settlers taking possession this land and

arguably of its people. The texts read this morning are important and relevant and we

will get to them but these texts reveal something godly, a possibility and a hope. Our

story this morning, however, is just as much about Eve taking the apple, Jacob grasping

his brother’s heel, and David taking hold of Bathsheba. This is the story of our desire to

sit in the place of God; to be in a place of possession and control.

I should state from the beginning that the issue of control is not confined to

certain people or groups. One side of this issue is not all good and the other side is not all

bad. The stories of individual people’s lives are varied and diverse. We must be careful

that these stories are allowed to be told as honestly as possible even if that makes things

more complicated. This past Wednesday our Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized

for the government’s role in residential school system that attempted to educate and

assimilate native people and often became the site of various abuses and injustices. It is

no small thing for the government of a country to admit they were wrong. However, this

move cannot come at the cost of shaming and excluding the positive stories that also exist

from within the walls of residential schools. There should perhaps be a special grace for

those who could work good within an unjust system. Also, when advocating and

supporting the First Nations community it can be tempting to romanticize their culture

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and practices. While there is much we can still learn from this culture the people that

make up the culture are no better or worse than anyone else. I have heard too many

stories from young native people telling me of the abuses of privileges within native

leadership. Whenever we are dealing with people and relationship we can sure that the

situation will be complex and will not always stick to clear lines.

What does continue to emerge in the history of Canada is a consistent attempt to

control or at least manage the First Nation’s population and to possess the land they

inhabited. This history is of course already seen in the unapologetic views found

Christopher Columbus’ own journal. When he first set foot on land the Spanish flag was

thrust into it. The land was marked. And what of the people? They were to become

Christians, namely they were to become like the Europeans, but to be a little less then

them. Columbus viewed them undoubtedly as servants and not as equal. The flag that

was planted made this clear. The cross was in the middle of the flag with initial of the

king and queen on either side. To live under the cross was also to live under the crown.

The people and land of the Americas appeared to have been viewed from the beginning

as objects of control and possession.

In Canada it was in the second half of 19th century that crucial events and

decisions began shaping the relationship between the emerging government and the First

Nations people. The situation at this time did require some sort of decision making. The

buffalo, the main source of food for the native people, was hunted to near extinction and

hunger spreading across the population. The railroad was stretched across the West

bringing increasing contact with Europeans which also brought land disputes, epidemics

and alcohol. In the official documents the government did want to help this crisis

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situation but their response was not one of mutual aid. Rather, they acted to take control

of the land and the identity of the people. Treaties were drawn up that gave the

government control of the land and in return the native people were given small parcels

of land on which to live as well as some annual monetary support. In addition it was at

this time that policy was being formed with the purpose of assimilating the native people

into European culture. A native person could live as a native within the boundaries of the

reserve or they were to become European in order to participate in the rest of the country.

This gave rise to the way that the residential school system was used. Many of these

schools became sites of coercion and the manipulation of children forcing them from

their known culture into a new one. The expression was used many times on Wednesday

in the government’s apology saying that too often the intention of the residential schools

was stated as trying to ‘kill the Indian in the child’.

As I begin to learn my own place in this story I recognized how closely the events

of my history coincide with these developments. In 1870 after defeating the provisional

government established by the Métis leader Louis Riel the Dominion of Canada admitted

Manitoba as a province. It was in 1871 that Treaty number 1 was signed in which the

government took control of Manitoba and created various native reserves. And it was in

1874 that my great-great grandparents arrived in Canada and settled on the newly

acquired land. One of the most unfortunate ironies of this is that in contrast to the native

people who were beginning to be systematically assimilated in residential schools the

Mennonites of southern Manitoba were given special privileges which included the right

to run their own schools in their own language. As I reflected on these develops I began

to wonder if the government viewed the Mennonites as a group that they could trust to

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remain passive and to confirm the government’s land ownership as well as work up an

economic base in the barren plains.

Canada and the Mennonite church have come a long way since that time. The

Canadian government has formally discarded the notion of enfranchising and assimilating

native people and as I mentioned Stephan Harper has apologized for the impact of the

residential schools. In much of the Mennonite church we are now actively working in

various ways to build healthy and healing relationships with First Nations people. The

question I want us to ask ourselves is whether we have understood and addressed the

underlying impulse that fueled a relationship that has proven to be so difficult and so

devastating?

Like Eve, Jacob and David we too continue to grasp and take hold. However, we

might interpret Stephen Harper’s apology we should recognize that it was given in the

House of Commons from his seat of power. The apology covered a school system that is

now obsolete. He did not address the present land claims and protests that affect the

Canadian business sector. We have become more concerned and aware of these issues

but typically not to the extant that they affect our daily lives. We continue all too often in

our own colonial mentality of spreading our presence wider in our bank accounts and

broader in our backyards and higher in our material goods. I would suggest that the issue

of Canada and First Nations relations is as much an economic one as it is about race or

culture. Similar expressions of displacement and discrimination occurred in the 1930s

during the Great Depression. After my family received land in the late 1800s it was also

my family who bought up more land during that era, able to profit from those could not

produce enough wealth. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath explores the

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discrimination that people from central and southern U.S. experienced as they lost their

farms and traveled west for work. Today we can name numerous groups who are

stigmatized and marginalized because they cannot grasp and possess power. There

emerges, and must emerge, in this issue the larger question of oppression, the placing of

some people in a position of superiority and power over another. What are the resources

and images that can guide us in transforming our relationships to be ones filled with

grace?

Our texts this morning offer two important images of God. In Exodus we hear

God calling Moses to help deliver his people from slavery. We are given a very clear

picture of how it is that God came to respond to this situation. In the text God says, “I

have seen the misery of my people . . . I have heard them crying out . . . and I have felt

their suffering.” This is an image of a God who makes it a point of being in some way

present with his people. This is our first image. We are to be attentive to our neighbour.

This is the constant discipline of making the lives of others a priority in your daily living.

The next image we find in the Exodus passage is a little more subtle. After God

gives Moses the instructions Moses asks what he should tell the people if they ask for the

name of the God who is calling them. God replies saying, “I AM WHO I AM. This is

what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Names of course are

important. What you call someone speaks closely of their identity. We know that the

Europeans falsely called the native people Indians, misunderstanding their identity from

the beginning. In addition, in order to assimilate them most were given European names.

The Europeans came and named the native people. They attempted to fix their identity.

The name God gives is something radically different. I am who I am or as it can also be

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translated I will be who I will be. The name of God is living and active. God by his very

nature cannot become the possession of any person or group. This is the God who defies

attempts at control or domination or assimilation. The attempt to assimilate God is

idolatry. Idols were people’s efforts to worship a god they could have some control or at

least influence over. The God of the Old Testament radically rejects any form of

idolatry. When archeologists uncover ancient temples it is not uncommon to find on an

alter the shape of a bull or a tree representing the gods who control weather and fertility.

This is not the case in the Tabernacle or Solomon’s Temple. At the heart of this

worshipping space and therefore at the heart of the community surrounded on both sides

by angels within the room called the Holy of Holies there was an empty space. No image

was allowed to take the space of the God who was, is and will be. This was no abstract

theology this was a practical reality. The presence of God could only be encountered in a

posture of openness to this living and active God.

In Israel’s history they had a king named Uzziah who became a powerful and

prideful leader. He decided that he could enter the Sanctuary of the Temple, a place

where only priests were able to enter. You get the sense that Uzziah believed that his

power gave him the authority and right to approach God. Uzziah was confronted by the

priests and it says that as Uzziah was raging against the priests and about to burn incense

on the alter he was struck with leprosy. The God of the Old Testament will not be

confronted by the world’s power. God will not be subject to the will of someone who

claims their own power and authority. Conversely we find that the prophet Isaiah was

met by God in a vision of being in the sanctuary. Isaiah responds to this vision not by

claiming authority but by acknowledging his guilt and the guilt of his people. Then in

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contrast to Uzziah who tried to light a fire on the alter it says that one of the angels took a

coal from the alter and pressed it to Isaiah’s lips and cleansed him from guilt. Isaiah

came into the presence of the God who will not be controlled and is no one’s possession

and in turn Isaiah became a prophet to those who lived under the oppression of the

powerful.

I am who I am is the God of hope. I am who I am is the God who has not

submitted, been assimilated or even taken hold of the powers of this world. I am who I

am, this God who saw and heard and felt the pain of those being controlled acted in an

even more definitive way then his appearance to Moses or Isaiah. I am who I am came

and lived as a human. In our other reading this morning Paul tells us of Jesus and what is

for this God to live as a human. Paul is encouraging the Philippians to live in unity. He

is trying to dismantle any expression of control and possession. We are to look to other’s

interests as we look to our own and we are not to act out of selfish ambition and vain

conceit. Reading these words from Paul I was struck by how well they fit to describe the

European colonization of the Americas as a project of selfish ambition and vain conceit

that looked clearly and primarily to their own interests? Paul then says that our attitude

should be the same as Christ and elaborates on what this means. Jesus’ very nature was

that of God. Jesus was the expression of God in human form. Paul says, however, that

Jesus as the human form of God did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped.

Equality with God or godliness is not a project of expansion and colonization. It is not a

grasping for control and possession. Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar says that though

Jesus was the very form of God, “he did not believe it necessary to hold on to that

condition as to some possession, precious, inalienable, all his own. . . . He is so divinely

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free that he can that he can bind himself to the obedience of a slave.” Balthasar views

this understanding as offering a radical image of God. He says, “God is not, in the first

place, ‘absolute power’, but ‘absolute love’, and his sovereignty manifests itself not in

holding on to what is its own but in its abandonment.” The love of God is that which

gives and not that which takes hold.

These images of God should in some way be starting rub against the grain of what

the project of European expansion in the Americas was all about. I have no doubt that in

those waves of early settlers there were good and honest relationships that were formed

and that good things have come from this history. This can be affirmed in the same way

that positive stories from the residential school system are also emerging. These stories

however come under the shadow of the larger story of power that planted its flag 500

years ago. We must continue to encourage and tell the smaller stories of hope and peace

but if we are to follow Jesus and be faithful to the image of God we receive in the Bible

then we must in our lives and in our communities confront the powers within and around

us that reach out and grasp for control and possession. It is difficult and costly to call

ourselves and those around us to account.

In the Exodus account we encounter a God who sees, hears and feels the abuses of

power. This God comes as one of hope who exists beyond these powers. One named I

am who I am. In the presence of this God all idols are rejected, all images of power are

disarmed. This God is so interested in humanity and is so interested in those who suffer

that this God drew near and came in human form. This God, named Jesus, came not to

exercise power or be assimilated into it but to pour out love. Like the European project

of colonizing other countries Jesus’ mission is also global in vision but it spreads by

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being poured out and not by taking hold. If there is a story we can share to First Nations

people who have suffered the abuses of power it is the story of one who also faced the

challenge of assimilation and did not submit to it. Perhaps a first step for us this morning

in living in this story is to pray with our hands open that we might release and be released

from the powers that grasp for control and possession.

Let’s pray . . . with our hands turned open.

Jesus help us live in peace

By your Spirit help us release our need for power, control and possession
Help us release the need to find security in some form power
Help us release the need to have some control in our relationships
Help us release the need to find meaning in possessions
Help us to release and cure us of our grasping
Jesus forgive us as we are assimilated into the powers around us
and forgive as we force others into assimilation
Jesus with open hands we seek to receive your Spirit that we might live beyond power
and in love. Jesus help us live in peace. Amen.