Dream team leads Tuesday night worship at Presbyterian Youth Triennium
Youth, dancers, musicians and others combine for a meaningful and memorable service
LOUISVILLE — The Rev. Bruce Reyes-Chow, a speaker and author who was elected Moderator of the 218th General Assembly (2008), spoke from his big heart during Tuesday night worship at Presbyterian Youth Triennium.
He had a lot of help as dancers and energizers, a spoken word poet, young speakers, musicians and the Stated Clerk of the General Assembly and Executive Director of the Interim Unified Agency, the Rev. Jihyun Oh, all combined for a memorable night of worship inside the Kentucky International Convention Center in downtown Louisville.
“It’s good to get to be in a space where you are here to gather with other youth, young adults and adults, thinking about what it means to dream,” Oh said. “It’s good to have dreams for your churches and for your denomination.”
“I hope together we will continue to dream dreams about the wholeness God wants for us, Creation, community, justice, right relationship and our relationship with God, so we may be Christ’s witnesses in the world and people will know Christ still matters in this time,” she said. “Let us worship together.”
Did they ever. Steel drummers and brass players joined the Nettletons for a rousing “Uyai Mose.” Genesis 28:10-16 and Genesis 32:24-28 were Reyes-Chow’s preaching texts.
Krystal Torres Perez and Diego Cordero shared their faith journeys, employing both Spanish and English. The Rev. Samuel Son, the PC(USA)’s manager of Diversity and Reconciliation and a celebrated slam poet, shared a slightly altered version of his “America, My America,” which the youth applauded.
Alex Wells of rural Illinois, a young attendee, used an ear of corn as a prop and a reminder during his presentation about home. “Home is where you feel loved and seen, and where you feel closest to Jesus,” Wells said. “The place God will lead you is to the place where your soul has always longed to be: home.”
Five dancers from Haus of Us gave their all just before Reyes-Chow took to the pulpit.
“Good evening, all. I’m not going dance,” he said with a grin. “It’s good you be with you all.”
He focused his sermon on collective dreaming, or “what it means to be God’s people together.”
Reyes-Chow told stories about his early guest preaching days. After one sermon, a woman told him, “What a big voice for such a smaller man!”
“It’s a reminder that we are in this work together. None of us holds the key,” he said. “If we believe we are the single person to save the church, we are in a lot of trouble.”
About a decade ago, a white relative told Reyes-Chow, who has Filipino and Chinese ancestry, that his grandparents should have never been allowed to come to the United States. “My grandparents’ experience was dehumanized, and mine was too. I had to get up and walk out,” he said. Some people have the attitude “that when new people come to the U.S., we have to protect what we have, that their dream and ours are mutually exclusive.”
When we believe that “my dream is the one that counts, we discover we create suffering for others,” he told the youth, who frequently added to Reyes-Chow’s sermon with enthusiastic applause. “We see immigrants on our streets being kidnapped. We look at an environment that continues to be destroyed every day. We look at communities being torn apart. Our trans siblings are being attacked by cruelty.”
“Those are not God’s dreams,” he said. “Those are ours.”
Reyes-Chow noted he’s been to Palestine and Gaza four times in the past 18 months.
“God wants us to be a people who do not feed into the terror of the world, who return evil for evil and continue to mount violence on violence because we are trying to protect something,” he said. “God wants us to name … where we are creating pain and suffering for others, and then change the way we live.”
On one trip to Israel-Palestine, Reyes-Chow and others met with families of people being held hostage by Hamas. One father was talking about the son he hadn’t seen in months. At one point he told the visitors, “A parent will do anything to get his child back.” Someone then said, “Don’t you think Palestinian families feel the same way?”
“Something shocking came to me. I broke down,” Reyes-Chow said. “I’m a parent, and the person was about the same age as my child. I realized I had no compassion. [This father] was talking about grief and sorrow, and I had no empathy. At that moment, evil won my spirit. Evil said, ‘I can be more powerful than blessing.’”
The easy route, he said, is “to continue to hide in the cocoon of our privilege at the expense of the suffering happening around us. My challenge for you,” he told the youth and young adults gathered in worship, “is to think about God’s blessing on your life, which is not just our gift. It’s everyone’s, and because we received it, we bless others.”
“There’s noise in a world that doesn’t want us to do that,” he said. “You and I are called to make sweeter music. Let’s sing a song of blessing and love, a song that says we are all blessed. The dreams I have for you are the dreams we have for one another.”
The Rev. Theresa Cho, pastor and head of staff at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in San Francisco, offered up recordings of some of the voices of youth who have been praying inside Triennium’s Prayer Center.
Prayers included one youth not wanting to run the world, “but to meet it with kindness.”
“I pray God has a plan for me,” said another.
“I pray leaders of our nation will have their hearts touched by God.”
Videographer Randy Hobson contributed to this report.
Presbyterian Youth Triennium ends Thursday with closing worship. Check back with Presbyterian News Service and on the PC(USA)’s social media sites for updates.
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