I lift my eyes to the hills
The following is a lightly edited transcript and a video of Jeff Chu’s talk from our 2022 Enfleshing Witness gathering.
Jeff Chu wears several hats, including writer, reporter, and editor. He's also the co curator and co-host with Sarah Bessie of Evolving Faith. He's an occasional preacher. He's also a teacher in residence at Cross Point Church in North Carolina. He's an ordinand in the Reformed Church in America. He's a cook, gardener, and dog walker to Fozzie in Michigan, where he lives with his husband.
Some days, Jeff says he believes in God. Other days, he wants to believe in God.
I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?
My first home in scripture was Psalm 1:21. This was the psalm that my grandmother taught me in Cantonese when I was a child. This was also the psalm that went with her when she and my grandfather were forced onto the refugee road during World War II, the psalm that crossed an ocean with them to a new country years later.
The psalm that stayed lodged in my heart as I veered off the straight Baptist path that they and my parents had marked out for me, and the psalm that accompanied me even as I left the Church. The Church that couldn't be my home because I wasn't straight, the Church that didn't want me on equal terms because of this skin and these eyes and this hair, the Church that still isn't sure what to do with me.
I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?
I don't know that my grandmother meant for this psalm to meet me in the fullness of my intersecting identities. In my youth, I didn't know enough to be honest about them to myself, let alone to her.
I do know that these ancient lines had met her in the fullness of her identities: a lone daughter in a family with eight boys in a patriarchal culture, an educated pastor's wife who taught Bible in her own right, a deacon, a poor person, an immigrant.
Perhaps she'd bargained, just as she had taught me to stash away a few twenties in case of emergency, that tucking a few lines of biblical poetry in my heart might just come in handy someday.
I lift my eyes to the hills, where does my help come from?
The old Sunday school psalm about the foolish man building his house on the sand wasn't that wrong after all. What if, in a world that idolizes certainties and fundamentalisms, (progressive or conservative) with their right opinions, what if they're finally revealed to be the sham building materials and shaky foundations that they've always been? What if the human welcome that you wish for, and then the human affirmation when that mere welcome doesn't satisfy, and then the human celebration when affirmation seems paltry, what if they prove insufficient? After all, it's still human, and what your soul longs for is the divine.
What if it's no lasting shelter? No ultimate comfort because what your heart craves, what your heart was made for, is to be loved above all by a God who isn't fickle like people are.
I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from?
My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. I might once have told you that my help, my sense of home, came from the one who made me fried rice. My grandma's battered old wok produced the most marvelous version, always with extra scallions, both because I love them and because the Chinese word for scallion is homophonous with the first character in the word for intelligence, and my people, even the Christians, are superstitious like that.
The crust got crispy. Egg and soy and sesame oil hugging each grain of rice much as my grandmother seemed to embrace me each time I ate the dish. But then my grandmother died, or as she would have said, she went home to her lord. Did she? I want to think so. I want to believe that before the one who made me fried rice, there was the one who made rice itself. Who created rice to begin with.
My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. In a world that can feel so far from home, I lift my eyes to the hills, searching the horizon, seeking divine fingerprints in the ragged silhouette of those hills, against the heavens and in the tree line. In the clouds as they race against the sky, and in the stars as day turns to night. God is there, everywhere, in my own scallions that I grew the way my grandmother taught me, in the sesame and the soy that sing of faraway lands, in my own fried rice, cooked the way I learned from her.
I take a deep breath, smell the damp earth and the bright alliums. And the fragrant rice, and slowly I stumble back into the embrace of the one who makes home for all who struggle to find it.
My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. Rooted and grounded in God's ever present love, I, a Hakka son, whose tribe carries the nomad's legacy because our people's name literally means guest family, I, the child of the immigrant, make home nowhere and everywhere.
Once a wise teacher told me that she creates her own belonging wherever she goes, never expecting it to be offered by any other human, always trusting in the presence of home wherever her body happens to be.
My help comes from the one who made heaven and earth. My help, but also our help, right? We recited this hymn in the little congregation in my grandparents living room, but generations of ancestors before us also sang this psalm. Perhaps there, in the continuity of the centuries, in the echoes of the ages, in the company of the great congregation of sinners and saints, I can find my home and make it for someone else.
My help is not mine alone. nor is home to be mine alone. I can make enough fried rice to share. We're invited to borrow hope, and maybe even home, and to lend it to one another too.
In the name of that one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, creator mothering one who longs to collect her chicks under her wings and companion to us all.
Amen.
We are excited to announce a new chapter in the Enfleshing Witness movement: “Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching.” Learn more about this new grant opportunity and sign-up to stay connected as the project unfolds.
