The Jewish festival of Passover - 8 days of story-telling and ritual remembrance - actually begins next Sunday. For some of the you, the story and the rituals are a familiar part of your family history. For others, the very language of the seder may be totally unfamiliar. This morning we consider the basic story told and retold on Passover - the story of the Exodus - both as a way to better understand and connect ourselves to the Hebrew tradition which is part of our own religious heritage, and as a way to better understand ourselves as people who also have been, or will be, forced to walk in the wilderness.
Judaism is very much a religion of community, of ethical imperatives about the way a group of people should conduct their communal life, treat each other, and treat others who are not part of the community. So in every story that comes out of the Hebrew scriptures, there is a communal/ethical piece, as well as a person/spiritual/experiential piece. So too with the Exodus.
As the story is told, the ancient Hebrews have fallen on some truly hard times. Enslaved in Egypt, they have lost their autonomy but not their identity. When a charismatic leader rises up and urges them to trust in their God and seize their freedom, they rejoice. But not for long. Freedom sounds good to them, but the steps required to win it are daunting. Alla Renee Bozarth has created a Passover reading that captures some of these arduous expectations.
"Pack nothing. Bring only your determination to serve and your willingness to be free. Don't wait for the bread to rise. Take nourishment for the journey, but eat standing, be ready to move at a moment's notice."
Often, our invitations to freedom look just like that - scary and full of loss and doubt. How often have we faced a choice between the safe and predictable, and the unknowable? And sometimes we don't even feel like we have a choice. Life broadsides us with a loss - death, divorce, loss of job - and we have to move on. We can't take it all with us. We have to assume that we have what it takes to move through a difficult and uncharted time in our lives.
The ancient Israelites decided to follow Moses. They had watched his negotiations with the Pharaoh - the promises made and reneged on - the progressive waves of plagues - the determination of their leader not to be deterred from his mission. His message to the Pharaoh was simple and consistent. "Let my people go." And finally, in the dark of night, with nothing but what they could carry on their backs, they fled their Egyptian captors and walked off into the wilderness that lay between them and the promised land.
"Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind - fear, silence, submission. Only surrender to the need of the time - to love justice and walk humbly with your God . . . Begin quickly," Bozarth continues, "before you have time to sink back into old slavery. Set out in the dark. I will send fire to warm and encourage you. I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud . . ."
Here is our reminder that in order to be truly free, we must first unlearn the adaptations we have made to slavery. Fear, silence, submission - they are the very characteristics that keep us alive in dangerous situations. And yet, when the time comes, we have to give them up. This is often the most difficult piece in the recovery process for people who have been abused as children - recognizing that the defenses that served them so well and allowed them to survive unbearable situations are no longer serving them well. It takes a real leap of faith to leave those old ways behind as we walk in the wilderness, whether that wilderness be the personal challenge of recovering from a loss, or the communal challenges of creating a new and healthier community. And always, the reminder is there in the telling of the story that the wilderness experience is not only personal - the component of justice and loyalty is an ever-present demand.
"I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to that place you have not yet seen . . . I am sending you into the wilderness to make a new way and to learn my ways more deeply . . . "
The image in this piece of the reading reminds us of two important lessons from the Exodus story. One is that we cannot know the destination when we begin the journey. Our dreams in the desert are dreams of a place we have not yet seen - and yet that place is home. We often talk in UU terms of life being a journey. And when we think carefully about it, we have to acknowledge that none of us knows the destination for our particular journey. We can choose goals which are but signposts along the way. The ultimate home to which we are headed? "God only knows," we might say. Or, as feminist theologian Nell Morton says, "The journey is home." Humanist language would suggest that being fully human in the present moment is the destination. What makes this truth bearable is the fact that as humans we are capable of dreaming dreams, of casting a bold vision, of using our imaginations to travel past the painful parts and into the new place. The only way to walk in the wilderness is to keep the dreams and the vision firmly in mind.
Another lesson learned from the Exodus story is that though we may ask, plaintively, "why me?" or "Why now?" - the faithful in many religious traditions believe that we redeem our wilderness experiences by learning new ways, or learning the ways we should go more deeply. This goes to the issue of identity - whether it is one's identity as an individual or the religious or cultural identity of a group of people. Now, I'm not arguing for some soppy theology that urges us to be grateful for misfortune for any of the silly reasons that are often given in the name of comfort: God never gives you more than you can handle, when one door closes another one opens, the Lord works in mysterious ways . . .
But there is a grain of truth in all of those statements. Bad things happen to people. And the way we walk through bad times does contribute to the content of our character. Furthermore, the way we remember the hard times also contributes. Over and over again in the Hebrew Scriptures, the children of Israel are exhorted to remember that they were slaves in Egypt - that memory bestows an ethical obligation to forever take the side of the oppressed, to forever be grateful for freedom, to forever be at the ready to assist another people on their wilderness passage. We are changed, profoundly, by our wilderness experiences. We have no choice about the hard times that come along; our choice is in how we react to those times, and how we choose to remember them. If we gloss over the sad stories, refuse to acknowledge the hurts, we lose a valuable piece of our emotional and spiritual history. But if we remember, in faith, we grow and change in ways that we could otherwise not have dreamed of.
"Some of you will be so changed by weathers and wanderings that even your closest friends will have to learn your features as though for the first time. Some of you will not change at all. Some will be abandoned by your dearest loved ones and misunderstood by those who have known you since birth and feel abandoned by you. Some will find new friendship in unlikely faces, and old friends as faithful as the pillar of God's flame . . ."
So the possibility of change is one of the potential benefits of the intentionally lived wilderness experience. But so is the possibility that you will not change at all. If we go back to the original Exodus story, we learn what happens when people cannot or will not change. Almost immediately after fleeing Egypt, the whining and complaining started. "What, you brought us out of Egypt just to die in this stinking desert?" Faced with the arduous task of providing for themselves, many of the Israelites longed for the security of slavery - it was not much food, but it was given to us. It was poor shelter, but it was provided. We didn't have to make any decisions, all were made for us. When you don't have to make decisions, you don't have to risk making mistakes. And, best of all, you never have to take responsibility for the quality of your own life! You always have somebody else to blame.
Perhaps the greatest cost of freedom is the assumption of personal responsibility. And some of those Israelites, products of generations of servitude, were not able to make the transition. You know why they had to wander in that desert for 40 years? 40 years is the span of a generation. They had to wait until the cohort of people who had lived their lives enslaved had died off before they could enter the promised land. They had to wait for the children to grow to adulthood - people who were capable of finding new friendships in unlikely faces, who could bear the burden of being misunderstood and figuring things out for themselves in a strange land among strange people. They weren't lost for 40 years, they were on the communal journey from slavery to freedom - a journey that had to take place as much in the minds and hearts of the people as it did in their foot-steps through the desert.
"Sing songs as you go, and hold close together. You may at times grow confused and lose your way. Touch each other and keep telling the stories. Make maps as you go, remembering the way back from before you were born."
In those words we find the key to creating a religious identity - to being together as a people. Sing songs - celebrate, even the little things, don't always focus on the bad and the difficult - direct your energy sometimes toward the dream, the vision, the idea. Hold close together. It won't work every minute of every day - that is OK, in fact it is to be expected. We are, after all, only children of God, not gods. None of us can get it right all the time, and sometimes all of us veer off course at the same time! That is why it is so important t keep telling the stories. The stories are the spiritual maps that keep us on the path. Continuous corrections are required in all human endeavors. The airline pilots among us can probably explain this more coherently, but is it not true that a jet is off course 90% of the time? And that the pilot's job is to make those small, minute by minute corrections that keep the plane approximately on course?
That is who we are - wanders in the desert, constantly drifting off course, constantly calling ourselves and each other back, reminding ourselves of who we are and what we represent and what we believe in.
"So you will be only the first of many waves of deliverance on these desert seas. It is the first of many beginnings - your Paschaltide." With these words, Bozarth acknowledges the truly universal nature of the Exodus story. Waves of deliverance, many beginnings. In every generation, in every country and religious faith, in every generation - ships are launched onto uncharted seas, groups set out into uncharted territories, rockets are aimed at far-away planets. And eventually, wonder of wonders, they arrive at some promised land. Maybe not exactly the place they expected when they set out, but a destination just the same. This is the true meaning of being at home - arriving at the place you set out for, having no idea where it was or what was standing in your way. T.S. Eliot said it best. "What we call a beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
Some of you are, right now, in a wilderness stage in your lives. Others are just emerging, sinking your feet into the sweet sand of the promised land. Still others are on the other side, in a safe and secure place from which you cannot imagine departing. It helps, when you are in the middle of your wilderness experience, to have faith in something, to believe that some force, or some being, or intention, is rooting for you to arrive. For the ancient Israelites, this was their god, Yahweh, who traveled with them in the cloud and the pillar of smoke. He was, quite literally, present with them on their journey. For many of us, the idea of a God on a hike with us in a pillar of smoke is a most unlikely eventuality. But many of us hold in our hearts a belief in something other than ourselves that brings intention to our lives. It may be indescribable, or it may change as our ideas and experiences change and grow. But it remains constant in presence.
Alla Bozarth speaks for this steady presence as she concludes her reading with these words. "Remain true to this mystery. Pass on the whole story. Do not go back. I am with you now and I am waiting for you."
The Passover story is a gift to all of us - a gift of memory, a celebration of hope, an affirmation of freedom. Whatever you need from it, all you have to do is remember.