The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the LORD. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the LORD. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.
This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance
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I don't know about you, but this passage from Exodus has always been difficult for me. If you'll remember two weeks ago we started this cycle at Exodus 1 with the brave midwives who go against an unrighteous law and stand up for justice by allowing Moses to live. God chooses to turn the world upside down with the Exodus by five women and a baby.
Last week our reading from Exodus had to do with the call of Moses. Moses doesn't want to do the job that God has called him to so he comes up with excuses -- mainly that he stutters. Does that get him out of it? No. God tells him that his brother Aaron can help him. Then the lectionary conveniently skips the plagues and takes us to today's reading -- the institution of the Passover.
Now before I get to the Passover I think I need to at least touch on the final plague -- the one I can still see vividly in my mind from Charleton Heston in the Ten Commandments. When the angel of death comes and takes the firstborn -- firstborn of cattle and firstborn of human beings. The first time I remember hearing this text and it really setting in I was about nine years old. I was a little scared at first because I thought that meant I was going to die since I am my mother and father's only child. But then I remembered a loophole . . . my dad had a son from a previous marriage. So that mean that Wayne would die -- not me! Oh, happy day! That was appealing at the time when my brother and I fought like cats and dogs -- but not so much today.
This raises some difficulties because we have to ask hard questions like "Does God love the Hebrew people and not the Egyptians?" What does it mean when we read over and over that "God hardened Pharaoh's heart?" These are hard questions that don't have easy answers.
For me, God's love is an inclusive love that loves everyone. But God is also a God of justice. The Egyptians had enslaved the Hebrews for hundreds of years and God is never on the side of oppression. For some reason God chose a certain people to be God's own. It goes all the way back to Abraham and the covenant God and Abraham made together. God bound Godself to a people. God didn't have to do this. God chose to do this. In these powerful stories from Exodus we see that God is always on the side of human freedom and free will. Pharaoh could have changed his mind at any time. He didn't have to reject God's will for justice. I think by the third plague even I would have got God's message.
What's amazing about this entire Exodus saga is that God does fantastic things around very human characters -- namely Moses and Aaron.
One of the greatest gifts I ever received in my life was the opportunity to study Biblical Hebrew for a year as an undergraduate student. One of the blessings was to study it with a lay conservative Jew. Throughout the year, she taught us about various festivals and traditions from Judaism. She said if you ever want to understand modern Judaism, you need to study four things: 1.) The Exodus, 2.) The Babylonian Exile where Israel is conquered by a foreign people and forced to live in a foreign country, 3.) The Destruction of the Temple, and 4.) The Holocaust.
In order to help this Christian class of Hebrew students better understand Judaism she tried to teach us everything she could about the Exodus, and especially the Feast of Passover celebrated by our Jewish brothers and sisters in the spring of each year -- which usually closely coincides with our celebration of Easter.
What's amazing about the feast of Passover is that it it celebrated just as our passage tells us this morning "with loins girded, sandals on your feet, and staff in hand." In other words you've got to have your traveling clothes on. The equivalent today would be to have on comfortable shorts, t-shirts, and tennis shoes. The other amazing thing that is done is they eat bitter herbs to remind them of the bitterness of slavery and so they'll never enslave a people as they were enslaved.
By participating in the ritual of Passover, the past becomes the present. These ancient stories become alive once again and it's a way for Jews to pass on their story from one generation to the next. It's how children learn the story of Judaism.
Now you might be wondering what this has to do with Homecoming. The key is in the celebration of Passover. As Christians, we have our own celebration each and every week called the Holy Eucharist. Like our Jewish brothers and sisters, this is a way for folks new to the community of faith to hear of God's saving acts in history over and over again. By listening to the words we pray in the Eucharist we are participating in something that happened in the past, yet becomes real and present to us once again. It's no accident that at the end we say, "Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast."
Christ is our Passover and has opened the way to freedom and peace. Our job is to work with God in bringing about that reign of justice, freedom, and peace. Amen.
The Rev'd Thomas S. Rogers, III
Assistant Rector
All Saints Episcopal Church
Frederick, Maryland
September 7, 2008 // Year A: Proper 18
Link to audio: http://www.box.net/shared/y6c9cnk08s
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