Passover: A Story of Risk Taking

We all know the story. We tell it every year, but we know it.  

• Abraham, Isaac, Jacob 

• Joseph sold/exiled to Egypt 

• His brothers followed 

• Generations passed and they remained refugees/outsiders 

• Forced into slavery 

• Harsh conditions 

• They call to god. God hears them and takes their side. 

• Moses is called by God to liberate them 

• 10 plagues, Red Sea, Desert 

My interest today is in the tiny space between when Pharoah said, “Fine, go.” And when  they actually left. Before the 10th plague, Moses told the Israelites to put lamb blood on the  doorframe so the plague – the killing of the first born son – would pass over them. Until this  point, nothing had been asked of the slaves. And even in this act, there wasn’t great risk. Have  lamb for dinner tonight, share with your neighbors – which scripture actually says – and mark  your door.  

It’s after that when all the Nile River Valley is mourning and the Pharoah relents that the  people have to step up. That’s the moment. 

I can imagine that moment well. Eldest son, super happy he survived the night, says, “Let’s  get out of here.” Teenagers in the household are all for it. Pack up some bread and water and  we’re out. But mom isn’t so sure. I mean, life here sucks and Pharoah is god-awful, but what do  we know about this Moses guy? Isn’t he Pharoah’s grandson? Who are his people? Wasn’t there  a rumor he killed someone? And dad doesn’t want to get up in the morning to hunt for straw and 

labor all day in the dry hot sun, but he has a house with a doorframe and food and they just planted  those fig trees. Maybe we should wait and see what happens.  

It’s human nature to assume the best, even in the face of impossible odds, to want to stick  with what you know, to live within the familiar narrative, even if it’s one of slavery and  oppression. 

Years ago I heard a story from a Polish woman. She was a child and Germany had taken  over. It was the 1940s and her Jewish family had gotten a letter. They were to be on a train heading  for Auschwitz in 2 weeks. She talked about counting the days and waiting up the night before  wishing she could stop the sun from rising. On the train, she and her brother were bickering about  shoes. When they arrived, she and her mother were sent in one direction, her father and brother  in another. She never saw her brother or father again. Her mother was killed shortly after. She  was the sole survivor in her family. 

In hindsight, waiting at home for 2 weeks to catch that train taking you to your own murder  seems deranged, but, it’s what most families did. Leaving, escaping, seeking an alternative meant  confronting the truth about what was happening, and accepting that life isn’t what it used to be,  no matter how normal each day appeared. It was the same for the Israelites. The first and most  difficult step is breaking through the denial to understand this isn’t like anything we’ve  experienced. Everything is different and we have to respond in unusual ways.  

For the last few months – or maybe for 200 years – this pulpit has been a counterforce, a  visible alternative, to the normalcy of American culture, the everydayness of accepting the slow  burn of social, economic, and political oppression. We’ve been providing a counter-narrative,  offering wide-eyed truth telling. I’ve noted the danger in that, the potential for dismissal, that  your desire for comfort – and my desire to provide it – could mean fewer people show up, leaving  our pews literally and figuratively empty. But, that hasn’t happened. You’re still here and more  have been coming. We are willing to speak and hear the Truth, willing to accept the consequences  of knowing, and willing to participate in the resistance we are mounting. 

John Haynes Holmes once said from this pulpit, “When the church identifies itself with the  state, it becomes a chaplain to empire, blessing guns and sanctifying slaughter. In that hour it  ceases to be the church of Christ.” 

The problem for most of us, even as we acknowledge the need to oppose tyranny, is that  we want to be safe. We want to live simple, quiet lives. We want the question of what we’re eating  for dinner or whether it’s warm enough to skip a coat to be all that fills our minds.  

But as we stand on a precipice of history, no one is innocent, no one is irrelevant, and  neutrality is fantasy. Doing nothing is a choice with a consequence.  

Some of the Israelites stayed in Egypt. They decided it was too much to risk and they’d  prefer the devil they knew. There are no stories about them. They have no history. They melted  into irrelevance having sacrificed their lives to the gods of autocracy. 

Because there are no innocent actions. There are no innocent people. When the dragon of  empire breaths fire as ours has been doing, we all get burned. We are complicit either in our  collective destruction or in the building of the new world. Either way, we are all accused and we  are all guilty. 

There is no safety, there is no neutrality, there is no passive democracy. The price of truth  is risk. It could be the risk of inaction like the family that obediently brought themselves to the  train heading to their own deaths. Or it could be the risk of action, of occupying federal space, of  blocking the expulsion of people born on the other side of the border, of speaking unpopular truths  to break through denial and claim your place even in the face of loss.  

To be faithful is not to be safe. The Israelites who stayed behind, faithful to the Egyptian  empire, were no more safe than the ones who left. The family that got on the train, faithful to  governmental orders, was not safe. Safety is as much an illusion as innocence. The implication  of every action and inaction is guilt. The world is broken and we are incriminated by our very  presence in it. We are all participants, one way or another.  

We commit our lives to collective liberation, pushing back on the power of empire, and we  will be found guilty.  

We provide no resistance, obeying the law and accepting the stories we are told, and make  no mistake - we will be found guilty.  

The question before us isn’t how we stay safe, or how we avoid risk. Those are not options.  The question before us is “What does Love require of me? What does Love require of us?” I’m reminded of when John Haynes Holmes stood at this pulpit while patriotism was the  air everyone breathed on the eve of war, and declared, “So long as I’m your minister, this church 

will answer no military summons.” He was risking his job, his career, his livelihood, his  reputation, his standing. He was called disloyal, dangerous, treasonous.  

But the church - our spiritual ancestors – applauded him. He did not stand alone. Because  risk is made possible by our membership, our participation, in community. When we stand alone,  it’s more likely we’ll get crushed. Alone, we are dissenters, non-conformists, trouble-makers.  Together we are a force. A church. A movement.  

What we have here is costly solidarity grounded in an unflinching truth. We are making no  moral surrender to power. To autocracy. To empire. We are linking ourselves each to the other,  knowing Love is the bond, Love is the Truth, Love is the ground on which we stand, together.  

Communities that avoid risk not only become irrelevant, they become soulless. We are here  to save our souls. Salvation isn’t the byproduct of following the rules, the law, living within the  structure of the totalitarian fantasy of a mad king. Salvation is the byproduct of living in Love  with one another, saving each other again and again. Helping each other gather the food and the  water we need for the journey. 

Because we need each other to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain and  possibility that is unknown, that has yet to be imagined, map-less but not without direction,  protecting each other from the dragon’s fire the way they walked out of Egypt, away from  European concentration camps, far from Southern plantations. As Marge Piercy has said, “We are  born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining  down.” We will be counted among those who chose the desert over bondage, who revolted, who  fought, who ran. We will one day be the ancestors who let go of everything but freedom (This is a paraphrasing from a piece of Marge Piecy’s poem “Maggid”).