Passover and the Path to Liberation

The ancient Israelites were enslaved in the land of Egypt. They’d arrived there after being a nomadic people for centuries. They lived in freedom and partnership along the Nile River for a few generations, but then one particular Pharoah, not knowing the history or context of this co-habitation, decided to enslave the people. The line in the Book of Exodus is something like: There arose a king who knew not Joseph. In other words, he didn’t remember the friendship which was the foundation of these new people living on this fertile land. His primary concern was that there were too many of them. The Egyptians were outnumbered. He was afraid they could be overtaken if the Israelites wanted a fight, or became willing to join an invading army. There was no reason to think they would, but it seems to be part of human nature to think in terms of Us and Them, and to exercise power over whomever you see as the outsider. So, thousands of people were enslaved.

Their lives were intentionally made difficult. Pharoah wanted them to have fewer children so their numbers would stay small, but their numbers grew anyway. He wanted to work them so hard they couldn’t possibly rise up against him, but they seemed more determined to resist with each new cruelty. To break their spirit, he ordered the first born son of every family to be killed, which was a horrific and violent response, but the midwives resisted, lying about the births.

There was still a massacre, but some of the children were saved, including Moses, who was sent down the Nile and retrieved by the Pharoah’s own daughter who raised him in wealth as part of the king’s court. It was Moses, after witnessing his family’s cruelty, who took a stand, killed a soldier, and ran into the desert. It was there that he started a new family and then heard the call to free his people.

In this story, there is a good-guy, Moses, backed by G*d, and a bad-guy, Pharoah, whose behavior is sponsored by greed and fear. Moses wants to get the Israelites out of there, to lead them to a place they can live without persecution or oppression. Pharoah wants free labor. He has plans for development and he needs slaves to do it, and he wants a large population to back him in case of invasion. He wants the Israelites to stay, but on his terms. Moses doesn’t see any way forward if his people remain on this land; they need to find somewhere else to settle.

In order to get the people out safely, Moses and G*d team up. Moses tells Pharoah to let the people go, and G*d sends plagues to make Pharoah’s life difficult as long as he keeps these people enslaved. The final plague is the killing of the first born Egyptian sons.

To ensure none of the Jewish children are killed, they are told to put lamb’s blood on their doors so the angel of death will know and pass over them.

This is an important moment. This is the first time the people participate in their own liberation. This is the moment they make the decision to be counted, to join the group, to declare their intentions. This is when they take an action aligning themselves with others, putting their own lives on the line for the good of their people and future generations.

Pharoah relents and lets the people go. Once they flee and are on the way out of town, he changes his mind and sends his soldiers after them. They are unarmed, carrying whatever food, blankets and water they manage, holding their kids’ hands, helping their elders keep up, and an army is fast on their trail aimed at killing enough of them to convince the rest to return to their enslavement. They go as far as they can, but are stopped by a sea. They don’t have boats. It’s much too far to swim. They are caught between death in front of them and death behind them.

Then, as the story tells us, Moses steps into the Red Sea, raises his staff and the sea parts, letting the people go through. When the soldiers arrive, the sea closes up and drowns them.

They were saved.

And the journey begins.

I wonder what this looks like today. We feel the pressure of change, we see a tidal wave of incompetence, of carelessness, even of cruelty, and if it’s coming for any of us, it’s coming for all of us.

There’s a human psychological process that happens in moments of political crisis. First, we don’t believe these things can happen here. Then we think they can happen here, but only to people who deserve it. Then we think it can happen here to people who deserve it and it’s sad because some good people get caught up. Then we see that it can happen to good people, but it won’t happen to us. Then it happens to us.

The it can be a long list of things. Deportation. Unexpected poverty after benefits are cut. Avoidable sickness after medications are no longer accessible. Hunger after food costs skyrocket. Kids who can’t go to schools because funding was cut from necessary programs or schools shut down or universities shrank incoming classes.

And when we see these things coming, one of our instincts is to shift into survival mode. How can I save myself and my family? People begin to hoard, to lie to protect themselves, to stop speaking out, to comply even when they haven’t been told they have to do that.

And in our computer driven world where so much of our lives happen on a screen, isolation is easy. It’s one of the ways we comply in advance. We stay away from each other. We send messages. We watch things from a distance. And the more distant we are, the more detached we are, and the more likely we aren’t going to identify with people who are different. It’s part of survival mode. We pull back from people who are not like us. We are safe because whatever happened to them isn’t going to happen to me – they are different. They are poorer, sicker, browner, gay-er, they are trans, they were born somewhere else, they live in a red state – they are different so I am safe. We create a disembodied artificiality that has isolated us from each other.

So we turn our attention to the wisdom of our ancestors, to the ancient stories that tell us how we have survived in the past and how we will get through whatever we’re facing now. And when we look at the Exodus story, the foundational story for both the Jewish and Christian traditions, we see that we survive when we work together.

G*d didn’t save Moses. Or Moses and his family. Moses was chosen to be a leader of all the people. All the people who declared themselves ready. All the people who wanted freedom over slavery. All the people who were willing to take a huge risk, to place themselves in the group who were going to run, in the group who had no idea what was before them, but were willing to leave everything behind in the hopes that it was better than what was behind them.

They had a choice. You can put the lamb’s blood on your door or not. You can mark yourself, publicly, visibly. Yes, this means the angel of death will pass over you, but will it? What does that mean? Who says? It’s a risk. It’s a declaration. I’m joining my people.

They weren’t even a people yet the way we think of them. We think they were all Jewish, but that comes later. There’s no such thing as Judaism. We might think of them as the 12 Tribes descended from Abraham, but that story was written later. What they all were was enslaved. They were not of the free-class, they were of the slave-class. That’s what they had. Shared desperation. So, they put the blood on their doors, and the next day, after death caused unbearable grief for the Egyptians, they fled. They followed Moses who led them right to the sea and then, miraculously, through it to the other side.

We can get into the science and history of this, but we’re not going to. There were other bodies of water they might have run into, bodies that decrease dramatically and then fill up quickly. It doesn’t matter. The story is that they made a radical, way outside the box, seriously courageous decision to leave, and off they went, into and through a giant, foreboding sea. And their enemies didn’t make it. They were safe.

And they were together.

This isn’t a story of one person’s salvation. It’s the story of an entire people.

And ours isn’t the story of one person’s salvation. It’s the story of our entire people.

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a member here who is concerned that, in this hyper-individualistic world, if she gets sick and is unable to make decisions for herself, that there isn’t anyone who can do it for her.

I had a conversation a few days ago with a woman who works full time but who is afraid the church she works for can’t give her a raise and she won’t be able to pay her rent. She’s afraid that she will become one of the working homeless.

I had a conversation recently with a man who has been paying into social security for 50 years, but whose check didn’t arrive on the 1st. Without it, he can’t afford to pay any of his bills.

I had a conversation with a mom recently who has stopped feeding her children breakfast to save the money on groceries.

Our artificially divided lives are becoming deadly.

They are also optional.

We are saved, together.

I want to start a Mutual Aid Society. Instead of just preaching every week about how we’re saved together, I want to create the infrastructure in which this can work. We are not saved alone.

Br. Zachary and I will host a series of meetings. The first one will be online, although I’m hoping most of these will happen in person. Tuesday, April 29th at 3pm, we’re going to gather together to talk broadly about mutual aid, but more specifically about the question of health proxies. What happens if you don’t have someone who can represent you in a hospital? Let’s see if we can do this with and for each other. And, let’s think about what other safety nets we need to create together.

If we’re going to figure out how to get across the Red Sea, we’ll need to do it together. The sea will open if we lock ourselves arm in arm, committed to our shared salvation, unconcerned with who has what, who owes what. Then we’ll go, children and elders, musicians, artists, teachers, the poor, the rich, people of all nations and religions and colors, refugees and profits, bound together, each to the other, ensuring no one is left behind.

The land of milk and honey is somewhere before us, currently unseen, but we know it’s there. We know because we are the ones who are going to create it.

I’m closing with an excerpt from Aurora Morales’s poem The Red Sea.

This time we're tied at the ankles.

We cannot cross until we carry each other,

all of us refugees, all of us prophets.

No more taking turns on history's wheel,

trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.

The sea will not open that way.

This time that country

is what we promise each other,

our rage pressed cheek to cheek

until tears flood the space between,

until there are no enemies left,

because this time no one will be left to drown

and all of us must be chosen.

This time it's all of us or none.