Passover Lessons

Exodus, Chapter 12, verses 21–34:

Then Moses called all the elders of Israel and said to them: “Go, select lambs for your families, and slaughter the Passover lamb. Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and touch the lintel and the two doorposts with the blood in the basin. None of you shall go outside the door of your house until morning. For the Lord will pass through to strike down the Egyptians; when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over that door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you down. You shall observe this rite as a perpetual ordinance for you and your children. When you come to the land that the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall keep this observance. And when your children ask you: ‘What do you mean by this observance?’ You shall say: ‘It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.’”

And the people bowed down and worshiped. The Israelites went and did just as the Lord had commanded Moses and Aaron. At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his officials and all the Egyptians. And there was a loud cry in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead. Then he [Pharaoh] summoned Moses and Aaron in the night and said: “Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord, as you said. Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone. And bring a blessing on me too!”

The Egyptians urged the people to hasten their departure from the land, for they said: “We shall all be dead.” So the people took their dough before it was leavened, with their kneading bowls wrapped up in their cloaks on their shoulders.

The Jewish holy week of Passover began at sundown on Mon Apr 22. The celebration of freedom continues eight days, through the evening of Tue Apr 30. The first two days and the last two days are full-fledged holidays: the middle four days are semi-festive. The first two days commemorate the 10th of the 10 plagues on Egypt. In that final plague, the mystery-beyond-naming killed all the firstborn of Egypt, but passed over the Israelites: hence Passover.

At this, Pharaoh released the Israelites from bondage. They immediately fled. They took their dough before it was leavened. They did not wait for the bread to rise. Pharaoh changed his mind and went chasing after them. A week later came the episode of the parting of the Red Sea, commemorated the last two days of Passover.

This is not history. Scholars put the setting at about 1300 BCE, but historically, it never happened. But that is not the point – because it’s not about ancient Israelites. It’s about you -- and us -- and about freedom – yours and ours -- right here and now. It is a narrative metaphor for us, as it has been to peoples through millennia.

"Bring out the festal bread and sing songs of freedom." Celebrate and reflect on the blessing of freedom. In parts of the world, full-scale slavery is still going on. If you're here today – or listening online -- then chances are that you are not enslaved in that full-scale way and never have been. Even so, I would guess that there has been a metaphorical land of Egypt in your past in which you were bound and from which you now are free.

"Bring out the festal bread, and sing songs of freedom." Yet freedom is the half-won blessing. Modern pharaohs live unchallenged. Chains still there are to break, metal or subtle-made. Resentments, small or large, bind us. A further Exodus awaits us still. And further truth, bright as a burning bush, cries to become known. We (we who are not under an unrelenting grind of oppression, nor consumed wholly with mere survival) stand somewhere in the middle between full-scale slavery and full-scale liberation. We have broken out of some fetters – but other fetters, or perhaps reconstituted versions of the old ones, have clamped onto us.

The next step in the work of freedom lies before us. So bring out the festal bread and sing songs of freedom.

Did you hear about the guy who was addicted to brake fluid? He said he could stop any time he wanted....

We all have our addictions. Whether it’s full-blown alcoholism or drug addiction or something we think of as milder, the key feature of addiction is that disconnect between what we want ourselves to do and what we’re able to actually do.

Passover is a time for celebrating the blessings of our freedom and also reflecting on what greater liberation would be. Pharaoh has many forms of bondage – addictions to video games or shopping or work. We can be addicted to anger or to blaming judgment.

What Pharaoh holds you in bondage in Egypt? Freedom is ever the half-won blessing. Its unfinished work lies before us. As they say in the recovery community: you can be consumed by your addiction -- or you can be recovering. Recovering – but never recovered.

It is rare indeed for a human to attain complete freedom. New chains appear. Old chains return. And their constraints are often so comfortable, for a while. It’s no easy thing to commit to a path of freedom, of liberation.

Here are four questions:

1. Can you make a decisive break with a big part of your past?
2. Can you endure the sacrifices this will mean?
3. What about the effects this will have on others?
4. Are there others who can go with you on this journey, who can walk with you on the path to liberation?

The Passover story is a narrative for wrestling with each of these questions. As I said, it’s about you.

First, can you make the decisive break? This is the "not waiting for the bread to rise" part. Even under the worst of conditions, there is some leavening in the loaf. What, give that up? Our addictions and our judgmentalism offer us creature comforts that are like a nice, hot yeasty loaf. What harm could it do to let one more batch of dough rise? Is it really necessary for the sake of freedom that we make do with the blandest unsalted crackers?

Sometimes, yes. It is. At some point we have to say: no more delays, no more putting it off. That’s going to mean something that was in the pipeline has to be abandoned. The bread won’t have a chance to rise. Is that a reason to stay in bondage?

It’s those little rationalizations that keep us stuck, isn’t it? Can you make the decisive break?

Second question: can you endure the sacrifices? Unleavened bread is nothing compared to hardships and trials on the path to freedom. It’s scary out there. The status quo has fierce armies to enforce its way. Days after leaving Egypt, the Israelites see Pharaoh’s army advancing on them. They cry out to Moses – Exodus, chapter 14:

“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, ‘Let us alone and let us serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”

Powerful resources are arrayed against you to enforce the old way. And you don’t have the resources you need to support the new way. A few weeks after leaving Egypt, the people moan again to Moses – Exodus, chapter 16:

“If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

The path to freedom is risky and uncertain. Can you endure the sacrifices?

Third question: what about the effects this will have on others? Are you just being selfish thinking about your own freedom? In the Passover story, the Israelite quest for freedom involves an enormous slaughter of Egyptians.

The rituals -- the paschal lamb, the unleavened bread, the consecration of the firstborn -- probably predate the story and the story probably took shape around pre-existing rituals. The rituals account for the story more than the story accounts for the rituals. It is impossible to know, writes the scholar Carol Meyers,

“how much of the narrative draws upon authentic experience and how much of it developed over time in relation to existing customs.”

Whatever it’s source, we have this problematic story. Meyers continues:

“The intentional destruction of innocent life in God’s slaying of the firstborn has long troubled readers of this narrative. What kind of deity was it, whose deed could benefit one group at such expense of others? Already in the early postbiblical period, rabbinic commentators sought ways to rationalize such a horrific act.”

The Israelites path to freedom came at the cost of this tragic slaughter of Egyptian firstborns. Is it worth it? What is the cost to others of your freedom? Should the Israelites feel responsible for this tragedy to the Egyptians?

It’s true that liberation leads to compassion. The chains that hold you back, more than anything, limit your ability to be present and caring to others. But might it not be better to try to work with the chains you’ve got, dragging them with you though they hamper and slow you?

Put yourself in the Israelites’ position. You hear that a plague is coming, and to protect yourself, you put lamb’s blood on your doorway. Should you also be protecting your neighbors?

Pharaoh got the same warning you did. In fact, he got 9 previous warnings in the form of the first nine plagues: Water was turned to blood, there was a plague of frogs, then one of lice, then flies, then livestock pestilence, a plague of boils, of hail, of locusts, and of darkness. He got the warnings, but he hardened his heart. Actually, Exodus says repeatedly that God hardened Pharoah’s heart – so is it Pharoah’s fault?

Let’s say you did tell your Egyptian neighbors to put lamb’s blood on their doorway, and they just wouldn’t do it. Now they’ve lost their child, and their grief is overwhelming. “There was not a house without someone dead.” Exodus says. What kind of God would do that? What kind of world would do that?

Our world contains such enormous grief, it is more than you or I can fix. Your path to freedom occurs in the context of others' pain and loss, but your freedom is not the cause of their loss.

Perhaps the Israelites’ hearts went out to their neighbors. Maybe they asked, how can we help? They were told to just leave – which happened to be what they’d always wanted. If there is a path to liberation for you – going back to school, quitting your job, changing the way you eat, changing your daily routine to include journaling, study, and meditation – and you hesitate because of the effect this might have on the people around you – you might just ask them. They might tell you, as the Egyptians told the Hebrews, just go. Do it.

What about the effects your liberation would have on others? A story about an activist I’ll call Gloria illustrates one way this question can play out. I met Gloria a number of years ago, back in the aughts. Gloria worked for good, for policy changes that would increase fairness and reduce suffering. Gloria had anger that took her straight to blaming and condemnation. "Those people in that other party are evil, corrupt, willfully blind," she said. "Some of that party’s supporters are simply dupes – who are duped by the evil and corrupt others." Her anger and judgmentalism were her bondage. It was hard for her to give that up, to be free of those chains, because she saw them as integral to helping the people she wanted to help. So there’s that question: how would your liberation affect those you care about? Sometimes we stay in the chains because we think we need them to be of service.

Gloria was venting with me one day, and I remembered: it is often the case that anger outward is a projection of anger inward, that negative self-judgments manifest as negative other-judgments. As the saying goes: When I point the finger at someone else, there are three pointing back at me. Gloria said, "Those people have no respect for other people." So I asked, "Have there been times when you didn’t respect others as much as you wish you had?"

Yes, there had indeed been times. Personal stories of regret and shame began pouring out. We’d made the shift from other-blame to self-blame – a step, maybe, but not a final destination. The path ahead, to self-forgiveness and self-compassion and thence to compassionate understanding of others, including one’s political opponents, would not be easy. That liberating path would make Gloria a more effective activist – and certainly one who enjoys life more.

She assumed she needed her chains of anger and judgment to serve the causes she cares about. The truth is that freeing ourselves allows us to more lovingly and more effectively care about others.

Fourth question: Are there others who can go with you on this journey, who can walk with you on the path to liberation? Here, too, is a lesson of the Passover story: Not one Hebrew ever walked out of Egypt alone. Nor could any have survived the wilderness alone. Freedom is a collective enterprise. We need each other to be free. Yes, there is necessary work only you can do. You, individually, have to decide it can’t wait any longer, can’t wait for whatever batch of dough you’re in the middle of to rise. You, individually, must choose the uncomfortable path.

Once you do, though, you don’t have to face it alone. There is other necessary work only we can do -- together. That’s what a liberal faith community is for: "liberal," as in "liberty," as in "freedom." Liberal faith community offers support – maybe some guidance, maybe some insight, maybe some affirmation and encouragement – as we wander in wilderness trying together to make our way to the freedom that is our birthright.

You aren't responsible for everything -- sometimes you have to let go and let others manage on their own -- but we are responsible for care and connection to one another.

Walking a labyrinth might be way you can bodily enact and reflect upon your path to and of freedom. Some years ago I was asked to lead a labyrinth walk for about 50 people in rehab to recover from substance abuse. These were people wrestling with demons that I can only imagine. Somehow, summoning courage that they wouldn’t have known they had, they made a break with their past lives, a sudden and dramatic exit from the comforts of slavery to their addiction. They now faced the slow part – the rest of their lives, really – the wilderness to traverse, a new life of freedom to build. We gathered by the outdoor labyrinth.

A labyrinth is not a maze; it has only one path. Its lesson is let go of your need to control, trust the path, keep going. One foot in front of the other. You must go into your center – wind your way in. You must find what is there. And: you cannot stay there. You must return out to the world, bringing the true self you have found. As the Gospel of Thomas says:

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

This was a group that knew a lot about what will destroy them.

Freedom is our half-won blessing. The first half is straightforward and negative (in a good way): no slavery, no masters or overlords, no chains. The second half is paradoxical. We arrive at liberation by accepting the constraints of discipline, by surrendering. By letting go and giving up, we gain. The first half involves being able to do what you want. But then you can become enslaved to your own impulsive wants. So the second half involves liberating the true self from the bondage of the desiring self.

The labyrinth is an exercise in freeing the true self by accepting the dictates of a prescribed path. When you walk a labyrinth, you wind around and around and end up at the center. Then take the path in reverse to go back out. Both journeys, the in and the out, are circuitous and terribly inefficient. The labyrinth’s lesson is that path and destination are intertwined, they define each other. The destination isn’t the destination unless it is reached by the needful path. Like Hebrews in the wilderness, you go around and around – often winding further from your destination rather than closer.

I instructed the group to notice the rhythm of their breathing, and synchronize their steps with their breaths. It helps the mind quiet, so the path can take over. Then I stood by the entrance with my watch, and sent them in one at a time, at five-second intervals. The first ones in reached the center, hung out there a while, and started back while others were still heading in. This, too, is a lesson: we encounter people who are heading in an opposite direction from us, who we could bump heads with, who might seem to be heading in a wrong direction, but there is only one path. We go in and we go out, and if you are in a going-out phase and pass by someone in a going-in phase, rest assured your positions will soon be reversed. Practice the gentle grace of letting others by. And notice that, doing this, you may have to take one step off your path. Others can knock you off your path, but never very far, and you can step back on.

Afterwards we retreated to an indoors space to debrief about the experience. I heard from them how they valued the experience, how they took to its lessons – though some acknowledged they had been skeptical and dubious. Some spoke of how, yes, their need to control had to be tamed, and how good that felt. They spoke of how the path was not always clear – the layer of leaves has gotten thick – but they let themselves trust the person in front of them, and how good it felt to trust and follow – to not be alone on this path. We all have our addictions. And we’re sometimes judgmental of others, of ourselves.

Before us is a path of freedom from those constraints. It may take some discerning to see it. Once you do: Take it. Go. You are not alone. There are others on the path waiting for you join them. Go. Don’t wait for the bread to rise.

Easter! Passover! Ramadan! Liberation! part 2

To part 1

Two ideas in the Passover festival are central:

1. It is a celebration of freedom. Passover is known as “The Season of our Liberation.” It commemorates the escape from enslavement in Egypt.
2. It is a call to hospitality.

The two phrases that echo most loudly through the Passover Seder Haggadah are: (1) "In every generation let each one feel as if he or she came forth out of Egypt"; and (2) “Let any who are hungry come and eat.”

These are interrelated and intertwined. The human psyche has three basic categories: ME, US, and THEM. Exodus tells about the liberation of an US. As a story initially and primarily told by Jewish people to Jewish people, it’s the story of how WE were enslaved. Physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, or sleep were often inadequately met. Worse, human needs for respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression were systematically and extremely denied – through regular use and constant threat of inflicting great pain and humiliation, typically the lash, applied in a way sometimes punitive and sometimes simply random, though always ostensibly punitive. It was an utterly miserable existence.

That’s the miserable existence WE were stuck in. But WE got out of it. WE, as a people, as an US, achieved political liberation – a system of some modicum, at least, of rights and liberties. It was not at all a democracy, and a read through the books of the prophets illustrates how the Israelites struggled constantly for centuries with issues of oppressing each other. But the oppressors were US now – we shared a bond of culture and of worship -- and their cruelties were less systematic, less extensive, and usually less extreme. So we were free. Or at least, "free."

When political liberation happens – when a people enjoy some rights and liberties, when physical needs can be met and those human needs -- respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression – are not systematically denied, people become susceptible to different kind of bondage. We are likely to want to guard what we have. We can become, essentially, enslaved to self-protective habits and desires of the moment. Life can come to feel bereft of meaning, even though we have autonomy.

The tradition of liberation that begins with political liberation from external oppressors must then turn to personal liberation from our own internal oppressors. When US is no longer oppressed by THEM, ME may still be oppressed by ME-self. The internal voices of self-protection and of satisfying desires of the moment drown out the voices that want our life to mean something more than its own security and gratification.

Thus the Passover Seder tradition, the Haggadah text, addresses this liberation, too. “Let any who are hungry come and eat” is as central a message as “we escaped our enslavement in Egypt.” To liberate US, we get away from the THEM that oppresses. But then, to liberate ME – that is, liberation from internal voices of self-protection and desire – we must turn toward THEM, turn toward those who are other, turn with an open heart toward those, whatever their culture, who we can help. We make our lives meaningful – liberated from the abyss of meaninglessness – by reaching out to help, to share with, any THEM that is need.

Rabbi Hillel said it succinctly: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” Yet another way to say it is that gratitude and generosity are intrinsically linked. The Seder exercise of imagining yourself as personally coming forth out of Egypt is an exercise in gratitude. It fills us with thanksgiving for the freedoms we enjoy. And the concomitant of gratitude – the action that confirms and solidifies and sustains gratitude – is generosity. So the gratitude of escaping slavery very naturally segues into the generosity of “let any who are hungry come and eat.”

Inspect your own experience. What does being ungenerous – being stingy – feel like? Does it not feel like a kind of ungratefulness Isn’t the miser necessarily also an ingrate (whether in the form of your own inner miser, or someone else)? To turn toward generosity, toward radical hospitality, toward open-heartedness toward THEM who are not US – this gives our lives richness and meaning. It is liberating.

Political liberation without radical hospitality becomes personal bondage. Hospitality to the other is what you can do right now for collective liberation. And the Passover message is that what you do for collective liberation serves also your personal liberation.

It’s a message also found in Ramadan, to which we now turn. For Muslims, all scripture was revealed during Ramadan, and it is to the celebration of scripture, or Mohammed’s revelation of that scripture, that this holy month is dedicated. It’s a time of fasting and prayers – which highlights the personal liberation of connecting to the ultimate. It’s also a time of community and heightened charity – which highlights the linkage of individual liberation to engagement with the welfare of others.

During the 30 days of Ramadan, Muslims are enjoined to read the entire Quran, which is divided into 30 parts – so, one part per day. Believers are called to stand up for justice and bear witness to the truth, as the Quran says, “even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives.” The Quran says to never allow “hatred of others to lead you away from justice.” It tell us to “be a community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids what is wrong.” It tells us “to free the slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those believe and urge one another to steadfastness [in doing good] and compassion.” It prescribes almsgiving for the poor and needy (9:60) and an ethic of charity that affirms and restores the dignity of socially neglected people (2:261—274). It tells us to defend the oppressed even if it means putting our own lives at risk.

This is the social justice message of the Qur’an. The Quran also includes prohibition of usurious loans, giving short measure in one’s business dealings, exploiting orphans, acting like tyrants, or spreading corruption. There’s a recognition here, as in Judaism and Christianity, that our own liberation is tied up with the liberation of others.

Emma Lazarus, writing in 1883, said: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Fannie Lou Hamer put the point a tad more pithily: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Our own personal liberation is bound up with ending all systems of domination.

We come again to what would appear to be the Catch-22 alluded to earlier: You can’t be free unless you free others. Yet you can’t free others unless you yourself are free. But this conundrum dissolves when we simply observe that liberation is not all or nothing. We are part-way liberated.

We are part-way liberated as individuals – though still held in some thrall to our addictions, attachments, habits, fears. We are part-way liberated as a society – we have come a long way from the absolute monarchies in which no one had rights or a vote but the king – though still held in some thrall to white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, generational wealth, meritocracy.

Such personal liberation as we have can be used to advance collective liberation. Such collective liberation as our society has lays the groundwork for us to take the next steps on our personal liberation journey. So bring out that festal bread and sing songs of freedom. And may we, along with the Earth in springtime, awake again.

To part 1

Easter! Passover! Ramadan! Liberation! part 1

To part 2

Today is a holy day in the Christian tradition. It’s Easter.

This week is a holy week in the Jewish tradition. Passover began last Friday evening and lasts until next Saturday evening.

And this month is a holy month in the Islamic tradition. It’s the month of Ramadan.

We have three great traditions overlapping, and each tradition offers us a story, redolent with meaning and possibility whether we are adherents of the faith tradition from which it comes or not.

At Community UU, our theme of the month for April is liberation, and our journey groups are exploring this issue, and looking at what sorts of things from which a person might need to be liberated.

• There have been and are groups that are oppressed, beaten down. Liberation is about ending forms of enslavement, oppression and injustice. Liberation calls for dismantling the systems of colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
• There’s also the issue of personal liberation – liberation from our own irrationalities, fears, bad habits, preoccupations, cravings, and ego defenses. These constraints may constitute a kind of prison -- though sometimes quite a comfortable prison -- even when there are no iron bars.

Let’s look today at how those two sides of liberation are addressed in the three stories: the Easter story, the Passover story, and the Ramadan story.

The Easter story has often been presented as a story of personal liberation – liberation from, in the Christian argot, the bondage of sin. In other words: we aren’t always our best selves. Heedless pursuit of passing desires can feel like a kind of bondage. Or our habits of self-protection constrain us from a more fulfilling joy -- and may lead us make moral mistakes. According to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, Jesus' suffering on the cross redeems us from all of that. Jesus suffered and died that we might have life (i.e., he substituted for us in order to atone for us).

Unitarians have been rejecting substitutionary atonement for centuries. As our UU Minute segments have noted, Fausto Sozzini in the 16th-century, Joseph Priestley in the 18th-century, and William Ellery Channing in the 19th-century were among prominent Unitarian thinkers to critically examine the doctrine of substitutionary atonement and find it unsupported by either the Bible or reason. The implication of substitutionary atonement is that real love manifests as complete submission and self-sacrifice. God required of Jesus -- and may sometimes require of us -- passive acceptance of violence. If that sounds to you like a dangerous and harmful theology, I agree.

The message of Jesus’ ministry was not an exclusive attention to individual bondage to sin. He speaks often of something generally translated as “Kingdom of heaven” or “Kingdom of God.” In Matthew, the phrase is usually "kingdom of heaven," while in Mark and Luke it's usually "Kingdom of God." (Neither phrase appears in John.) Jesus spoke Aramaic, and we have no records of his actual Aramaic words. What we have is the Greek in which the Gospels were written. The Greek word typically translated as “kingdom” is basileia. The basileia Jesus is talking about – the kingdom of God, or, better, the kin-dom of God -- is a siblinghood of radical acceptance, a social arrangement based on our universal kinship and oriented toward justice. Theologian Robert Goss writes of:

"the basileia, the reign of God which signified the political transformation of his society into a radically egalitarian, new age, where sexual, religious, and political distinctions would be irrelevant. Jesus acted out his basileia message by standing with the oppressed and outcasts of society and by forming a society of equals."

For Goss, the resurrection represents God’s endorsement and confirmation of Jesus’ basileia message. The resurrection reveals God’s orientation toward the excluded.

In Luke 17, verses 20-21, we read:

“Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” (NRSV)

Other translations give, “the kingdom of God is within you,” and in this translational difference we have the two sides of liberation. If liberation is within you, the emphasis is on personal liberation from the psychological constraints of our irrationality, anxiety, ego defensive habits – bondage to sin; Jesus is saying you have it within you to break free from patterns that disconnect you from joy. If liberation is among you, the emphasis is on social liberation from forms of inequality; Jesus is saying that the liberation we seek is to be found in our togetherness, in the relationships of beloved community.

In fact, the original Greek preposition here is entos (“in the midst of”), which might suggest either within or among. A translator might reasonably go either way. In truth, it is both at once. The basileia is both within you and among you: within us each, individually, and among us, collectively. It must be both at once – neither the personal nor the social by itself will suffice. It’s our psychological bondage to counterproductive strategies of self-protection that creates and sustains structures of inequality. At the same time, it’s the sociopolitical structures of domination that create and sustain the bondage of irrational self-protection strategies. Reversing that feedback loop will require working on both sides at once. It will require doing what we can to liberate ourselves from clinging fears and attachments. At the same time, it will require doing what we can to dismantle the structures of social domination that engender individual self-constraining thinking.

A picture of the two sides of liberation at work is presented in the Passover story. We'll look at that in part 2.

To part 2

Traditions of Liberation

OPENING WORDS

It seems appropriate during this time when we are worshipping via internet to begin with a poem that came to my attention by being widely circulated around the internet. In this time of virus, here’s a poem that went viral. Some of those circulating it claimed it was written a hundred years ago as a response to the 1918 flu pandemic, but it turns out it was written in the last month. This is by Kitty O’Meara.

And people stayed home
and read books and listened
and rested and exercised
and made art and played
and learned new ways of being
and stopped
and listened deeper
someone meditated
someone prayed
someone danced
someone met their shadow
and people began to think differently
and people healed
and in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways,
dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
even the earth began to heal
and when the danger ended
and people found each other
grieved for the dead people
and they made new choices
and dreamed of new visions
and created new ways of life
and healed the earth completely
just as they were healed themselves.

HOMILY ONE

We are celebrating today both Passover and Easter. The Jewish holiday of Passover began last Wednesday sun down, and continues until sundown on Thu Apr 16. Some of you joined me for an online virtual Seder that night, and I thank you. It was moving to be together and to tell again the familiar story, and say again the familiar words.

A traditional saying at the end of Seder and also at the end of Yom Kippur services is “next year in Jerusalem” – evoking the hope for, and commitment to, a more full spiritual redemption, a more complete liberation that comes from a more widely realized justice. But as our online virtual Seder concluded, my thoughts were also on, “Next year, back in our building, together in person.”

The Passover story is a story of political liberation – the story of a people escaping from enslavement in Egypt. Two ideas in the Passover festival have remained unchanging and central. One, it is a celebration of freedom. Passover is known as “The Season of our Liberation.” Two, it is a call to hospitality.

In Exodus, Yahweh alternates between telling Moses what to do, and telling Moses how, in future years, he is to celebrate what he’s now in the middle of doing. As soon as the Israelites get out of Egypt – before Pharaoh’s army comes chasing after them – Exodus 13 relates:

“Today, in the month of Abib, you are going out. You shall keep this observance in this month. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival to the Lord. You shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’”

“You shall tell your child,” it commands. So the Haggadah text to be followed at Seder dinners emerged in order to obey this commandment, this mitzvah, to tell each generation about the liberation.

The two phrases that echo most loudly through the Haggadah are

"In every generation let each one feel as if he or she came forth out of Egypt"

and

“Let any who are hungry come and eat.”

These are interrelated and intertwined.

The human psyche has three basic categories: ME, US, and THEM. US is, roughly, the people who share a culture with me. “Culture” is a fuzzy notion – its borders are vague and constantly shifting – but it is important and powerful nonetheless. Exodus tells about the liberation of an US. As a story initially and primarily told by Jewish people to Jewish people, it’s the story of how WE were enslaved. Physical needs for food, clothing, shelter, or sleep were often inadequately met. Worse, human needs for respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression were systematically and extremely denied – through regular use and constant threat of inflicting great pain and humiliation, typically the lash, applied in a way sometimes punitive and sometimes simply random, though always ostensibly punitive. Another way to say that: sometimes the slave is publicly tortured or executed for something they did, and sometimes just for who they are – and it’s never clear which one a given instance might be. It’s a combination cruelly effective at maintaining tremendous oppression.

It was an utterly miserable existence. That’s the miserable existence WE were stuck in. But WE got out of it. WE, as a people, as an US, achieved political liberation – a system of some modicum, at least, of rights and liberties. It was not at all a democracy, and a read through the books of the prophets illustrates how the Israelites struggled constantly for centuries with issues of oppressing each other. But the oppressors were US now – we shared a bond of culture and of worship -- and their cruelties were less systematic, less extensive, and usually less extreme. So we were free.

(And, I’d like to add: What’s remarkable isn’t that Israelites oppressed each other – for every people of that time did. What’s remarkable is that they actually struggled with it – they had a tradition of prophets, a tradition of calling each other out for abuses of power. The Jewish people invented social justice. They hardly perfected it, and may not have been much better at it than other cultures of the times, but they invented the idea of it -- the idea that there was a standard of social justice to which even the powerful were held. That idea was their tremendous gift to the world.)

When political liberation happens – when a people enjoy some rights and liberties, when physical needs can be met and those human needs -- respect, autonomy, trust, dignity, worth, and self-expression – are not systematically denied, people become susceptible to different kind of bondage. We are likely to want to guard what we have. We can become, essentially, enslaved to self-protective habits and desires of the moment. Life can come to feel bereft of meaning. The tradition of liberation that begins with political liberation from external oppressors must then turn to personal liberation from our own internal oppressors. When US is no longer oppressed by THEM, ME may still be oppressed by ME-self.

The internal voices of self-protection and of satisfying desires of the moment drown out the voices that want our life to mean something more than its own security and gratification. Thus the Passover Seder tradition, the Haggadah text, addresses this liberation, too. “Let any who are hungry come and eat” is as central a message as “we escaped our enslavement in Egypt.”

To liberate US, we get away from the THEM that oppresses. But then, to liberate ME – that is, liberation from internal voices of self-protection and desire – we must turn toward THEM, turn toward those who are other, turn with an open heart toward those, whatever their culture, who we can help. We make our lives meaningful – liberated from the abyss of meaninglessness – by reaching out to help, to share with, any THEM that is need.

I just used a whole bunch of words to say what I think Rabbi Hillel so beautifully said in 25 words or less:

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”

Hillel’s plaintive question, "What am I? If I am not for others, what am I?" points to the void of meaninglessness of a life solely consumed with self-protection and gratifying the moment’s desires.

Yet another way to say it is that gratitude and generosity are intrinsically linked. The Seder exercise of imagining yourself as personally coming forth out of Egypt is an exercise in gratitude. It fills us with thanksgiving for the freedoms we enjoy. And the concomitant of gratitude – the action that confirms and solidifies and sustains gratitude – is generosity. So the gratitude of escaping slavery very naturally segues into the generosity of “let any who are hungry come and eat.”

I invite you to inspect your own experience here. What does being ungenerous – being stingy – feel like? Whether you notice the stinginess in yourself or in someone else, what is it like? Does it not feel like a kind of ungratefulness? Isn’t the miser necessarily also an ingrate (whether in the form of your own inner miser, or someone else)?

In the story that Tracy’s going to share with us in a few minutes, you’ll notice a movement toward generosity, toward radical hospitality, toward open-heartedness toward THEM who are not US. As you do, notice the feeling of increased liberation, of increased meaning that comes with that turning.

Political liberation without radical hospitality becomes personal enslavement.

[Tracy's story, from UUA's "Tapestry of Faith" set of curricula, is HERE.]

PRAYER

In the midst of this Passover season, sacred in the Jewish tradition, today is Easter, sacred in the Christian tradition. So let us pray:

Dear Light of the World that can pierce the darkness of our world and understanding – piercer of darkness that Christians name Jesus:

We come to this Easter morning in the midst of a pandemic. These are times of uncertainty, fear; lack of food, money; lack of access to basic necessities, healthcare, clean water and sanitation.

Let us remember that for those on the margins, this is their “normal.” Facing conditions of uncertainty and lack has been the daily reality for those with severe disabilities or illness, the migrant, the refugee, the homeless, the poor, the jobless, the voiceless, the powerless, victims of violence, those with mental illness. For many there is the added trauma of grieving the loss of loved ones while separated by ‘social distancing’, quarantine, or lockdown.

Light of the World, illuminate us with loving compassion. Pierce the darkness of our world and understanding.

Many are rediscovering the joy of sharing and the joy of loving those who are our neighbors. We celebrate and give thanks for the kindness of so many. In Italy, the Rainbow in Every Street movement leaves food for those in need. “If you don’t have food, please take. If you have, please give.”

Two Nigerian software engineers fix faulty ventilators for free at the University of Jos teaching hospital.

In Capetown, South Africa, the gangland truce helps provide food instead instead of lethal turf wars.

We rejoice in the inventiveness of so many across the globe trying to solve the critical shortage of medical equipment and personal protective supplies.

Light of the World, heal our selfishness and help us reset our values where every one of us truly looks out for each other. May we come out to the reality of new life for us all. Help us to travel the road to freedom to live in your Light. May we be open to the promptings of compassion.

Amen

HOMILY TWO

The Easter story is also a story of liberation – the story of freedom from the bondage of sin. I know that language, for many of us, evokes a way of thinking that feels alien. Yet we would agree, I think, that we aren’t always our best selves – that heedless pursuit of passing desires can feel like a kind of bondage – and that habits of self-protection can sometimes constrain us from a more fulfilling joy.

Even so, we may well wonder how this is supposed to work: how does a story of a person cruelly executed yet rising from the dead free us from any kind of bondage. One account, prevalent in much of traditional Christianity, is called the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. This is the account of Easter that, somewhere along the line, you probably learned. It goes roughly like this:

The Easter story tells us that Jesus' suffering on the cross is redemptive. He suffered and died that we might have life (i.e., he substituted for us in order to atone for us). In that way, we are freed from bondage to sin.

I don’t think substitutionary atonement is the best way to read the Easter story. The implication of substitionary atonement is that real love manifests as complete submission and self-sacrifice. God required of Jesus -- and may sometimes require of us -- passive acceptance of violence. I think that’s actually a dangerous and harmful interpretation of the Easter story. As I read it, the death from which we may rise, from which we can help others rise, is specifically an entombment in fear and shame.

Crucifixion was designed to inflict optimal physical pain, dragged out over many hours. More than that, crucifixion was designed to humiliate. The person was stripped naked – lifted up to public view, gasping, fully exposed, utterly powerless. At the moment of death, his bowels would loosen, for all to see. Crucifixion was designed to instill fear, and to make anyone associated with the victim feel ashamed of themselves. As Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, write in their book, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire:

“Crucifixion was used against the underclasses and slaves and was regarded as so shameful that even victims’ families would not speak of it. It functioned to fragment communities, tearing the fabric of even the strongest bonds of connection and commitment.”

And, as Ron Rolheiser adds, for some of Jesus’ followers, it worked.

“Many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.”

In their fear and their shame, they fell silent about the promise of a new social order, a Kindom of God. Others, though – women, at first – broke silence. Brock and Parker write:

"The Passion narratives broke silence about the shame and fear that crucifixion instilled. To lament was to claim powers that crucifixion was designed to destroy: dignity, courage, love, creativity, and truth-telling. In telling his story, his community remembered his name and claimed the death-defying power of saying his name aloud....The Passion stories brought testimony before a higher court of appeals than the bogus trial of Jesus they indict. The purpose of such writing is assuredly not to valorize victims, to praise their suffering as redemptive, to reveal ‘true love’ as submission and self-sacrifice, or to say that God requires the passive acceptance of violence. Such interpretations mistakenly answer the abusive use of power with an abnegation of power. The story of Jesus’ crucifixion, in marked contrast, asserted that the answer to abusive power is the courageous and decisive employment of the powers of life – to do deeds in Jesus’ name.... To break silence whenever violence is used to shame, instill fear, fragment human community, or suppress those who advocate for justice is life-giving. Just as Jesus, in John’s Gospel, stood before Pilate and said, ‘you have no power over me,’ the Passion narratives defied the power of crucifixion to silence Jesus’ movement. In doing so, they placed before his movement the choice to tell the truth and live by ethical grace. They said life is found in surviving the worst a community can imagine, in lamenting the consequences of imperialism, and in holding fast to the core goodness of this world, blessed by divine justice and abundant life."

Against all violence to body or to spirit, against all fear and shame endured by us and by others, against all the protective strategies we ourselves devise to be safe, there is rising to accept and affirm and speak who we are. There is yet the possibility of transformation into who we are, unobscured by fear or shame. There is yet the possibility of justice, an end to violence, a new social order, a Kindom of God. That’s how I read the Easter story.

But why would that story need to include the part of the story about the empty tomb – the resurrection? One answer is what I've indicated: the resurrection of Jesus is symbolic of resurrection from the psychic death of fear and shame. Another answer is: because it’s important to remember that the dead are not gone. On Easter we remember that the dead do continue to guide us. They do so through conscious memories of them, what they said, and what we may imagine they would say. They also do so in unconscious ways – they continue to influence our individual and collective way of being.

Let me share with you a personal story by way of inviting you to reflect this Easter on your experience of ways the dead rise -- continue to comfort, to guide – ways their love and their wisdom continues somehow to be felt.

I have had three lucid dreams in my life. The first was 40 years ago, and the last was just couple months ago, and is still very vivid for me.“Lucid dream” is a name for the extraordinary experience of being conscious that you are dreaming while you’re in the dream. As you are conscious that you are dreaming, more of your waking brain is functioning. So if something completely crazy happens, your normal dreaming brain casually accepts it as if it were perfectly ordinary, but in a lucid dream you would recognize that things that make no sense, and you can bring more of waking cognitive capacity to the unfolding narrative. In what’s called lucid dreaming, the awake consciousness gets to interact with subconscious stuff in a way that it normally can’t.

In the first two lucid dreams of my life, as soon as I realized I was dreaming, my concern was to wake up. I was like: “This place isn’t real. I don’t want to be in an unreal place. Get me out of here.” I was straining to wake up, but couldn’t – so I felt trapped. In this third one, though, I met my father, and was delighted to have the chance to be with him again.

I was on an academic campus. Nothing unusual there. I grew up on college campuses, as both my parents were professors, and then spent my young adulthood as a grad student and then professor myself. I had left something behind in one of the buildings, and went back in to look for it. In the lobby, there was my Dad.

He said, “I’ll show to your new office.” Now that was a twist, because the narrative up to that point was that I was just visiting this campus, for some conference, say. I didn’t have an office there – or the responsibilities that would go along with that.

It was at that moment that the dream became lucid – that I became aware that this was a dream while I was still having it. My brain went from casually accepting that it was perfectly natural for my father to be standing there to: “Oh, my god! Dad!”

It’s been five years since my father died of Alzheimer’s in January 2015 at the age of 82. Because of the nature of Alzheimer’s, the Dad I knew has actually been gone for a lot longer than that. The man who was standing before me – who was offering to show me to my ‘new office,’ wearing a tie and a tan sport coat with elbow patches – was the version of my father when he was in his early 50s and at the height of his powers. He was smart, he was funny – could be sarcastic sometimes – had a finely tuned sense of irony. God, I've missed him.

So I held out my arms and I said, “Dad! Hold me.” And he did.

Then we were walking down the hall toward this new office, and I said to him, “You’re dead, you know.”

And he answered in that one-eyebrow-raised, ironical way of his, “here and there.”

And then, sadly, I did wake up in my bunk at the monastery. But what a perfect answer that was. Just like my Dad. Yet my conscious brain by itself would never have thought of that.

Death, like life, is always a "here and there" affair – parts of us go and other parts stay.

Some would characterize such a visitation as a projection of the subconscious. Others would say that a spirit from the afterlife broke the veil to communicate with the living. As for me, I don’t see what the difference is. Aren't they the same thing? After all, my subconscious knew the man very well.

The dead are with us. They continue, in ways we often but dimly apprehend, to comfort, to guide, to orient us toward our next “new office” whatever that may be. In such ways the presence of those who are absent calls us to our better self – offers us a nudge toward liberation from pettiness.

He is risen. She is risen. They are risen.

Happy Easter, everyone.

Amen.