You know the story. It’s an old story–the long freedom march from bondage to the Promised Land. It’s about the people of Israel held captive in Egypt for 430 years under the rule of tyrants. It’s pure mythology—that’s why it’s our story—because it’s the human story, and it’s happening right now.
We humans have a love-hate relationship to this thing we call freedom. On the one hand, we are, as the philosopher Sartre said, ‘condemned to freedom,’ and the psychologist Erich Fromm said, we do all we can to ‘escape from freedom.’
On the other hand, the process of becoming an authentic human soul is the journey toward freedom—to free ourselves of fear: those who live in fear are not free. Self-control is basic to human freedom—we are not free if we are controlled by compulsions. We are not free if our thoughts, attitudes and beliefs are weighed down with prejudices—racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism.
A report this week says that those of us who are somewhat overweight are better off, so the big shift is on, from prejudice against the obese to prejudice against those who are too thin! Prejudices prevent us from freedom.
This week the Connecticut legislature extended freedom to gay and lesbian couples by writing a law that provides the same rights and protections as heterosexual couples—the civil union bill is a major step from bondage toward the Promised Land of full marital status—the ‘promise of this land’ of ours.
This legislation is part of our Passover story…it’s about the long march toward freedom, not only for gay and lesbian couples, but a step that will help liberate many from the old prejudice that was planted in the hearts of children.
Passover is the story of the long march toward freedom—it applies to each of us as individuals, and it applies to us as a society, and it applies to us as members of the human species. The Passover story is told every year at the Seder meal—the word ‘seder’ simply means ‘order.’
The rabbis say that you should enter the Passover story and see it as if you were held in bondage, as if you crossed the Red Sea and moved from bondage toward the Promised Land; as if you wandered in the desert for forty years; as if you stood on the mountain with Moses and looked out over the horizon and saw the Promised Land, though you would not be allowed to enter it.
So let’s look again at this interesting Jewish-Christian myth. The story begins in the book of Genesis—the first book, the book of beginnings.
Let’s pick it up at the part where Jacob tricks his twin brother Esau out of his birthright, leaves home, lives with his uncle, marries two of his cousins and with their handmaidens becomes the father of twelve sons.
After 21 years he leaves his uncle’s place a wealthy man; but he’s afraid of his brother Esau, who swore to take revenge on him for stealing the birthright, so he arranges a peace treaty with his brother. The plan is that he’ll meet his brother on the road, bringing him a generous gift of sheep, cattle and oxen—a gift that seems more like a bribe than a freely-given gift.
The night before they are to meet he stays by himself. The story says:
“And Jacob was alone, and he wrestled with a man all night long.”
Who is this ‘man’ with whom Jacob wrestled? He’s described both as ‘an angel of God,’ and the inference is that this is God himself.
After wrestling all night long the man tells Jacob to let go, the new day is dawning. Jacob refuses to let go until he gets the blessing, so the man says, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
Then Jacob asked him, ‘Tell me, I pray, your name.’ But he said, ‘Why is it that you ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”
Jacob had a powerful experience. That’s the only thing that really and truly causes the kind of change within ourselves that allows us to move from bondage to the promised land. It boils down to personal experience. Not reading the right book—except insofar as that book might confirm what you already know, but haven’t been able to put into words, yet. It’s not a matter of finding the right religion—even the Unitarian Universalist religion! It’s about experience, and the processing of that experience in the depth of your own mind.
So Jacob has a life-altering experience, which allows him to meet his brother—his twin brother, which to me symbolizes coming to terms with the two parts of himself.
He makes peace with his brother Esau and settles down in a new land…which is to say, he makes peace with that part of himself with which he’s been wrestling!
Getting back to the Biblical story, you’ll recall that Jacob’s son Joseph is his love child—the first son of Rachel, his second wife, whom he loves; so Joseph is his father’s favorite.
Jacob gives Joseph the infamous coat of many colors, which sets him apart, makes his brothers jealous, and they beat him and throw him in a ditch, and then they sell him into slavery and tell his father that he was killed by a wild beast.
Joseph is taken in bondage into Egypt. This is how the story gets the children of Israel, the Hebrew people, into Egypt to begin with.
Joseph gains a reputation as a great interpreter of dreams, and by interpreting the Pharaoh’s dream about a coming drought, he saves Egypt from the famine which the dream foretold. As a result, he got a good job as keeper of the grain, saves his family who came begging for food and thus the Israelites wound up in Egypt.
As the generations pass the people of Israel gain wealth in Egypt, become a threat and are enslaved. That’s where Moses comes in, and we move from the story in Genesis to the freedom march—the book of Exodus.
The evil Egyptians are killing the male children of the people of Israel to prevent them from gaining more power, but Moses is saved by sympathetic midwives, and Moses’s mother puts him in a basket and floats him down the Nile to the Pharaoh’s daughter who raises him as her own. Moses’s sister tricks the Pharaoh’s daughter Moses doesn’t realize that he’s not an Egyptian, but a Hebrew.
He comes to the defense of a Hebrew slave who is being abused by his Egyptian overseer and has to get out of town. He meets some women who are being prevented from having access to water for their sheep, chases the bad guys away from the well, they tell their father, Jethro, and in response to the act of kindness from Moses, Jethro gives him one of his daughters and Moses settles down.
The story says that one day when Moses was alone, tending his father-in-law’s flocks at the foot of mount Horeb, the mountain of God (another name for Mount Sinai) he saw a bush that was burning but was not consumed.
A voice from the bush told him to take off his shoes for the place on which he was standing is holy ground. He obeyed.
The voice—the voice of God—told him to go back to Egypt to free the people of Israel. He protested, saying he wasn’t a good speaker. God assured Moses that he didn’t have to worry, God would take care of the details.
Moses hesitates, and he says, “If I go and gather the people of Israel and tell them to come with me, they’re sure to ask who sent me. What shall I say?”
The voice from the burning bush—the bush that was burning but was not consumed—says, “I AM THAT I AM, tell them I AM has sent you.”
In the animated film of Moses, The Prince of Egypt (Dream Works) they had to decide whose voice to use from the burning bush. They finally decided to have the voice of the character who plays Moses, Val Kilmer, speak his own voice from the burning bush. It’s a strong statement—it’s an encounter with himself, on the deepest level.
Herein lies the freedom stories new idea of God. In this passage God becomes a verb, literally meaning, “I am becoming.” We might say, ‘evolving…growing.’
This definition of God is central to the Exodus story, the story of human freedom—the process of moving from bondage toward the Promised Land…the story of moving from child to adult…the story of our human evolution and the sacred-ness of the soul, which is intimately tied to the quest for freedom.
Well, you know what happens: Moses tells the Pharaoh to ‘let my people go,’ but for some strange reason God hardens the Pharaoh’s heart, making it necessary to send the ten plagues, and finally the angel of death, to kill all the first born in Egypt—a kind of retaliation for what the Egyptians did to the people of Israel.
Before God sends the angel of death to slay all the first born He instructs the people of Israel to kill a lamb—one for each family, or to be shared in the case of small families—and to put the blood of this sacrificial lamb on the lentil and doorposts so that the angel of death will pass over the homes of the Hebrew people.
It works. Pharaoh lets them go, and thus begins the long freedom march—the Exodus, with six hundred thousand men, plus the women and children on foot.
Pharaoh changes his mind, sends his army after them, but they march into the Red Sea, which is parted for them, and then, when the Egyptian army is in the middle of the Red Sea, God drowns them all.
The freedom march continues—for forty years they wander the desert, until Moses gets the Ten Commandments—though he has to repeat the process a second time, since his brother Aaron gave in and made a golden calf to worship while Moses was away.
Herein lies the central issue of the freedom story—the warning against the danger of idolatry.
God, through Moses, punishes the offenders, killing three thousand of them–those who refused to repent; Moses goes back up the mountain, God carves the commandments into the stone again, and Moses brings them down to the people.
In addition to the first Ten Commandments, like the first ten amendments–there are 603 other commandments given to the people of Israel, making a total of 613.
After forty years of wandering rather aimlessly, the people of Israel are ready to settle down—they needed a set of rules to live by in order to be free.
This is the lesson of Exodus—freedom doesn’t come simply by moving out of bondage—escaping; it comes gradually, it comes with structure, with order; it comes little by little. It’s not a destination as much as it is a way of traveling ‘from bondage to the Promised Land.’
The commandments, all 613 of them—formed the foundation of freedom for the people of ancient Israel. The commandments are the equivalent of our Constitution. It’s at the foundation of our society, providing a structure, or set of boundaries. It doesn’t tell people what to do—it establishes a system wherein people are free to choose, within the boundaries that are drawn.
The decisions we make form what we call character– the essence of each individual. Every decision of consequence requires reflection, or processing—what we do when we put our heads on the pillow at the end of the day.
At the end of the day we listen to the voices within us—those voices that assess who we are, where we’ve been, what we’re becoming.
The Passover story is filled to overflowing with this kind of symbolism.
At first, Moses doesn’t know that’s he’s a Hebrew—he doesn’t ‘know himself.’ He discovers his true identity in his early adult years. The word adult comes from the Latin verb adolescere, ‘to grow up.’ It shares the same root as the word adolescent. Moses doesn’t fully mature until age 80, when he has the encounter with that burning bush. Earlier in the story he acted on impulse and killed the Egyptian that was beating up on the Hebrew slave—he lacked self-control. To grow up is to move from bondage toward the Promised Land.
The Exodus story is about growing up—it’s about the process of maturing, both for the individual and for a society or culture, and for the human family.
Immaturity struggles against all the rules and boundaries: ‘something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ is the way Robert Frost puts it in the opening lines of Mending Wall.
His neighbor, though, quotes his father’s favorite saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
One of the commandments says that you should ‘honor your father and your mother.’ That doesn’t simply mean to be obedient—to honor, in this sense, is to show respect—it is to assume the obligation to continue the journey on the road from bondage toward the Promised Land. It doesn’t require blind obedience, however; it requires maturity—it requires deeper understanding. (“I see where you’re coming from,” we say.) You don’t really respect what you don’t understand. Without understanding you can have mere obedience, but not respect.
The road from bondage toward the Promised Land is the life-long process of maturing—moving toward a deeper understanding. For the individual it’s about authenticity, as symbolized by Moses finding out who he really is and what he has to do.
While it’s about the inner journey, it’s also about the development of civilization—it’s about living in society and the development of cultures.
We are at a crucial cross-road in our society. There are some who say that our Constitution is carved in stone, while others of us say that it is a living, breathing document that must be continually interpreted in light of the times; that it must have a degree of flexibility.
Religious fundamentalists are comfortable with a strict set of rules, including a definite belief system to which all who wish to be part of their group must adhere, must swear their allegiance.
The problem comes when these religious fundamentalists would impose their narrow belief system on the rest of us.
The elevation of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope Benedict XVI this week is consistent with the Catholic Church’s carved-in-stone approach. A strange trend is running through the Church in Europe and America—Catholics are willing to give a polite nod to the old authoritarianism, then pick and choose which of the church’s commandments to keep. The majority do not keep the commandment to observe the Sabbath—church attendance continues to slide, though it is considered a sin not to attend weekly Mass.
The majority of Catholics do not keep the rules about birth control; they see the notion of the Pope’s infallibility as a quaint anachronism, and most don’t even realize that it was inserted in 1854 by Pope Pius IX so he could have the final word in defining the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which asserted that the Virgin Mary was freed from the taint of original sin and had occurred at the moment of her conception.
William S. Coffin, minister emeritus of Riverside Church put it this way (CREDO); “Too many religious people make faith their aim. They think “the greatest of these” is faith, and faith defined as all but infallible doctrine. These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with freezing the doctrine than warming the heart…”
He’s talking here about the Tom DeLays and the Bill Frist’s and the George W. Bush’s of the world—men who would impose their narrow beliefs on the rest of us—which makes us wonder if they really embrace those so-called religious beliefs at all, or if they simply want power over and control over, as opposed to the democratic process of living with one another, respecting differences and celebrating diversity.
If you’re after big church growth in terms of numbers of people, the experts tell us that we should make rules for membership strict—that membership should carry significant demands; they say that’s why conservative churches are growing—in numbers, that is.
It reminds me of scenes in the Exodus story—when the people of Israel get across the Red Sea they look back at the sense of security they felt, wishing they were back there, where they knew where their next meal was coming from; or the scene when Moses is on the mountain, away from the people, and they become impatient so they make a golden calf—an idol to worship; he comes back to see this scene and realizes that the people were not ready—they hadn’t matured enough to assume the responsibilities of freedom—the responsibility to be an authentic person.
I do not mean to suggest that we Unitarian Universalists have a corner on religious maturity or a franchise on the truth. Far from it. But I understand the Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong when he wrote in his recent book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die:
“Love is the source and creator of life. Love is the essential power that deepens our relationships and simultaneously expands our humanity. The more we are freed to be ourselves, the more we are enabled to give our lives away to others. The more we know of life-giving love, the more we find the courage to express and reveal the ground of our being.”
That phrase, the ground of our being, is another name for God, similar to that which is found in the book of Exodus when the voice from the burning bush says, “I AM THAT I AM…I AM BECOMING.”
Certainly this is not a new idea. The founder of the Methodist church, John Wesley, put it this way in a well-known prayer: “That I may become master of myself so I can be a servant to others.”
In closing I want to hook onto last week’s sermon in which I told you about Ann Cohen’s long journey from bondage toward the Promised Land. She experienced liberation, in spite of her family’s effort to pull her back into Egypt; she planned her funeral service, and they honored some of it—as much as they could handle. The planning itself indicated the progress she had made along the road ‘from bondage to the Promised Land’ of personal freedom and dignity. Her planning was an act of liberation as well as an indication of her liberation. There’s a heroic quality in every life that dares to be free; there’s a heroic ingredient to living an authentic life, and her story provided a perfect preface to the Passover story.
There’s a sense in which we’re all moving between bondage and the promised land—the bondage of self-doubt, the bondage of things like greed, avarice, discontentment, fear, anger, resentment, and so forth, and the promise of some kind of inner freedom—peace of mind; forgiveness; the promised land of feeling at home in the world and in the self each of us occupies; the promised land where we feel a deep, genuine sense of appreciation for life as expressed in the words of the Psalmist: ‘my cup runneth over.’
That’s what the Passover story is about—for me.
“And he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.”—Exodus 3:2-3