Exodus 12:1-15a
October 4, 2020
Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel, a United Church of Christ author
and pastor out of First Congregational Church UCC in Dubuque, Iowa, wrote a
very popular column for many pastors some years ago that she parlayed into a
popular book. When it was posted on Facebook,
I wrote, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Several others wrote, “Finally!”
Or “Preach!” or “wise words.” Her
book sparked a conversation that first led to much acclaim but later went
through some backlash as people started to hear her words judgmental and grumpy
against people who no longer find involvement in the institutional church
meaningful.
Rev. Daniel is part of a UCC writer’s group and a regular
contributor to the UCC website. This
particular article was titled, “Spiritual but not religious? Please stop boring me.”[1] She wrote about a nightmare most any pastor
has faced. Tracy and I have each had
this experience. You end up on an
airplane sitting next to a stranger who finds out you are a pastor. Oh, no—trapped, especially if you are in a
window seat. These conversations,
inevitably, go one of two ways. One, the
person believes their brand of Christianity is the same as yours and spends the
rest of the plane ride telling you what’s what in the world . . . assuming you
agree. Or, two, and this is what Rev.
Daniel experienced, the person tells you that they are spiritual but not
religious and they can find God much more easily in a beautiful sunset.
Rev. Daniel
effectively rolls her eyes at this statement, wondering if the person
recognizes that pastors and congregational members are also sometimes released
out of their church buildings, into the wild, to also see beautiful
sunsets. It is easy, Rev. Daniel
believes, to follow the popular culture and claim an individual and private
spirituality in sunsets. “There is
nothing challenging,” she writes, “having deep thoughts all by oneself.” The tough part is to work through and cross-stitch
and darn community together in a local church setting where people can call you
on your stuff, or, “heaven forbid, disagree with you.” Please stop boring me with your
culturally-laden, individualistic, private spirituality. Do the hard work to weave together community
when people have their annoying habits, call you on your stuff, and never seem
to have a positive word for the things you contribute. And do it all with declining budgets and
numbers in the mainline church. Do the
hard work of using warp and weft to create a beautiful tapestry.
Indeed, the
literal meaning of the root word for religion means “to bind together.” So maybe Rev. Daniel has it right. To claim to be spiritual and not religious
may suggest that a person is not only interested in the private meaning a
sunset can offer, but also wants to avoid all the messiness of what it means to
be in human relationship. How do we work
through those oppositional, naysaying, hypocritical betrayers anyway? Sometimes that is the very difficult work of
community quilting or church.
Part of
what Rev. Daniel is saying is that one may fall out of bed and be spiritual,
but being religious requires our hard work and intention. We are a healthy community when, through
hard work and intention, we learn how to bind together by how we challenge each
other, sing in harmony, disagree with each other, and, finally, find mutual
meaning. Conflict in all the beauty of
God’s given diversity is inevitable.
Continuing unhealthy habits, patterns, and ways of being that lead to avoiding
conflict at all costs is not what brings healing, repair, and the darning we
need to continue our community pilgrimage.
I think
there are very good reasons why people no longer find the institutional church
meaningful. I get that. I do think, however, Rev. Daniel reminds us
that sometimes people are leaving the institutional church out of a wider
cultural narrative that wrongly lauds individualism over necessary hard
communal work. This “spirituality” too
often circles the wagons to make sure me and mine are taken care of . . . but I’m not so sure I am all that concerned
about you and yours.
I think Rev. Daniel rightly observes that sometimes
institutional churches are suffering losses because community work is hard
work—across race, gender, class, sexuality, and age groups. Finding the joy in our differences takes time
and effort. And though we may be able to
observe the transcendent beauty and color of a sunset alone, God created us to
share in our joy and our pain, that our joy and pain might be more meaningful,
truthful, and whole when that joy or pain is mutual.
Some years
ago, when we lived just outside of Rockford, Illinois, our family was honored
to be invited to the family Passover meal of Rabbis Binah and Shlomoe
Wing. Binah was the first-ever female
rabbi in Rockford, Illinois, and she became one of my closest colleagues
Often in contrast to the silent, individual reflection of
our sacred meal, this sacred Passover meal had noisy and playful children
involved, the laughter of friends and family, and the telling of communal pain
and joy. We also had good brisket!
Today we share in a mutual meal, a special meal, a meal we
say is a sacrament within our tradition.
We believe this special meal says something about us corporately, as a
community and a church. In the midst of
the separation and distance of pandemic, in the incredible amount of hard work
and good intention found at St. John’s United Church of Christ, what does this
special meal and how we celebrate it say about us?
What do your special meals say about you and your
family? Who is invited? Who is not?
What food is served? Where does
that food come from? Who makes it? How is it prepared and presented? How does the meal begin? What words can you expect to hear at every
one of these special meals? Is there any
order to how the food is served? How are
children and youth included or not included?
How are children and youth mentored into full adulthood through
placement around or at a different table, in conversation, and through questions
asked of them? What questions do
children and youth get to ask? Does the
meal say something not only about your family’s identity but about your
community or national identity? (For
example, a Thanksgiving Dinner can say something not only about our family but
also about our religious and national history and identity.) In the Mulberry family, historically,
Thanksgiving Dinner was about plugging into your patriotism and the timing of
the National Football League. As a
pastor just west of two Native American reservations, I learned that
Thanksgiving Dinner meant re-lived pain and trauma. So critical questions about meaning were
always asked.
All of
these are questions the Jewish Passover seeks to answer. After
430 years of slavery, of someone and something else telling the Children of
Israel who they were and who they would be, who God is, and, most importantly,
who they were and were to be in the future in relationship with God, God wants
them to imagine who they are differently.
God wants the Children of Israel to memorialize what it takes to be a
free and liberated people. They are not
slaves. And they are not to develop an
identity, policies and practices, that make them slaveholders.
In the Passover, bitter herbs are eaten
and food prepared to represent the bricks and mortar of slavery. Unleavened bread is made to remind them that
this holy time was also a time when they had to get-out-of-Dodge quick, no time
to wait for any bread to rise, and that the whole meal was to be eaten with a sense of trepidation
and fear. If you think the same God who
would not take Pharaoh’s b.s. in cruelty and torture is somehow going to make
you exceptional and take your cruelty and torture b.s., you are sadly mistaken—that’s
what the trepidation and fear is all about.
Eggs are a symbol of life and mean a multitude of
things. Eggs are a reminder of the loss
of Egyptian life, the mourning done by Egyptian parents . But the egg also represents that the longer
the Hebrew people were cooked in oppression, the harder and stronger they
became.
Every year
the Jewish people say words that remind them that they were once aliens and
immigrants in
Children are included and invited to ask questions so that
the simple truths of the story can be told once more. They are included in play and fun, an
important part of children’s spirituality, as they hide some of the unleavened
bread. An empty chair is left to leave a
place for the prophet Elijah, a prophet from another era, who re-called the
people to their highest values of remembering those must vulnerable. In leaving that empty chair, the prophet
Elijah is invited to every Passover.
Rabbi Shai Held writes that the Passover, this special meal
described in Exodus 12, teaches the deepest truth of who God is—“the God of the
downtrodden and degraded.”[2] By participating in the Passover meal then, Jewish
people remember that they are created in the image of God, participate in that
image, and become a people who care for the weak, free the wrongfully
imprisoned, and raise up the cast down.
One of the
final acts of many Passover meals, not the one we attended, but many, is to eat
the food reclining, a way of recognizing that the Jewish people are slaves no
more and that God does not intend for them to be slaves. God wants, intends, and desires their freedom,
leisure, and rest. So eat Passover
reclining in leisure, mindful you are no longer slaves, and God desires your
rest.
The
Passover, Rabbi Held writes, is a counter to the despair and hopelessness of
those who say that nothing ever changes and that the status quo will hold. Generation after generation, after hundreds
of years, these slaves are dehumanized and have the dignity beaten out of them. Nothing will change. This is the way of the world. But then, the meal says, after eating the
bitter herbs of slavery for so long, everything changes. And the meal is eaten year after year, and this
simple story is told, Rabbi Held writes, “until every slave is freed and all
oppression is rooted out.”
Knowing
that this is the special meal, Passover, out of which our special meal, the
Sacrament of Holy Communion, is based, through hard work and intention, we must
collectively decide not only what this special meal means for us now but what
it calls us to be in the future.
Exodus 12
reminds the Jewish people that, in Passover, they are not only called to be a
spiritual people but also a religious people, tied together in a single garment
of destiny. The signs and wonders of God
are not experienced and explained isolated as individuals but tied together as
a community. As we receive communion
today, celebrating with Christians around the world as we do so, what words and
actions tell us who we are, who we are in relation to one another, who God is,
and who God is in relation to us, and finally, what we are called to be in the
world. Told again and again, what is our
simple story?
As Rev. Dr. Lillian Daniel wrote, anyone can be spiritual
and think deep thoughts alone but how boring is that? We are
St. John’s United Church of Christ in Jackson, Michigan. We call each other on our stuff. We disagree with one another. World Communion Sunday calls us to the table
to do the hard work together. We will
work toward mutual meaning so that all of the world might know that we are
Christians—not only by the deep meaning we find in sunsets alone, but in our
shared joy and pain, by our love. And as
we do so, God is praised. Amen.
[1]Rev.
Lillian Daniel, “Spiritual but not religious?
Please stop boring me.” http://www.ucc.org/feed-your-spirit/daily-devotional/spiritual-but-not-religious.html,
August 31, 2011.
[2]Rabbi Shai Held, “The
Deepest Truth About God: How the Exodus
teaches is about ethical passion.” http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/2000/01/The-Deepest-Truth-About-God.aspx
