September 7, 2008 | 8:00 a.m.

Beginnings

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 149
Exodus 12:1–14
Romans 13:8–14

“It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep.”

Romans 13:11 (NRSV)

Relocate us in your eternal resolve,
that the earth may be fully your realm,
that the world may wreak with your shalom,
that we ourselves may find our true freedom
in your sovereign purpose.
Yours—not ours—is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory . . .
and we are grateful. Amen.

Walter Brueggemann

There’s a question I’d like for you to think about today: is there something that someone, maybe a parent or a mentor, told you when you were young that you weren’t ever able to forget? Maybe it was positive, maybe it was negative, but think about it, was there something that really stuck with you, something that is just burned into your memory? Take a moment and remember one of those things.

The story we have today from the book of Exodus is a story that is intended to have the same kind of power as the one you thought about. It’s a story that God doesn’t want us to forget.

Some people interpret this story and remember bad things from it. Whoever wrote down this story says that during this plague, this Passover, the spirit of the Lord passes over Egypt, putting to death every firstborn male. What kind of God does that? I’m not sure. Maybe the story is remembered this way because the storyteller is someone who lives in ancient times, someone who thinks that the God who deserves to be worshiped is one who is powerful enough to bless us and also to curse us. In the ancient world, the god who held the most power over us was the one who deserved praise. This perception of God is a part of history.

Other people had a more positive memory of this story. They remember it as a defining moment in the history of Israel for all kinds of good reasons. While we may have the negative backdrop to deal with, the real reason this story is told is to make it abundantly clear that, in the midst of a horrible situation, God saves the Israelites. Against all odds, God hears the cry of the people and delivers them from slavery; in the darkest time in the history of Israel, God saves Israel. And this perception of the story is so strong within the tradition, it’s so powerful, that in Jewish tradition people still retell this story every year as one of the great traditions of their worship.

I’m glad to be able to welcome you to Fourth Presbyterian Church today. We find that those who attend our services run the gamut from weekly devotees to those who were just walking by today and thought, “What a beautiful church; perhaps I’ll give it a try.” As some of you may know, we have four services each Sunday, ranging in attendance from as few as 50 worshipers to around 1,000. Different preachers, different hymns, different prayers, and different musical offerings appear throughout the day, but something you’ll notice is that, for the most part, services here have a feeling that most of us would probably agree is rather “traditional.” We acknowledge—and gladly acknowledge—that around our city and our nation and our world, people are gathering in other places, worshiping in ways that are quite different and yet quite faithful and honest and pleasing to God. And we hope our way of worshiping God accomplishes those things as well.

But acknowledging that there are many authentic ways of worshiping God causes us also to ask a question: Why continue to worship in this old, traditional way? Why tell all of the stories, particularly ones like today, the ones that might give some of us the opportunity to take a dark impression of religion? Particularly here, on North Michigan Avenue, steps away from countless examples of our fast-paced modern world, where there seems to be so much good fortune, why would we here in the church stay in the dark ages and tell stories about God that give people the chance to speculate about God in such a dark way? And why continue to tell stories of God in such a traditional, premodern way? Where are the video screens? Where’s the band? Why do it the old way? I think this messy story of the Passover actually provides us with some pretty good reasons.

This passage from Exodus is part of the law that was given to the Isrealites after they were liberated from slavery in Egypt. It contains specific instructions about how the Israelites are to observe the Passover. Let me pull things back for a moment and lighten the picture a little. Let’s try not to take ourselves too seriously. There’s a level of detail, a number of particular points in the passage, that one might call an “excessive” or even an “excruciating” amount of detail. While Reverend Rook did a fine job of reading the text, giving it, I think, appropriate expression and life and reading with good inflection, I would also not be surprised if, somewhere around the warning against boiling the lamb rather than roasting it, your mind began to wander a bit. “Did I leave the iron on? What time is the Bears’ kickoff? What are those things hanging from the pastor’s collar? How do they hook on?” A lot of people get lost in passages of the Bible like this. Why all the details? Why, when God could have used the pages of the Bible to give us a good way to protect New Orleans from a hurricane, or a recipe to prevent global warming, or an effective exit strategy from Iraq, why does the Bible have pages and pages of these details for outdated ceremonies that don’t have a thing to do with us?

Let me back up a little and give you some context for this passage. The Israelites, at the moment in their history when the Passover takes place, have been slaves in Egypt for generations. Finally God sends Moses as a messenger from God to demand that the Pharaoh release the slaves, and when Pharaoh doesn’t listen to Moses, God brings plagues upon the land of Egypt in order to convince Pharaoh who is in charge. The Passover is the culmination of those plagues. By following the directions in the passage we read today, the Israelites make a choice to align themselves with God’s purposes, and it is only then that they are saved. This becomes the central story in the Hebrew Bible. God saves Israel. And because God doesn’t ever want them to forget that choice, there are very specific instructions the people are given about how to institute the Passover, and these exact instructions are given again and again, and every single year the Israelites repeat the ritual of the Passover in order to remember a central lesson, and—listen closely (after the service I’ll tell you about the tabs) the point is that God’s saving power is every bit as present for the ones who repeat the Passover tradition as it was for the Israelites who were freed from slavery that very first time. The tradition is repeated in exactly the same way because not just the original event but the repetition of it has the capacity to show God’s love for us.

It’s hard, I think, to figure out a way to articulate the power of rituals that repeat themselves day after day, year after year, or generation after generation. But think about it. Think about the power of tradition and consistency in our lives. When someone loses a spouse or a loved one, we often feel that loss most painfully when we face changes in the traditions or routines in our lives. Holidays are hard when a loved one is lost. An empty space at the table or in the bed is felt with particular weight. Even the absence of little habits we once found annoying can be incredibly painful. I started this sermon today by giving you some time to think about an old memory of your own because I think that all of us, for better or worse, have certain things burned into our memory, and memories and traditions carry power.

God seems to know this. God knows that our lives are defined by routines and traditions and memories. Because of this realization, the Bible is built around this central story of the Passover. It’s a story that is repeated time and again in exactly the same way to show us that God means to deliver people from evil not just once upon a time but in every place and time.

For we twenty-first-century Christians, the long and short of the message is that whatever dark place we find ourselves in, God is still able to deliver us. We can still make a choice to follow God’s directions and choose God’s way, choose life. And we do the rituals in the traditional, same old way that people have always done them so that we will be reminded that the promise that God makes is every bit as near to us and effective for us as it was when the instructions were given to the Israelites way back when God delivered Israel for the first time.

There are all kinds of ways of worshiping God, all kinds of good and faithful ways. And here we worship God in an old way, a way that people have done for a long, long time. And we believe that it’s worth doing it this way because no matter what time or place we live in, people will find themselves in places where they feel unable to escape a vicious cycle that is consuming them. People will continue to ask, like the Israelites did, “how can I escape from this slavery?” Is there something in your life that seems inescapable? Is there something that has you stuck, something that you are so deep within that you have lost hope for escaping it?

God made and kept a promise long ago. God rescued Israel, and in excruciating detail, God gave the people of Israel a ritual, a tradition, a recipe for remembering that there is a choice; there is a way out. God says, “Celebrate this same tradition, in exactly the same way, every year, so that you will remember that as much as God cared for Israel, so God cares that much for you, today. There is no place and no time you can go that is so far away that God cannot help you start again.”

Christians have our own way of remembering this promise. We call it Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. At this table we are reminded that, quite long ago, Jesus sat with his disciples on the night before he would be put to death, and he gave them a ritual involving bread and wine and told them, “Eat this bread and drink this cup, and do this in remembrance of me, because every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the saving death of our risen Lord until he comes again.” Jesus said that because no matter how desperate things have become in your life, God is present to you in the same way that God was present to the disciples who were gathered at a table with Jesus. It is never too late for any of us to hear these stories for the first time.

There’s an interesting connection between these two stories, the one of the Passover and the one of the Lord’s Supper. The Israelites were asked to sacrifice a lamb, so that God would know that they had made a choice to begin their life anew. Jesus is known to Christians as the Lamb of God. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world and has mercy upon us and gives us peace, so that we can start again.

We worship God in the same, old way, because there’s something about forgiveness and hope and God’s promise of peace that needs to be retold in every place and time. It needs to be retold as often as it possibly can be. Please come to this table today and hear the story. Please go from this place today and share the story with someone who needs to hear it. Amen.