WEBVTT 00:00:47.060 --> 00:00:56.340 Let the faithful rejoice in triumph, let them be joyful on their beds, let the praises of God be in their throat, and a two-edged sword in their hand. 00:00:56.740 --> 00:01:00.500 In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 00:01:01.140 --> 00:01:01.780 Amen. 00:01:06.900 --> 00:01:21.700 A couple of weeks ago, in our electionary story from the book of Exodus, the people of God had become enslaved in the land of Egypt by a Pharaoh who did not remember the friendship between Egypt and God's people in an earlier generation. 00:01:22.500 --> 00:01:31.460 In their enslavement, the people of God labor making bricks, building a civilization from which they do not and will not benefit. 00:01:31.700 --> 00:01:35.379 They cry out to God for respite and freedom. 00:01:35.620 --> 00:01:41.539 In spite of the difficulty of their lives and labor, they are fruitful and multiply. 00:01:41.859 --> 00:01:48.740 But Pharaoh becomes nervous about what would happen should the people of Israel rise up against the people of Egypt. 00:01:49.060 --> 00:02:09.139 And in order to control the population and allay his fears, he commands the death of all infant boys, creating in the process some of the greatest stories of resilience and resistance from people and especially women, who love God more than they fear Pharaoh, more than they fear even death. 00:02:10.180 --> 00:02:16.259 Last Sunday, Moses, after growing up in the house of Pharaoh, flees from Egypt after killing an Egyptian. 00:02:16.500 --> 00:02:25.460 He makes his way into the wilderness, receives a call from God to return to Egypt, to confront Pharaoh, and to call for the liberation of the people. 00:02:25.939 --> 00:02:28.340 In this work, he will not go alone. 00:02:28.580 --> 00:02:33.139 He will go with God whose name is given, I am who I am. 00:02:33.620 --> 00:02:37.780 Sometimes this name is rendered, I am who I will be. 00:02:38.020 --> 00:02:53.219 And I like this translation of the name because it reminds us that while we know how the story will go, the people of God dwell in a space that is organized only by their radical trust in a God that they do not know yet. 00:02:53.459 --> 00:03:04.019 They do not know what is going to happen, and they will follow the instruction and leadership of a God whose identity is fundamentally hidden except as it is revealed in God's action and activity. 00:03:05.459 --> 00:03:10.500 After his call, Moses returns to Egypt to demand the freedom of the people of God. 00:03:10.739 --> 00:03:20.340 Each of Moses' many confrontations with Pharaoh is followed by a plague until the final plague is wrought on Egypt, the death of the firstborn. 00:03:21.459 --> 00:03:27.060 We have spoken much of the echoes in the biblical story, and this is one of the most important. 00:03:27.699 --> 00:03:36.099 The death of the firstborn is an inversion of Pharaoh's command that all infant boys of Israel are to be thrown into the Nile. 00:03:36.659 --> 00:03:48.659 One of the patterns that has become clear in Genesis and Exodus over the past several months, is that people and empires set up the very violence to which they eventually fall victim. 00:03:49.060 --> 00:03:58.659 Abraham and Sarah enslave Hagar, an Egyptian woman, setting up the realities that will be tied into their own descendants' enslavement in Egypt. 00:03:58.979 --> 00:04:06.819 Pharaoh's regime, which has become associated with death through murder and slavery, becomes associated with death through loss. 00:04:07.139 --> 00:04:19.699 Guided by fear and anxiety, what appears to be the free action of domination becomes the very power under which seemingly free agents live in bondage and by which they die. 00:04:20.579 --> 00:04:28.660 One of the things that is being argued in the biblical text is that this kind of cycle of violence is no freedom at all. 00:04:28.980 --> 00:04:31.860 It is a kind of act of captivity. 00:04:32.180 --> 00:04:57.620 Without going too far afield here, consider just for a moment what it means to live in a world in which our own safety feels secured only by arming ourselves to the teeth, by building ever greater weapons and stockpiling more of them, by dominating any possible conversation to such an extent that we come to live under the allure and power of death. 00:04:58.259 --> 00:05:12.819 Consider too how on an individual level, it matters very little what you think about this and how much you participate or want to participate in such a regime of death, because your very life, its form and order, depends on it. 00:05:13.060 --> 00:05:14.500 Your money funds it. 00:05:14.659 --> 00:05:16.740 There's seemingly no escape. 00:05:16.980 --> 00:05:19.060 It is hardly freedom. 00:05:19.620 --> 00:05:26.259 The house of Egypt was associated with the shedding of innocent blood through Pharaoh's bloodlust and fear. 00:05:26.659 --> 00:05:47.060 In the instructions of the Passover given in our text, the houses on which the blood of the lamb are spread, are spread on the lintels and on the doorpost become disassociated with death through the protective blood of the lamb's life, which is given to them and for them as a shared sustenance and gift. 00:05:47.939 --> 00:05:59.139 As the people of God prepare for this moment, for the inversion of Egypt's violence, they inhabit a liminal space, lingering on the cusp of liberation. 00:05:59.540 --> 00:06:07.459 There are instructions and tasks, but little certainty about what will happen and what it will all come to mean. 00:06:07.779 --> 00:06:10.899 God is, I am who I will be. 00:06:11.379 --> 00:06:14.099 And the people do not know what that will look like. 00:06:14.339 --> 00:06:20.099 Or it deserves to be said, whether it will be successful in accomplishing their liberation. 00:06:20.740 --> 00:06:36.180 This moment will become a major turning point, the center point of the people's memory of the Exodus, which will encompass these events as well as their passing through the waters of the Reed Sea, their wandering in the desert, and their arrival in the Promised Land through the waters of the Jordan River. 00:06:36.420 --> 00:06:39.860 All of that is what we mean when we say the Exodus. 00:06:40.180 --> 00:06:47.219 And the Passover will organize the time of the people of Israel from the moment of this story and forward. 00:06:47.540 --> 00:06:57.139 The moment the people are waiting for liberation is built permanently into the rhythm of seasons and years that they will observe in an ongoing way. 00:06:58.339 --> 00:07:04.420 Sometimes I hear people offer that they would like to cut off the Old Testament from the New Testament. 00:07:04.819 --> 00:07:14.899 The argument they offer is that God is too different, that the stories in the Old Testament are too bizarre, problematic, or uncomfortable to keep around. 00:07:15.219 --> 00:07:20.339 The Passover is, admittedly, a story that is rather uncomfortable. 00:07:20.899 --> 00:07:32.180 But there can be no recognition of God's saving work and pattern without the testament and the testimony of the Old Testament generally, or of this story in particular. 00:07:32.420 --> 00:07:48.019 Without the story of liberation from Egypt, the faults and the sins of the people and the consequences of that sin, in earlier parts of the stories and in stories to come, without exile and return to the land, without the Passover. 00:07:48.659 --> 00:08:04.579 In this story, especially, we are learning to train our attention to the pattern of God's activity and rescue in history, to identify the things that God is rescuing us from that we may not be aware of or know how to identify. 00:08:05.060 --> 00:08:13.699 And that training is supporting our discernment of God's activity today on scales small and insignificant or grand and mythic. 00:08:13.939 --> 00:08:21.620 From the very beginning, the Exodus story shapes the story of God through generations for the people of Israel and even for us as Christians. 00:08:22.180 --> 00:08:29.620 It is the events and observation of the Passover that shapes the story of Jesus in his final days in Jerusalem. 00:08:29.860 --> 00:08:35.300 It is a series of events which happen in all four Gospels during the Feast of the Passover. 00:08:35.700 --> 00:08:39.779 And we can make no sense of that story without this one. 00:08:40.180 --> 00:08:53.139 The decisive story of God's action in history against the powers of the empire and death, and on behalf of the people of God, even when they don't know what is coming. 00:08:53.779 --> 00:08:57.460 This happens for the people in Exodus and on the cross. 00:08:58.100 --> 00:09:05.860 That pattern is developed by this story here, where the people of Israel wait for God's decisive and liberative action. 00:09:06.259 --> 00:09:16.180 And it's a template for recognizing the activity in God in history, for God's work against and the liberation of all people from death at the very last. 00:09:16.659 --> 00:09:18.100 Thanks be to God. 00:09:18.420 --> 00:09:19.060 Amen.