Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
April 8, 2018
OPENING WORDS
As our Jewish friends finish their celebration of Passover, this morning we will consider that epic story from which the Passover celebration comes – the book of Exodus. This is the story of a people enslaved in Egypt for generations, a greedy Pharaoh with a hardened heart, an unlikely leader named Moses, ten plagues upon the people, the parting of the Red Sea, and then finally liberation – but not immediate liberation…for before they reached that land of milk and honey, the Israelites had to live in exile for 40 years, wandering through the desert.
They find themselves wishing to return to enslavement rather than face this journey of hardship and uncertainty.
How often in our own lives, when we face a time of exile, of journey, of hardship, or uncertainty – How often do we wish for something more stable, even if it does not give us life?
What does it mean to journey, to search, to wait…?
It is good to be together this fresh new morning, pondering these questions of our lives.
Let us worship.
READING
A reading by UU minister Kathleen McTigue
When the escape from Egypt was certain, when the last furious wave had closed over their enemies’ heads and the dangerous waters lay smooth again, when the Israelites could finally turn toward the future without fear that the past would snatch them back–what did they see before them? Not the Promised Land, flowing with milk and honey, but the wide and terrifying wilderness that would claim them for forty long, hard years of wandering. They were not carried along on a surge of vindicated faith, but stumbled forward with paralyzing doubts. And instead of enjoying sweet unity after all they’d been through, they were torn by bickering and division. They walked into relentless uncertainty and discomfort, and fell asleep on the hard ground to wake feeling ashamed for dreaming of the easier life of slavery they had left behind.
Our own stories will never be quite so dramatic. Yet each of us knows a little about what it means to be lost in the wilderness. We know the awful disappointment, akin to despair, of being suddenly pathless and alone when we’d expected to stride confidently straight into the promised land. We know how it feels to take a leap of faith toward some place we want to be–in love or relationship, in work or school or location–only to find that nothing turns out the way we’d hoped and expected. The familiar has been left behind, but what we yearn for has not yet come into view, and there we are, lost in the desert. We have no way to know how long our wandering will last.
These passages through the land of in-between are scary and uncomfortable, and the desert is a place we would rather barrel through as quickly as possible toward the welcoming ground of our destination. But our time in the desert is often a passage of the heart, not a physical journey of the body, and it’s not in our power to speed it up.
SERMON
I remember once when I was young on a family road trip – my two siblings and three step-siblings – that makes six of us kids – were all squeezed into the back of a minivan. I was feeling very crowded, pushed into the back corner, convinced that I was not being given as much room. When we finally stopped at a gas station and every one got out, my stepmom found me still huddled in the back corner, whining pitifully, still scrunched into a painful knot even though I now had plenty of room.
How often in our lives, when we have reached a place that is meant to be our transformation, do we stubbornly remain our former selves? How often do we look around and only see the negatives?
Psychologists say any change is stressful, even if it’s a good and hoped for change. Sometimes the hell we know is better than the heaven we don’t. Sometimes the enemy we know is easier to approach than the potential new friend.
Sometimes I just want to keep complaining.
This is what happened to the Israelites when they crossed the Red Sea and left their captors in the wake – only freedom before them. But they are not happy. They say to their God (and you can see why God calls them a “stiff-necked people”!):
Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt? Is this not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness?’ (14:11–12)
And they are not the only stubborn ones. It’s a theme running throughout all of the characters in the story.
Pharaoh “hardens his heart” each time Moses asks him to let them go. Sometimes the text even says that God is the one to harden Pharaoh’s heart – that doesn’t seem fair! The Jewish interpretations say that this is like a metaphor for when we have reached a point of no return. We have become so closed off to the world that it’s as if we don’t even have our free will anymore. We’re stuck in a rut, a habit, a way of being that doesn’t allow in anything new, that doesn’t see pain, that doesn’t listen.
The Jewish Torah scholar Avivah Zornberg((Quotes from Zornberg in this sermon come from Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb. The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. and from https://onbeing.org/programs/avivah-zornberg-exodus-cargo-hidden-stories-4/)) likens it, at the extreme, to what happens in totalitarian regimes:
[It’s] what Vaclav Havel, the Czech leader, calls … a kind of automatism, in which everyone somewhere becomes the system. People don’t just accept their role, they almost become that role. There are no choices involved anymore….And this is not only those who are imposing the regime, but also those who suffered under it.
So she says that not only does the story portray Pharaoh with a hardened heart, but also the Israelites. Moses even wonders often in the story whether the Israelites are even good enough to save – whether they are “fit for redemption.” Moses tells God, “They will not believe me, nor will they listen to my voice…”
Zornberg says, “they are incapable of listening to a new voice.”
The Hebrew words for Pharaoh’s heart: kasheh, kaved, chazak, hard, heavy, dense – Zornberg says “are the words for ‘what is already given’ for ‘the way it must be.’ They express the density, the cumulative weight of the past, of the system.”
So the Israelites cannot just flip a switch and suddenly let go of their minds that have been enslaved for so long. There is so much weight, so much habit, so much change, so much uncertainty.
Even Moses had to jolt himself out of his stupor on many occasions. It is said by Jewish commentary that when he saw the Burning Bush – the voice of God that called him to lead the Israelites, he had to twist his neck to see it.
In direct contrast to the stiff-necked Israelites, Moses realigned himself, took himself radically out of his routine, and thus did not walk right past the Burning Bush as many might have, as perhaps many of us do everyday.
Even the character of God in the story has to undergo a process of transformation in order to get to redemption. Zornberg explains that when God says to Moses out of the burning bush that ‘I’ve really seen the pain of the people, and I’ve heard their cry,’ the word used for “seen,” implies a radical, new way of seeing. “So to be able to see pain… is a very important dimension of what makes redemption possible.”
Zornberg’s thesis is that during the Israelites’ in-between time in the desert, they have to undergo a process of growth and transformation. Specifically, she says they need a “center of gravity to contain the zigzags: their volatile reactions to redemption.” There have been gifts, miracles, revelations…There has also been hunger, thirst, boredom, uncertainty. She says they need to sense “God as the connecting line that joins the points on the graph, the inner ‘songline’ that maps the human world of ecstasy and disenchantment.”
As a parent, I think of the theories of attachment, and the healthy place an infant needs to arrive in which they know that their parent loves them even when they are not present, even when they cannot immediately respond to their cries, even when they learn to soothe themselves.
But if we do not have the equivalent of this strong attachment – this anchor to God, or to meaning, or to Love – we come into a time of change, or hardship, and we start to wonder if we are unfit, if we are loved, if life is ultimately meaningless.
Doubts of all kinds creep in, and at our darkest, we question even our own basic worth and dignity.
Rabbi Nahman says that when we enter this wasteland is when we must search ourselves for just one spot of health, one spot of joy, one spot of peace. He says: “Finding some basis, however tenuous, for joy becomes a religious duty.”
He likens spiritual healing to creating a melody – having found one good spot, you search for another, and yet another:
Drawing on those fragmentary, disjointed moments into connection with one another creates a …song: a way of drawing a line through the wasteland and recovering more and more places of holiness.
And the song is not the point, but the singing…the continual effort to find that pitch between the highs and the lows of life, to let the breath animate it and to be able to remember the melody and start singing, even when it needs to be a sad song.
Sing songs as you go,
and hold close together.
You may at times grow
confused and lose your way.
Continue to call each other
[by your names]
to help remember who you are.
You will get where you are going
by remembering who you are. – Alla Renee Bozarth
And who we are is beloved – held always by a love beyond belief.
May we know it to be so.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon