First Parish Unitarian UniversalistWilderness Wandering:
A Passover Reflection
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane D. Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
April 20, 2008
Any good story prompts us to reflect on its meaning for our own lives, and the Passover story in the Jewish tradition is no exception. In fact, the re-telling of the story every year in the Passover Seder is designed for such reflection, as you will experience if you come back this afternoon at 3:30, with a dish to share, for the First Parish potluck Seder hosted by Joe and Diane Amster, for which you may still sign up during coffee hour.
The order of service for the Seder, called the Haggadah, is based on the Exodus story, of the Israelite’s delivery from slavery to freedom. What will happen this afternoon here, and what was done last night in Jewish homes, including the one where I participated in a Seder with friends, is based on the traditional order. But the tradition allows, if not requires, that the people gathered interpret the story for the freedom struggle of their own time and place.
So, Jews interrupt the Seder to bring the story into the present moment, or some revise the printed Haggadah so that the re-telling speaks most deeply to them. Joe does that for our Seder at First Parish. Last night, there was a stack of Haggadahs to draw from, but we mainly used one, from the secular Jewish organization in Brookline called the Workmen’s Circle. It stated that this tradition of contemporary re-interpretation goes back to the second century when Rabbi Akiba used the Passover Seder to plan a revolutionary struggle against the Romans.
Last night, the Haggadah emphasized the mutually inter-dependent liberation struggles of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, neither of which will have freedom without the other having freedom. The Haggadah even included a reading from the Qu’ran.
The Passover Seder is also designed to teach the story to the next generation. So, any Haggadah, traditional or contemporary, will include a scavenger hunt, special parts for the children to read, and lively songs for all ages. So, bring your children this afternoon!
As you can imagine, with such a tradition of re-telling and interpretation, many reflections on Passover themes have been published, including in our tradition, which does of course re-trace its roots to the early Christians, the first of which were, of course, Jews who celebrated Passover. We know from the Bible that Jesus’ last supper was a Passover Seder.
Our Unitarian Universalist minister in Burlington VT (Gary Kowalski) writes in a Passover reflection in his meditation manual Green Mountain Spring and Other Leaps of Faith, “In the book of Exodus, Moses set out to liberate the children of Israel, but most of them didn’t want to be freed. Many preferred the security of Egypt to the risks of a race across the Sinai desert.”
“I suppose the same is true today,” he writes. “We like our addictions. We cherish our prejudices and parochialisms. We hold onto outworn ideas and ineffective ways of coping because they seem safe and familiar. We confine and imprison ourselves…in unhealthy relationships, in self-defeating habits, in compulsive consumerisms, in fixations with food and body image…in forms of inappropriate guilt, in unwarranted anxieties and unfounded fears.”
“This is not to suggest,” he says, “that the Pharaoh is not real. External constraints do exit. But the biggest obstacles to seizing control of our own destiny are often internal. Not even a Moses can lead us to freedom unless we are willing to take the first step.”
As many of you may know, I recently was diagnosed with the most favorable, curable breast cancer diagnosis one can have. Thankfully, as far as we know at this time, it was caught early, was tiny, and was not invasive—because it was not invasive, some physicians even refer to it as pre-cancerous. Never the less, it’s treated as cancer and I am in the midst of making treatment decisions. At the least, I will have surgery near the end of the month, but it will be outpatient surgery, not much different than the surgical biopsy that revealed the diagnosis. Depending on the pathology report after this procedure, I will decide whether to have radiation treatment, and if so for what duration, at what dose, over what area. And I will decide whether to also take the recommended hormone pills, every day, for five years.
I feel like I’m wandering unexpectedly in the medical wilderness, with no Moses. Some of you have been in that wilderness, I know.
There’s more medical knowledge about my condition now than ten years ago, which only means there are more treatment options, the comparisons of which are still unclear. So, it’s a wilderness with confusing and even some conflicting signposts, where some paths continue ahead for a long lifetime and others for shorter—but, it’s impossible to know from here which path leads where.
Twenty years from now, I suspect the signposts for a woman my age with this diagnosis will all point in the same direction. Then, it will feel less like being in the Sinai desert… and more like hiking the well-traveled Appalachian Trail!
And, like many of the Israelites, I’d rather not be in the wilderness at all.
As someone who has been very healthy all of my life—due to heredity, luck and my own intention— I have no prior medical experience upon which to call at this time. Having taken a less invasive path whenever possible in the past, whether for a cut finger, interrupted sleep, contraceptives or childbirth, I’m poorly prepared for the present. No prior surgeries or even broken bones, no known history of allergy to medications because I’ve been on so few, no experience with getting second opinions because I’ve so rarely even needed a first opinion. Being healthy most of my life turns out to have a downside: I’m not prepared for illness very well at all!
As a minister, as a daughter and as a best friend, I’ve seen others face far more difficult medical care choices than mine. But even so, I’ve had my sad or angry moments bemoaning my situation or its timing. If there was a Moses, I’d be saying, take me back to Egypt!
But, now I’m also coming to see a bit of Egypt in my pre-wilderness life, as good and healthy as it was.
You know, Egypt was oppressive for the Israelites, but some got used to it. It was a known hell. The food, if there was food, was normal. None of this matzah or even this “manna from heaven” where they came from.
I’m seeing that my aversion to all things medical hi-tech was confining. Healthy skepticism is good, especially about pharmaceutical advertising, but my well-honed distrust might now get in the way of making the best treatment decisions.
And, I’m seeing how much more supportive of me my spouse Don is than I’d been previously aware or previously needed him to be. Before, we allowed our relationship to be confined by our respective work commitments. Now, this bit of a mortality scare has woken us up, and making time to go to so many medical appointments —together—has given us more time in each other’s company and evoked more expressions of love between us.
So, this wilderness has its oases, ones that I would not now give up, nor even trade for my previously clean bill of health. Sometimes the oases in the wilderness are wonderful enough to be the Promised Land!
It wasn’t until writing this sermon that I began to look at my situation through the lens of the Passover story, and began to notice and appreciate its gifts more than its challenges. As events unfold for me, I’m sure I will grapple again with the challenges, and in moments of frustration or fear, even feel cowed by them. But, I also know that I will stand strong because of these new gifts I’ve been given—of an increased appreciation for medical science and of a deeper relationship with (dare I call him this? Romantic language isn’t my native tongue!) my beloved.
I think it might be this finding the gifts in our trials that Vaclav Havel spoke of in the passage about hope I’m about to read. He is a good person to turn to on Passover, because he lived in Czechoslovakia under communist oppression, and rose to lead the Czech people to freedom like Moses led his. Maybe his history makes Havel a reliable witness to what hope really is. I’ve read this here before.
“Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from ‘elsewhere.’ It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually try new things.”
Remember, he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” This must be the kind of hope that enables a person with invasive, incurable cancer to discover life-giving gifts hidden in their experience of approaching death.
My ministerial colleague and friend David Blanchard, who is living with a very serious form of cancer, writes about this kind of hope. You might remember him from his true story I told you one Christmas. About how, during his congregation’s annual clean-up only a few years ago, he was working in the church attic and came upon an old manger scene stored in its original box. He wondered why it was stored up in the attic, apparently never used. Carefully unpacking each porcelain figure from its tissue paper wrapping, he eventually came upon the answer. There was no Mary, and two Josephs!
As a gay man then still in his forties, who grew up in the UU church he was then serving as minister, who had been married to a woman with whom he’d had two daughters when he came to terms with being gay, this was a discovery with many layers of personal as well as public meaning.
Anyway, David said in his Easter sermon this year, “I believe hope is transcendent, and by that I mean that it speaks to a capacity of our being which we do not control and that our rational minds cannot contain. (By this I do not imply that hope is in any way irrational. I suppose it is transrational.) I believe that hope is manifest in far more than just our minds. It is present, physically, in our bodies and in our spirits and in the deepest recesses of our souls. Even our imaginations can be too limiting for hope.”
Moses must have had this kind of hope that is not bound by imagination, which is a certainty that the struggle for liberation makes sense, regardless of its outcome. God had promised to be with him in that struggle and to lead them to the Promised Land, but Moses had his moments of doubt. Forty years is a long time to wander in the wilderness.
You may have noticed that these reflections on the Passover story move back and forth between public and personal, collective and individual, liberation stories. That’s the nature of any good story, of course, that it sparks helpful interpretations.
The Bible itself intertwines the personal with the public. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, whose re-telling of the story was our reading this morning [from Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays], says that the story itself “intertwines the birth of children and the birth of freedom” in “the emphasis in the first four chapters of Exodus on childbirth as the crucial element in the Israelite search for freedom and the Pharaoh’s denial of it. The [Pharaoh’s] effort to drown newborns, the midwives’ frustration of that effort, the conspiracy of Miriam with Pharaoh’s daughter to save the baby Moses, the birth of Moses’ own son before he can experience God in the burning bush, and the uncanny circumcision of that son before Moses can become the liberator—all these suggest a strong connection between human birth, the protection of babies, and the liberation of a people.” [pp. 134-5].
There is yet another way to interpret a story, and that is to see its characters in oneself, as aspects of ourselves. It’s much like dream analysis, which assumes that any character or event in a dream represents some aspect of the dreamer, and so one teases out the dream’s meaning by looking for its characters and events in oneself. This interpretation can easily be done with the Passover story, for its characters are so archetypal.
Contemporary Jewish author, Noah benShoa, does this with the Passover story. He first became known for a series of books in which a fictional baker named Jacob becomes a wise sage. The story goes that Jacob used to spend his free time while his bread dough rose, and when it baked, musing on the meaning of life and he used to write his thoughts on scraps of paper. One day, such a scrap got into the bread dough without his noticing it and was baked in a loaf of bread. The woman who bought that loaf, found the scrap of paper and read his bit of wisdom was so impressed, she told all her friends and that is how Jacob the Baker became known as a wise man. Soon, he was selling wisdom instead of bread.
Here is a conversation drawing on the Passover story between Jacob and his friend Samuel from benShoa’s first book, Jacob the Baker.
“Don’t be afraid to learn from fear. It teaches us what we are frightened of.”
“Look carefully and you will see we are all orchards hiding in seeds. You will see inside each of us is the Pharaoh. And inside every Pharaoh is a slave. And inside every slave is a Moses.”
“We must lead ourselves out of the enslavements we have constructed and called Pharaoh. We must be the Moses in our Egypt…We are the border we must cross over to enter the Promised Land.”
Let this place, this sanctuary of memory and of hope, be a place where we are empowered… by ancient stories, their modern interpretations, and the love and support of this caring community …to make it through the wildernesses and the enslavements in our own lives…so that our free and generous spirits may join the larger struggles for peace and compassion in our times.
Amen.