Sermon for September 10, 2023 – The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Exodus 12:1-14, Psalm 149, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 18:15-20

Wherever you are right now in your spiritual and physical lives, you might be feeling a little like Egypt in some way or another.

In other words, there is a better land, a better world that could be established, were you not stuck in Egypt. But the only way to get to that better land -- by no means simply relegated to the geographic location of the soles of our feet -- is by joining together and marching toward it. The Exodus event speaks deeply to the relocation and reformation of our souls as being part and parcel to the work of bringing God’s Kingdom revolution into the here and now.

This is what the Exodus teaches every generation of its readers. This is why Exodus imagery and imagination has played a crucial role in revolutions, from the Jesus movement to the civil rights revolutions in the United States and beyond.

Over the next couple of weeks in the lectionary, we will explore the importance of the Exodus narrative for Israel, as well as for the early church and indeed for ourselves as we reflect on how these themes play out in our own lives. Themes of death and life, slavery and freedom, holding on and letting go, are not just isolated to the experience of Israel. As we walk with the Israelites from bondage in Egypt through the promise of deliverance and liberation, we will see that their story is our story, their hope is our hope. In some way, that is different for each of us, we too are bound up seeking freedom, seeking peace. But before the Israelites even step foot out of their doors to begin their journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land, they have work to do. They must learn to let go.

It can be hard to let go of the things, places, relationships, and systems that enslave us.

In the desert, God’s people will want so badly to get back to the thing they knew. It doesn’t matter that it is an awful, deadly thing that stole their freedom and future. They will want so badly to get back to the Nile, to the meat and savoury vegetables, to the predictable powerlessness, that God is going to send them through a wilderness maze to ensure they could never find their way back to slavery in Egypt.

This week’s passage is, on one level, a description for a ritualistic meal, and yet on a deeper level it is about freedom from slavery, new beginning, and leaving behind. It is about life and death. It teaches us how to get ready to move fast.

The repetitive, ritualistic language of the opening verses focuses on the month, the year, and the marking of time. And it tells God’s people: this time is for you. The month is measured by the visible cycles of the waxing and waning moon. The year progresses according to the alternations of night and day, labor and rest, and seasons of rain and dryness, planting, and harvest.

Later in Exodus, we will find commandments for festivals of first fruits and harvest. These festivals anticipate a future in the land that God has promised. To arrive at that future, the people must first leave the past. They must leave Egypt. The month of their departure marks the beginning of their future and freedom. And so, the whole calendar must now find a new fixed point of origin and orientation. Henceforth, for God’s people all of time originates in, is oriented to, and commemorates each year their release from slavery. Time for God’s people is forevermore freedom-time.

It is such a radical reorienting of time, that we might take a look at our wrists, in our pockets and bags, on our walls, on the screens that soak up so much of our time. How much of our lives, individually and collectively, are populated and regulated by clocks and calendars? “What do you like to do in your free time?” asks a well-intentioned new acquaintance. We scoff, not without some smug pride: “free time? What’s that?” What calendar are we using? What is its origin and orientation? Is how we use our time leading us to freedom or towards death?

God knows the system of death for what it is. Brick-quotas, beaten backs, bitter lives, murdered babies: God sees the suffering and hears the cries of God’s people, so much so that through the calling of Moses to be God’s voice to Pharaoh and the people, God will fulfill his promise of liberation.

Through Moses, God commands that the lamb’s slaughter takes place at twilight. As we have seen before in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it is the hour of transition between day and night, a time of ending and beginning. The lamb’s blood upon the doorposts of the Israelites’ houses similarly marks transition. These houses are not their permanent dwellings. They provide short-term protection. But their most important feature is the doorway, the site of entry and exit. The lifeblood of the lamb marks that exit, protecting, hallowing, and preparing their departure from slavery in Egypt.

The meal itself is also symbolic. They will eat bitter herbs, a sensory reminder of bereavement and suffering to be tasted, chewed, swallowed, and digested. The flat bread, made without yeast, is a bread of haste and readiness. The instructions for cooking the lamb are specific. Neither raw nor boiled: the waters of Egypt have been a source of death for them. The Israelites will leave it all behind. Instead, they shall cook their meal in the fire, another reminder of the fire of God’s presence in the burning bush, and foreshadowing of the fire that will lead them through the wilderness to new life.

When they eat of the lamb, they shall leave nothing over -- there will be no waiting, no holding back, no returning. The Israelites eat this meal quickly, ready to run from death to life. Moreover, with a staff in one hand, a hasty meal in the other, it becomes impossible to hold on to anything else. This is the first step in finding liberation from endless slavery and death in Egypt.

The economy of death is addicting. We pick up what we were supposed to let go. We keep resetting our clocks to the quotas of Egypt. We bend like reeds in the wind to the pressures of our work lives rooted in a capitalistic society that measures success purely in how much can be made in one day. We stretch each hour, each minute to maximum capacity in order to do more. And whether we realize it or not, it slowly wears us down. We spend most of our lives working so that we might be lucky to enjoy it in retirement, if we even make it that far. And when the day is done, come home, we take off our shoes, put down the staff, and dawdle by the door looking out at the horizon wondering, if I just had the courage, the strength of heart to take that first step, what might be different if we let it go and enter into a new orientation with time that is rooted in God, and not our manmade constructs of time.

Like the Israelites wandering through the desert who longed for a return to comfort and security of the old ways, there is something deep within us that also desires a return to our old ways. Our story today offers us the opportunity to reflect on our own lives and discern what is binding us up and it encourages us to let go of the habits and relationships that are not life giving. What is it that is creating separation between us and God? Today, you are invited to let go of slavery, enter freedom-time, and journey together into a new rhythm of life in God. Amen.