Proper 18A
Exodus 12:1-14
September 4, 2011
Fast Food for a Long Journey
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa
One of the greatest stories ever told continues in our Old Testament lesson for this morning. It is a story of great sorrow and of great joy. It is a story of slavery and freedom. It is the story of a long journey suddenly begun. It is one of the stories that grounds us in hope. It is a story that gives us a humane and liveable alternative to the inhuman and death-dealing stories that form the major narratives of our time.
It is a wonderful story. But it is also very strange. It’s strange for several reasons. It’s strange because it comes from a far away place and from a long time ago. It’s about a meal, a strange sort of barbeque. A yearling lamb or a goat is to be slaughtered. It is to be roasted whole over the fire: head, legs, “innards” and all. It’s strange to us, but maybe not to them. Maybe this is the sort of thing people did in that time and place.
It’s also strange because the way we have it it’s not just a story about what happened the night they were set free. It’s also a story that explains how Pesach or the Passover meal came to be. As such part of its purpose is not only to say why God’s people celebrate the Passover, but to tell them how they are to celebrate it. It’s a set of instructions as well as a story.
Some of the strangeness of this story we can dispel by a better understanding of the time in which it was told and written down and the purposes for which it was preserved. But only some.
Some of the strangeness is just there, no matter how well we understand. We have the story of a God who is often a stickler for detail, a God who knows and cares about whether a lamb or goat is a year old or a two year old, a God who can tell a first-born human being or animal from a second- or third-born. This same God, however, cannot seem to tell the difference between an Egyptian and a Hebrew household. This same God tells the Hebrews to splash blood on the doorposts and the beams above their doorways so that it will look like God has already been there so that God will pass over that house while engaged in this killing rampage.
And this may be the strangest thing of all: that the liberation of the Hebrews should require the deaths of countless other innocents. Our moral sensibilities are offended by the deaths of all the first-born sons, all the first-born cattle, all the first-born dogs and cats, very few of whom had anything directly to do with oppressing the Israelites. The story doesn’t say why. The violence is just there, scandalous perhaps, but unapologetic.
But this story is also strange because it is alien to our ways of seeing the world, of thinking about it and living in it. If offends because it contradicts us and makes us uncomfortable.
God promises not only to kill the first-born, but also to “impose judgments” on the gods of Egypt. The contests between Moses and the Egyptian magicians and the confrontation at the Sea of Reeds between the escaped Hebrews and Pharaoh’s cavalry are more than they seem to be. Behind the scenes it is Yahweh who is engaged in the most important contest of all: a contest with the gods of Egypt.
Yahweh would take on Atum, Isis, Nut, Osiris, Seth, Tefnut and dozens of others. It would be one against a hundred or more, an unknown storm God from the desert against the gods of empire. It wouldn’t simply be a contest of strength against strength in which Yahweh would show that these gods who pretended to be strong were in fact weak, too weak to keep a few slaves from escaping from their masters. Instead it would be a judgment. Yahweh would show that the gods of Egypt had failed in their legal responsibility; they had failed to uphold justice. Yahweh would show that they didn’t deserve to rule.
While God would be “imposing judgments” the people of Israel would be eating! They would eat lamb, but wouldn’t take the time to dress it out; they would simply roast it whole. They would eat bread, but they wouldn’t take the time let the yeast in the dough do its work; they would bake matzoh, wafer-thin bread that wouldn’t need to rise. They would eat dressed for travel. They would eat it with their shoes on. They would eat it with their walking sticks in hand. They would eat it in a hurry. History’s first fast food!
While they ate, they became God’s covenant people. We tend to think that we belong to God because of what we believe, but it was not so for them (and maybe it isn’t so for us, either). They became God’s people by eating. The meal marked them. It was a meal that sacramental theologians call a “sign act” and it was something they would do ever after.
They began their shared life as God’s people with fast food, but the pace slowed a lot after that. The business beside the Sea of Reeds was pretty exciting, but after that, their life was pretty dull. They would walk to an oasis and set up camp. They would stay there for a time and then they would move on. They gathered the manna that God gave to them. Same stuff every day.
—What’s for breakfast?
—Manna.
—Manna again?
—Yeah, but I rolled it into little balls and boiled it.
—Well, okay, then—something different. No, wait! It still tastes just the same. Manna again!
(Later that day)
—What’s for supper?
—Fried manna.
Children were born and grew and had children of their own and grew old and died and still they seemed no closer to their goal. After a while the only life they knew was walking from one oasis to another. That and eating manna.
The sheer dailiness of their lives must have been overwhelming. They couldn’t even look forward to getting a new Android. One day, one year, one decade, was like another. Fast food for a long journey.
And this is where it comes a little too close for comfort, because this pattern of life as God’s people runs against the grain. One of the gods of our regime, it seems, is Novelty, the god of new things. Novelty is an active god, doing all sorts of important things that keep our way of life going. Novelty makes sure that we are never happy with what we have, unless it’s brand new, and then only until something newer comes along. Novelty offers itself as the cure for what we have come to believe is a fatal condition: boredom. Serving the god Novelty we will spend our money, risk our health and our bodies. We’ll do anything to escape boredom.
In our churches we look for ways to repackage and re-present what is essentially the same stuff as if it were different stuff. We expect constant creativity in our worship. We demand the glossy and new in our educational curriculum. We expect new pleasures in our fellowship. We don’t like doing the same thing twice. We especially don’t want to do the same thing enough times that it gets under our skin and soaks into our bones and becomes a part of us.
But the long journey is the pattern of our life with God, the long journey that is often, well, boring. The word journey in fact comes from the French for “day.” A journey is a succession of days, days that are mostly like each other. Our life with God and our life with each other is mostly made of dailiness. Sometimes something happens, but mostly it doesn’t. And even when something happens it often turns out to be not as important as it looked at the time. The work—God’s work—of shaping and fashioning us as individuals and as a congregation is a work that takes a long time. We are in a hurry. But God is not.
So it often happens that we come to some decision point in our faith journey. We commit ourselves to being Jesus followers. Or we decide to attend to our own life with God more carefully. The decision is made in a moment. And we expect, somehow, that we’ll see results right away. We’d like to be saints by the end of the year. But it will take a lifetime and more. It will take a lifetime of mostly doing it wrong and only occasionally getting it right, a lifetime of beginning again, a lifetime of shaping our lives while—unseen—God is shaping us. The journey of God’s people may begin with fast food eaten in a hurry, but it is made of days, many days, one after another, mostly alike.
Fortunately, there is food for the journey and like manna it comes from God’s hand and like manna there is nothing much remarkable about it, especially after we’ve had it week in and week out for a lifetime. And yet, like manna, it will nourish us, strengthen us and get us there. We have set a table and spread out a meager meal that we call, ironically, a feast. It isn’t much, but everyone is welcome. If you’ve decided to come on the journey, you’d probably better join us at the table. You’ll be hungry if you don’t.
©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.
No comments:
Post a Comment