LEAVING EGYPT

Sermon preached at Emerson Chapel, Sunday, April 9, 2017

LEAVING EGYPT: ENVISIONING A NEW FUTURE

Good morning! It is spring, and we are only a few days away from what most of you know as Passover. In Hebrew, we use the word Pesach. We also refer to this festival by several other names, such as Chag ha’Aviv, which means Festival of Spring. And there is Chag ha’Matzot, which means festival of Matzahs, and if any of you have ever eaten the cardboard we call matzah, I don’t know why anyone would call it a festival! Some people call it The Feast Without Yeast. But perhaps the least often heard, yet most meaningful term we use for this time is, Z'man Cheiruteinu, which means, the time of our freedom.

We’ve just heard Debbie Friedman sing The Journey Song. Her song gives us a lot of important questions we must ask ourselves today, as we stand in this space between slavery and freedom.

Her song asks, Where does the journey begin? We stand at the shores of the sea, fearful and wanting to turn back, to be who we once were because it was familiar, and as humans we find comfort in the familiar, even if it isn’t always the best situation. And as we look forward, all we see is this dreadful unknown before us, and a sea which could drown us between here and there.

We find some answers, but then, the answers change as we journey along. Hours pass, days pass, and even years pass, and even though the answers might change, and in fact have changed, we keep moving along. There’s no turning back from this journey.

We’ve been on quite a journey over the past three years, haven’t we? It would be easy to just jump ship. It would be easy to try to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them, which we have been, but sooner or later we must face the reality that the situation has shifted. And when situations shift, our journey shifts, and the answers which once worked for us also have to change. This is not a negative thing, because it means we are still on this journey! To be on a journey is to keep moving and growing.

So, that’s where we are. And two weeks ago Emerson made an amazing decision to continue the journey together. We need to continue for us, and we need to continue for others who have yet to find us.

As you have noticed, today I am trying a few tiny experimental shifts in the worship service, and my hope is that you will find that making a few shifts does not lessen our experience of being community together. Different does not always equate to less than. Sometimes, as the saying goes, less is actually more.

Let’s focus for a moment on the story of Passover. Is anyone here who hasn’t heard some basic telling of the story of the Exodus, or perhaps seen one of the movies about it? I am not going to convince you that this story is an historical fact. What I will say is that this story is a very powerful metaphor, replete with lessons for us. And as someone who likes very much to teach these kinds of things, I had a very challenging time trying to trim down what I want to share today, because the lessons here are so important! In the near future, I will offer a 6 week class on this story, and even then I will only barely touch the depths of it.

The Exodus story starts in Egypt. In Hebrew, the word for Egypt is “Mitz’rayim.” Anyone here know what that means? “Small, narrow place.” In order to leave Egypt, the Hebrews had to find a way to get through that small narrow place, through the desert, and finally make their way over to the land of Cana’an.

There are actually several theories about the origin of the word, mitzrayim, but the one we’re going to use today is the most commonly known, that the word mitzrayim alludes to the narrow gulfs on both sides of the Sinai peninsula. The word mitzrayim can also mean "boundaries, limits, restrictions."

 

In fact, if you look at the map, the two gulfs make this narrow space into a v-shape, which looks a bit like a womb, and passing through the small narrow place can be seen metaphorically as making one’s way through the birth canal into a new place filled with potential and opportunity. 

Passing through the birth canal and re-birthing ourselves is a very fitting metaphor for where we are as a community. We are in essence re-birthing ourselves. Anyone who has given birth knows that is is a painful experience, and we can choose to be excited to watch this newness of being and growth happening in the midst of the pain, and be eager to see it unfold in the coming days and weeks and months, to see where it might take us. Hopefully, we are heading to the Promised Land, just like the Hebrews.

In our call to worship this morning, we spoke of budding trees, and how the new buds contain everything they need to be what they are already meant to be, to unfold in their fullness over time. This is the season for new growth, for tapping into the natural energies of re-birth that are all around us here in the Northern Hemisphere.

So in order to get to the Promised Land, we go through that painful re-birthing process by first looking at where we have constricted and limited ourselves, and we do this both as a community collectively, and as individuals.

At the Passover seder, we are told to believe and behave as if we were personally leaving Egypt. On a mystical level, we are leaving slavery, oppression, that which has constricted us and kept us stuck, kept us from becoming free. So, for us to leave Egypt, Mitzrayim, the narrow place, the constricting limited place, we must pause and ask ourselves, where have we been stuck? How do we wish to be more free?

One of my favorite Rabbi sages to learn from is Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who lived from 1772 to 1810. He said, “The Exodus from Egypt occurs in every human being, in every era, in every year, and in every day.” Leaving Egypt is not just an annual event. Why? What can it possibly teach us more than just once a year? And why oh why is it so important for Jews not to eat leavened things for 8 days every spring?

The matzah we Jews are commanded to eat during Passover is a reminder of moving out of slavery away from that which holds us back. We avoid eating leavened things, as in, the Feast Without Yeast, and I also note that Matzah is called the “bread of affliction,” a good name for it, I might add, and I even like matzah!

Anyway, matzah reminds us of the oppression my Hebrew ancestors endured as slaves in Egypt. It also connects me to the night my ancestors left Egypt in such haste they did not have time for the bread to rise. Now that we eat matzah in freedom, it serves as a symbol of liberation.

In Hebrew, yeast, or leavening, is called “chametz,” and it makes dough rise. We do not eat chametz during Passover because the Hebrews did not have time for their bread to ferment and rise properly. We also avoid consuming or cooking chametz foods, and do a thorough search for any tiny crumb of chametz in our homes.

So doing these things has an historical meaning, and they also have a spiritual meaning. Chametz symbolizes a puffiness of self, an inflated ego, a self- centeredness that wants to rule, an arrogance that wants to intimidate and have the last word and final say. And just like a tiny bit of leavening will cause the whole dough to rise, so a little bit of ego can get in the way of doing great things.

Those of you who know S and I also know that we have moved countless times. And every move caused us to go through a purging cycle. Every time, we had the tough task of deciding what to remove from our lives and what we needed to bring with us. I confess, I have a particular problem with paring down, just as I often do in my sermons.

We can view letting go of clutter as doing a negative thing, a getting rid of, or we can view it as doing a very positive thing, because in letting go, we turn, and unencumber ourselves so that we may embrace a new future.

And this is where we are as a community today; we are standing at the edge, preparing ourselves to let go of the clutter and embrace a new future, together.

Obviously, the metaphorical meaning of chametz is more than the yeast that leavens bread; it’s a strong symbol for the clutter in our lives, the clutter of negativity, of pride that resists help and being helpful, arrogance, anger and resentments that can build in our minds, always wanting one’s way or seeing only one way to accomplish something, closing ourselves off from new and different or from the voice trying to explain a different perspective of understanding, ...those kinds of things.

So in addition to avoiding food with chametz, we also rid ourselves of our “spiritual chametz,” by facing the negativity we build up in our lives and our community that prevents us from embracing what is truly important, from moving forward, and that blocks us from being our best selves and our best community.

As we all know, it is far easier to let go of the things, the chairs and books and furnishings and old towels, the flotsam and jetsam that aren’t critical or can be easily replaced in the new location, than it is to let go of our ego attachments.

Let’s talk for a minute about leaving Egypt. What does it mean, spiritually, to leave Egypt? Why is it important that we leave Egypt? What are our Egypts?

Our Egypts are those places in our lives that have become lifeless — situations and aspects of ourselves that feel constricted, bound up, unable to be expressed. Our Egypts also represent our falling into a dullness, the deadening routine where we have lost consciousness, where we are going through the motions but our hearts are no longer in the game, where things have lost their meaning as a consequence of kevah— where we repeat the actions and words— without kavannah, without the soulful intentions to back them up.

When Moses tells the Hebrews that it is time for them to leave Egypt and to break free from slavery, their first response is that “…they could not hear Moses, their spirits crushed by cruel bondage.” [Exodus 6:9] The worst level of enslavement is when one has grown so accustomed to it that one no longer knows themselves to be enslaved, or believes themselves not to be able to become unenslaved. Harriet Tubman once said, “I could have saved thousands more if I could have convinced them they were slaves.”

Think about that. That’s a profound statement when we consider Harriet Tubman’s work. From Harriet Tubman, then, we learn that our first step toward freedom is to know that we are enslaved— enslaved to our routine, enslaved to our old stories, enslaved to our past, enslaved to rigid views that claim we’ve always done it this way or that it can only be done this way and that we can’t do something some other way.

We are enslaved when we allow ourselves to be intimidated into compliance, our questions quashed or ignored, and to be more afraid of standing up for ourselves than to give up and resign ourselves into passive submission. Accepting that we have been enslaved is not easy, because it requires us to get up and do something to move out of it.

So we take a few minutes this morning to stop and ask ourselves, where have we been slaves, both individually and as a community? What are our narrow places and the chametz of ego which have contributed to our enslavement?

After asking these hard questions, our next step to leaving Egypt is to ask ourselves, Mah Nish’tanah? That is, what is different here? How can we be different here? What needs to be different here? How DARE we to be different here?

We question. We question ourselves inwardly, and we engage with our community in the conversation about how we are able to liberate ourselves from the grip of the Egypt we have awakened and found ourselves in.

Our question, our “Mah nish’tanah?”, has another dimension. Not only do we ask what is different, we also ask what has changed? What has shifted? And how do we respond to that shift?

Ask yourself this morning, “Mah Nish’tanah?” What has changed in me, in Emerson? How can we begin grow again? What questions must we ask? What must we do to shift, to move out of Egypt? How must we change in our willingness?

Our Exodus story is a clarion call for us this morning to let go of that which holds us back, including our fear of the unknown. We look to the example of the story of Exodus, and we begin to seek out and rid ourselves of the chametz in our lives. We question. We engage in the conversation. We find ways to move out of Egypt and to envision a new future where we will not be enslaved to what or who has held us back.

Today we have sung of weaving the sunshine out of the fallen rain. We have weathered the fallen rain, we have stood on the bank of the river of limitations, and today, together, we can join hands and continue our journey of weaving the sunshine out of the rain.

Our challenge as a community, just as it was for the Hebrews in our story, is to let go of what shackles us, limits us, and holds us back, and to go into an uncertain future in a new land, with however many, or few, of us are left.

What holds you back? Is it the thinking that we can’t possibly arise from the ashes, that there aren’t enough of us left to do this?

Maybe we are too tired, too spent. We have given our all and then some, and have no more to give, especially when our well is so dry and has not been refilled.

The answer to that is to be who we are and do what we do best in ways that don’t zap our energy, to make the shifts necessary so that the work isn’t so taxing and consuming, and as we begin to shift and rebuild outwardly, we will also begin to be renewed inwardly.

Our strength will return to us, if we learn how to take smaller steps and how to support, encourage, and nourish ourselves rather than waiting to be nourished by someone else who can’t do that for us, who does not have our community’s best interests in mind.

Still, we move forward, and we do it together. We do smaller things, and we do them in smaller ways. And slowly, we regain our strength and energy.

The important part is to remember that, like the Hebrews, we are not diminished. We are not less than what and who we once were. We are different, yes, and we carry more strength, more resilience, more boldness, and more experience than we ever had before. We are more than, though our numbers be different from what they once were. Never lose sight that being fewer than is not the same as being less than. We are not less than. The past three years will only diminish us if we decide to let it do that.

So today we find ourselves standing at the shore of the sea and having the courage to say, “Yes! We will cross over and build a new life together in a different way! We are the buds on the trees, holding already within ourselves everything we need to be who we already know ourselves to be. All we need is sun, and water, and time to unfold into our beautiful leaves and blossoms.”

Do you have the courage to do that, to join with us in this bold, new, exciting adventure? To drop the shackles and limitations, claim our freedom, and move forward together?

As we stand today in this space between slavery, between the old ways, the things that have held us back, and an uncertain future filled with potential, it is time for us to make an assessment, to be willing to embrace new things together, to focus on our potential rather than our limitations, and to clean the clutter out of our souls, and out of our storage bins.

We have always known ourselves to be a real, and caring, community. It is what makes Emerson different. May we not lose sight of that, as we look to the spiritual lessons that Passover teaches us. We birth ourselves anew into the land of freedom. Together, we leave Egypt. Together, we are better.

As we face the unknown future, we do it together, knowing that there is no easy walk to freedom. We’ve been through the struggle, and now we can make the choice to walk across that river to freedom, one small step at a time, and we do it together. We don’t stop the journey, we keep on walking, boldly, courageously, and always, together.

Amein.