Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost, September 7, 2014

The Hebrew Bible Reading: Exodus 12:1-14

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbor in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it.  Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the Passover of the Lord.  For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.

Reflections:  The Rev. Hope Benko based her sermon on this lesson. This reflection includes her timely message to us.

The events of the Passover and Exodus forged one people out of diverse Hebrew slaves in Egypt. The prescription for the ritual, however, presuppose that the people is already one. The people are expected to look after one another so that nobody is left out: “If a household is too small,” it shall join its neighbor. Nobody is discriminated against but the food is to be shared equally “in proportion to the number of people who eat of it.” And, as with the manna that God later gives his people, nothing may be hoarded: “anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.” Individuals and families, even before they begin their exodus from slavery, ritually live out their unity in their greater identity as God’s people.

            The Passover ritual we read in the bible passage above was established for all time; annually generations of family and friends gather to remember who they are and where they have been. Their individual stories come to the table to be taken up into the One Great Story.

But they gather to do more than remember the past. They point of Passover is not to remember and stay there, but to move into God’s future. Dressed in traveling clothes, they share a meal, ready to embark on the daring journey into the future to which God calls them.

Like those who gathered around the Passover lamb, Mother Hope said, we stand on the threshold. After much prayer and work, we have elected a new rector. Together with her, we will begin a new journey into a new life. We are called to bring our past—all that has made us who were for this very moment—forward into this journey. But we are moving into a new place, into a new identity possible only because of who God has made us and what God has done for us in our own sacred history. Although all change and newness is both exciting and a little scary, we remember that that God is both our companion and our goal.