[From the steps]
I’d like to take a few moments to start this week’s sermon with a little experiment. Please indulge me for a minute or so…
Close your eyes… Keep them closed. Now do your best to answer to yourself the question I’m going to ask. Once you’re certain of the answer, please stand up... yes, stand up. In the middle of the sermon. With your eyes closed still. Make sure to keep your eyes closed tightly until I tell you to open them. And only stand up if you are 100% SURE of your answer without opening your eyes.
Ready? Here’s the question: What time is it?
[After allowing 5 – 10 seconds for the murmurs to stop, and few people, if any, to stand up, ask the congregation to open their eyes. Meanwhile, have moved from the front of the church to the back. Ask anyone standing to sit down at this point.]
In today’s Old Testament reading, you heard the writer of Exodus state: “This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you.” The repetitive language of this verse 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 moon. The year progresses according to the alternations of night and day, work and rest, and seasons of planting and harvest, rain and dryness.
[Move from the back to the pulpit as this is read] Later in Exodus, the writer talks about God’s commandments for festivals of first fruits and harvests. The festivals anticipate a future in a land that God has promised. To arrive at the future, the people must first leave their past – they must leave Egypt. Their departure from Egypt marks the beginning of their future and their freedom. And so the whole calendar must now find a new fixed point of origin. For God’s people, all of time originates in, is oriented to, and commemorates their release from slavery. Time for God’s people is now “freedom time.”
[Now at the pulpit again] Many of you found it difficult to accurately judge what time it was when I asked, because you couldn’t look at your wrist or your phone. You weren’t sitting in front of your computer, your iPad, or your TV, where clocks are predominately, and even obtrusively, displayed on a constant basis. In today’s society, time is judged by the clock. But you could just have easily said that it was harvest time and been completely correct.
How much of our lives today are regulated by clocks and calendars? Someone might ask us, “What do you like to do in your free time?” We laugh, and often answer, “Free time? What’s that?”
What calendar are we using? What is its origin? Does your year begin in January as the calendar suggests or in September as the school year starts? Labor Day unofficially draws the summer season of rest and relaxation to an end, and we seem to turn a page in our book. No big flashing ball descends in Times Square at this time of year, but there is an air of freshness, a new start, a new beginning on the road of life. Maybe your year begins around Thanksgiving… at the end of November, the church begins preparation for Christmas by beginning a new church year with the start of Advent. Are you ready?
On the surface, this week’s Old Testament reading is about the Passover, but look more closely, and you’ll see that it’s about freedom from slavery, new beginnings, and leaving the old behind. It seems very appropriate as students and teachers begin a new school year and parents settle into a new routine for another school year.
Let’s look together at a bit of what has happened in the Exodus story since the reading last week in Exodus Chapter 3. Those of you who have watched The Ten Commandments can probably fill in the gap by remembering the movie. But for those of you who haven’t seen the movie, here’s the 1-minute version: the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and after Moses saw God in the burning bush, he talked to Pharaoh and told Pharaoh to “Let my people go.” Pharaoh responded by requiring more out of the Israelites while cutting the resources they had to do their work. Moses complained to God about Pharaoh’s treatment, and God revealed that when Pharaoh didn’t listen to Moses, he would lay his hand upon Egypt and bring the Israelites out of the land with great acts of judgment. As a result of Pharaoh’s ignorance, God sent nine plagues upon the land, ranging from a bloody river to hoards of frogs to swarms of insects, from diseases upon livestock to diseases upon humans, from thunder and hail to total and utter darkness over the land.
In preparation for their leap out of captivity, and for the 10th and final plague, God gave some specific instructions to the people. “This month shall mark for you the beginning,” God told Moses and Aaron, who were to pass the message to the rest of their people. “It shall be the first month of the year for you,” God said. In other words, throw out the old calendar, the calendar of your oppressor, of the Pharaoh. That’s what God said! Toss it out! You’ve been living by Pharaoh’s time for too long! Get ready to live by God’s time. Freedom time.
The instructions from God, which Moses told the people, concern a meal. This is the primary text for Passover, a Jewish celebration, a feast of remembrance. To this day, our Jewish neighbors still gather around a table, and with this meal, they remember what God did to finally convince Pharaoh to let his people go. These words are central to their identity. It is no mistake that Jesus chose Passover as the time to fulfill God’s promise. Most scholars believe that His Last Supper with the disciples was a Passover meal. It was a meal that Jesus didn’t just eat. He lived it out.
God told the Israelites to take a pure, year-old male lamb, and on that fateful night when God totally changed the course of their history, slaughter it. Some of the blood was to be painted upon the doorposts of each home as a sign that children of Israel lived inside. When death came and took the life of every firstborn Egyptian, this blood served as a sign for death to “pass over” the house. It was the death of the Egyptian firstborn, the tenth plague, that finally persuaded Pharaoh to let God’s people go.
During the fateful Passover centuries later in Jerusalem, Jesus himself was slaughtered just like the year-old lamb. Our faith has, in fact, come to see Him as the Passover lamb: “Alleluia. Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” And the feast we call communion is a time to remember again and again what God has done to free us from slavery to the power of sin and death. “Therefore, let us keep the feast.”
You’ll notice that there is a “gathering together” in the story. God instructed the Israelites to pull together as “households.” We’re talking extended family… small households were told to join with others for the meal. Not every family could afford a lamb. But spiritually speaking, it wasn’t a matter of each family for itself. There is power in gathering together when the storms of life hit. We don’t face Pharaoh, the power of sin and death, alone. We support one another, as we trust in the blood of the lamb.
You’ll also notice that the lamb was to be cooked in a specific manner so as to have a bitter taste. The bitter taste should be thought of as a wake-up call. Does anyone turn away from something if they haven’t tasted its bitterness? So it is with the Israelites turning away from Pharaoh – there needs to be a bitter taste to remind them of why they’re doing this. And there is to be no lamb left over – no waiting for seconds, no holding back, no returning.
Finally, you’ll notice that the Israelites were instructed that they should eat the lamb in a certain way: with “your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly.” God wanted his people to be ready to roll at a minute’s notice, to follow his lead as soon as Pharaoh let go, and to get out of harm’s way.
Change is difficult. I started off the sermon today in an uncomfortable place for me – on the steps of the church – fully exposed. I asked you to do things that were probably uncomfortable for you – closing your eyes, and perhaps standing up in the middle of the sermon – something that left you vulnerable. And I threw some discomfort at you as I preached from the back of the sanctuary, rather than from the front. But we made it through – and it’s a lesson for us all. We can handle change. Think back to the change that God asked the Israelites to handle – a change from their time to God’s time. That was a huge discomfort for them – and yet they made it through too.
That’s the sense of the Exodus story. Change is disconcerting, and this is not a leisurely trip with a huge moving van. This is picking up what you can carry. No more. So the question is – what is most important? What do you want to carry on your back as you leave the relative security of Egypt for the unknown wilderness?
Friends, this is the opportune time to re-examine our lives, to look at changing our lives to live them as God calls us to. The crisp autumn air (which comes as summer so fleetingly leaves us)… the new start to the school year… these are opportunities for us to look back at the past year and ahead to the future year, opportunities to take time to change. How is God calling YOU to act at this opportune time?
It can be hard to let go of the things, places, relationships, and structures that enslave us. God’s people – the Israelites – wanted so badly to get back to the thing that they knew. It didn’t matter that it was the thing that stole their freedom and future. They wanted so badly to get back to the meat and savory vegetables, to the predictable powerlessness under Pharaoh, that God had to send them through a wilderness maze to ensure that they could never find their way back to slavery in Egypt.
We’re no different. We pick up what we were supposed to let go. We keep resetting our clocks to the quotas of Egypt. When day is done, we take off our shoes, we put down the staff, and we dawdle by the door. Instead, we should celebrate the festival and preach the word that will help God’s people let go of slavery, enter freedom-time, and journey together into new life.
And so I ask again… What time is it? You shouldn’t need to look at a clock or the calendar. It’s God’s time… freedom time. Welcome the change with open arms.
