Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's September 4, 2005 Sunday worship service.

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Defining Moment

Exodus 12:1-14

Bethel 9/4/05

Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD

It has been, quite simply, a horrible week for us as we have watched and listened to the unfolding disaster along the Gulf Coast and in New Orleans, and worst of all, we know that things are going to get worse before they start getting better. Between the 9/11 tragedy and the war that followed and this horrendous natural disaster, this opening decade of the 21^st century will be remembered, I believe, as a time that tried all of our souls as American citizens. And if might even be, years from now, that the ramifications from Hurricane Katrina and its massive destruction will reverberate in all our lives in ways we scarcely can imagine right now.

As other nations rush to our aid, as American governments, faith communities, and volunteer organizations at all levels scramble to respond to the chaos, the aftermath of this hurricane will be, in short, I believe, a defining moment for our national character, civic responsibility, and sense of compassion and mercy. A defining moment -- it will force us to take a long, hard look at the soul of this nation.

Hardest hit have been the poor and members of African-American communities. In New Orleans, nearly 2/3rds of residents are black and more than a quarter of the city lives in poverty. It doesn’t take more than a second of TV viewing to see who were the ones left behind. I believe that the ineptitude of our government in responding in a timely fashion, and the kind of additional suffering that has been imposed especially on minority groups, can only further the problem of our society’s polarization around issues of color, of poverty/ wealth, the haves and the have-nots.

There are long lists of prayer concerns – children and psychological trauma, the frail elderly, rescuers, churches gone – I understand that in South Louisiana Presbytery alone, 36 Presbyterian churches have been damaged or destroyed. Lots of prayer concerns. I hope that each us will make reconciliation and forgiveness across the lines of color and class an additional top prayer priority as these days unfold.

This disaster will pose many tests of our national character, including questions about our national priorities and why we could not have been better prepared to rescue those whose lives have been threatened. It will pose tests for churches and faith communities. Through it all, we can hope that the recovery process will instill within our nation and leaders and local communities greater humility before God and before both those natural and unnatural forces that threaten the very life of this creation that God has entrusted to our care and keeping.

Defining Moments. They can either shape or break us; encourage or embitter; unite or divide; cause us to retreat into our own shells or send us out in gestures of compassion and care towards others.

There was not another more central defining moment for ancient Israel than that which is recounted in our text from Exodus. Passover. Deliverance. Freedom. Exit from Pharaoh’s Egypt. As the old African-American spiritual puts it: “Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land, Go down, Moses, tell old Pharaoh, let my people go!” It’s a rallying cry that oppressed minority groups, from white American colonists in the 1770s to black slaves in the 1800s to Civil Rights activists in the 1960s have used to evoke the message and hope of freedom from Pharaoh and from all other cruel task masters.

I’ve wondered about the people of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, if some of them have thought about this ancient story and the way it has, in a way, come alive for them in a terrible way, in this disaster of biblical proportion. I’ve wondered if they have put themselves into the place of the enslaved Israelites – lives under threat and clinging to a thread of promise that deliverance would come. I’ve wondered if God seems real to them as they watch their lives wash away and wait for a way to get to freedom.

Over the next weeks and months, we will begin to hear their stories.

We do know this ancient story, for it is the root story of our lives as people of faith: Moses delivered his message; Pharaoh resisted; God sent 9 horrible plagues; Pharaoh still resisted; then God sent this 10^th plague, the worst one of all, with a promise to strike down the first born in every household in the land of Egypt. The only recourse to avoid the angel of death who “passed over” all the households of Egypt was to put the blood of a lamb on the doorposts as a sign marking that people of the covenant dwelled inside. The Exodus text says: “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.”

The memory of that moment and that blood became, for Israel and still today for Jewish people everywhere, the decisive moment of corporate identity under the protection and providence of God.

And because memory is best activated and best preserved by ritual, the writer of Exodus offers specific instructions about how to perform Passover as a ritual of remembering.

There is ritual time: the 14^th day of the month; the ritual sacrificial object is an unblemished, year old male lamb or goat selected four days earlier; the time when the animal is slaughtered is to be twilight; the doorposts and lintel are to be marked with blood, and the animal cooked whole and eaten and the leftovers burned; eating it is to be done in an attitude of haste and fear as if the whole community were ready for departure at a moment’s notice: “with 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.”

In following these specific instructions, through all the years to come, in this ritual of remembering, the people reclaim their identity as God’s chosen people.

In much the same way, we ritually repeat the words of Jesus, himself a Jew who gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover and the feast of unleavened bread. The words and gestures, the symbolic actions, the bread and wine, the table, these are to take us back, not only to Jesus, but even further, to Passover and to the primal hope of deliverance from danger.

It’s a tall order, I know, for a ritual to communicate the kind of hope and courage and comfort we need today when so many lives, so many churches, so much culture and history, have been washed away. But the message of Passover is that God will deliver the nation. God provides a way through the storm.

When we were baptized, the promise was not that we would escape tribulation or trouble. Rather, faith is always forged on the anvil of human adversity.

There is an old custom in the Eastern orthodox church, that is, the Greek Church, when a baby is baptized. The priest, after baptizing the infant, takes a cross off from around his neck and forcefully strikes the little child on its breast, so hard that it leaves a mark, so hard that if hurts the child and the child screams. In the west, we give roses; in the east, the child receives a blow to the chest. But this is a ritual action that offers a foretaste of that suffering that comes as the child and all gathered hear the call of Christ, a reminder that following Christ is costly.

But our baptism also declares that we have been put onto this earth for a reason, and that God will give us grace to endure whatever calamity or suffering might come our way. Heavy loads have been placed upon us in these days, and even greater burdens and sacrifices are yet to come. How will we manage?

Our fundamental faith challenge is not to forget, to remember that God who has been faithful in the past, promises to be with us even when the storm surge seems impossible to comprehend.

Here, today, we have these rituals of remembering, these simple everyday actions of washing, eating, drinking that we do together, invested now with deep and abiding meaning.

And like the Israelites of old who faced danger yet put their trust in the Almighty, and like our fellow citizens whose very lives have been turned upside down in the watery chaos of this week, let us stand and be ready to hear and respond to the call of God.
Amen.