Exodus 12:1-14
Proper 18 (23) – Year A
Maundy Thursday - Years A, B, C
Have you marked a first month for the rest of your life? Not only do we remember the first month for the Israelite community, I am now writing as Ramadan comes around again. These are lunar holidays, not solar. Their perpetualness is enhanced by the peripatetic nature of a maddening moon going its own way, marching contrary to the regularity of evenings and mornings. The moveable nature of these months makes intentionality all the more important. We have to plan more for them. They interrupt all our other plans.
What are you to do when a whole nation and its power is against you? Clarify a needed change and affirm your basis of authority. Say, “No.” Say, “Let people go.” Say, “Past, Present, and Future Life is calling.”
Let us continue to be about a business of loosening (never again slavery) and binding (rituals to remember freedom).
To best be about this business of setting people free, attention to the realities of beginnings is important. A danger of ritualizing beginnings is that an on-the-ground pain is covered in a patina of glory. The whole Exodus story goes back to a Pharaoh who forgot. We need rituals that help us remember the whole story and not just a dramatic moment.
In election times there are frequent attempts to define a starting place from whence we can arrive at a solution being offered. Pay attention to political theatre to see if you agree with their assessment of the issues. Who best gets a “Remembrance Award” that honors all people and shares common-wealth equitably? Remember that Pharaoh wanted to continue being on the top of his wealth gap over others, even if that meant their enslavement to the economy of his day. Remember you can chose to “Think Different” than a Pharaoh.
Would you have participated in this first Passover? Just because Moses says so? His track record wasn’t the greatest. If pests and boils won’t work, why would blood on the door and shoes at the ready?
This challenges us to attend to a moon that breaks all our solar-based routines and to hope beyond current evidence.
- - - - - - -
From a vantage point after an Exodus we wonder how
our crying out for G*D to come to us was reversed
to plead G*D to pass over us, miss us.
You just never can tell with G*D.
our crying out for G*D to come to us was reversed
to plead G*D to pass over us, miss us.
You just never can tell with G*D.
As found in Wrestling Year A: Connecting Sunday Readings with Lived Experience
This is to be the first month of the rest of your life. Did you know that?
This is the day the Lord has made. Did you know that?
This moment is to echo on. Did you know that?
There is no other time for freedom than now. Did you know that?
Yes, there have been previous acceptable years of jubilee, and months, days, moments. They have played their part in bringing us to this time.
In anticipating and remembering we are bold to be in a hurry for justice. Are you doing what you can in conversation and action?
Yes, we have had our hopes raised and dashed before. But a part of who we are is found in the meaning of never giving up on issues of freedom.
A part of our freedom is to pray for the rear-guard of days gone by. Someday we will measure people by the content of their character not their color, gender-preference, labor-status, class, or any other cultural boundary. That someday is already assured and we will speed its arrival with our boldly living as if someday were today.
So, workers of the world, arise! We have nothing to lose but our chains!
This old, but venerable chant, needs to be heard again and again wherever people are in cultural and religious bondage (yes, the two do go hand in hand).
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2002/september2002.html
What time is it? Time to not let sin continue unchallenged.
A part of this is to remember the gift of blessing that came first so that we might sing a new song to one another and not just bring suit against one another, no matter how many witnesses we are able to round up.
There is more than enough to be divided up among us. To continue acting as though G*D and a religious impetus is a zero-sum game is false to the strongest and most steadfast tenet we have - wholeness / love.
So what will we bind on earth (another to our way of thinking) and what will we loose (a new song that is an old song - honor)?
- - - - - - -
my lamb is served with mint jelly
your lamb is tofu with mint leaves
both may be apportioned
according to the number present
both lambs are without blemish
in themselves or in our eyes
both remind us of the fragility
of life and death and beyond
both prepare us for a new journey
we will remember until the next
so we call out to one another
owe nothing but love
the lambs are gone into a good night
and awaken in honor fulfilled
of the flesh we are born and grow
with such flesh we travel together
for life takes pleasure in life
and adorns the humble with honor
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html
Passover is often thought of as a sedentary event as we associate it with sitting around table. Remember the injunction to gird your loins and any thing else appropriate to girding such as shoeing your feet and staffing your hand.
We are straining forward, waiting for a starting signal to run for our lives. The table passes our time while waiting, but we must always be ready to leave the table at any moment.
At the least we need to jump up to help serve.
What are you chomping at the bit about? Has it something to do with service or escape. Depending on the situation, one or the other is more appropriate. It becomes amazing when both are suitable at the same time - when we can participate in escape (our own and another's) by being of service or our service cannot help but eventuate in escape for ourselves or someone else.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/april2004.html
This month (Nisan - begins with new moon) shall be the first month of the yearly cycle. This day (14th day - middle of full moon) shall be a day of remembrance.
On Maundy (Command) Thursday (Thunder) we find the beginning of freedom from our various enslavements - "love one another." This is the equivalent of the command "let my people go."
This day we celebrate that what we only dreamed as a possibility can actually be so.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/march2005.html
Blood and dust are signs to us. Passover and Baptism are signs to us.
They are signs of needed and continual renewal of community.
We have been enslaved (blood). We have been apart (dust).
We journey together (Passover). We cleanse each other (Baptism).
In such we receive bounty and offer our lives to increase it for others.
In such we are revived with feasting and invite others to more feasting.
We neither cast a glance behind nor peer ahead. We don't need to justify this day by remembering slavery or anticipating resurrection. This day stands within and beyond any past liberation or future death. We simply are in this moment, in this moment, and that is enough.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html
We watch for different things at different times. Our watching grows out of a particular past, is influenced by what is going on around us, and anticipates a future. In each of these ways our what-we-look-for and what-we-see is shaped and constrained.
When we watch inward to avoid a danger going door-to-door, we begin to set up a particular community that will have strengths and weaknesses based on what is experienced. When we watch outward to avoid a danger on the horizon we set up a related community that will have strengths and weaknesses based on what is believable. Each has its place.
One of the issues of the day is whether we look inward or outward. There is much to be said about hurricanes and a party people looking inward and sentinels looking outward who do not widen their horizon to encompass an inevitable event.
Yesterday I helped clean up after a tornado a half hour from here. Yesterday I thought it silly to attempt to clean up after hurricane Katrina. I could see new life coming back after the tornado but I couldn't see the worth of forcing habitation in a reverse Red Sea setting where the waters are set to roll over instead of part (we don't live constantly in a miracle, we cross over and move on).
Some of the same issues are alive and well between nations (Iraq, et. al., and USA, et. smaller al.) and between humans (sexuality being a key one in these days - fast and pray for Hearts on Fire [MISSING URL] being held this weekend).
Are you looking inward or outward on these and other issues closer to your home? Are you paying attention to details filled with devils or horizons of hope? Are you acting on what you see and helping to shape new communities? Are you hunkering down for a long haul or starting to move toward a known issue and engage it directly? Is this part of self-preservation or investment in others? Obviously these are not mutually exclusive positions but they do shape our basic responses to one another and others.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/september2005.html
Have you marked a first month for the rest of your life? Not only do we remember the first month the Israelite community, we are now in Ramadan begun again. These are lunar holidays, not solar. Their perpetualness is enhanced by the peripatetic nature of a maddening moon going its own way, marching contrary to the regularity of evenings and mornings. The moveable nature of these months makes intentionality all the more important. We have to plan more for them. They interrupt all our other plans.
What are you to do when a whole nation and its power is against you? Clarify the needed change and affirm your basis of authority. Say, "No." Say, "Let people go." Say, "Past, Present, and Future Life is calling."
Let us continue to be about the business of loosing (never again slavery) and binding (ritual to remember loosing).
To best be about this business of setting people free, attention to the realities of beginnings is important. A danger of ritualizing beginnings is that the on-the-ground pain is covered in a patina of glory. The whole Exodus story goes back to a Pharaoh who forgot. We need rituals that help us remember the whole story and not just a dramatic moment.
In election times there are a lot of attempts to define the starting place from whence we can arrive at a solution being offered. Pay attention to political theatre to see if you agree with their assessment of the issues. Who best gets the "set people free" bumper-sticker? Note that it usually has something to do with the reigning economic paradigm. Pharaoh wanted to continue being on the top of his wealth gap over others, even if that meant their enslavement to the economy of his day. My current assessment is that John McCain best fits the Pharaoh model and Barack Obama better sees the disaster coming and how best to deal with it. This is not a pronouncement, but an attempt to remember our history and actually apply it to the issues of the day. How do you see your situation in light of your history?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html
What is loosened on earth will be loosed again. We need to always remember that traps can be avoided. A “Think Different” mantra is a good one to have handy. Who’s going to believe that “Think Different” would have blood smears involved in a process of freedom? Would you have participated in this first Passover? Just because Moses says so? His track record wasn’t the greatest. If pests and boils won’t work, why this internal, passive approach? Would something in you have been set free to try anything? And when one “anything” turns out to at least be coincidental, does that get so enshrined that it must then be recapitulated, at least metaphorically, eternally? Does ritual have to be be liberated from being ritual before it can liberate?
Looking at this from a vantage point after an Exodus, we wonder about the reversal of calling G*D to come to us when the real trick was to have G*D pass over us, miss us. You just never can tell with G*D.
You may have been trying too hard, looking for a magic fulcrum point from which the world might be moved while what is needed is not that particular, but guerilla graffiti.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/08/exodus-121-14.html
Tracking a beginning is very tricky.
Was Jesus’ last Passover meal a beginning or did it begin with his baptism or temptations or miracles or signs or Temple confrontations or showing up the priestly class?
Does Israel’s first month of the year depend on the last of the plagues or did it begin with a babe on the water or a murder or burning bush or a hardened heart?
Where is your marker for your life? Was it an economic turnaround, a lottery ticket, a relationship beginning or ending, a death of a significant person in your life or your own brush with mortality?
Presuming you can identify your own personal turning point, how do you celebrate it? A feast? With cake and candles? And will others carry that on?
Blessings on identifying your beginning point and the point before that. Eventually you’ll get back to a slight moment before a big bang - how mysterious that there is something rather than nothing. Rejoice and move on.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2012/04/exodus-121-4-5-10-11-14.html
Passover anticipates Exodus. Crucifixion anticipates Easter. What are you anticipating?
Blood has been and continues to be a sign of release. Blood brothers and sisters take a step deeper into a relationship. Blood is a part of birth. Spilling our heart’s blood in passionate prophecy symbolizes the depth of a call. Blood is memorable. Where blood is visible new life can take place.
This can all be contrasted with hidden blood of others to prop up our privilege. All manner of coerced blood of other’s bodies for my profit brings eventual destruction.
For now simply remember that the lamb was to be divided in proportion to those feasting. If This day of being commanded to love one another means nothing else, it means we are to share proportionally. If you know nothing other than Capital desires to mimic humans by way of a command to Multiply, to Profit, you know that, in human terms, proportionality then takes a back seat to accumulation. This day is a lesson in basic communal economics. Listen and learn. We only make it together, together.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2014/04/exodus-121-4-5-10-11-14-thursday.html
“You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn.” So much for literal legalisms based on biblical mandate selected to support my bias.
This passover is not a feast. Feasts are leisurely. This has a manic feel to it. It is like trying to play Twister and eat at the same time. This is serious competition eating. Imagine miscalculating the proportion of lamb to diners. Somebody is going to be throwing up from cramming too much too quickly.
In observing Passover as a perpetual ordinance we diminish its power. The sign is not the experience. Emphasizing the repetition of a once wonderful sign dims our ability to catch a next wonderful sign. We get so caught up in doing it just right the second or two thousandth time that we can easily let a quieter and deeper transformation slip by.
Conclusions:
- Literalism carries within itself its own contradiction.
- It is difficult to carry desperation past its time.
- Familiarity blinds us to beauty as we yearn for novelty.
This is not an easy place for the generation of a sermon. It is a helpful place to wrestle with some of the persistent tensions on a pathway to freedom, except for those are simply subjected to active genocide such as that experienced by Indigenous Peoples everywhere. There is no redemptively violent exodus for them.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2014/09/exodus-121-14.html