The story of Passover endures because it speaks to one of the fundamental aims of religion: liberation. We seek to be released from all that holds back individuals and groups from the full expression of our potential. The spiritual journey is the journey from oppression by others and by our own doubts and fears to the freedom of lives we make for ourselves.

            I’ve been spending this year looking back at a career in ministry and lifting up, perhaps for the last time, those foundational spiritual questions that keep returning again and again on the spiritual journey.

            These are the questions that come up regularly in sermons, because there are always new people joining the church, just beginning to walk a spiritual path, and they need to have the foundations under them as they start.  I preach about these questions regularly, because it’s always someone’s first time to encounter them.

            “Who am I?”  the question of identity.  Am I a soul or a body?  Am I born to be a certain individual, or do I develop into myself through life experiences that I both choose for myself and that are given to me by circumstances I cannot control?  And “Who are we?” as human beings.  Born with original sin, or original blessing?  Mortal or destined for eternal life?  A part of creation, or unique among creation with special gifts and responsibilities?

            The question of meaning:  “Why does it matter?”  What values are important to live for:  adventure, beauty, relationships, wisdom, loyalty, joy?  And is it enough to justify my life only by answering to my own desires, or does the universe, or God, desire something greater that I am called to contribute to?

            And then the question of purpose:  “What do I do?”  How should I spend my days?  What job should I pursue?  What kind of life should I create for myself and how best to serve the world?

            These questions have depth and dimension.  They aren’t facts of the faith, like learning that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian minister, or that when MLK said “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” he was paraphrasing the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.  If a faith life involved merely learning the facts, faith wouldn’t be much of a journey, or sustain a career.

But the spiritual questions cannot be dismissed with simple answers.  These questions continue to open themselves the more we consider them and return to them.  So we keep turning them over, Sunday after Sunday, year after year.  There’s always another side, another vantage point.  And the changing circumstances of our lives, and the changing world around us, demand, if not new answers, at least continual reflection on our old answers.

So, I knew, at the beginning of this year, that I wouldn’t come to the end of these questions, for you, or for me. I’ll stop preaching about them after this year, because I’ll stop preaching.  But I won’t stop thinking about them.  I won’t stop living them.  I cannot give you final answers, for questions which have no final answers.  The best I can offer you is some final thoughts.

            The holiday of Passover, which began last night and continues this week through Sunday, is one of those holidays of the liturgical calendar that demands repeated attention every year.  I’ve preached on it specifically, or at least folded its themes into sermons on other topics, every year that I’ve had a pulpit to preach from.

            But I was thinking (Thursday night, as a matter of fact, as I left the church after choir practice and walked down Whitsett to the bus stop) how incredibly old this Exodus story is and how many times it’s been told.  Not just the thirty or so years I’ve been sharing this story, but how for year after year, in multitudes of households, around millions of Seder tables, in countries around the world, for centuries, this story has been told, again, and again, and again.

            The Exodus, if it was in any way a historical event, and there is good reason to suspect that it was not, which in no way lessens the power of the story, would have happened sometime around the year 1300 before the Common Era.  The Torah commands Jews to re-tell the story annually along with very specific instructions for a ritual meal that accompanies the re-telling.

            So as we re-tell the story again today, we are telling again a story that has been told yearly for more than three thousand years.

            Year after year.  We were slaves in Egypt.  Year after year.  Oppressed so hard we could not stand.  Tell it again how we were freed from bondage by a divine spirit of freedom that could not be resisted by even the mightiest earthly powers.  The hardship of our work.  The bitterness of our tears.  The lamb we sacrificed to prove our commitment to the spirit of freedom and our faith that we would at last be free.  The eventual downfall and humbling of those who held us back.

            And then we wandered in the desert.  That’s part of the story, too.  We lost our way.  We lost our faith.  We doubted.  We complained.  We turned back, some actually went back, because in bondage at least we knew security.  Or we turned back spiritually, giving ourselves to false gods, because a god that promises gifts of wealth and pleasure is easier to follow than a god that grants us freedom, but requires that we work to keep it.

            We had good leaders, but we didn’t always trust them.  The divine spirit stayed true to us, though we sometimes turned away from it.  We endured pain and hardship, sometimes as bad as it was before we came out from Egypt.  Some died along the way.  It took a very long time.

            We keep telling that story, not just at Passover, and not just Jews, but for thousands of years, by thousands of peoples, from all cultures and circumstances at all times because it is one of those foundational issues of spiritual development that we cannot be done with.

            Oppression.  A divine spirit that wants us to be free.  A time of trial.  Liberation.

            In the version of that story by Alla Renee Bozarth that’s included in our hymnal and we used as our Call to Worship this morning, she gives a list of advice and instructions for people who want to start a journey to freedom.  Although the reading is titled, “Passover Remembered” in the reading itself she never mentions the Exodus.  There’s no Egypt.  There’s no Pharoah.  No Moses.  No parting of the Red Sea.

            This is a Passover remembered for any form of oppression.

Alla Renee Bozarth, by the way, knows something of oppression and liberation.  She was one of the group of eleven who became the first women ordained as Priests in the Episcopal church in 1974.  Here’s her advice for any movement toward liberation from any form of bondage:

“Pack nothing,” she says.  When the moment arises, seize it.  “Don’t wait for the bread to rise.”  Go now.  Nothing is more important than freedom, and the opportunity may not come again soon.

“Do not hesitate to leave your old ways behind,” she says.  And then she names three of those old ways:  “fear, silence, submission.”  Sometimes our oppression comes not from others but from ourselves.  Sometimes it isn’t chains or locked doors, but just our unwillingness to trade the security of a life we know, for an uncertain future.  It’s a risk.  We may not make it all the way through the desert.

We tell ourselves we’re not good enough.  We’re not strong enough.  We don’t deserve happiness.  Or life isn’t supposed to be happy anyway.

Sometimes our captors are complicit in amplifying our self-criticism.  “You’ll be lost without me.”  “Who do you think you are?”

Or they play on our sympathy, “I’ll be lost without you.”

The only solution the oppressor offers is to stay bound to each other in our oppression.  All kinds of slaves bound to all kinds of masters.  

Meanwhile the God of liberation is calling outside the door.  Come out.  Come now.  “I will send fire to warm and encourage you.  I will be with you in the fire and I will be with you in the cloud…..  I will give you dreams in the desert to guide you safely home to that place you have not yet seen….  

Early in my ministry, I identified two spiritual goals, which I realized were a convenient way of summing up the entirety of the spiritual journey.  I still think that the spiritual journey is really about just these two goals.  And it doesn’t particularly bother me, in fact it intrigues me, that these two goals contradict each other.

The two goals are freedom and connection.

We’ll talk about both of them this week of Passover and Holy Week:  freedom being more of the focus this Sunday.  Connection being more of the focus next Sunday at Easter.

Freedom is the spiritual goal of becoming wholly and completely the person you were made to be.  Expressing your unique self fully.  Knowing who you are and giving yourself entirely to life.  Released from any bondage.  Leaping over and across any barrier.  Breaking the grip of any person who holds you back, freeing yourself from any cultural constraint that says people like you can’t do that, that’s not for you, or you can’t afford it, or the way of being you imagine for yourself isn’t possible here or now.

            And freedom also, from those ropes we tie ourselves up with.  Those same messages of don’t and can’t and stop that we receive from the outside world are even more powerful when we say them to ourselves.

            So the spiritual goal is to learn to stop holding ourselves back, to not let anyone else hold us back, and to help others break the bonds that are holding them back, so that we can all find freedom.

            Oppression.  A divine spirit that wants us to be free.  A time of trial.  Liberation.

            That’s the spiritual goal of freedom.

            The second spiritual goal is connection.

            We find ourselves in the world, at an early age, as a lone individual.  As a baby, we first experience life as a solitary ego.  The rest of the world exists to fulfill our needs.  We cry and anonymous helpers come and attend to us, feeding us, keeping us safe, and clean, and comforted.  Later we begin to recognize that those others are not extensions of ourselves but are themselves individuals just like us.  We begin to realize that we exist not as isolated individuals but as parts of a complicated system of interdependencies.

            Too focused on satisfying just my own desires, I destroy the relationships that I depend on to get those desires satisfied.  Too focused on reaping the abundance of the world for myself, I destroy the basis of that abundance.  For a time, we can treat others like objects and amass wealth and physical pleasures for our own enjoyment.  For a time, we can cut down the forests and “drill, baby, drill” and convert raw materials to plastic and send it down the river to the ocean.  And some folks can sustain such self-centered behavior for their entire life.  But whether we’re forced into recognizing our interdependency with the rest of existence, or we come to see it logically, spiritually, eventually we learn that spiritual maturity comes through connection to others, and to the planet, and to God, and to all that exists.

            And thus we begin the spiritual journey toward even-widening connection, stretching from loving ourselves to “loving our neighbor as ourselves” and then to the final spiritual realization that by “neighbor” we mean all that exists.

            The tension between those two goals is that one names the truth of our existence as free individuals.  The other names the truth of our existence as connected members of community.

            The more I express my wild and creative individuality, answerable to no one, breaking tradition, ignoring cultural rules, doing my own thing wherever and whenever I want, the less connected I will be.  That’s the terror of freedom:  I’ll be alone.

            The more connected I am, respecting others, tending relationships, generous, humble, deferential, self-sacrificing, the less free I will be.  That’s the terror of connection:  I’ll disappear.

            Communities have rules.  Rules are oppressive.  Some rules should be broken.  But breaking every rule leads to anarchy, not health.  When the Israelites arrived in Judea, they didn’t say “now you’re free, go do whatever you want.”  They created communities.  They raised Judges and eventually anointed a line of Kings.  They didn’t abandon rules, they wrote a whole book of them, called the Torah.

            So liberation doesn’t mean liberation from community.  Liberation means liberation within community.

If we get the balance correct between connection and freedom, we create communities that encourage the liberation of individuals but protect themselves from the excesses of individuals that would destroy the community.  If we get the balance correct between freedom and connection, we nurture free individuals who agree to submit to the constraints of communal life while boldly challenging those restrictions that prevent the flourishing of each individual.

The prayer that we sang as our Opening Hymn this morning is the Passover prayer of liberation:

“Let me flower.  Help me flower.  Watch me flower.”

Let me move from this closed-up bud, afraid and trembling, holding all of my beauty and color inside, to become the expansive, bold, complicated, ever-unfolding, and truly alive person I can be.

“Let me flower,” means don’t hold me back with discriminatory laws, or arbitrary cultural norms, or religious traditions that say some lives are reserved only for some kinds of people.

“Help me flower” means we are called to be agents of social change that see the places people are in chains and we actively move to release them.  We give people the financial assistance they need.  We offer people the education they need.  We connect people to the mental health resources and the medical care, and spiritual care they need.  We heal, we help, we bless.  We make the world bloom.

Notice how the hymn places the act of individual flourishing into the context of community.  It’s freedom with connection.

“Help me flower.”  I can’t do it on my on.  Then, “Watch me flower”.  Celebrate with me the liberation of all of us.

Liberation is a gift that we make for each other.  First, actively for ourselves.  Advocating for ourselves.  “Let me flower.”  “Don’t stand in my way.”

And then, for those steps of the path to liberation we cannot walk for ourselves, “Help me flower.”  We ask for help because we cannot do it alone.

And then, remembering that we were once in bondage ourselves, we vow never to be a source of oppression to others.  We stand aside to give the next flower room to grow.  We rush to offer aid when, with a little water, or a sprinkle of fertilizer, another bloom could open.

We rejoice when we see the flowers opening.  We glory in the show that surrounds us.  We show our own colors with pride.  “Watch me flower.”

And finally we connect our individual flower to every other flowering individual in the divine bouquet of all existence.  “In the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit… I will find true harmony.”