Passover: it's the eight-day spring festival in Judaism which starts on the evening of April 16th this year (Thursday the 17th is the beginning of Passover, but the Jewish day begins at sundown on the previous evening); it commemorates the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and the "passing over" of the Jewish houses by the Angel of Death. When I read this definition, I realized that the death part of it is often forgotten (even though the English name of the festival comes from it) and I won't dwell on it today, but it may be appropriate to remember now that every day of our lives gives us cause to be grateful that the Angel of Death has passed over us. In the funeral services I conduct I often ask that we all take time to acknowledge that as soon as we are born we are old enough to die, and that all life, every day, is a fragile and precious gift. We do well to be grateful for that gift.

The older name of the Passover festival is Pesach, "festival of the shepherds", and it was celebrated long before the Exodus by the pastoral tribes of Israel. It's the festival that they were preparing to celebrate, with the traditional thanksgiving sacrifice of a lamb, on the night on which the Exodus from Egypt began. I find it interesting that the Christian festival of Easter, which means Spring, is tied in with Passover, which Jesus celebrated with his disciples at the "last supper", and that Passover in turn goes back to that ancient celebration of Spring, the Shepherds' Festival. In fact, what we call Easter is still called Pesach in French-speaking countries. It seems that almost all of our religious observances can be traced back to our awareness of natural seasons and cycles and our relationship to the natural world. By the way, having mentioned the Christian festival of Easter, I can't resist mentioning that today is observed by Christians as Palm Sunday, commemorating the day when Jesus rode on a donkey into Jerusalem along a palm-covered road. A colleague of mine writes that one Palm Sunday in the church where he ministered, he processed alone down the center aisle which was covered in palm leaves, and that he was never sure if he represented Jesus or the donkey!

Next week, we'll be celebrating Easter and Earth Day at the same time; I want to anticipate that just a bit this morning, because there are some connections, which I don't think are too far-fetched, between Passover and current concerns for the environment. The ecologist and theologian Matthew Fox has written about the ancient concern of Jewish people with what Fox calls "creation spirituality", a reverence for the goodness of the Earth. We need to set this against the concept of "dominion" which has often been blamed for environmental degradation.

As I began to think about the story of the ten plagues, culminating in the death of all the Egyptians' firstborn sons, I wondered to myself, "Was this really the only way Pharaoh could be persuaded to let the Israelites go? Is the most powerful way to appeal to people through their fears? Do we only wake up to what's right when disaster happens or threatens?" Although I didn't want to answer these questions positively, I had to admit that our concern for the Earth provides awful illustrations of the truth that very often, yes, we only see the error of our ways when it becomes very obvious that it's almost too late. I realized that the plagues were all comparable to things happening today. It says in the book of Exodus which recounts the plagues

the fish in the Nile died, and the river became foul, and unfit to drink

the frogs died, and the land stank with the smell of their decay

there came a plague of mosquitos throughout all the land of Egypt

there came great swarms of flies into the houses of Pharaoh and his servants

a very severe plague devastated all the cattle and other livestock

a disease of boils broke out in sores on humans and animals

there was thunder and hail and fire which struck down everything in the fields

the atmosphere was darkened with locusts which ate every green thing

darkness over the land of Egypt, so dark that people could not see one another

All these are troubles which in one form or another afflict the Earth today, and perhaps only when they touch us closely enough and hurtfully enough will we take what steps we must to save the planet. But we pray we may be spared the tenth plague, the deaths of our children -- though even as we pray this we know that children are dying all over the world just because we have not taken the necessary steps to save them. May our remembering of Passover, if it does nothing else, help us to do what is needed to save the world from all the plagues that afflict it -- because there's so much that's within our ability to do. And that belief, that we can affect the outcome of events and the course of history, is one aspect of Judaism which I believe has been especially influential on us in the modern western world.

The concept of history, the idea that the world had a beginning, that it's evolving in an historical process, and will one day end, is so familiar to us that we take it for granted. But this is not the view of most ancient thought. Classically, the world was seen as eternal and essentially unchanging, with various cyclical movements.

The other view is that there's irreversible historical development, a view which has always been fundamental to Judaism. I'll quote from a book by the Canadian philosopher George Grant called Philosophy in the Mass Age:

It was the Jews who discovered the very idea of history. More than anything else, what has made western culture so dynamic is its impregnation with the Judeo-Christian idea that history is the divinely ordained process of man's salvation. ... In Hebraic religion there is a new conception of ... time and of the meaning of human action in time. Time no longer repeats itself endlessly as the moving image of an unmoving eternity. ... Not a timeless eternity but the future will regenerate time... The Jews are not interested in the immortality of the individual but in the salvation of the people.

So from Judaism we get the idea that the events of human society have a meaning and are moving in some direction. We owe to Judaism our conviction that what we do, or fail to do, matters, not just for ourselves and our own little life, but for the future of the world. Unlike the heroes of the Greeks, fated to unfold a pattern and a destiny in which they had no choice, the great characters of Jewish history made decisions which were real, not illusory, and they took part in events which changed the course of history. This is the faith the Unitarian Universalist tradition shares with Judaism: the faith that the world can change, that there's the possibility of progress, that the spirit of love and justice can enter human affairs in a saving way, and that it matters whether human beings respond to what they're called to do. The Passover story records this faith, and today we recognize and pay tribute to it. Our recognition and tribute will continue in our meeting after this morning's service, as we discuss and debate and vote on what we should do and where we should stand in relation to today's international situation. Whatever our stand on this issue, let's recall that what we decide and do has significance. As Anne Orfald's talk reminded us last week, we may not have the whole world in our hands, but we do have a part in shaping its future.

Here are words from the Book of Exodus, Chapter XII:

This day shall be a memorial day ...; throughout your generations you shall observe it as an ordinance for ever. ... you shall observe the feast of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your hosts out of the land of Egypt. ... And when your children say to you, 'What do you mean by this service?' you shall say, "It is the sacrifice of the Lord's passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt ..." [when] the people took their bread [hurriedly] before it was leavened ... The time that the people of Israel dwelt in Egypt was four hundred and thirty years. And at the end of four hundred and thirty years, on that very day, all the hosts of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt. It was a night of watching by the Lord, to bring them out of the land of Egypt; so this same night is a night of watching kept to the Lord by all the people of Israel throughout their generations.

The history of the Jewish faith involves the continual attempt to remember what has mattered most to them, and to give it continuing importance today. The dietary laws, puzzling in many ways to non-Jews (and perhaps even to some Jews!) are one of the means for asserting this importance. For instance, at Passover it is forbidden to use any leaven, or rising agent, in bread -- or, for strictly observant Jews, in anything at all, as a a reminder of the hurry in which the escape from Egypt took place, such a hurry that there was no time for the bread to rise and it had to be taken in its unleavened form. Even china, silverware, pots and pans used throughout the year and which have come into contact with leaven are put away for Passover by orthodox Jews, and a special set of dishes used. It's not that leaven is evil, but it's vital to remember.

To remember -- and to tell. The word for what we might call the "order of service" is "haggadah", which means "the telling". The Passover celebration is almost entirely a matter of telling the story of that night when the Exodus began, telling it over and over in words and ritual and action and song. The words that we often use on Remembrance Day, "Lest we forget", express almost exactly the meaning of this festival: the story of escape from slavery must be told over and over again, every year without fail, lest we forget and revert to slavery again, the slavery of unawareness and ingratitude.

It's ironic, I think, that the Jewish people are among the least likely to forget how precious freedom is, after their centuries of persecution, but are so very religious about intentional remembering, while those of us who've had it so much easier rarely take the time to celebrate our freedoms. Passover can be for us all, Jews and Gentiles alike, a time for remembering and telling the stories of our individual and collective journeys into freedom. I invite you to consider for a few moments whether you have your own story to tell of achieving freedom -- yourself or your family or your culture -- and to connect it with the story of Passover. For myself, I want celebrate from the bottom of my heart the journey I've experienced over the past ten or fifteen years into a particular kind of freedom, that of being able to trust in the future rather than being afraid of it. It's not that I think everything's going to be easy, for me or for the world; it's that I believe with the help available I'm up to whatever life throws me, and that it's true for all of us. We are not helpless; we can respond to the world from a position of freedom. Let's take time now to reflect on our own fears, our own slavery, our own freedom and even greater potential for freedom.

Like you, perhaps, I've resisted life's unfolding in the past. It's been a long journey into the freedom of trust from the slavery of fear, and it's by no means over yet -- I'm often afraid, still. It's not over for us as a congregation or a country or a world, as I hardly need to tell you. We don't feel ready for all the things ahead, all the unknowns, any more than the Israelites felt ready for their hurried escape from Egypt. We can't help thinking it would be easier to rest in the familiar, even when we're aware of the call to move out and on. Here's a poem by one of our Unitarian Universalist ministers, Lynn Unger, which expresses all the ambivalence of the journey:

They thought they were safe that spring night,
When they daubed the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert without a home, without a bed,
Following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt, or stayed there a slave, pretending
There was safety in the old familiar.
But the promise, from those first naked days outside the garden,
Is that there is no safety,
Only the terrible blessing of the journey.
You were born through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
Brushed in the night by terrible wings ...
That we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
Brilliant in the desert sky.

There is a long journey ahead of us. For each of us, it will last a lifetime, for the Promised Land will always be just up ahead, glimpsed like the brilliant stars in the desert sky but never quite reached. Our free and responsible search for truth and meaning, and our attempts to make meaning and a better world, are never over, always ongoing. How very much we need the spirit of the Passover celebration! This is a time to remind ourselves, and tell each other, of the times when we, or our forebears, or our fellow citizens, were brave in facing dangers and difficulties and moving out towards the Promised Land.

Where is our Promised Land? As one of our hymns says, it's Awithin the human soul, wherever free minds truly seek, with character, the goal.” May our free minds begin that journey again, over and over again, ready or not, brave or not, prepared or not. And may we rejoice in knowing that as participants in this community, wherever we are called to go we are not alone.