PASSING OVER

James Ishmael Ford
13 April 2003

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.
Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the desert sky.
Lynn Ungar

This last week I received an email from Robin Nikora-Dorson. Oh, dear, I thought when I saw the name. Robin’s title is "Assistant to the President," that is Assistant to the Reverend Doctor William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association. This almost certainly meant I was going to be asked to do something. Sure enough when I opened it the email turned out to be an inquiry as to whether I would be available to take a call from Bill the next day.

"An honor," I said. "Rats," I thought. My plate’s already full.

So Bill called. First the small talk. How you doing? How is FUSN? He didn’t get elected president without knowing something about just about every one of our congregations. So, he inquired briefly about our religious education program and our astonishing religious educator Anne Bancroft. At that moment I thought, I’m going to dodge this one. He’s going to ask Anne to do something. But, no, he fairly quickly circled around and got to the point.

The Dalai Lama is going to be in town in September, and would I be willing to arrange a meeting with his Holiness? That was when I realized I must be the only UU he knows with a significant Buddhist connection. I’ve never met the Dalai Lama. I hardly even know any Tibetan Buddhists. In the spectrum of Buddhist schools Zen is to Tibetan roughly as Quakers are to Serbian Orthodox. As far as asking someone with connections he might as well have made this call to Liz Lerner the current coordinator of UUs for Jewish Awareness.

However I have a deep respect for institutions, like the presidency of our denomination. And besides, there could easily come a day when I might need to ask a favor of him, myself. So, I said, "Sure, Bill. I’ll see what I can do."

Actually an old friend of mine has Tibetan connections. Okay, maybe I am plugged into some of the right people. When I called it turned out he in fact is doing publicity for the New York leg of the Dalai Lama’s upcoming late summer visit to the States which includes the September visit to Boston. He gave me the name of his Holiness’s official representative in the US, and I made the call.

There is in fact a point to this story beyond dropping some names. And it has to do with Passover. As I was speaking with Mr. Ngawang Robgyal, telling him about us and particularly about Bill I realized I was shaping a story. I didn’t say a word that wasn’t true. I mentioned his scholarly reputation. I mentioned his fervent commitments to social justice. I dropped in the fact he is the first African-American head of a predominantly white denomination.

With that little part of me that observes what’s going on, I noticed how in the telling I was conveying as much about a symbol as a person. Not unlike the Dalai Lama himself. In many ways we are stories. You and I take shape in history; we are formed by our genes and environment. But the telling of who we are is not a list of chemicals or even simply dates and events. There is shorthand. There is pointing. There is hint.

And in all that, if we’re just a little lucky, there is also a pointing to a shape of something. Often human stories are stories of hope. So, for instance, the story of Bill Sinkford is in many ways the story of our communal hope for what we can be. We too often fall short of that possibility. But in some ways that is exactly why we need to keep telling the story. It gives shape to our hope. It reminds us of our striving.

And today we are celebrating another story with contours and shape. Here we remember a story that contains a dream, a hope for new life. The actual observation of the ceremony of the story of Passover, the Seder dinner belongs elsewhere than a Sunday morning, even in a particularly Jewish friendly community like ours. And it isn’t just because of our building. While we have a vast theological range among us our worship forms are Protestant. I would be deeply uncomfortable with our trying to fit a Passover observation into our worship patterns.

So, I’m glad to know Neil Katz and other Jewish identified members of our congregation are observing a liberal Passover Seder. I hope those among us who are particularly moved by the power of the story might consider joining Neil and those others putting it together. Here, this morning, I feel the appropriate thing is to consider the story and what it could mean for us as religious liberals.

It is a powerful story. The Dalai Lama himself is known to be deeply interested in it as a central part of how the Jewish people have survived as a community in exile for two thousand years. It is a plight he fears might be that of his own people. In this context it is worth noting how the Jewish community has also understood how this story is in some ways a universal story, a story for all people who suffer. In 1998 the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the International Campaign for Tibet joined together to sponsor a widely observed program "Next Year in Lhasa: Seders for Tibet."

The big stories tell us about ourselves as we might yet be. And the Passover story is one such. In short it is the story of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from their bondage in Egypt. In remembrance of this event people thoroughly clean their houses, prepare matzo, a flat bread consisting of just flour and water, then on a special night family and friends gather. There the story is retold; bitter herbs are eaten in remembrance of the time of slavery, greens are tasted for the onset of spring, other dishes are also eaten, each with symbolic meanings.

And four questions are asked, traditionally by the youngest present. "Why do we eat matzo on this night?" "Why do we eat those bitter herbs?" "Why do we dip our foods twice?" and "Why must we lean on a pillow tonight?" It is in the answering of those questions that the story unfolds, the sorrow and the hope. Like all rituals it can be a dead letter, and like all true rituals, it can open the heart to the stories of the ancestors, and our own dreams of new life.

Of course, most of us in this room as Unitarian Universalists feel the deep need to know to what degree the story is true. It is a hallmark of our spiritual culture; we’re always interested in the incongruities, in the distance between the polished story and the actual history. For this one the actual history is hard to know. Just too long ago. Although, there are ever fewer scholars who think the exodus is in fact a historical event.

The thirteenth century before the Common Era is not in fact without historical records. But, other than the story itself, there is nothing, not a spot of supporting evidence. Of course a negative isn’t a proof. But, it does make one hesitate. It makes one hesitate, that is, about the historicity of the event.

What is documentable is how in the wake of the destruction of the temple and the Diaspora of the Jewish people at the beginning of the Common Era, the rabbis took this old old story, and built a ritual around it. That ritual is the Passover Seder. That ritual has been a central gathering point, a time of remembrance, and a time of thinking ahead. Next year in Jerusalem. Next year in Lhasa. Next year it will be better.

We do find ourselves constantly in bondage. Perhaps it is from some outside force, perhaps it is our own inner demons. We need to acknowledge those forces around us that control our lives. We need to acknowledge how we are co-opted by those forces. By we here I mean we in our best selves, the parts of us that aspire to freedom, to love, to hope, to those better angels of our nature.

And we need to tell ourselves about it, we need to remind ourselves. The telling itself is a step toward the possible. But it also needs to be made current, recast for each generation. So, many contemporary Jews notice the lack of the feminine in the traditional story, but also notice how in the Biblical accounts there is a significant figure in Miriam, Moses’ sister who is acknowledged in the texts as a prophet in her own right. Drawing upon the stories about her, they add next to the goblet of wine a goblet of water.

And there can be more.

The writer Johanna Skilling tells a story about her own path to finding a Seder that informed her real life. She recounts how in her childhood the family used a Passover Haggadah ritual published by Maxwell House, the coffee company. It used mock Elizabethan language, and was in just about every way as stilted and dead-letter as a ritual can be. The only good part she recalled was the advertisement on that last page reading "good to the last drop."

She grew up and stopped participating in Seders. Then the day rolled around where she decided to put on a modern Seder, one that included the people and the concerns of her life. The list of those invited was, she writes, eclectic. "Besides David and me, there were Josh and his girlfriend Linda, a German Lutheran who was studying art history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. There were a couple of visiting Germans from Linda’s program, also Lutheran, and my friend Frank, the music director of a neighborhood Methodist church. Frank brought along his mother, Mary Frances, a lay minister. And there were a half a dozen friends from our synagogue, most, like David and me, children of Holocaust survivors."

Johanna tells how while reading through their contemporary Haggadah they frequently would stop and tell stories. Johanna told the story of her great-grandfather who survived the war as a slave laborer, who at the end weighed seventy-five pounds. The Germans present, innocent of the crimes, but nonetheless conscious of their familial connection shared their grief. History sometimes makes slaves of us all.

And then in that moment of quiet Mary Frances, the friend’s mother, the Methodist lay minister said softly, "I have a story about slavery." Everyone waited.

"When I was a girl, I lived in the Philippines with my mother and father. My father was a missionary for the Methodist Church. When the war started in Asia, the Japanese invaded the Philippines and took us prisoner. We had to leave our house—which was nothing special, just a regular house—and go to a special camp.

"We couldn’t take anything with us. There was barbed wire all around the edge, and soldiers with guns. All the women lived in their own huts, and the men lived in theirs. It was so hot. There wasn’t very much food, and I saw my father wasting away. I tried to take care of him, but he got very sick. I watched him die in that place."

In that silence, the silence of hurt and longing, the silence we all must have experienced at some moment in our lives, but very much the silence of the Passover night, everyone might feel how we’re caught up in this story. Perhaps that would be enough—the lesson of our common humanity, and our constant possibility of slavery, and our constant hope of freedom.

But there is one more point. A little latter Frank asked his mother, why she had never told that story before. She looked at him, and said, "You never asked."

You never asked. We need to ask. We need to find our ways into the longing of our hearts. Because as we do this; we find the way through to new hope. This is what we’re about. Ours is a community of memory and action. We remember these stories, we retell these stories. And, from that, knowing ourselves and the great family, we can act.
Sometimes it is something grand like what Barney Freiberg-Dale and others in our community are doing in creating an actual modern anti-slavery project among Unitarian Universalists. Sometimes it is small like our second collection to send urban children to summer camps. Always it is the dance of grace, and hope, of memory and action.

So, we ask.

And in that asking, I really believe, next year it will be better.

Amen.