bapifar01: With our backs to the past...

I want to talk about the Easter story, and I want to talk about the Passover story. Only I'm not concerned about lamb's blood on the lintel, or a cross, or an avenging spirit, or an empty tomb. I don't even want to talk about religion in the usual sense. I also don't want to argue about the literal truth of the stories. Whether the mummified remains of Rameses II reveal the only face we'll ever see from the Bible, or whether names scratched into a first century ossuary are authentic is beside the point.

It's not even the characters at the center of each story that concern me. It's the other guys -- the people who don't know what's coming. The ones who are only aware that their world has been flipped over, and what's next could be anything.

Those Israelites marching out of a battered Egypt accompanied by wails and curses... they had no idea where they were going. Maybe the guy at the head of the line had a clue, but the rest went forward with more hope than knowledge. One thing is sure, they weren't marching off to restore the way things used to be. About the only time on the trip when the Israelites did something that looked back to their past was when they pestered poor befuddled Aaron into making them a nice statue of a bull so they could conduct the traditional worship of El*. Like their fathers had before them.

But that's not what this was about. There weren't going to be any more kneeling in front of gold statues. Tradition was out the window. This was something entirely new. The people who still practiced those old ways, who still lived and worshiped as Abraham's people had? They were the ones at the other end of the long wandering, many of whom would get kicked out of their homes -- and worse -- when this long-delayed freight train of change finally plowed into the Levant. El was old news. These folks were marching along behind the heavy tread of Yahweh Sabboath, Lord of the Armies, who would test them, slaughter them, teach them, and exalt them. Passover signaled the start of a journey that was far more spiritual than physical, one that would carry those people behind Moses to places they never imagined.

Twelve hundred years later, the Jesus movement faced a jumping off point of its own. Whether you believe it came in dark despair as a body was lowered from a cross, or in astonished joy as a radiant figure was lifted from the ground, the result is a group of men and women cast adrift from their leader. They were suddenly left to formulate their own vision of what came next, and their own interpretation of the experiences of the past year**. They did this at a time when their people were not precisely enslaved, but certainly in thrall a much more powerful nation. They had to work out for themselves what their role would be within this subjugated state, and how they would grow their movement against a backdrop of surging social unrest.

Like Passover, Easter wasn't the end of a race, it was a starting gun. Within a short time the struggling movement would deal with a crisis of leadership, and with deeply divisive struggles over how to teach and apply an understanding that was still highly malleable.

Eventually, both Jews and Christians would recognize these moments as great pivot-points in their own history and lavish them with tradition and mystery, but if either of these groups had remained flash-frozen at that point -- if Judaism had never gone past fearful obedience to the bloody-minded God of the Armies, if Christianity had stayed trapped in arguments over who was acceptable to be part of the community -- neither would have survived for long. We'd have no more idea of Yahweh than we do of Kumarbi or Chemosh. We'd run into teachings of Jesus no more often than those of Choni the circle-drawer.

What started at Passover was a journey that lead past centuries of war and poetry, despair and elation, to a transcendent unbounded faith. The idea of Yahweh, and the events that happened before, during, and after Passover would be interpreted and reinterpreted, again, and again, and again. The members of this community would create for themselves an anchor that could hold against time, distance, and heartbreak.

The Jesus movement spent decades working within the Judaic tradition, and made a fair bid to become the dominant form of Judaism in the chaotic despair that followed the destruction of the temple faith. But their ideas would also be reshaped, renewed, and utterly transformed into a wholly new vision. Not a forgetting of the past; a new understanding.

And in the case of both movements, that constant change and adaptation has never stopped. They've never ceased to be relevant, because they've never stopped evolving into something new, even when that evolution is disguised as a return to something old.

That's where we are this morning as a country. To lift a line from Ronald Reagan. It's morning in America. It's Easter morning in America. It's Passover morning.

The question that the country has to face is not how we preserve something past, it's what we will be from here. The loose collection of states that the founding fathers gathered into a nation? We are not that place nor those people. Some of our leaders still seem to think we are that superpower which emerged from World War II to careen to unmatched influence. America Saboath, the nation of war. Maybe we are, but we're not the nation who stormed the beaches at Normandy, and we can no more recapture that option than we can flip time's arrow.

The question in front of us this morning is the same one we face every day: what will we be now? Should we be the world's bully, trying to hold onto our slipping authority by unmatched expenditures of blood and money? Could we once again be the world's factory if we only sacrifice every standard on the altar of providing cheap labor?

I'd like to think we can be what we've always claimed to be: good. Not good enough or good at fighting or good at making things, just good. Truly good. Instead of trying to be great in the sense of lording our power over others, why not be good in the sense of respecting justice, supporting peace, seeking ways to help others. You know, promoting the general welfare and securing the blessings of liberty. That old stuff. It may seem naive, but it's my belief that America is always at risk when we move away from those goals. After all, just because that stuff is old, doesn't mean it's not relevant. It means we have to make it relevant by working every day to come to a new understanding and a new application of those words.

I have the sneaky suspicion that if we work hard enough at being good, greatness will come on its own.