Remember and Remember and Remember

Exodus 12:1-13; 13:1-8

 

(content warning about infant death and infanticide)

 

Once again as we arrive at this week’s scripture lesson, we have catapulted past lots of action in the big story of God.  Last week, we left Joseph in a seat of power and privilege as a trusted official in Pharoah’s court at the end of the book of Genesis.  

 

We have skipped over the ominous opening of the book of Exodus. 

 

There rose a king in Egypt who did not know Joseph.

 

Joseph and his brothers died, and eventually, a generation came to power in Egypt that no longer knew or remembered or revered what Joseph had done for the Egyptians in the past.

 

Joseph had been forgotten. The work it took to survive catastrophic famine had been forgotten.

 

It happens. Time erases things.

 

The Israelites (the descendants of Joseph and his brothers) were now enslaved by a new Pharoah. 

 

The Israelites are many and they are the builders of the great economic engine that is the land of Egypt, land controlled by Pharoah.  

The Israelites’ time, their toil, their bodies are not their own. 

 

Their time, their toil, their bodies are all part of the machinery that makes Pharoah comfortable. And powerful. And wealthy.

 

In spite of their hard lives, the Israelites have been incredibly fertile – and their population has grown and grown and grown. As the book of Exodus begins, their sheer number feels like a threat to Pharoah and so he’s issued a series of commands to ensure that male babies do not live. But one mother hides her beautiful (good – tov) baby boy for three months, as long as she can, before floating him down the Nile in a waterproof basket.

 

That baby boy was raised in Pharoah’s household until he witnessed the harsh treatment of his own people. He tried to run away from his past, to escape Pharoah and the reminder of the Israelite slaves, but the people cried out to God and God remembered them.

 

The second chapter of exodus ends with this:

 

²⁴ God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. ²⁵ God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.

 

God remembered the covenant. God remembered the people of Israel, the promised descendants of Abraham. God called Moses into leadership among his ancestors for the purpose of delivering them to the land that God had promised so long ago.

 

But first, the Israelites must be liberated from Pharoah’s grasp. Initially God sent Moses to negotiate with Pharoah, but Pharoah wouldn’t be moved. Pharoah’s heart grew harder and harder. Eventually God sent plagues, one after another, to demonstrate God’s power. Moses keeps saying to Pharoah, “Let my people go.” And Pharoah keeps saying “No.”

 

We enter the text today right after God has announced to Moses and Moses has announced to Pharoah the final deadly plague:

“Thus says the Lord, ‘About midnight I will go out through Egypt. ⁵ Every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the firstborn of the female slave who is behind the handmill and all the firstborn of the livestock. ⁶ Then there will be a loud cry throughout the whole land of Egypt, such as has never been or will ever be again.”

 

Now. I find myself in one of those preaching pickles. Three weeks ago, I reflected on a God who is not necessarily all powerful but instead all loving. And here in the heart of the scripture, we have a violent and vengeful God. I see and I feel the dissonance. Really I do. This is not TO ME the image of an all-loving God, especially not to the Egyptians or to the animals whose firstborn are ripped away.

 

And this is a story that is told through the eyes of the oppressed – the Israelites. It is remembered through the eyes of oppression. 

 

This kind of power-wielding God might just be what love looks like when you are enslaved. 

Love looks like liberation. 

Love looks like whatever it takes for your body and your time and your labor to be your own. 

Love looks like whatever it will take to leave the oppressor behind – even leaving what you know, traveling through the wilderness to a future that MUST be better than your immediate past.

It might feel like love that stops at nothing. The oppressed are bound to long for that kind of powerful show of love in desperate circumstances. 

 

How very human.

 

And I think that it is fair to say that many of us within the sound of my voice, many of us (but not all of us) have never known oppression like that. And we never will. And so we visit these memories differently. 

 

(It is worth noting that ancient Jewish scholars of these texts argued that God and God’s angels wept for the Egyptians upon the death of the first born. That is an accepted midrash – the teaching of what is between the letters and words in the historic text. Jewish scholars attribute to God empathy, grief, regret, anguish.)

 

In today’s text, we hear the instructions that God is giving to Moses and Aaron so they can prepare the Israelites for what will happen as the final plague unfolds. And so that they can establish ways to remember. 

 

The instructions begin with a calendar reset – this is the beginning of a new month and from this point forward, you will mark time in a new way. (It is a day of new beginnings, so to speak…)

 

The instructions are detailed. Take a lamb for each household and if your household is too small for a whole lamb, share with another family. The lamb should be perfect, and all of you will keep your lambs until the 14^th day of the month. They will all be slaughtered on the same night – and you will take some of the blood from the slaughtered lambs and paint your door frames with it.  

 

The cooking instructions are particular – cook it with bitter herbs, undressed, over a fire. Don’t boil it or eat it raw. And be sure there are no leftovers – burn what remains with fire until there is nothing left.

And while you eat, be fully dressed, with sandals on your feet and a walking stick in your hand. 

 

In other words, be ready to GO.

 

They are instructed that the blood on their doorposts will be a sign as God passes through the land striking down every firstborn. When God sees the blood on their doorpost, God will pass over.

 

In the next verse from chapter 12 that we did not read, God says, “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”

 

This thing is going to happen, here’s what you are to do, and here is what you must continue to practice in order to remember.

 

I invite you to think a bit about how this then unfolded – They had these instructions about how to walk through the next events and about how to keep remembering what happened. And in our bible study, we pondered the sheer horror that must have surrounded them as they huddled in their homes, eating their prepared lamb, with the howling cries of anguish and loss mounting just outside their doors.

 

This would be part of their memory, for sure.

 

The remaining text heard today continues with more instructions for remembrance. After the LORD has passed over, after the night of the 10^th plague, the Israelites are to observe seven days with no leaven in their homes, their diet, their community.  This will be how the Israelites remember the way they came out of Egypt.  

 

And it hasn’t happened yet. So in this particular case, they are being told how they are to mark and remember something that has not yet happened. 

What did they think of when they considered no access to leaven?

Did they have associations with unleavened bread before this? Was their muscle memory about matzah? Or hard tack in our frontier context?

Did they imagine a hard journey?

Did they imagine hunger and hardship and murmuring?

 

On the last day of that 7-day ritual – they are instructed that ‘You shall tell your child on that day, “It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.”’

 

Now…there is a pattern and style to the whole Exodus story that can make the text confusing.  Throughout, we have accouts of God giving instruction to Moses and then Moses repeating the instruction to the Israelites. It is repetitive. 

 

We learn by repetition, don’t we? 

We remember with repetition.

It’s one reason that we study scripture in a repetitive multi-year cycle.

 

As we’ve discussed in bible study recently, these texts began with an oral tradition. The way this Exodus story is told models how that tradition works. God tells Moses. Moses tells the people. 

 

In the case of these two remembrances that are established in today’s scripture, the people are charged with telling the story through storytelling and rituals of remembering again and again in each generation.

So much so that these remembrances still happen today.

Have you had the privilege of being invited to a Passover Seder?  

And if you did, were their children present?

In the Haggadah, which is a core text recited on the first two nights of the Passover, the story of the Exodus is told. And throughout the retelling, the children ask key questions.

 

My favorite is “Why is this night different from all others?”

 

At its core, the question is “why do we do this again and again?”

 

Because remembering keeps us connected to what has happened. Remembering helps us metabolize our experience.

 

And a funny thing about remembering – every time we “remember” a past event, we bring with us everything that has happened to us to shape us SINCE the initial event.  

 

In the Jewish tradition, each time communities of family and friends gather to remember the Exodus, they are remembering much more. They may be remembering the destruction of the Temple, or the Holocaust, or a family tragedy, or the horrible attack by Hamas on October 7 last year, or the antisemitism they experienced last week. 

 

If they are remembering from a position of privilege – a place of personal safety, material comfort, social power - it is an opportunity to recognize their privilege, to recognize how life and circumstances have changed (perhaps what God has done), how they or ancestors have been delivered from oppression.

 

Every time we revisit the stories of the bible, we bring with us who we are today as we remember what happened in a prior time. We bring our current selves to the memory. We may see different ripples, different nuances, different values.

 

In this two-part remembrance, the Israelites are instructed to remember the mercies. They are also instructed to remember the times of hardship that will follow. One right after the other. And to do it again and again and again.

 

This story, for me, is a source of rich questions. Sometimes we long for solid answers, but I think that being in relationship with a living, moving, loving God sometimes means we must sit with the questions. 

 

In light of this story, in light of the way it sits in our scriptures, what are we called to remember?

In light of this story, in light of the call to remember, how do we sit with our relative privilege when remembering oppression?

In light of this story, how do we as individuals who follow Jesus and as a community working as the body of Christ INVEST in remembering the story of God, invest in making sure that the next generation and the next generation and the next generation KNOW these stories? Not as some rote exercise but as a living practice of eating and drinking and feeling and storytelling and reflecting and living and SERVING and giving in light of that experience of remembrance?

 

I say it again, sometimes we long for solid answers, but I think that being in relationship with a living, moving, loving God sometimes means we must sit with the questions. We must let God speak through the questions and guide our lived response.

 

May God guide our steps and our work so that we continue to remember God’s mercy and grace for generations.

May it be so.

Amen.