Our Escape from Egypt
By the Rev. Lee Woofenden
Bridgewater, Massachusetts, November 3, 2002
Readings
Exodus 12:31-42 The Israelites Escape from
Egypt
During the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and
Aaron and said, "Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go,
worship the Lord as you have requested. Take your flocks and
herds, as you have said, and go. And also bless me."
The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and
leave the country. "For otherwise," they said, "we will all die!"
So the people took their dough before the yeast was added, and
carried it on their shoulders in kneading troughs wrapped in
clothing. The Israelites did as Moses instructed, and asked the
Egyptians for articles of silver and gold, and for clothing. The
Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people,
and they gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the
Egyptians.
The Israelites journeyed from Rameses to
Succoth. There were about six hundred thousand men on foot,
besides women and children. Many other people went up with them,
as well as large droves of livestock, both flocks and herds. With
the dough they had brought from Egypt, they baked cakes of
unleavened bread. The dough was without yeast, because they had
been driven out of Egypt, and did not have time to prepare food
for themselves.
Now the length of time the Israelite people
lived in Egypt was 430 years. At the end of the 430 years, to the
very day, all the Lord's divisions left Egypt.
Mark 7:1-8 Jesus speaks on tradition
Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes
who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that
some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands-- that is,
without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not
eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the
tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the
market unless they wash it; and there are also many other
traditions that they observe: the washing of cups, pots, and
bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why
do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the
elders, but eat with defiled hands?"
He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly
about you hypocrites, as it is written,
'This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'
You abandon the commandments of God, and hold
to human tradition."
Apocalypse Explained #717.17 Mere tradition
A church comes to its end when salvation
becomes merely a matter of knowing what the Bible says, and not
living according to it. With the ancient Jewish nation, this
happened through the traditions by which they falsified the Word
of God. The truths of the Bible become traditions when we are not
living a life of kindness. The truths of the Bible also become
falsities when we separate faith from kindness.
Sermon
The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and
leave the country. . . . And the Israelites asked the Egyptians
for articles of silver and gold, and for clothing. The Lord had
made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and they
gave them what they asked for; so they plundered the Egyptians.
(Exodus 12:33, 35, 36)
In the opening scene of the popular 1964
musical "Fiddler On the Roof," we are given the secret of what
keeps the Jewish community in the little turn-of-the-century
Russian village of Anatevka together: TRADITION! Tradition!
Tradition! TRADITION! Tradition! Tradition! The song continues:
Tevye & Papas:
Who, day and night, must scramble for a living,
Feed a wife and children, say his daily prayers?
And who has the right, as master of the house,
To have the final word at home?
The Papa, the Papa! Tradition.
Golde & Mamas:
Who must know the way to make a proper home,
A quiet home, a kosher home?
Who must raise the family and run the home,
So Papa's free to read the holy books?
The Mama, the Mama! Tradition!
Sons:
At three, I started Hebrew school. At ten, I learned a trade.
I hear they've picked a bride for me. I hope she's pretty.
The son, the son! Tradition!
Daughters:
And who does Mama teach to mend and tend and fix,
Preparing me to marry whoever Papa picks?
The daughter, the daughter! Tradition!
Tevye, the father of the household, concludes
the scene by affirming, "Without our traditions, our lives would
be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof."
I suspect that as I was reading the words to
the song, you took exception to some of the roles prescribed for
the papas, the mamas, the sons, and the daughters. They are very
traditional roles. And though these roles have by no means
entirely disappeared from our society, we modern Americans, both
male and female, like to think that we have freedom to live and
work the way we want. And we especially believe that we are free
to marry who we want. The idea that our father--in
consultation with the local matchmaker, of course--would choose
the person we are to marry strikes us as being not "traditional,"
but feudal.
As the story unfolds, it turns out that Tevye's
five daughters are not happy with this tradition either. Tevye
stands helplessly by as one daughter after the other marries the
man she loves, rather than the one he had chosen for her. And
before the story has ended, the whole Jewish community in Anatevka
is uprooted from the home where they had practiced their
traditions. The story is one of struggle between the traditions
that hold the community together, and the inevitable change that
bends, and finally breaks, those traditions.
Almost 1,900 years before the era in which
"Fiddler On the Roof" is set, Jesus found himself in the middle of
the same tension between tradition and change. His disciples, most
of whom were rough, rural Galileans from the north, apparently did
not feel the need to follow the exacting traditions of the scribes
and Pharisees, who were leaders of the southern, city-dwelling
Jews. The Lord's disciples violated those traditions by eating
without washing their hands (Parents: aren't you glad your
children aren't listening to this?!), and the scribes and
Pharisees challenged Jesus to account for the behavior of his
disciples.
Never one to shrink from a challenge, Jesus
gave them more than they had bargained for, calling them
"hypocrites" who clung to human tradition while abandoning the
commandments of God. If we had continued the story, we would have
heard Jesus attacking and shredding the very roots of the ancient
Jewish traditions on ritual cleanness and uncleanness.
Though there was a struggle among the early
Apostles, before the first century of Christianity had come to a
close, it had been firmly established that Christians need not
follow the Jewish traditions, nor even observe the ritual of
cleansing and sacrifice decreed in the Law of Moses. The Christian
Church was founded on the rubble of religious traditions that had
developed over a period of at least two millennia.
And yet, the Lord did not utterly cast
tradition out of the church. It is true that he had no use for the
entangling web of strict and complex traditions that the religious
leaders had progressively laid on the people. But he perceived a
kernel of spiritual reality underneath the religious and social
accretions of the centuries. He stripped away all those extra
layers, leaving us with two simple, meaningful rituals that
fulfilled everything the previous complex system had sought to
accomplish.
In place of all the rituals of cleansing, Jesus
established the sacrament of baptism as a symbol of the spiritual
cleansing that we must all undergo to become truly Christian. And
in the place of all the rituals of sacrifice, he established the
Holy Supper as a symbol of our need to come into the presence of
the Lord, and together with our fellow believers, accept the
Lord's love (symbolized by the bread) and the Lord's wisdom
(symbolized by the wine) into our lives. The Lord commanded us to
observe these two rituals for all time. And they have formed the
core of all the ritual traditions that have developed in the
Christian Church.
What is the message here? Tradition does have
its place. The glue of outward ritual and prescribed behavior can
hold our families and communities together when we might otherwise
be driven apart by interpersonal friction, and by outside forces
beyond our control. Yet when tradition takes over as the primary
focus of our lives, it becomes a heavy and restrictive weight,
pressing us down with deadening restrictions on our free will.
When tradition gets control of us, it gradually squeezes the life
out of us in its ever-tightening coils.
It was this deadening influence of overbearing
tradition that Jesus struggled against in the religious
institutions of his day. And the same forces of crystallized
tradition that brought the ancient Jewish church to its final
reckoning have been at work in the Christian Church ever since it
broke free from the traditions that had built up over the previous
two thousand years. Eighteen centuries after the Christian Church
broke away from Judaism, Emanuel Swedenborg found the Christian
Church to be just as burdened down with deadening tradition and
dogma as was the Jewish Church of Jesus' day.
It is now over two hundred years from the
beginning of the new Christian era proclaimed by Swedenborg. Yet
the religious organizations that name themselves after the
spiritual New Jerusalem described in Swedenborg's writings have
adopted much of the tradition of the earlier Christian Church--and
we have developed some of our own.
Just as there was a kernel of goodness in the
great mass of tradition that Jesus railed against, so there is a
kernel of goodness in the Christian tradition we have inherited.
But though our traditions have kept us together as a church, they
have not helped us to move forward, reach out, and grow. Over the
past century, we Swedenborgians have clung to many of our
traditions, while the world has moved forward at a faster and
faster pace. As the gap widened, our church's appeal to the people
of our culture waned, and we experienced a century of drastic
decline, dashing all the golden hopes of the early Swedenborgians,
who envisioned our church moving forward into a glorious and
ever-growing future.
Perhaps the growing clan of Jacob had similar
golden hopes when they moved from their famine-stricken home in
southern Palestine to the grain-rich land of Egypt, where Joseph,
the long-lost brother, had become a powerful ruler--ensuring they
would receive special treatment. Perhaps when they settled into
the rich Nile river delta they thought they had "made it," with
their troubles at an end, and their wealthy future assured. Yet in
two short centuries (the 430 years in our reading is measured from
the time Abraham first sojourned in Egypt, not from the
time Jacob and his family went there), their descendents found
themselves enslaved and bitterly oppressed by the Egyptians.
What does this have to do with our religious
traditions? In the Bible's spiritual symbolism, Egypt stands for
the knowledge we have gathered together into our memories, both
about the material world and about spiritual life. In other words
Egypt stands for all the information we have learned. When Joseph
advised the Egyptians to store up grain during the seven years of
plenty to tide them through the seven years of famine predicted in
Pharaoh's dreams, it was an apt symbol of how we store up
knowledge of good behavior and sound thinking during our good
times, which tides us over during our times of struggle.
The type of knowledge that Egypt represents is
just the sort of knowledge Tevye lists as part of the tradition
that held his community together. He says:
Here we have traditions for everything: how
to sleep, how to eat, how to work, how to wear our clothes. For
instance we always keep our heads covered, and always wear
little prayer shawls. This shows our constant devotion to God.
You may ask, "How did this tradition get started?" I'll tell
you . . . I don't know; but it's a tradition, and because of our
traditions, every one of us knows who he is and what God expects
of him.
Tradition--the knowledge of how we are supposed
to behave in every situation--can be very reassuring. Like the
fertile land of Egypt, it looks like it will take care of our
every need, and sustain us through thick and thin, year after
year. But over time, the hand of tradition gradually, almost
imperceptibly, changes from a hand of helpful guidance to a heavy
hand of compulsion and oppression. The traditions that parents and
grandparents willingly adopted become irksome and restrictive to
their children and grandchildren. Jacob and his family moved
willingly to Egypt. Their descendants became slaves there.
Must we, then, leave all our traditions behind
in order to move into the future? Is it necessary to give up
everything that has made our church dear to our long-time members
in order to welcome a growing number of newcomers into our beloved
faith community?
No, it is not. Jesus distilled the ancient
Jewish traditions into the two new traditions of baptism and the
Holy Supper--traditions that remain meaningful to this day. And as
we read in Exodus, the descendants of Jacob came out of Egypt rich
with in articles of silver and gold, in clothing, and in
livestock--symbolic of the good, true, and useful elements that
can be pulled out of the suffocating mass of outmoded tradition
that must be left behind.
We do not have to leave behind all our
traditions in order to move forward. But we do have to be the
masters, and not the slaves, of our traditions. If, as Tevye
admits, we do not know how our traditions started, and if we
cannot give good reasons why they should continue, it may be time
to re-evaluate the way "we've always done it." It may be time seek
out the kernel of good that we can take from our old traditions,
and start new traditions that not only serve those of us who are
already part of the church, but serve the people of our community
who would benefit from the great blessings our church has to
offer. This is where Swedenborg offers a crucial insight. Again,
from Apocalypse Explained:
A church comes to its end when salvation
becomes merely a matter of knowing what the Bible says, and not
living according to it. With the ancient Jewish nation, this
happened through the traditions by which they falsified the Word
of God. The truths of the Bible become traditions when we are
not living a life of kindness. The truths of the Bible also
become falsities when we separate faith from kindness.
When our church--at whatever level--becomes
merely a matter of knowing the teachings of the Bible and the
church, and of knowing how things are "supposed to be done," it
ceases to be a living, growing church, and becomes enslaved to
tradition. When we think it is more important to preserve the
"proper" way of doing things than to serve our neighbor and our
community, then the living Word of God has become a dead letter.
This is when we must leave our old mass of
traditions behind, and begin anew--yet still preserving the best
from what we have inherited and built up. Our church has already
begun to do this. And the engine that can carry us forward,
perhaps a bit reluctantly, on this new endeavor is the desire to
serve the people of our community--people who are crying out for
the beautiful insights and the loving community that we have to
offer.
We are moving toward a time of visioning and
planning in our congregation. And we will soon be considering new
proposals for our church's Massachusetts Association and its
properties. Our first reaction may be to resist any change. Change
is scary. Things might go wrong. We might lose what we have so
carefully preserved all these years.
Yet simply clinging to the way we have always
done things means allowing our traditions to enslave us. And while
the richness of religious tradition can be a powerful force to
hold us together, the forces of growth and change are even more
powerful. And when the two forces of tradition and change collide
with each other, it is time to listen to the Lord's call to move
forward--yet still preserving the best of what we have inherited.
There is a good reason to move forward. People
need what this church has to offer. This community needs our
church's clear teachings of God's love and of spiritual light.
Are we ready to listen to the Lord's call to
move out of our remaining bondage to the past, and carry the rich
treasures of our church forward into a new land of wider
usefulness? Are we ready for our congregation, our Association,
our denomination, to reach out and grow beyond anything they have
ever been in the past? The Lord has given us this challenge:
You are the light of the world. A city on a
hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it
under a bowl. Instead, they put it on its stand, and it gives
light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light
shine before others, so that they may see your good deeds, and
praise your Father in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-6)
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